Lynton and Lynmouth: A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland

by John Presland

Lynton: The Devil's Cheesering

The names of other remarkable features of the island, the great rocks which are piled along its coasts, are all descriptive and not legendary names—the Devil's Chimney, the Cheeses, the Templar's Rock, the Gannett Rock, the Mousehole. These names will have been given in comparatively recent times, at least since the Saxon invasion, for they show a different mentality from the Celtic names which are found widely in Cornwall, Devon, Wales, and Northumberland, and which have a poetic and imaginative quality. Such is the difference between Heddon's Mouth, "the Giant's Mouth," or Dunster, "the Tower on the Hill," and such names as I have quoted above. The very name of Lundy itself, which is "Lund-ei," the island of Lund, as Caldy is "Cald-ei," the island of Cald, show a Teutonic origin, perhaps Scandinavian, but not named so by the Celts of Britain or Ireland.

But "there were great men before Agamemnon"; certainly there were great men on this island before the adventurer Lund landed upon it and gave it his name.

In 1850, in digging foundations near a farmhouse in the southern part of the island, a great grave, or series of graves, was discovered. There were two stone coffins, made of hewn blocks of granite, just deep enough to contain a body, and with the covers sloped and cut each from a single block. One was ten feet in length, and contained the huge skeleton of a man, over eight feet high; the other was eight feet long, and contained a skeleton well over six feet, which "was imagined to be that of a woman," but on what grounds I cannot discover, as it does not seem to have been carefully examined, and is therefore probably mere conjecture, based upon its juxtaposition to the larger coffin. In the account of the excavation a "macabre" incident is recorded. One of the workmen, seizing the shin-bone of the giant, placed it against his own leg, and found that it reached halfway up his thigh; whereupon, taking up the lower jawbone, he fitted it easily over his own lower jaw, though he was a burly man and bearded.

"To what base uses a man may return, Horatio! . . ."
"Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw."

For that these were the bones of a man mighty in his day the workmanship of his coffin goes to prove. For he lay with a stone rest for his head and feet, made each of a cubic block of fine granite, and a deep depression hollowed in his pillow to take his head, resting sideways towards his shoulder. As these great blocks were cut and squared and hollowed with stone tools, the labour which they betoken may be imagined; and none, I suppose, but an imperious Caesar could have exacted it. The skeleton was covered and surrounded by a mass of limpet-shells. There were seven other skeletons buried in a line with these two, but without coffins, and they were not of the race of giants; and then, at a little distance, there was a great pit, filled with the bones of men, women, and children, as if a slaughtered multitude had been flung into a common grave. In this pit were found some beads, light blue in colour, some sherds of red glazed pottery, and a few fragments of bronze. Over all was scattered a vast heap of limpet-shells.

Here is one of the fascinating problems of archaeology, which comes with the touch of romance to the dry study of minutiae: When were these burials made? Are they of two different dates? The giant of the stone coffin perhaps belonged to the far-off Stone Age, already grown dim and legendary to these later peoples, who knew of the working of metal and the making of glass. And were they sacrificed to him, as a dark hero or demi-god of the past, to propitiate him against plague or conquest? And what is the magical significance of the limpet-shells, which cover them and him alike? These questions, and many others, will, I am convinced, be answered by the patient research of archaeology within comparatively few years. The suggestion that this interment is Danish, and is the remnant of the force defeated by Alfred the Great outside Kenwith Castle, is, I think, untenable; the bones of women and children being found with those of men alone disproves it, apart from the inaccessibility of Lundy and the very great antiquity of the stone coffins.

But whoever they may be who left their bones here, it is certain the story of their lying there is a tragedy, of bloody sacrifice or more bloody massacre, like all the histories of wild animals and of primitive peoples.

Not far from the Giant's Grave, as this site is locally called, is another relic of hoary antiquity, in the shape of a tumulus, which, when opened, laid bare a kistvaen, or sepulchral chamber, formed of a great block of granite, weighing nearly five tons, resting on two upright granite slabs, and enclosing a space about six feet square. This method of burial is well known throughout the old world; such burial chambers have been found in Greece, and in considerable numbers in Ireland, where they are primitive Celtic. In the Lundy kistvaen no skeleton was found, nor anything, indeed, save a small fragment of pottery, though "there was a rank odour in the cavity, very different from that of newly turned earth."

There is a logan-stone on the eastern side of the island, which, within the memory of Mr. Heaven, the last owner of the island, was a true logan-stone, and could be rocked with the hands, but has now slipped from its socket. But the whole question of these logan-stones is controversial, some claiming them as relics of antiquity of whose use and meaning we are ignorant, and others as the chance product of the natural forces of rain and weather.

The same also may be said of the "rock-basins," of which a very perfect example may be found in the Punchbowl Valley, being a granite basin of four feet in diameter, with a uniform thickness of six inches, with both the concave and convex surfaces segments of a perfect sphere. Later opinion inclines to a human, and not a chance, origin for these interesting phenomena.

But, leaving the dim and still conjectural paths of archaeology, let us turn to the history of Lundy. Here again we are confronted with facts which a conscientious historian would hesitate to assert, save as legend. For this singular land, where the King's writ does not run, which is not assimilated even yet to municipal government, was for centuries, even down to the eighteenth century, a robber stronghold, from which, as from those castles on the Rhine, and still earlier and more powerful castles of the Aegean lords, built athwart the peninsulas of the trade-routes, the garrison swooped maraudering upon the peaceful occupations of unprotected folk.

Lundy is supposed, not upon very certain authority, to have been called "Herculea" in Roman times; and there is no record, nor even tradition, of how it came by its present name, only a vague conjecture of a Scandinavian origin, of which I have already spoken. But there are evidences of a much earlier occupation than the Roman—indeed, so far as I know, there have been no Roman remains found yet upon the island—and it is no unlikely supposition that the great skeleton of the Giant's Grave was some such feared and piratical chieftain as the first recorded lord of the island, the fierce de Marisco. These Mariscos were a branch of the great family of Montmorency, and they were ever a thorn in the side of their liege-lord, whether in England, Ireland, or Lundy. They must have owned Lundy since the days of the Norman Conquest, if they had not seized it before; for the great castle Marisco, built upon the extreme verge of the cliffs, commanding the bay and the landing-place, and overlooking in a wide sweep all the southern coast of the island, was already built in the eleventh century. From this impregnable fortress, with its massive walls nine feet in thickness, its squat, strong Norman turrets, its encircling fosse, and the perpendicular cliffs by which its seaward wall was made unscalable, Sir Jordan de Marisco used to sally with his retainers, making war on all alike, levying toll—blackmail, if ever there was, in the true meaning of the word—disobeying the laws of the land, and outraging the dictates of common humanity. So that, though he had married a Plantagenet, a blood relation of the King's, Henry II declared his estate of Lundy forfeited, and granted it to the Knights-Templars. Whether peace was made between Sir Jordan and Henry, or whether Henry was not strong enough to enforce his edict (though he was a powerful and determined monarch), I do not know; but in 1199, in the reign of King John, Sir Jordan's son William following in his father's evil ways, the grant of Lundy was confirmed to the Templars.

But this fortress was a hard nut to crack. The only approach is from the south-eastern corner, by a steep and narrow path commanded by the castle, and held by Marisco's men, and it was no light undertaking for the invaders to beach their boats and effect a landing against wind, weather, and attack. So that, although a tax was levied upon Devon and Cornwall to support an undertaking for the siege of Lundy, it does not appear to have been taken; for it was granted to Henry de Tracy (of the famous family of Tracy, cursed since the murder of Becket), and a few years later to one Robert Walerand. Then for some years de Marisco seems to have found even its mighty walls and granite cliffs too insecure, for he is found fighting among the French, and in 1217 was taken prisoner in a sea-fight, when Eustace the Monk, the pilot of the French fleet, was slain. Yet a few months later, in November of the same year, he was reinstated in possession of Lundy, and his wife, his sons and daughters, who had been seized by Henry III as hostages, were restored to him. Now favoured, now disgraced, but turbulent to the last, he died in possession of Lundy, but in the very year of his death having paid ransom to Henry of 300 marks.

His grandson, also William de Marisco, filled up the tale of violence and ill-doing, and forfeited at length the family inheritance, by his share in the attempted murder of the King at Woodstock. This is Westcote's account of the plot, given in his "View of Devonshire":… "Only Matthew Paris speaketh of one William de Marisco who, conspiring the death of Henry III, persuaded a Knight sometime of his Court to murder him, and with that intent got at night by a window into the King's bedchamber; but He, in whose protection the lives of princes are, disappointed him, for the King lay elsewhere. He seeking from chamber to chamber with a naked weapon in his hand, Mrs. Byset, one of the Queen's women, sitting late up at her devotions, shrieking at the fearful sight of him, awakened the King's guard, who presently took him."

The unhappy and probably demented youth was put to death, and de Marisco fled to his island, which he further fortified, and there, attaching to himself a band of outlaws and malefactors, lived by piracy. Retribution came in its due course, for, having made himself detested by all decent men, many knights and nobles joined against him, and contrived to take him by strategem. He was brought to London, tried, and condemned to death with sixteen accomplices, dragged from Westminster to the Tower, and there hanged. "When he had there breathed out his wretched soul," he was drawn and quartered—a literal account of which, as given in Matthew Paris, I forbear to set down—and the quarters of his body sent to the four principal cities of England. His father, Geoffrey, fled to France, and the island came under the government of Henry de Tracy for the Crown.

Yet in the reign of Edward I, one of the Irish branch of the Marisco family was reinstated in possession for a few years, though Edward II gave it to his favourite and his worst enemy, Hugh Spencer. It was there also, be it remembered, that he purposed taking refuge from his Barons, but was driven to Wales by contrary winds. In the time of Edward III the island came to the Luttrells, the great family that owned Dunster, Minehead, and many manors on the North Somerset coast; in the time of Westcote, in the reign of James I, it was in the possession of the Grenvilles.

It is difficult, and perhaps tedious, to attempt to follow in detail the many families who had, or laid claim to, possession of Lundy throughout the course of history; it is clear that it was a stronghold of importance, from the frequent references to it in our records. It was claimed and loaned and bought and held in fee from the eleventh to the nineteenth century. It was the scene of a wild and fantastic adventure in the reign of Charles I, when three Turkish pirate-ships swooped upon it, and made slave-raids into Devon and Cornwall, taking sixty men out of a church one Sunday morning, and carrying them away prisoner. "Egypt was never more infested with caterpillars," wrote the captain of a ship of war in 1630, "than the Channel with Biscayers."

The Turks sailed south with their human booty, but the Channel and the Devon coast became the prey of an English buccaneer, the famous Admiral Nutt, who was more boldly and splendidly piratical even than the buccaneers of "Treasure Isle," and who faced the King's navy and got clear to his stronghold of Lundy, though they dropped thirty great shot among his fleet, of which Nutt received ten through his own ship. What became of the Admiral I do not know; he was not captured and hanged, and so may have sailed away to the Barbadoes or the Mediterranean, and there have met his death and scuttled his ship in a last fight against odds, or perhaps been marooned by a mutinous crew, or set adrift in an open boat to die of hunger and thirst, or been stabbed in a drunken scuffle over a bottle of rum.

He passes away from the history of Lundy, but now a French man-o'-war and now a Spanish made raids up the Bristol Channel and upon Lundy, until Thomas Bushel held it for Charles I and established some measure of order. It was claimed from Bushel by Lord Say and Sele as his "inheritance," and he wrote to the King for permission to deliver it up, but proposing:

". . . If your Majesty shall require my longer stay here, be confident, sir, I shall sacrifice both life and fortune before the loyalty of

"Your obedient humble servant,
"THOMAS BUSHEL."

Bushel received the following letter from Charles, which I transcribe because of the light which it throws on the King's character, a letter written in answer to a faithful and disinterested servant in a mood of petulant self-pity. "…Now, since the place is inconsiderable in itself, and yet may be of great advantages to you in respect of your mines, we do hereby give you leave to use your discretion in it, with this caution, that you do take example from ourselves, and be not over-credulous of vain promises, which hath made us great only in our sufferings and will not discharge our debts." This letter, more than any single document I know, shows the hopeless weakness of the Stuart character, and the unhappiness of serving the Stuart cause; this letter might have been written by Mary, Queen of Scots, or by James II, or by the Old Pretender, or by the Young Pretender; in all alike we find what this letter shows, a certain gracious melancholy, a lack of moral courage, a great self-pity, and a great selfishness.

Thomas Bushel gave up the island into the hands of Colonel Fiennes, a Parliamentarian soldier, and the father of the intrepid young lady, Celia Fiennes, who, a few years later, travelled through the length and breadth of England on horseback, and wrote an account of her journeyings. Lord Say and Sele, who claimed the island, was her grandfather on the mother's side.

After the Restoration, and under the corrupt administration of Charles, the Dutch ravaged the shipping of the Channel, as the French did in the reign of William and Mary and Queen Anne, and as pirates did at all times, whenever a body of desperate men could establish themselves on Lundy, and from there make raids on the coastal traffic. The last and worst pirate of all, the most inhuman, as the meanest, a trafficker in human misery for the sake of gold, false even to the partners in his base contract, was Benson, a rich man by inheritance, and belonging to one of the oldest Bideford families, the leading citizen of Bideford and Appledore, and a member of Parliament for Barnstaple.

In 1747 he entered into a contract with the Government for the exportation of convicts, and gave bond to the Sheriff to transport them to Virginia or Maryland, which was the horrible method of treating criminals then in common use. But in 1748 he leased Lundy Island from Lord Gower, and, transporting the convicts there, began building walls and cultivating the island with this slave-labour. The great wall, called the Quarter Wall, on Lundy was built by these unhappy convicts. After a few years, however, Benson was discovered in smuggling, and a large quantity of tobacco and other goods was found in caves and chambers cut out of the rock. For this he was fined 5,000 pounds; but when his importation of convicts was discovered, and he was taxed with it, he excused himself by declaring that to send them to Lundy was the same as sending them to America, so long as they were transported anywhere out of England. The termination of his villainous career in England was owing to a conspiracy to defraud an insurance company, a vulgar and inglorious crime without the element of danger and adventure which in some slight degree may be said to have invested the exploits of the other pirates who have infested Lundy.

Benson, having laded a vessel called the Nightingale with a valuable cargo of pewter, linen, and salt, insured her heavily before she sailed, ostensibly, for Maryland. But he had arranged with her master, Lancey, to put back at night and land the cargo at Lundy, and then to burn and scuttle the Nightingale. This was accordingly done, and the crew took to the boats and were picked up by a homeward-bound ship; but, as usual in these circumstances, one of the crew, animated by some personal pique, "blew the gaff," in the parlance of roguery. Lancey was taken, tried, and hanged, and Benson escaped to Portugal.

Little more remains to be said of the history of Lundy. In 1834 it was purchased by Mr. Heaven, and remained the property of his family for over sixty years, till 1906, when it once again came on the market, and was bid for by Germans, but was withdrawn from sale, and remains in English possession.

But I cannot close this short account of the island without a brief reference to the wild life which abounds on the pinnacles of its inaccessible rocks, on the fern-covered, steep slopes, and in its numberless sea-washed caves, which are haunted by seals, or were until within the last few years; for the brutality and selfish carelessness of chance visitors allowed to land by the courtesy of the owner have driven away much of the timid wild life which had taken refuge against the advancing tide of civilization. Seals used to be observed in fair numbers, particularly at the southern end in a great cave called Seal Cave, and walruses were occasional visitors. But lobsters and crabs are still caught in very great numbers, and, together with the innumerable conies which breed on the island, form the staple industry of the island.

Lundy is also the last stronghold of the original old English "black rat," which has been invaded and destroyed throughout England and Scotland by the common Scandinavian brown rat; Rat Island, at the south-eastern corner by the landing-stage, commemorates in its name this last fortress of a dying race.

But it is for its birds that Lundy is perhaps most notable. To those who first approach its mighty cliffs it might appear to be the haunt of all the birds in creation. There are gulls of many varieties, falcons, kestrels, ravens, crows, cormorants, kittiwakes, puffins; there is the razor-billed auk, and that now extinct bird, the Great Auk, was seen on the island no later than the last century.

But, indeed, it was no surprise to me to hear of this extinct species lingering on Lundy; the strangeness and wildness of the place might lead one to expect it to be the haunt of the Dodo, or that monstrous and fabulous bird of the "Arabian Nights," the Giant Roc.

The hoopoe, the pretty little Southern bird which haunts the gardens of Greece, sings its "tio, tio, tio, tio, tix" of Aristophanes' comedy on this wind-swept Northern isle; the rose-coloured starling, that rare and beautiful bird of a warmer clime, has been seen here in the spring; the eagle and the golden eagle hover above its crags; the sparrow-hawk and the great gyrfalcon prey upon the small birds and little rodents; even the wild and shy osprey was known to build its eyrie upon Lundy to within the last half-century.

Many of these birds are visitors only, and do not breed here; for in the spring and the autumn, when the great tides of migration set north and south, Lundy lies in the track of their going, and here the birds alight, in their hundreds of thousands, to rest the wings tired with the going and coming from Africa or Asia across the miles of water.

But whether in winter or summer, spring or autumn, any bold walker who ventures round the cliffs and coves of Lundy will find himself surrounded with such a crowd of screaming sea-fowl, diving, swooping, poising, or darting, in such myriads as if the foot of man had never yet scared them from their breeding-places, as the sea-fowl swooped and screamed from their inviolate heights when the first Norsemen ran their beaked ship on to the desert beaches of Iceland.

CHAPTER IX

THE LAST STRONGHOLDS OF TRADITION

Schools, newspapers, and railways have gone far in the past hundred years to destroy the wealth of oral tradition which once satisfied the imagination and taxed the memories of the country-dwelling population of England. And do not let us too greatly deplore this; let us recognize that it is better for the general welfare of the world that a man who dwells three hundred miles from London should have some interest, however slight, in international politics, and some knowledge, however fragmentary, of natural forces, rather than a slipshod belief in ghosts, witches, and the omnipotence of "squire." It is not from such minds that empire is made or deserved, and if with the increase of cheap schooling, cheap printing, and cheap travelling much that is beautiful in language or in legend is swept aside and forgotten, we who have, by the fortune of training, been allowed to see the beauty of the old things must recognize that what the generation gains is more for its happiness than what it discards, as a new brass Birmingham bedstead is cleaner, healthier, and more desirable for a small crowded cottage than a worm-eaten old wooden four-poster.

This reminder I make to myself more than to any "gentle reader"; for I have a passionate attachment to antiquity and a curiosity in legend which leads me into remote paths of speculation and fancy. Some of the most interesting survivals of ancient tradition are those customs, far more common all over England than is supposed, which contain some very ancient religious rite, long ago forgotten by the people, who practise as a superstition, or sometimes as a pastime, what was once an act of worship. The Christian Church, indeed, embodies many of these survivals of paganism, not in its dogma or liturgy, but in its customs. Such, for instance, is the giving of eggs at Easter, the eating of hot cross buns on Good Friday, the games of All Hallowe'en, the harvest festival.

Such customs as "touching with a dead hand" as a cure for sickness, covering the mirrors in a house where one has just died, watching at the church door on Midsummer Night to see the souls of all the worshippers pass in, and those who will not live out the year remain behind and do not pass out—these are part of the common stock of beliefs, not confined to Devonshire or Scotland, nor directly traceable to Celt or Saxon or Latin, but surviving from the remote past of the human race, when the slowly emerging mind was struggling with its apprehensions of life and death. But there are other customs, surviving in the wilder and less accessible parts of our country, in Scotland, Northumberland, Devon, and Cornwall, which seem to throw a flash of light on the history of vanished peoples, by their resemblance—though worn and rubbed by time, like a defaced coin—to certain rites, well known to us in history, as practised by the Romans, or the Druid peoples, or the worshippers of Baal.

Of such kind is a ceremony, until a few years ago very common in Devonshire, where the first armful of corn that is cut is bound into a little sheaf, called "the nek," and set aside from the rest of the field. At the end of the first day's reaping the oldest man present takes the little sheaf and holds it aloft, crying, "We ha' un!" (We have it!) The cry is repeated three times, and the rest of the reapers, standing round the old man with their reaping-hooks in their hands, bow down at each cry. The spokesman then cries out three times, "Thee Nek!" or, as it is stated by some witnesses of the scene, "Arnack, Arnack, Arnack!" and the little sheaf is carried off the field and hung up in the church. I do not know the meaning of the cries, but the whole ceremony is undoubtedly a dedication of the corn to the Corn-Spirit, and the little sheaf which is carried home and hung up is a rough image of the Corn-Maiden, like those plaited straw figures of Demeter and Persephone the Greek husbandmen used to make, and which the peasants of Sicily make still. Whether the observance of this rite in Devonshire is of Roman date, or whether it goes farther back, to a remoter tradition of preclassical times, it is difficult to say.

So it is, also, of the Devonshire custom of making an offering of wine and honey to bees on the day of their owner's death, and of reversing their hives until the corpse has been carried out of the house. The Greeks poured honey, but not wine, in their rites for the dead, and in all the ceremonies which had to do with the worship of the earth deities—the ancient autochthonic gods, older than the Olympians. But wine was strictly an offering to the gods of the heavens, not to the gods of the underworld, or of death.

There is another custom, still very common in North Devon and Somerset, for the young men of the countryside to climb the nearest hill-top to see the sunrise over the ridge of the Quantocks or the distant Mendips on Easter morning. They account for their action by saying it is "for luck"; but this custom, if connected popularly with Christian worship, has at its roots an older, sterner, and perhaps bloody origin. For, searching back into the mists of antiquity, we find that those early and mysterious peoples whose priests we call the "Druids," to whom the mistletoe was sacred (and with which we decorate our houses at Christmas, the festival of "peace and good-will"), offered human sacrifices to their dark gods on high mountains and at the hour of sunrise.

Whether the Britons whom Caesar describes as sacrificing human beings in vast wicker cages were the Druidical peoples who built Stonehenge and the great stone circles of Dartmoor and Cumberland, or whether with them the mode of worship was already traditional, preserved by a priestly oligarchy from a yet remoter age, and connected by I know not what strange links with the fierce Eastern worship of Baal or Melkarth, it is impossible to say with certainty at present, though the names by which the Cumberland men still call the peaks and valleys round the small Druid circle near Keswick contain the elements of those foreign Phoenician words.

But at least we may assume that the accurate astronomical arrangements of these Druid stones connected human sacrifice with the movements of the sun, and the tradition which sends the young men of the countryside up Dunkery Beacon on Easter morn is certainly older than the first Roman galley that beached in our bays.

Dunkery Beacon is the highest peak in the West of England; it rises above Exmoor black and bold above bog and heather, commanding a view from the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire on the north to the high lands of Plymouth on the south-west, two hundred miles distant the one from the other. The great sweep of the Bristol Channel shines below it on the west, and beyond that lie the blue hills of Monmouthshire and Pembrokeshire; eastward the counties of Somerset, Devon, and Dorset lie under the eyes, and on a clear day it has been computed that no fewer than fifteen counties can be seen from this one eminence.