The Doone Valley in Winter
The fury of such a storm across these always windy Exmoor heights can hardly be imagined; only Conrad could convey in words some adequate idea of the fury and the force, as he has done in "Typhoon." Anyone who was in Exmoor during these three days would have been fortunate to have reached shelter alive, and not to have been lost, as were so many unfortunate sheep and ponies, in the deep snowdrifts. There is a scene in "Lorna Doone," where John Ridd and his servant Fry go out on a bleak stormy morning to rescue their sheep from the snow, which gives a vivid picture of what must have been many times enacted in the Exmoor valleys during those wild March days. Of the loveliness of the scene when the snow had fallen, and after the fury of the wind had abated, when the March sun shone on the smooth upland curves and beautiful rounded hollows of the moors, stainlessly white and wonderful under the clearing sky, Mr. Widgery's picture of Lorna's Bower under snow gives a beautiful impression.
Apart from its cattle industry and its herrings, Minehead was noted in the seventeenth century for its alabaster mines, "harder than ye Darbishire alabaster," says Thomas Gerard in his "Particular Description of Somerset," written in 1633; "but for variety of mixture and colours it surpasseth any, I dare say, of this kingdom." The mines are said to have been discovered by a Dutchman, but I cannot find that they were much worked, or were very abundant; for there is no record of them a century and a half later. They were not like the Combe Martin silver-mines, which were worked for centuries—some say in the time of the Phoenicians, when the mines of Cornwall furnished tin for half the bronze in Europe—which helped Henry V to pay for his wars in France, and were reopened by Adrien Gilbert in Queen Elizabeth's time, and a great cup and cover, fashioned from the silver, was presented by him to the City of London, and may still be seen among the city plate. The water got into the workings, and they were running poor after so many centuries, and were finally abandoned in the seventeenth century; for which Combe Martin is the more picturesque, according to our modern standards, if less prosperous.
There is another industry of Minehead, or, more properly, a curiosity; for there are no traces of the most enterprising approaching the matter from a commercial standpoint. "There is on the rocks at low-water a species of limpet which contains a liquor very curious for marking fine linen," says our seventeenth-century authority, and he gives directions for breaking the mollusc "with one sharp blow," and taking out "by a bodkin" the little white vein that lies transversely by the head—a somewhat delicate operation. "The letters and figures made with this liquor on linen," he continues, "will appear of a light green colour, and, if placed in the sun, will change into the following colours: if in winter about noon, if in summer an hour or two after sun-rising and so much before setting, for in the heat of the day in summer it will come on so fast that the succession of each colour will scarcely be distinguished.
"Next to the first light green it will appear of a deep green, and in a few minutes change to a full sea-green; after which it will alter to a blue, then to a purplish-red; after which, lying an hour or two (if the sun shines) it will be of a deep purple-red, beyond which the sun does no more. But this last beautiful colour, after washing in scalding soap and water, will, on being laid out to dry, be a fair bright crimson which will abide all future washing."
Is this indeed the "murex," as Browning calls it, of the Tyrian purple, which can be found on the Minehead rocks at low-tide by the holiday-makers of our day?—that "purple dye" for which, the weary Roman usurper said,
"We'll stain the robe again from clasp to hem
With blood of friends and kinsmen . . .,"
and yet which is only
"Crushed from a shellfish, that the fisherman
Brings up in hundreds, yet rejects as food."
In coming to Dunster we come to the last of the many beautiful places that lie within the compass of this fifty miles of England, places with so varied a loveliness that nowhere else, I think, can you match with them.
There is Barnstaple, suave and clean and sunny, with its well-kept streets and smooth, broad river, and its air of all prosperity and peace, the very type and pattern of a decent English country-town; and almost within stone's throw of it the moors begin, lying widely under the expanse of the sky, with the perpetual running of waters, and the lonely farms, from which the smoke curls up, blue against the brown hillside. There are the sombre and unpretending small villages, Parracombe, Brendon, Bratton-Fleming, each with its history and its little church, and the homesteads from which the young men have gone, in their humble twos and threes, to take their part in this war of millions. There is the grand solitude of Heddon's Mouth and the raven-haunted cliffs to Lynton; there is Lynton itself, drowned in the green woods that surge up the steep hillside; there is the West Lyn Gorge, shadeless and sultry even on a spring day, and the East Lyn Valley, where ferns and lilies of the valley grow, and every green thing that loves moisture and shade; and the Watersmeet, where there is a perpetual rushing of waters which drowns the song of the birds; there is Porlock, between the moors and the marshes, and the drowned forest of Porlock Bay; there is the green magnificence of Horner Woods or Bossington, and the cloud-wreaths that gather and lift on the summit of Dunkery; and here, easternmost of our journey, is Dunster, the castle on its wooded hill rising above the long street of the village, and the edge of Exmoor beyond, dipping now from its bleak heights in gentle wooded undulations to the shores of the Bristol Channel. The Tower on the Hill, that is the meaning of the word "Dunster," and the name fittingly describes it; for it dominates many miles of beautiful and fertile country, and stands feudally above the village, perceptible from every angle of the street, at once a guardian and a menace. It has stood so for a thousand years, for it was a stronghold of the Saxon Kings before William the Conqueror gave it to William de Mohun, and he built his gloomy Norman fortress, with its massive, windowless walls, and squat strong towers, of which nothing now remains save a bowling-green which marks the site of the old keep.
The main part of the present building dates from "the spacious days of great Elizabeth," when her nobles needed rather magnificent country-houses than fortresses for defence; but the gatehouse, with its four flanking towers, was built in the time of Henry V, and the oldest part of the castle is the gateway by the side of the main entrance, which was built by Reginald de Mohun in the time of Henry III, while Henry Luttrell added the south front in the "antique taste" of a hundred years ago. Yet, like so many cathedrals, and not a few of the castles and great houses of England, like Hampton Court or Ely Cathedral, the varying styles of architecture do not give an appearance of patchiness or incongruity, but rather a feeling as of the vitality of the old building, and the continuity of life within it, that century after century adapts and adds to the uses of the present the habitation of their ancestors. The sun and rain mellow all, and the ivy makes all green; stone urn and Roman column grow old and gracious beside steep Elizabethan gables and fantastic chimneys, and the grey pointed arches of the fifteenth-century gateway are as good to ride under to the meet on crisp September mornings as a Renaissance doorway or an eighteenth-century portico. Much of the charm of these old buildings cannot be reproduced by brush or camera; it lies in their intimate association with the scene around them, sunshine and cloud, summer and winter, their hills and their streams; it is the sense of age which they convey, of long-continued tradition and a certain mellow security.
It was in 1376 that the Luttrells bought the castle from the Mohuns; and they hold it still; the old receipt for the purchase-money is still preserved in the castle hall, with various ancient and yellowing title-deeds, and a list of the "muniments" of the castle, made by William Prynne, who was sent there as a prisoner by Cromwell in 1650, after having suffered branding and the loss of his ears at Royalist hands for his "seditious teachings," and who, firebrand and fanatic as he was, beguiled his imprisonment with this curiously peaceable occupation.
The village is as beautiful as the castle; in the long, irregular street every house is three to four hundred years old. The projecting upper stories are supported on great timber balks, often with the ends grotesquely carved. Under the projecting eaves the swallows build, and twitter about the diamond-paned windows which reflect so richly the sunset light. In the steep roofs there are dormer-windows, and the old tiles have mellowed to a deep rose-red, stained yellow with lichen, and sink into irregular planes and angles of beautiful, varied colour. There are tall brick chimneys and steep gables, and all manner of odd delicious scraps and jags of architecture, where one building has crowded upon its neighbour in its growth, like trees in a forest. There are old gardens also, long sunny walls with old fruit-trees that look like hoary serpents writhing up them, until the spring comes and the delicate, exquisite forms of plum or peach blossom break out of the gnarled boughs; there are wallflowers and lavender and rosemary, for the sweet scent and the "remembrance" of them, and tall hollyhocks to nod over high brick walls; creepers, green or flowering, to grow over the whitewashed spaces, and great trees for shade on summer afternoons.
In the centre of the long main street is the yarn-market, a beautiful wooden building of the seventeenth century, built by Sir George Luttrell when Dunster was still a centre of the wool industry. It is built with wide overhanging caves, pierced by eight little dormer-windows, with a lantern at the apex of the roof, and is a unique little building whose characteristic features have been sketched and photographed many scores of times, and is comparable, perhaps, only with the butter-market at Bingley in Yorkshire. Opposite is the Luttrell Arms, a quiet, comfortable, harmonious stone building of the eighteenth century, but with part of the older building still preserved inside—a wall that overlooks a paved court, with windows set in frames of beautiful carved oak, and a gabled roof, a moulded plaster over-mantle also, and yet with that general air of disregard for these treasures, amid a hurrying to and fro with plates and bottles, which, to me, is one of the special charms of these long-established country inns.
To anyone who loves England, and that beauty which is so characteristically English, where the life of the present day is visibly linked with the life of the past through long centuries of security, where age has ripened all, the great old trees, the colours of old oak and weather-beaten tiles and warm brick, has gently undulated straight lines, and softened all sharp angles, where the very sunlight has the mellowness of old wine, to a mind perceptive of this peculiar and intimate charm of England, Dunster makes a special call, set amid the suave curves of its rich country, crowned by its ancient castle, dignified by its old, beautiful church (grown, like the castle, through Norman and Early English and Perpendicular styles of architecture), yet intimate and familiar, and beautiful most of all because of the use and wont of daily life within its walls.
CHAPTER VIII
LUNDY
It is curious in this twentieth century of ours, when every corner of the habitable globe is docketed, measured, mapped, and surveyed, when a railroad runs across "darkest Africa," and the great ice-wall of the Antarctic cannot keep its inviolability from the feet of those resolute and heroic explorers who go with camera, microscope, and theodolite, against such forces of Nature as would daunt anything but the resolute human heart—it is curious to come across small corners of the world where the law of nations seemingly does not run, and the current of the modern world sweeps by, leaving them in a backwater, strangely aloof and undisturbed.
Such is the island of Herm, in the Channel Isles; such are one or two volcanic rocks in the Greek Archipelago, which you may purchase for a song, and live on if you can, though their barren waterlessness under the midsummer suns will compel you to put out to sea again for all the dangers of swift currents and black crags; such, too, I imagine, are some of those enchanted small islands in the South Seas of which Conrad writes: "It was as if the earth had gone on spinning, and had left that crumb of its surface alone in space"; such, too, is Lundy.
But Lundy is only fourteen miles from the English coast, this populous and organized England, and in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, in the direct track of all the shipping of the West—sighted, it is estimated, by at least a million vessels a year in their business up and down the world—and yet, to within the last generation, it was almost as inaccessible as in the days when the de Mariscos built their castle there and defied the King and all his armies.
Even now, though in the summer pleasure steamers run from Ilfracombe and Minehead, and land their noisy crowds on the south-eastern corner of the island, the narrow peninsula of Lametor, it is during barely three months of the year; they have ceased before the coming of the October gales, and the island goes back to its solitude, and the wild clamour of its innumerable sea-birds, while its few inhabitants wait their bi-weekly post, and the coming of the Trinity boat on the 1st and 15th of the month, for news of the outside world.
For Lundy is a great rock, about three and a half miles long, and averaging half a mile in depth, cutting the strong tidal stream which runs round the south coast of Wales and up the Bristol Channel, with steep cliffs and outlying crags and peaks of rock over which the surf is flung ceaselessly, even on still summer days, and with a dangerous tidal race at its northern end and the south-west and south-east angles. It stands, too, in the highway of the winds as well as of the waters, and is so scored and buffeted by gales that hardly any trees, except the stunted dwarf-elder, can survive the winter fury on its open slopes. When a westerly gale is blowing, many ships run in under its lee-shore for shelter; but its only landing-place is at the south-east angle by Rat Island, and that becomes dangerous in an easterly wind, so that boats have to be beached on the south or west side, though with difficulty and some danger. Add to this that the road from the landing-stage is so narrow and steep that it could be held by two men, and its suitability as a robber stronghold becomes clear.
It is a land of romance, singular in every aspect: in the formation of its rocks, in the birds that haunt its cliffs and the beasts that haunt its caves, in its antiquities, and the whole course of its adventurous history. It is a granite rock, with here and there patches of clay-shale, notably at the south-eastern corner; but the granite is differentiated from the granite of Devon, to which it is so proximate, and of so marked a character that it can be traced in many buildings along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, principally in towers and churches, proving that quarries must have been worked on Lundy at some time during the Middle Ages, and before the fifteenth century; for there is comparatively little building of churches after that date. A company was formed in 1863 to work the Lundy granite-quarries, and it was intended to use this stone in the building of the Thames Embankment; but the difficulty of shipment from so inaccessible a spot proving insuperable, the enterprise was abandoned.
But apart from the height and boldness of these granite cliffs, rising in places almost sheer to a height of more than seven hundred feet, with outlying reefs and insular rocks bristling black and jagged through the foaming waters, with gully, creek, and cave, worn by the action of rain and sea, there is a further wildness given to the island by a great series of clefts or fissures, running for a considerable distance in a line irregularly parallel to the cliff, sometimes from ten to twenty feet across, and as much as eighty feet deep, where they can be measured; at other places too narrow for sounding, but seeming to strike right down into the bowels of the earth. Locally this phenomenon is called the "earthquake," and the popular tradition of the island ascribes its appearance to the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755; but it is certainly older than that date. However, the shock of that great disturbance may have further rent the granite and displaced the mighty boulders. It extends for about two miles from the southern coast, running in a northerly direction, and where the slate formation meets the granite it is fractured in the same sharp manner. Some upheaval of the earth's crust in far-off prehistoric times must have cracked the granite and made these mighty chasms; the wildness and singularity of their appearance, and the confined locality in which they occur—for there is no trace of such disturbance elsewhere in the island—make one wonder if it were no imprisoned demon or angry god, chained in the blackness under Lundy, who, stretching his mighty sinews to be free, so contorted and rent the solid granite above him. The absence of legend or ancient tradition (for the tradition of the Lisbon earthquake is comparatively recent) about so arresting a spectacle I ascribe to the condition of Lundy's history; there has been no continued habitation of the simple people of the land to pass on, from generation to generation, the ancient names and the ancient stories of their dwelling-place, untouched by the changes of rule and ownership which go over them.
For this reason another strange phenomenon of Lundy, about which the imagination of an earlier people must have lingered, passes barely remarked. There is a great promontory on the coast, opposite the reef called the Hen and Chickens, which is pierced by a sort of tunnel about eight hundred feet in length and sixty feet in height, through which a boat can sail on calm days at high-water; and in the centre of the tunnel, bubbling up through the sea, rises a perpetual spring of fresh water. This is called the Virgin's Well, and I can discover no story or legend with which it is connected, though the name may possibly contain some earlier myth, not based upon Christian worship.
