“HUNTER’S INN.”
Winding footpaths lead up the lonely valley and through a wood, and then conduct to a well-known hostelry in these parts, the Hunter’s Inn. For many long years this was a picturesque thatched house, but it was burnt down at last, in 1895, and the new “Hunter’s Inn,” although it is built very charmingly and in good taste, and really is as picturesque as the one it replaces, has not yet existed long enough to compel the affections of the sentimental. There is a nameless something in these things, an elusive flavour, an unexpected feeling, it may be, that the old inn was picturesque by accident, as it were, and was the natural product of its era and surroundings, while the new was created to be self-consciously pretty. It is a favourite resort of anglers, who, except in summer, when pedestrians and carriage-parties come this way, have the inn and the whole valley very much to themselves, for there is no neighbourly village and Trentishoe is a mile distant, half-way up one of the steepest of hills.
Trentishoe has a church of the Early English extremely rural type, with a little insignificant tower; but, although it possesses this church of its own, no one would accuse it of being a village. Two cottages by the church, a little group half-way up hill, and another little group below, by the Heddon, constitute Trentishoe.
The moorland to which the traveller comes is the wild windy waste of Trentishoe Down and Holdstone Down, considerably over a thousand feet above the sea, scorching and drouthy in summer and ferociously cold in winter; but these disadvantages, each in its season, have not prevented hopeful, would-be sellers of building-sites from erecting the usual notices of “this desirable” land to be on offer. It has come to this at last, that all land is in land-agents’ jargon, “desirable,” just as, conventionally, a naval or military officer is “gallant,” members of Parliament are “honourable,” and barristers “learned”: to name but a few of those tags and labels that nowadays mean so little.
TRENTISHOE CHURCH.
Few are those who explore to the right hand on this upland, where Trentishoe Barrow seems to witness that, however un-desirable the site may really be for residences, Prehistoric Man found it eminently suitable as a burying-place. The “Great Hangman,” the crowning height of these cliffs (1187 ft.), obtains its ill-flavoured name from an ignorant perversion of Pen an maen: the old Cornu-British for “the Hill of the Stone,” namely, a rude, post-like monolith, standing something over five feet high. The “Pen” was lost in course of time and “an-maen” became by degrees “Hangman,” when the legend that now attaches to the stone was duly invented to account for the name. According to this thoroughly unveracious story, which old Fuller, who does not appear to have disbelieved it, no doubt heard from the peasantry, a sheep-stealer was crossing the hill with a sheep slung over his back, and sat down here to rest awhile, and, doing so, the sheep in its struggles slipped, and the rope tightening round the man’s neck, he was strangled. Two difficulties, however, meet us here (supposing, for the moment, we take this tale seriously)—(1) How the sheep-stealer could have sat down to rest on a post over five feet high, and (2) How this strangling accident could possibly in any way have happened. Probably we may be met with the reply that the standing-stone is merely a monument of the affair, but the final quietus should be given the legend by the fact that there are numerous tales identical in every respect, all over England: and it is unthinkable that sheep-stealers were always being accidentally hanged in such numbers—and in a manner demonstrably impossible.
This region between Heddon’s Mouth and Great Hangman Point is without doubt the most inaccessible nook along the coast. Roads avoid the neighbourhood of the gigantic cliffs that for the most part go sheer down into the sea, without sands or beaches at their base, six or seven hundred feet. And the combes, mouths, and valleys, that here and there let down some streams to the sea, are, if on a smaller scale than the gorge of Heddon’s Mouth, even more rugged and difficult of exploration. Sherracombe—or “Sherry-come-out,” as the fishermen name it—is particularly notable for its stream that, rushing down this cleave in the hills, pours out in a fall of seventy feet over the rock-face. Somewhat east of it, over the hillside and down a perilous climb, is “Wild Pear Beach,” a lonely spot overhung with brambles and hawthorn bushes: the haws upon the thorns in autumn being the “wild pears” in question.
The Great Hangman ends in Blackstone Point and beach; a savage spot, now absolutely solitary, but once the scene, together with the neighbouring cliffs, of busy mining operations. Combemartin, round the next bend of coast, was for centuries famed for its silver mines, and in a less degree for its lead, iron, and copper; and here also rich lodes were evidently discovered at some remote period, for the cliffs are honeycombed with tunnels and caves excavated in the pursuit of wealth. No road exists to these old excavations, and the rock and ore extracted must either have been shipped off by long-vanished stagings, or hoisted hundreds of feet above by ropes. One of these tunnels extends nearly 350 feet into the rock, and with a plentiful supply of matches it is possible to stumble along it to a great distance. But scrambling in these wilds, in a climate such as this of Devonshire, is an undertaking of the most exhausting kind, and not to be embarked upon by any except the agile or the robust. This explorer, at any rate, is not likely to forget the scramblings up and scramblings down involved, in company with showers of the loose stones that encumber the hillsides; nor the astonishment exhibited at West Challacombe Farm on beholding a stranger, stumbling upon the place by accident, on the way to Combemartin.