CHAPTER VII
“’COMBE” IN HISTORY—MODERN ’COMBE—THE OLD CHURCH
Ilfracombe occupies one of the strangest sites on this strangely contorted coast. Down upon it, on either hand, look the great rocky hills of Hillsborough and the razor-backed, spiny ledges of the Runnacleaves, and the Tors; while amidst the winding roads of the town itself run smaller hills and vales, and down by the sea, where other seaside resorts usually have a conventional flat parade running by the shore, there are the Lantern Hill, overlooking the harbour, and the Capstone Hill, placed just where the usual sea-front would be, if the site of Ilfracombe were other than it is. Fortunately it is not. Between the two is Compass Hill. The Capstone Hill—it was formerly, and should still be, “Capstan”—runs up towards the sea from the town, and presents, as it were, a lawn, inclined at an angle of something like forty-five degrees. When people most furiously do make holiday, in August, this expanse is covered over, day by day, with hundreds of figures, looking quite tiny in the scale of things. Sometimes, when Sunday Schools, or other institutions, come to Ilfracombe for their annual day out, they display their massed forces in living devices or letters of the alphabet, on the hillside, in view of the whole town.
E. D. Percival]
[Ilfracombe.
CAPSTONE HILL AND THE CONCERT PARTIES.
There is not, it has already been shown, any conventional front; and indeed at one time it was only possible to approach the shore at Ilfracombe at infrequent and isolated spots, such as Wildersmouth, or Chain Beach. That was in the times before seaside holidays were invented, and when Ilfracombe was only a small port. When the modern town began to rise, it was felt that a little more of the sea would be thought desirable, and consequently the present “Capstone Parade” was constructed in 1843, in the more or less perpendicular face that Capstone Hill presents to the waves. It is a semicircular roadway carved out of the rock, with rocky cliff above and more beneath, and beneath that, the sea, dashing in violently. The Capstone “Parade” has after all, you see, the conventional name; but, happily, it is not the conventional thing.
Since we cannot treat of Ilfracombe without touching upon its ancient history, it had better be done at once, and an end made of it forthwith. To begin with, it is not certain how the name derived. In Saxon times it was “Alfreincombe,” and from that has been hazarded the theory of its having once belonged to Alfred the Great. Then stepped in that eternal factor of the letter H, and it became “Halfrincombe.” I wonder if any contemporary, uncertain in his aspirates, ever called the great monarch, “Halfred”? It is a fearful thought.
Then the place, having been crowned with an H, of course those who should have kept the letter, vulgarly elided it, and the name became “Ilfardcombe,” or “Ilfridecombe,” and so remained until, with the introduction of printing, the style became irrevocably fixed at what it is now.