The North Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

The town was then nothing more than a few waterside houses down by the harbour, that curious, almost pool-like inlet intended by nature for the purpose, but the place speedily prospered, chiefly by reason of this natural haven, and in 1346 the port was sufficiently wealthy and populous to be able to assist Edward the Third with a contingent of six ships and ninety-six seamen, to help in the French war and the reduction of Calais. That appears to have been the high-water mark of Ilfracombe’s old-time prosperity, for thenceforward Barnstaple and Bideford took up the position of rivals, and wrested away much of its trade.

Little is heard of the town until the beginning of the Civil War. The sentiment of the townsfolk was strongly anti-Royalist, and it occurred, therefore, to Sir Francis Doddington, a Royalist commander who had helped his cause well at Appledore, that it would be the properest thing to teach them a lesson while the success of his party there was still fresh, to serve as a moral lesson here. What happened we may read from a contemporary account, in the Kingdom’s Weekly Intelligencer, September 3rd, 1644. It is couched something in the sarcastic vein: “At a town called Ilford-combe in Devonshire, that saint-like Cavalier, Sir Francis Doddington, set that town on fire, burnt 27 houses in the town, but was beaten out by the townsmen and sailors, and lost many of his men.”

So the teacher was taught, but the Roundhead success was not lasting, for, before the end of the month, Doddington had captured the town, together with twenty pieces of ordnance, twenty barrels of powder, and two hundred stand of arms. The Royalists then held Ilfracombe until April 1646.

The port continued to decline, and is described by Blackmore, speaking of the eighteenth century, in the “Maid of Sker,” as “a little place lying in a hole, and with great rocks all around it, fair enough to look at, but more easy to fall down than to get up them”—the laws of gravity being no more suspended here than elsewhere.

One of the many inlets here deserves particular note. This is Rapparee Cove, opening out just beyond the harbour.

Rapparee Cove is known to have borne that name certainly as far back as 1598, when it appears to have originated in some obscure connection with the Earl of Tyrone’s rebellion in Ireland, where the bulk of the rebels were armed with a species of small pike, called “raparys.” North Devon seems to have been in general a refuge for the fugitives from Ireland, and Ilfracombe, as a recognised port for the south of Ireland, to have been particularly favoured by them. Neighbouring Combemartin retained until 1837 an odd reminiscence of that time, suggested, no doubt, by the refugees. This was an annual pageant, or merry-making, the hunting of the Earl of “Rone”; in which hobby-horses, much rough music, and a considerable deal of drunkenness figured.

Rapparee Cove was in 1782 the scene of the disastrous wreck of a large vessel, variously stated to have been a prize captured from the Spanish by Rodney, or a Bristol slave-ship. For long afterwards, following storms, the beach was a happy hunting-ground for gold and silver coins, and for the less desirable relics of the many drowned, in the shape of skulls and bones.

The entrance to Ilfracombe harbour has been lighted from the earliest times by a beacon on the hill overlooking it, called, from that friendly gleam for the incoming mariner, “Lantern Hill.” Whose care it was, thus to befriend the sailor, we are not told; but, from the old-time readiness of the Church to perform such-like good deeds, and from the undoubted fact that the building on the hilltop was once a chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas, it would seem that those who tended the light were no mere secular lighthouse men.

Whatever may have been the character of the old chapel in past ages, the interior is no longer of any interest, disclosing only a plain whitewashed room. The time-worn exterior, partly overgrown with ivy, and the lantern, crowned with a fish for weather-vane, afford more satisfaction. A light is still shown at nights, from the end of September until the beginning of May.

The harbour, long, like Ilfracombe in general, the manorial property of the Bourchiers, Earls of Bath, in succession to the Champernownes, Bonvilles, Nevilles, and others, and then of the Bourchier Wreys, now belongs, together with Lantern Hill, to the Corporation.