And so Lundy up to date remains, as it has been, in the hoary jokes of over seventy years past, “the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Mr. Heaven’s residence stands near by the landing-place, and the venerable clergyman has long been a prominent figure, walking down to the beach occasionally, to gaze upon the people of the outer world, or to entrust some trustworthy-looking person with a letter to be posted; for in the official course it is only a weekly mail-service from Instow. The modern church of St. Helena, built at a cost of £6,500, was completed in 1897 and is capable of holding the entire population of Lundy, eight times over. Does any one expect active colonisation?
A new lighthouse looks down from Lamator upon the landing, and lights also the other side, where the disastrous Shutter Rock lies in wait for shipping. It is a famous rock, finding mention in “Westward Ho,” as the scene of the wreck of the Spanish ship, Santa Catherina, when Amyas Leigh was baulked of his own personal revenge. It stands up, in pyramidal form, outside the gloomy cleft of the “Devil’s Limekiln,” some 370 feet deep. It is the “shutter” rock because of the popular belief that, if it could be placed in the “Limekiln,” it would exactly fit. Outside rises Black Rock.
Near the older lighthouse are the ruins of St. Helen’s chapel, with, beyond it, the heights of Beacon Hill. Continuing on the western side of the island, we come to the old Signal Battery, whence guns were fired in misty weather, and so to Quarter Wall, built by Benson’s convicts across the isle. A number of yawning cracks in the upland, sloping down to the sea, are observed on the way to Jenny’s Cove. These are called “The Earthquakes.”
“Punchbowl Valley,” “The Devil’s Chimney,” and the “Cheeses,” indicate the weathered masses of granite in the little bay. Beyond these the Halfway Wall goes across the island. Thenceforward, save for the myriads of seabirds, the way is comparatively tame. Except for a little stream—a curiosity on Lundy—-no striking scenery is met until the North Point and its modern lighthouse reached, where the cliffs end in piles of rocks, like ruins, and the Hen and Chickens islets are scattered about, off-shore. Here, on most days, the air is filled with the screaming of the thousands of aquatic birds that inhabit the crannies of the rocks. Puffins or “Lundy parrots,” cormorants, guillemots, and gulls fly, or swim and dive, or sit in queer contemplative rows upon the reefs, like congregations at service. Occasionally a seal may be seen splashing off the seal rocks.
The very ground, sloping to the cliffs hereabouts, is honeycombed with the tunnels in which the puffins make their nests. The ruins of one of several ancient round towers, presumably old-time defences of the isle, are met with on turning the point and making for the curious pile of rocks called the “Mousetrap.” A track of marshy ground here diversifies the scene. Tibbet’s Point rises 510 feet above the sea. Beyond it is the “Templar Rock,” a cliff-profile singularly like the helmeted face of a man. At this eastern extremity of the Half-way Wall is a logan-stone that, owing to the decay of its support, no longer rocks to a vigorous push. The circuit of the island is completed on passing the deserted workings of the Lundy Granite Company and its empty cottages.
CHAPTER IX
CHAMBERCOMBE AND ITS “HAUNTED HOUSE”—BERRYNARBOR
The modern suburban extensions of ’Combe are devouring the rustic lanes far in the rear, and the natural wildness of Devonian landscape, that seems so untamable, is being pitifully bridled. New terraces of cheap houses climbing unimaginable steeps, deploy their battalions of “desirable residences” over the hills: each house with its pretentious name—“Hatfield,” “Blenheim,” “Burghley,” maybe—their sponsors, without humour themselves, the cause of much satiric humour in others who chance by them. You must pass many such on the way to Chambercombe (originally Champernowne’s Combe), one of the places no visitor to Ilfracombe is bidden to miss seeing; Chambercombe being a still rustic valley where there even yet nestles an ancient farmhouse, formerly a manor-house of a branch of the Champernowne family, and long enjoying a rather vague and ineffectual reputation as a “haunted house.”
Suddenly, passing “Champernowne Terrace,” the uttermost outpost of ’Combe, and a bankrupted mineral-water factory, you come to the opening of Chambercombe; a road steeply descending, hollow, rutty, with tall hedgerow elms—in a word, Devonian. Down at the bottom, the eye rests gratefully upon a steep-roofed old whitewashed building, enclosed within high and thick courtyard walls, and approached through a gateway: the old home of those North Devon Champernownes, extinct, equally with their South Devon namesakes of Modbury, long generations ago. For many years it has been a farmhouse, and in all this time its uncertain legendary fame has grown, so that now, by dint of its nearness to the town, and of the constant stream of curious visitors who plagued the very life out of the farming folk, the present occupants have taken Opportunity by both hands and exploit the legend to commercial ends; as the notice, with a generous profusion of capital letters displayed at the gateway, discloses. Tea and refreshments may, you read, be obtained, and even lodgings had, at Chambercombe Farm, “With its Haunted Room And Coat of Arms Shown To Visitors.”