Morte Point does not impress me, and although I have every wish to “write it up” to its grim name—as every journalist who properly understood what is expected of him would most assuredly do—I cannot see the grimness of it; only a projecting tongue of land that runs down to the sea and ends in low, insignificant cliffs, with a chaotic scatter of formless rocks projecting from the waves, and the “Morte Stone,” rather larger than the others, seaward. And there are, you know, squalid little gardens of the allotment type in the fields, and Morthoe village itself is so commonplace that the tragical names, “Death Point,” “The Hill of Death,” seem absurdly misapplied. But Morte Point is a great deal more deadly than it looks, and although the landsman who sees with his own vision, rather than at second hand, may slight the name, seafaring men dread it more than the really magnificent spectacular bulk of Hartland Point. It is not the size, but the awkward situation, of Morte Point, together with the currents which set about it, that make it dangerous to shipping. The removal of Morte Point is, naturally enough, beyond the powers of man, but it should at any rate, in these days of high explosives and engineering skill, not be impossible to abolish the isolated rock of Morte Stone, in spite of the ancient sardonic jest that the only person to remove it will be the man who can rule his wife.
Morthoe (locally “Morte”) village is a wan, desolate-looking collection of a few houses on the cliff-top, overlooking the wide expanse of blue sea and yellow sands of Woolacombe Bay. It can never have worn anything but a stern, stark, weather-beaten appearance, but that is giving way in these times to something even less attractive; commonplace plaster-fronted houses, that would not pass muster in even one of the less desirable London suburbs, having sprung up around the ancient weatherworn church, while a grocer’s shop, styling itself “stores,” looks on to the churchyard. At a place named so tragically “Morthoe,” you do most ardently demand that the scene be set somewhat in accordance with the ominous name. The stranger does not insist upon a mortuary full of shipwrecked sailors, as (so to say) a guarantee of good faith, but he does resent, most emphatically, the sheer commonplace that dashes his anticipations remorselessly to extinction.
The ancient family of Tracy, associated closely with Barnstaple, and with many another locality in North and Mid Devon, are mentioned in histories of the neighbourhood as early as the beginning of the twelfth century. Ever after the murder of Thomas à Becket in 1170, in which William de Tracy bore a part, the Tracys were said, in the wild legends of old, to have always “the wind in their faces.” The belief provided a rough rhyme, and satisfied a queer idea of retributive justice by which root and branch alike of that unfortunate family suffered for the acts of one who it appears was not himself, after all, of that race: having been a de Sudeley by birth, and only assuming the name of Tracy after his marriage with Grace, daughter of Sir William de Tracy. The legends that have gathered like the incrustation on old port-wine bottles, round the assassination of Becket and the after-history of the four knights who murdered him, tell how Tracy fled to Morthoe and passed the rest of his life in prayers and penitence, but it seems to be fully established that he fled the country and died three years later, in Calabria; after having, according to a yet further variant, thrice unsuccessfully attempted to make pious pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and being beaten back on every occasion by adverse winds.
MORTHOE.
The legend associating the assassin with Morthoe would appear to have been invented to account for the ancient altar-tomb, covered with an inscribed slab of black marble, bearing the name of one William de Tracy, that still stands in the south chapel of the old church. There was not, in the days when this tale originated, the disposition to criticise any story that imaginative persons might choose to tell. Research, for the purpose of recovering facts obscured by lapse of time, was unthinkable in the days when travel to the repositories of learning could be undertaken only at great risks and incredible cost; and so, what with both the will and the power wanting to arrive at mere facts, many an incredible tale has been started on its career. It seems, in this instance, never to have occurred to the people of Morthoe, who long accepted this story, that among the numerous Tracys with whom they were in old times surrounded, there must have been more than one William. William, indeed, appears to have been a favourite name among them. In short, the man whose tomb remains here was a Tracy who from 1257 to 1322 was rector of Morthoe. He thus died close upon a hundred and fifty years later than Becket’s assailant.
Remains of the incised figure of a priest are yet traceable on the tomb, together with an inscription which has been deciphered, “Syre Guillaume de Tracy, gist ici. Dieu de son alme eyt merci.” The interior of the tomb was rifled long ago. In the quaint description by old Westcote, who wrote in 1620, “He rested in ease until some ill-affected persons, seeking for treasure, but disappointed thereof, stole the leaden sheets he lay in, leaving him in danger to take cold.”
This Early English church with aisleless nave and two chapels, has few other memorials, none of them ancient; but many of the old carved bench-ends remain, the balance of them being imitations, carved locally, when the church was restored in 1857. In recent years the east windows of chancel and north and south chapels have been filled with beautiful stained glass, designed by Henry Holiday, and the space above the chancel-arch decorated in gold and coloured mosaic, with four stiffly decorative angels in the Burne-Jones convention, by Selwyn Image. The dangers of Morthoe, not only to seafaring folk, but also to bathers, appear in the memorial window to Thomas Lee, architect, of Barnstaple, who was drowned off Barricane Beach in 1834. The memorial of a more recent tragedy is seen in the churchyard, where a tombstone records the drowning of “Winifred, youngest daughter of Sir Walter Forster, M.P., who was swept away by the treacherous ground-swell, while bathing in Coombes Gate, Morthoe, Aug. 14, 1898, aged 21.” Near by is a rhymed epitaph upon one “Albion Bale Harris, aged 13,” who was killed in 1886 by falling off a cliff at Ilfracombe.
The long, steep road that descends from Morthoe to the flat shore of Woolacombe Bay, is becoming plagued with a growth of tasteless lodging-houses, whose neutral-tinted stucco is put to shame by the splendour of sea, sky, and sands. When last I came this way, two Italian piano organists, with a cage of canaries, were grinding out their mechanical music-mongery in an exceptionally lone spot, away from those new houses; wasting, like the flowers in the wilderness, their sweetness on the desert air. None but the rocks heard them, for not another living soul was near. They were not drunk, neither did they appear to be mad. I have not yet discovered the true inwardness of it; is it possible that here at last were two artists, for Art’s sake, piano-organing for the very love of it? Dark doubts cloud the idyllic picture!
Below the road, before you come to Woolacombe Bay, is the little inlet of Barricane Beach, shut in between two projecting reefs. Charles Kingsley, many years ago, writing of Woolacombe Sands, referred to them as really composed of shells, but it would seem that Barricane Beach alone can claim his remarks: