“Every gully and creek there among the rocks is yellow, but not with sand. Those are shells; the sweepings of the ocean bed for miles around, piled there, millions upon millions, yards deep, in every stage of destruction. There they lie, grinding to dust, and every gale brings in fresh myriads from the inexhaustible sea-world. The brain grows dizzy and tired, as one’s feet crunch over the endless variety of their forms—and then one recollects that every one of them has been a living thing—a whole history of birth, and growth, and propagation, and death.”
The little inlet, so shut in, has an exclusive air, in contrast with the open semicircular three-miles sweep of Woolacombe Sands; but refreshment caterers have descended upon the place with tents. They have done the like at Woolacombe Bay itself, for in these days Woolacombe Bay is a name denoting more than an expanse of water with a sandy fringe. The safe bathing in the sea, and the extensive golfing on the sand hills or in the flat fields have converted what was, literally, a “howling waste”—for the winds occasionally blow great guns here—into the semblance of a seaside resort. There were, but a few years ago, only some three houses here, including the old manor mill, whose water-wheel formed a picturesque object beside the little stream that empties itself into the bay; but now there is a great red brick hotel with the usual “special terms to golfers,” and a little red town has sprung up around it, with a fringe of rather blear-eyed shops facing the sea, and some better, turned at right angles to it. There is so impossible a look about the whole thing, that “here we have no abiding place” is a quotation that rises promptly to the mind of the observer. It looks, with its refreshment booths and array of chairs on the shore in summer, like some camp-meeting in a desolate part of America. But it is intended to last; a permanent water-supply has been installed and a kind of modern missionary tin church, dedicated to St. Sabinus, who voyaged across from Ireland a thousand years ago, to convert the heathen of this neighbourhood—and was wrecked on this shore—has been erected. Woolacombe Bay, however, is a melancholy place. It has had no past, and it is difficult to imagine it with a future. Only a fanatical golfer to whom the world beyond his putting-greens and his bunkers is merely incidental, could long find occupation here.
That is a terrible road—preposterously steep, deep in loose sand, and strewn with large stones—which leads up from this resort in the making to the high table-land down on whose other side lies the village of Georgeham, whose inhabitants, quite exceptionally, insist upon it being styled, not “Georg’m,” but emphatically “Georgham.” That is their pronunciation, and they bid you use none other. In the fine, but rebuilt church, is the cross-legged effigy of an ancient St. Aubyn—one Sir Mauger of that ilk, who died in 1293—and an ugly and greatly-decayed monument of the Chichesters, with medallion-portraits of many seventeenth-century bearers of that name. In the churchyard, where the humbler sleep just as comfortably, is the epitaph of Simon Gould and his wife Julian, who died in 1817, after seventy-five years of married life, each aged 107, and near by may still be found a stone to one William Kidman, who, with all his mates, was drowned in the wreck of H.M.S. Weazel, guardship stationed off Appledore, at Baggy Point, in February 1799. An epitaph upon Sergeant Job Hill, of the 40th Foot, completes this list of interesting relics, on a martial note:
Nor cannon’s roar nor rifle shot
Can wake him in this peaceful spot.
With faith in Christ and trust in God,
The sergeant sleeps beneath this clod.
Leafy lanes and rugged lead to the hamlet of Putsborough, very much removed from the snares and pitfalls of the world of affairs, and on the road to nowhere at all, unless it be the rocks of Baggy Point, which forms the southern horn of Morte Bay. Putsborough takes its name from some Saxon earl, just as Croyde derives its own from Crida; and doubtless it was to convert the people of Putta and Crida, or their descendants, from the fierce heathen rites of the Saxons, that St. Sabinus, St. Brannock, and many another Irish missionary landed in the long ago on these shores.
Putsborough lies embedded in leafy seclusion. A farmstead or two, and their attendant cottages, together with a most delightful thatched manor-house, overhung with tall trees, comprise the whole place. The manor-house and its lawn and garden stand whimsically islanded by surrounding roads, and a little stream trickles by, in a water splash. It is a most primitive place and some of the lanes leading on to Croyde are fit fellows with it, being cut deeply into the rock and overhung, ten feet high, with brambly growths.
Croyde is not so entirely removed from social intercourse. It is still a pretty, scattered rustic village lining a road running down a valley to the sea, with a brawling stream beside the road; but on the shore of Croyde Bay, where there are yellow sands, some recent seaside houses have been built. It is a pretty and cheerful little bay; not large enough to look melancholy and desolate, like that of Woolacombe, and the road on to Saunton is excellent; having really been remade across Saunton Down, as part of a “development” scheme. Excellent, that is to say, from the point of view of a motorist, for it is broad and straight, and the surface is beyond reproach. But it is, it must be added, more than a trifle bald and uninteresting to those who do not regard roads as the nearer perfection the more closely they resemble a race-track.
Whether Saunton be “sand-town” or whether it was originally named “Sainct tun,”—as, in some sort, a holy district—is still a vexed question; and likely to remain undecided, for these shores are remarkable both for saints and sands. We have already told briefly how St. Sabine—or Suibine, as he was known in Ireland—landed in disorder on Woolacombe sands in the dim past. Here were chapels of Saint Sylvester, Saint Michael, and Saint Helen; and here St. Brannock came ashore in A.D. 300, to convert the heathen, and incidentally to found the church called after him at what is now Braunton, in “Brannock’s-town.” More of him anon. But legends tell how he built his early church of timber cut in forests by the seashore, and dragged inland by harnessed stags. Where, it has been asked, did these forests stand? No one knows where legend begins and fact ends; but it is certain that underneath these miles of blown sand, on to Braunton Burrows, and again at Northam Burrows and on to Westward Ho, there lie the remains of a prehistoric forest, overwhelmed by sea and sand, or in some ancient subsidence, many centuries ago.
There is no town at Saunton, and the mere fringe of houses beside the road is very new; this coast having been of old too dreary and inhospitable to afford a home for honest folk. Smugglers, wreckers, and such shy cattle, were among its scanty frequenters, and sometimes (the place being so lonely and secretive) refugees landed amid these wastes. Among them was the Duke of Ripperda, who landed one dark night in the beginning of October 1728, out of an Irish barque. He “had no one with him but the lady who had procured his deliverance, the corporal of the guard, and one servant.” This fugitive had escaped from the castle of Segovia. He was entertained the night by one “Mr. Harris of Pickwell,” and then went to Exeter. Thus the Duke of Ripperda, who is no national concern of ours, flits mysteriously across country to disappear again in foreign parts. It would puzzle a biographer to give him a domicile. Born a Dutchman, he seems to have been sent on a diplomatic mission to Madrid, and there to have renounced Holland and the Protestant religion and to have become a Spaniard and a Catholic. Philip the Fifth rewarded him with a dukedom. Eventually he is found in Morocco, as a Moorish subject of the deepest dye. At one period, we are told, he became a Jew, but that is scarcely credible. At last, having been everything it was possible to be, he died in 1737.
