The Quay, looking straight across to Appledore and out to the west, commands magnificent sunsets over the sea, with lovely views up the river Torridge and its heavily-wooded banks; the famous bridge of Bideford and the white houses of that town clearly to be seen, three miles away; or, lovelier still, and mysterious in the twilight—“the dimpsey,” as they call it in North Devon.
The river Taw is fine, but the lovely Torridge is its much more beautiful sister. Those familiar with South Devon will readily find a remarkable resemblance between the estuaries of the Exe and the Torridge, and in the upper reaches will not fail to note an equal likeness to the Teign, just below Newton Abbot. And, to clinch the resemblance, Instow Quay is not unlike Starcross, with the further similarity of a railway running by. Here is the same waterside line of houses, chiefly of the Regency and Early Victorian white-faced sort, just on the verge of becoming romantic, by mere effluxion of time. Little plaster-faced villas with green-painted verandahs and hairpin railings enclosing close-cropped hedges of privet or euonymus, approached by neat pebble-pitched pathways, sometimes, for greater effect of decoration, done in white pebbles, with a pattern of brown. I can imagine our great-grandmothers, as pretty girls of sweet seventeen, in book-muslin, taking holiday here and reading Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell.
Opposite lies Appledore, with the tall tower of what looks like a church on its scarred hillside, and is really a look-out tower known as “Chanter’s Folly”; and sometimes you may see the grey mass of Lundy, on the horizon. Lonely Lundy, to which His Majesty’s mails go only once weekly from Instow Quay, per sailing-skiff Gannet. For those who like tumbling on the ocean wave, the cruise there and back in the day on those weekly sailings is enjoyable; but for those who do not happen to be good sailors, the return fare of five shillings only admits to five shillings’ worth of sheer misery. So Lundy generally remains to unseaworthy visitors to Instow a great unknown quantity.
The road runs close beside the estuary, all the way from Instow to Bideford, passing the nobly wooded hillsides of Tapeley Park, with its tall obelisk to the memory of one of the Cleveland family who fell at Inkerman. Bideford, on the opposite shore, becomes revealed, not only as a waterside town, but as very much of a hillside town as well, and with a not inconsiderable suburb on the hither side of the river: a suburb known as “East-the-Water.” Here we come to the heart of that district of North Devon so intimately associated with Kingsley and his “Westward Ho!” that it is very generally known as the “Kingsley Country.”
CHAPTER XII
KINGSLEY AND “WESTWARD HO!”—BIDEFORD BRIDGE—THE GRENVILLES—SIR RICHARD GRENVILLE AND THE REVENGE—THE ARMADA GUNS—BIDEFORD CHURCH—THE POSTMAN POET
“The little white town of Bideford,” wrote Kingsley lovingly, “which slopes upward from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and the many-arched old bridge where salmon wait for autumn floods.” He wrote a part of “Westward Ho!” in the drawing-room of the “Royal Hotel” at East-the-Water, looking across to Bideford quay and the little white town that so strongly inspired him; and the room is styled the “Kingsley Room” at this day. The older part of the house was once the residence of one of those old merchant princes who flourished at many a port, centuries ago, and, amassing wealth swiftly in their overseas ventures, built houses for themselves befitting their dignity. At King’s Lynn, at Poole, at Ipswich, and many another ancient port, the stately residences of those men, who risked much and often gained greatly, are still to be found; and often in the neighbouring churches you see their monuments in brass or marble, picturing them in furred robes and linen ruffs, piously upon their knees, with hands devotionally placed, just as though they never had dabbled in piracy and privateering, as undoubtedly they often did.
The house that is now the “Royal” was built by one of these merchants in the year 1688. The noble oaken staircase and the elaborately decorated ceiling of the drawing-room survive to show us that he did not think the best obtainable too good for him. The moulded plaster ceiling, designed in festoons of fruit, flowers, and foliage in high relief, is one of the finest works of that local North Devon and Somerset school of decorative artists already referred to at length.
The “Royal,” where Kingsley wrote, commands a view along the famous bridge of Bideford.
Never, surely, was other bridge so praised, sung, and celebrated, in all manner of ways, as this bridge of Bideford. The bridge is Bideford, to all intents; and only the name of the town fails to reflect its glory. It has obstinately remained, in spite of that bridge, what it was before ever a bridge of any kind was thought possible to be built by hand of man—“By-the-Ford.” For that, we are told, was the original name of Bideford; or, in its full majesty, the real original name of the place was “Renton-by-the-Ford,” which many-jointed and inconvenient title has only by degrees arrived at what it is now.