The United Services College was founded in 1874 by the exertions of General Sir H. C. B. Daubeney and a number of officers of the services. The idea was to provide a public-school education for the children of officers in Army, Navy, and Civil Services, at a lower cost than usual. “Fear God and honour the King” was its motto, and mural and naval crowns, surmounting crossed swords and anchor, were its badges. Mr. Rudyard Kipling was educated here, and the College therefore figures in that story of peculiarly nasty schoolboys, “Stalky & Co.”
The “Pebble Ridge” is a good deal better to look at than to walk on. Conceive a raised beach, flung up out of the sea in the course of countless seasons, and forming, as it were, a natural embankment, fashioned by the waves against their own encroachment upon the salt-marshes. But do not imagine a ridge of pebbles like those that rattle up and down to the scour of the tides at Brighton. Those are like the stones found in gravel; but what is in North Devon conceived to be a pebble is a monstrous thing, rather larger than a dinner-plate, and weighing anything from five to seven pounds. In the times before the wretched settlement of Westward Ho! arose, and when the rustics still talked broad Devon, these were “popples.”
CHAPTER XIV
ABBOTSHAM—“WOOLSERY”—BUCK’S MILL
A steep road leads up out of Bideford on the way to Clovelly, and goes, quite shy of the sea, and altogether out of sight of it, all the way. It is a quite unremarkable road. Here and there, subsidiary roads lead off to the right, giving access to entirely unsuspected habitations of men, lying variously from a quarter to half a mile distant on the seashore, or neighbouring it. First comes the village of Abbotsham, in its pretty valley, with a small church, chiefly remarkable for a little unpretending monument, dated 1639, to one Anthony Honey. He died aged nineteen; and some one, who loved him much, wrote the following epitaph upon him, in which humour and sorrowing affection peep out, really most plainly to be seen, you know, like the mingled sunshine and showers of an April day:
Hoc parvo in tumulo situs est
Antonius Hony. Melleus ille suo nomine,
more fuit. Obiit June 1639, ætati, suæ 19.
“His manners were as sweet as his name”; it is a pretty fancy.
Another bye-road leads down to the old mansion of Portledge, seat of the Coffin family, who rather intensified the gruesome suggestions of their name by adding that of Pine to it. The Pine-Coffins have been seated here for generations. Half a mile along the cliffs, Peppercombe is found; a few cottages seated in a hollow.
The main road passes at intervals, Fairy Cross, Horns Cross, and the Hoops Inn, and presently comes to Buck’s Cross; where one of many signposts continues a long series of pointing arms to “Woolsery.” I have successfully resisted that repeated invitation inland, and do not know what Woolsery is like: only this, that the village of Woolfardisworthy is indicated. But even in North Devon, where time goes something slowly, life is not long enough to always pronounce the word as spelt of old, and certainly the arm of no signpost is long enough to contain the whole of it; and so the district has cast away, like so much useless lumber, half its length.
Down on the right hand goes the road, staggeringly steep, to Buck’s Mill, a little cranny in the towering wooded cliffs, where a huge limekiln and a few white cottages hang crazily over the water.