Turner has made a pretty picture of “Bucks,” as it is called for short—or more properly, “Bucksh”—with a distant glimpse of the houses of Clovelly, pouring like a cataract down the face of the cliffs, and a still more distant peep of Lundy. The old, old tale of the original inhabitants of Buck’s Mill having been wrecked Spaniards is still told. You hear that story of many seaside hamlets in the West; but I, for one, fail to see the swarthiness, the obvious foreign origin, of the present men, women, and children of Bucks, so dwelt upon in guide-books.
[After J. M. W. Turner, RA
CLOVELLY, FROM BUCK’S MILL.
When I found myself down at the bottom of that profound descent and at Buck’s Mill, it began to rain: the hopeless dogged rain that comes down out of a leaden sky, deliberately, as though it were determined to rain all night. I sat in a leaky shed on a heap of sand and waited....
Still waiting! Some one has written, somewhere, that ignorance is the parent of wonder, and all this while I had been wondering many things—wondering if it were going to rain all night; wondering if it were not better to push on to Clovelly; wondering if one would get very wet if a start were made now; wondering why it should be a law of Nature that hopeless rain should set in when one was in an exposed situation and with a considerable distance yet to go.... Better chance it.
And so, pushing the bicycle up that long, steep ascent, which in descending had seemed only a quarter the length, I slithered through a sea of mud along the lonely road and in a dense white fog. It had ceased raining, on the way, but the fog exuded almost as much moisture.
And so, cautiously, from Clovelly Cross down to the Court and the head of that precipitous staircase called Clovelly “street.” The promised lingering approach, as the sun went down by the famed Hobby Drive, had to be abandoned for the while, and reserved for a more favourable day.