The North Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

Clovelly has been thought by some to have a Roman origin, and its name to derive from Clausa Vallis. The ingenuity of this derivation compels our admiring attention, even if it does not win our agreement. Ptolemy styled Hartland Point the “Point of Hercules,” and Barnstaple is thought to have been the Roman Artavia; but no evidence of any kind associates Clovelly with those times. The great triple-ditched prehistoric earthworks at Clovelly Cross, where the road down to the village branches from the highway, point to some ancient people having been settled here and greatly concerned to defend the place; but the history of Clovelly Dykes, or “Ditchens,” as they are called, will never be written. Clovelly’s name almost certainly derives from words meaning “the cliff place,” the site of it being amazingly cloven down the face of the steep cliffs that on either hand present a bold front to the sea. The force that carved out this astonishing cleft was the same that has fashioned the many combes and “mouths” along this coast; an impetuous stream rushing from the inland heights. Indeed, the cobble-stoned stairs that form the footpath of Clovelly’s “street,” descending hundreds of feet to the beach, now represent what remained until modern times the bed of that streamlet. It poured down here from the cliff-top, and the curious overhanging terraces of the “New Inn,” and most of the cottages are survivals of its banks. This stream was diverted half a mile to the east, and now flows through the Hobby Drive and over the face of the cliff at Freshwater Cascade.

CLOVELLY, FROM THE HOBBY DRIVE.

The population of Clovelly is almost entirely seafaring: or rather, the men are fisherfolk, and the men’s wives have for years past found a second string to the domestic bow in letting bedrooms and providing refreshments for visitors; so that when circumstances forbid the chase of the herring there is not likely to be that empty cupboard at home, which is apt to vex the lives and haunt the imaginations of the fisherfolk of most other seaboard places. What competition there is in this ministering to visitors is necessarily very limited, because Clovelly itself is unexpanding. What it was sixty or seventy years ago, that it remains in almost every detail to-day. It is the manorial appanage of Clovelly Court, standing up in its broad Park on the cliff-top; and has been since the earliest times. In Domesday we find it the property, among innumerable other manors, of Queen Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror. Down the centuries occur the names of Giffards, Stantons, and Mandevilles, as owners; and in the reign of Richard the Second it became the property of Sir John Cary, by purchase.

The oldest part of the church is Norman, but of those older lords of Clovelly no record survives. They are as though they had never existed. Sir Walter Robert Cary is the oldest represented here, on a brass dated 1540. Other Carys survive in epitaph: William, who died in 1652, aged 76, who (it is claimed for him) not only served “three Princes, Queen Elizabeth, King James, and King Charles I.,” but his generation as well; and Sir “Robert Cary, Kt. (Sonne and Heyre of William), gentleman of the Privy Chamber vnto King Charles II., who, having served faithfully the glorious Prince, Charles I., in the long civil warr against his Rebellious subjects, and both him and his sonne as Justice of the Peace, died a Bachelor, in the 65th yeare of his age, An. Dom. 1675. Peritura perituris relique.” And so at last to the Williams family and the Hamlyns.

In the days of those older lords, when the country was thinly populated, travel a penance, and the delights of the picturesque unthought of, Clovelly of course did not grow; and in our own times, now that beauty of situation is an asset and distinctly a factor in the value of land, and projectors of railways and hotels are currently reported to have eyes upon desirable sites, the Hamlyns have resisted all offers. So Clovelly will probably long remain unspoiled.

It has two inns, the old “New Inn,” up-along, as we say here, and the “Red Lion,” “down tu kaay”—not, please, “down upon the key,” after the style and pronunciation of the outer world. If one could conceive such a fantastic thing in Clovelly as a street directory, it would consist almost wholly of those features, “Up-along,” “Down-along,” North Hill, and Quay. “The New Inn and Hotel,” as it now styles itself, does so with some show of reason, for the original “New Inn”—when it was new I cannot conceive—still stands upon one side of the road, and a really new building has been erected opposite: the “Hotel” referred to in the new style, without doubt. There, in the larger rooms of modern ideas, guests breakfast, lunch, or dine, and those unfortunate ones who cannot be accommodated with a bedroom in the old house across the way, sleep. Unfortunate, I say, because at Clovelly one wants to fare after the old style. For years familiar (as thousands of people who have never been to Clovelly must be) with the well-known view of the street showing the “New Inn” and the quaint little soldier and sailor mannikins that serve as windmills on its projecting sign, had I cherished a resolution to stay in the old hostelry; and it had now at last come to pass. Up narrow, twisting stairs was my bedroom, looking out, through clusters of roses, upon the street; and being thus gratified in the main object, it was a small matter that I breakfasted and dined in the new building across the way.

“UP-ALONG,” CLOVELLY.

I shall say nothing of the fare of the “New Inn,” except that it is of the best a typically Devonian farm could produce, and what better would you or could you, than that? Both houses, old and new—the old, with its snug little old-fashioned bar-parlour, as tiny and as full of corners and cupboards as a ship’s cabin, and the new, with its large dining-room—are full to overflowing with the most amazing collection of china, old brass candlesticks, kettles, pestles and mortars, and all sorts of old-fashioned domestic utensils, accumulated in the course of many years at auction or private sales. You sit down to table in that dining-room as though you were dining in a china-shop. Some of the china is old and valuable, and a good deal is neither the one nor the other. By the odd decoration of the ceiling, representing the British “Union Jack” and the U. S. “Old Glory” in amity, you might suspect—if you did not already know it by the accents of fellow-guests—that the bulk of those who seek the hospitality of the “New Inn” are citizens of the United States; but that is no reason why a Briton should be guilty of such abject sentiments as those inscribed between the two flags—not “something proud and vain,” as the foremost modern novelist of the servants’-hall might say, but something mean and cringing, to the effect that it is hoped the United States will always remain friendly and not attack the Mother Country. To how many citizens of the United States is England the Mother Country? This is an age when Americans of British descent are in a minority among a huge population of cosmopolitan European immigrants, largely consisting of Russian and German Jews, Hungarians, and Italians. The people of Clovelly, it may be supposed, naturally seeing only those of British descent, are ignorant of that fact. And, as for being the object of attack, if that happened, could we not hold our own?