The North Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

BLACK CHURCH ROCK.

A long succession of cliffs leads at last to Eldern Point and thence into the wild inlet of Shipload Bay, whose shore, like most of these nooks, is paved with dark ribs of rock. Finally, West Titchberry Cliffs and Barley Bay, lead to Hartland Point itself; noblest in outline of all; with its coastguard station on the windy ridge, and the lighthouse, built so recently as 1874, on a rocky platform, two-thirds of the way down to the sea.

Here and onwards to Upright Cliff and Hartland Quay, the furious wash of the Atlantic is supremely noticeable, and has carved out the face of the land in fantastic manner. Pillared rocks, styled by some imaginative geographer the “Cow and Calf,” astonish by their bold aspect, and still more by their want of resemblance to Calf or Cow.

Follows then the hollow of Smoothlands, with Damehole Point; on the very verge, as it would seem, of becoming an island, through the violence of the sea eating away the softer parts of the rock. Beyond this, the hollow of Black Mouth, well named from its inky rock ledges, opens, with an enchanting view inland, up a wooded valley, where a noble mansion may be seen in the distance.

That is “Hartland Abbey,” the country residence so-called. Here, in the beautiful valley that, with its broad, level bottom, is more than a “combe,” Gytha, wife of Earl Godwin and mother of the unfortunate King Harold, who lost life and kingdom at the Battle of Hastings, founded a college of secular canons, as a thank-offering to God and St. Nectan for the preservation of her husband from shipwreck. In the reign of Henry the Second, this establishment was re-founded by Geoffry de Dynham as a monastery under Augustine rule; and through the centuries it prospered in this remote valley progressively enriched by the pious and the wicked alike: by the pious out of their piety, and by the wicked by way of compounding for their sins. And at last it ended in the usual confiscating way which makes the story of the monasteries in the time of Henry the Eighth seem to some so unmerited a tragedy, and to others a tardy, but well-earned retribution. From the Abbot who surrendered Hartland Abbey and its lands to Henry the Eighth, the property went by royal gift to one whose own name was, curiously enough, Abbott. From him it descended in turn to the Luttrells, the Orchards, and the Bucks, who in 1858 changed their name to Stucley. It was an Orchard who in 1779 built the existing mansion, that is seated so comfortably in the sheltered green strath, away from the winds rioting on those exposed uplands from which we have just now descended. He built in that allusive architectural style for which one may coin the word “ecclesiesque”; a midway halting between church architecture and domestic. Strange to say, he retained the Early English cloisters of the old Abbey, and here they are to this day.

HARTLAND POINT.

It really is strange that he should—or that his architect, for him, should—have kept the cloisters, for the spirit of the age—it was the age of Horace Walpole, you know—was remarkably addicted to a kind of wry-necked appreciation of Gothic architecture, and given to destroy genuine antiquities, only to erect on the site of them imitative Gothic with eighteenth-century frills and embellishments. The “men of taste” who flourished towards the close of the eighteenth century were quite convinced that they could have taught the men who built in earlier ages something new in the way of Gothic: and they were, in a way, right. But what a way it was!

There were some queer characters in these districts of old, and none more striking than an ancient scion of the Stucley family—Thomas Stucley, who was born in, or about, 1525 and died fighting the Moors, at the Battle of Alcazar, ex parte the King of Portugal, in 1578. There can be little doubt that, when he ended thus, Queen Elizabeth and her Ministers of State, like Dogberry, thanked God they were rid of a knave; for Thomas Stucley was adventurer, pirate, renegade, and traitor to his country, and the cause of innumerable alarms and embarrassments. One of the five sons of Sir Hugh Stucley, of Affeton, near Ilfracombe, he formed something of a mystery: vague rumours that he was really an illegitimate son of Henry the Eighth following all his escapades. These were strengthened by the lenient treatment with which his most serious and inexcusable doings were visited by Queen Elizabeth. Always of an adventurous and reckless nature, and perhaps not a little tainted with madness, he proposed, when scarce more than a youth, to colonise Florida, and in 1563 set out with six ships and three hundred men, for the purpose. There must have been something unusual in the relations between himself and Queen Elizabeth, for him to have interviewed her, before he set out, in the terms ascribed to him. “He blushed not,” we read, “to tell Elizabeth to her face that he preferred rather to be sovereign of a molehill than the highest subject to the greatest king in Christendom, and that he was assured he should be a prince before his death.”