An easy path leads from this point around Catherine Tor and its waterfall, into a wide moor-like valley where a little stream, fussing noisily in its peaty bed among occasional boulders, hurries along to join the sea. The scene where this rivulet, arriving abruptly at the cliff’s edge, falls sheer over it, in a long spout of about a hundred feet, is the most dramatic thing on the coast of North Devon. Imagine the lonely valley, not in itself very remarkable, suddenly shorn off in a clean cut, disclosing a smooth face of rock as black as coal, ending in a little beach—and there you have Speke’s Mouth, as it is called.
SPEKE’S MOUTH.
From here it is possible to follow the cliffs to Welcombe Mouth: a fatiguing journey. The quicker way, and also perhaps the more beautiful, is up the valley and into the road; coming down into the wooded vale of Welcombe Mouth by a zigzag route, amid a tangle of undergrowth. The village of Welcombe, which takes its name from a holy well dedicated to St. Nectan, is marked by its church-tower a mile inland; the valley itself being solitary, except for one very new and blatant farmstead. Here, as in all these other vales dipping to the sea, a little stream goes swirling down through the tangled brakes of the combe, to end ineffectively on the beach.
Welcombe Mouth is associated with the exploits of “Cruel Coppinger,” supposed to have been a Danish sea-captain, wrecked off Hartland. Thrown ashore in dramatic fashion, and narrowly escaping death at the hands of the half-savage Welcombe people of over a century ago, who nursed odd prejudices against allowing wrecked sailors to survive, he settled awhile in the district, and himself became a wrecker and smuggler. He and his exploits are now part of local folk-lore, and the novelists have got hold of him too; but it would seem that, cast ashore with clothes all torn from him by the fury of the waves, he recovered consciousness only in time to prevent his being knocked on the head. Jumping up, seizing a cutlass, and vaulting, naked as he was, on to the back of a horse, he galloped up the combe to the sheltering house of some people named Hamlyn, parents of the Dinah Hamlyn whom he subsequently married.
The exploits of Coppinger the Cruel, as they survive in legend, verge upon the incredible. How he beheaded a gauger with his own cutlass on the gunwale of a boat, how he thrashed the parson at the dinner-table, and how he was wafted away by a mysterious ship, from off the romantic-looking Gull Rock, that looms darkly off the coast; are they not all enshrined in the folk-lore of the West, and particularly in the verses of which here is a sample?
“Would you know of Cruel Coppinger?
He came from a foreign land;
He was brought to us by the salt water
And carried away by the wind.”
And now, over the steep hill dividing Welcombe Mouth from Marsland Mouth, we come to the conclusion of the coast of North Devon. Marsland Mouth is a fit ending: the very culmination of loneliness. If the scenery of its seaward end is not so rugged as that of many of these “mouths,” the extraordinary exuberance of the close-grown thorn, oak, and hazel thickets that have entirely overgrown the valley is unparalleled anywhere else in all these miles. Only a rugged footpath, closely beset with bushes, leads down to the shore. It must be admitted, however, that evidence of Marsland Mouth being within touch of modern life is not lacking—is only too evident, indeed—in two huge, outrageously ugly, plaster-faced houses, of the very worst type of Ladbroke Grove “architecture,” that look down from a ridge into the romantic cleft. The atrocity of their being placed here is beyond words.
I have styled Marsland Mouth “romantic,” and not without due warrant; for does it not appear, early in the pages of “Westward Ho!” as the scene of Rose Salterne’s adventure with the “white witch,” Lucy Passmore?
White witch or black, her beliefs were sufficiently dark, and the mystic rites she practised were as uncanny as any of those in common usage by the more inimical kind of witches—the kind who “overlooked” you, played the very deuce and all with your sheep and cattle, and generally harboured a “familiar” in the shape of a black tom cat.