MALMSMEAD.
On a busy day, as many as twenty-seven waggonettes and other vehicles may be found at Malmsmead, drawn up empty, awaiting the return of the “Lorna Doone” sightseers from the Badgworthy Valley and the Doone Valley, or Oare. Constant repetition of the trip, day by day in the season, for many years, has rendered the drivers indifferent. Some you may observe asleep, others playing cards, and all those who are awake swearing. Meanwhile, the pilgrims in search of the Doone Valley and the homes of those entirely fabulous people have tailed away along the footpaths beside the Badgworthy Water, in search of literary landmarks. Few, however, get as far as the so-called “Doone Valley,” for it is a very considerable walk; and most people have by this time sadly realised that Blackmore’s fervid descriptions of places are, as a rule, remarkable for their shameless exaggeration. In sober truth, the Badgworthy Valley, that opens out of Malmsmead, forms a much more striking scene than the supposed stronghold of the Doones. It is a typical moorland vale, with the Badgworthy Water—or the “Badgery” as they style it in these parts—pouring down out of the sullen Exmoor hills, gliding with an oily smoothness over waterslides, foaming over stickles, or splashing like very miniature Niagaras over great moss-grown boulders.
The valley is not nowadays so lonely as Blackmoor pictures it: in fact, the terrible “Badgery Valley,” as described by him, never existed, and almost the entire thing is a delusion and a snare. Plantations of fir and larch partly clothe the rounded hills on the left hand, and a farmhouse (since the publication of “Lorna Doone” named “Lorna’s Bower,” in big letters that, painted on its whitewashed garden-wall, stare across the stream) is perched comfortably half-way up the hillside.
The footpath that winds ribbon-like beside the stream comes presently to Badgworthy Wood, a wood of stunted oaks, whose limbs are bearded with a grey-green moss that tells sufficiently of the humid atmosphere and the mists that drift from Exmoor. Parson Jack Russell believed Badgworthy Wood to have been a Druid’s grave; but we may, perhaps, with safety decline to accept him as an authority on the subject. Now, had he expressed an opinion on horse-coping and sharp practice generally in horsey matters, his views would carry all the weight due to such an acknowledged authority.
BADGWORTHY VALLEY.
Here the foxglove grows in the shade, and hart’s-tongue ferns come to an unusual size. The whortleberry plant, too, flourishes in this moist spot to a height prodigious for whortleberries. Some of them must run up to eighteen inches; but the berries have not the sweetness of those that grow on the dwarfed plants of the sun-scorched, rain-furrowed, and wind-lashed downs.
Save for the passing of groups of “Lorna Doone” pilgrims, the place is very solitary. The hills that look down upon the valley here rise higher, and draw closer in, swooping down in naked round outlines in the foreground, and filling in the distance with dense blue-black plantations of larch. The bald outlines of those near at hand are sharply accented by a wind-swept lone thorn-tree that stands out curiously against the sky. Below it, stretching down the hillside is an ancient earthwork, in shape roughly like the letter Y; and down below this again, the Badgworthy Water foams and slides amidst its boulders.
Quietly walking through the little wood, and then silently along the grassy paths through the almost breast-high bracken beyond, I started a fox from his summer afternoon sleep on a sun-warmed boulder; a fine, but gaunt fellow of crimson hue, and with a magnificent brush. Not one of your full-fed Midland foxes, plump with a long career of raids on poultry-runs, but one accustomed to picking up a mere living by sheer hard work in these wilds. He loped leisurely away into the woods, with an easy swinging gait that looked deceptively slow. Up along there, where he disappeared amid the tangled branches, a monstrous square mass of rock stands half-revealed, remarkably like some ancient stone-built house; a veritable Mockbeggar Hall, that, on a near approach, is found to be no habitation of man, but a crannied, cliff-like place, partly draped with ivy; the home of jackdaws, and tunnelled about the base of it with the runs of hares and rabbits.