The road down from Selworthy to Porlock passes the little river Horner and commands views on the left hand up to the purple hills of Exmoor, up to Cloutsham, where the wild red deer couch, and the great heights of Dunkery, Easter Hill, and Robinow. To the left lies the hamlet of Horner, so-called from the river, “Hwrnr,” = “the Snorer,” snoring, as the Anglo-Saxons are supposed to have fancifully likened the sound of its hoarse purring, over the boulders and amid the gravel-stones that strew its shallow woodland course. Here, amid the woods, you may find, not far from a comparatively modern road-bridge, an ancient packhorse bridge flung steeply across the stream. At Allerford is another packhorse bridge.
CHAPTER XX
PORLOCK—BOSSINGTON—PORLOCK WEIR
A sudden drop into the vale of Porlock tilts the traveller neck and crop into the village street. You realise, when come to the village, that it stands in a flat, low-lying space giving upon a distant bay; a bay distant just upon one mile. Once upon a time—a time so distant that history places no certain date against it—the village immediately faced the sea, and indeed took its name, which means “the enclosed port,” from the fact of the harbour running up to this point, deeply embayed between the enfolding hills. Rich meadows now spread out where the sea once rolled; but the waves might surge there even now were it not for the continued existence of that great rampart of stones flung up in the long ago by the sea, which thus by its own action shut itself out from its ancient realm.
Porlock has for “ever so long” been a show place, and, like any other originally modest beauty, has at last become a little spoiled by praise, and more than a little sophisticated. We do not greatly esteem the self-conscious beauty, especially when she paints.
The charm of Porlock has been, and is being, still more sadly smirched by expansion and by that increasing intercourse with the world which has taken the accent off the tongues of the villagers, replaced the weirdly cut provincial clothes of an earlier era with garments of a more modish style, and brought buildings of a distinctly suburban type into the once purely rustic street. But these newer buildings, although sufficiently odious, do not by any means touch the depths of abomination plumbed by the local Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, built in the ’30’s, and fully as bad, in its grey stuccoed, would-be classicism, as that date would imply.
The coming of the motor-car has been nothing less than a disaster to Porlock. Not only private cars, growing ever larger and more productive of dust, noise, and stink, rush through the once sweet-scented street, regardless of the comfort and convenience of villagers or visitors, but “public service” vehicles and chars-à-bancs as big as houses slam through the place, raising a stifling dust that penetrates everywhere. Few sights are more distressing, to those who knew Porlock as it was, than that of the clustered roses and jessamines that mantle so many of the houses, thickly covered with dust. It is a standing wonder that the inhabitants of pretty villages plagued almost beyond endurance by motorists do not arise and compel County Councils and other authorities to take action. Possibly they know only too well that the majority of members of those Councils is formed by owners of cars, who are themselves among the worst offenders.
But, in any case, the simple old days of Porlock are done. To have seen Porlock with Southey, how great that privilege! Great, not only in the literary way, but in a glimpse of it in its unspoiled, unconscious beauty, before ever it had become notable as a show-place.
Local connoisseurs of the picturesque prefer Bossington, now that Porlock is worn a little threadbare and grown so dusty. They are of opinion that Bossington is the quainter of the two. But to come to judgment in this frame is not wholly in order, for the places are of such different types, and cannot fairly be compared. Porlock is a considerable village, with numerous shops; and Bossington is but a hamlet, without a church, and apparently with no shops at all. It is a very sequestered place, standing on the Horner, about a mile distant, north-eastward, from Porlock. The great recommendations of Bossington in these latter days are that motor-cars never or rarely get there, and that it is by consequence quiet and dustless. Porlock is on the main road—on the way to that Somewhere Else which is ever your typical motorist’s quest: a quest he relinquishes at night, only to resume it the next morning. Bossington stands in the way to Nowhere in Particular, and the roads that lead to it are less roads than lanes. That they may long continue their narrow, rough, and winding character is the wish of those who wish Bossington well.
