Below church and manor-house runs the lovely Otter to the sea. The Otter is twin brother to the Axe, and the Exe is the big brother of both. The strath—that is to say the verdant, low-lying meadowland—of the Otter is of that quiet, wooded, pastoral beauty which makes the nearness of the sea seem strange. But the speciality of the Otter seems to be its pebbles, or “popples,” as the name is, locally. There are more pebbles on the Chesil Beach; but then, that is one of the two greatest repositories for them in the world, and the popples of the Otter and of the seashore at Budleigh Salterton, where they are not only numerous, but very fine and large as well, are a class to themselves. Little beaches of them skirt the course of the river, and the matter of two and a half miles up-stream from Otterton is a village, as one may say, dedicated to them, in its name of Newton Poppleford; and there the popples muster as strongly as ever by the ford, which is now superseded by a bridge.
But now, crossing the Otter, we come to East Budleigh, by threading the mazes of two or three byways.
East Budleigh is a pretty village, with a little stream, clear-running, down one side of its street and a great church on the rise at the end; but, for all that, I should not have come out of the way to see it, were it not that a landmark of more than common interest lies half a mile on the other side. That landmark is Hayes Barton, the still extant farmstead that was the birthplace of Sir Walter Raleigh.
EAST BUDLEIGH.
The first part of the name of Hayes Barton derives from the Anglo-Saxon haga, a hedge, or cultivated enclosure from surrounding wastes, and there are, to this day, “hayes,” and “hays,” in abundance in this shire of Devon. Even in the urban circumstances of Exeter we find them, in the enclosed public pleasure-ground of Northernhay, and the square of Southernhay. “Barton” has a variety of meanings, from granary, rickyard, farmyard, and cattle-shed, to a large farm; a small farm being generally, in Devon, styled a “living.” In the time of Sir Walter Raleigh’s father, Hayes Barton was sold to the Duke family, of Otterton, and from its old name of Poerhayes, or Power’s Heys, it became known as Dukesheyes. In the eighteenth century, as we have already seen, it passed to the Rolles, whose paws have comprehended so much of the land between Seaton and Exmouth.
The old farm-house, smartened up with a facing of that stucco which is so beloved by Devon folk that it is almost a wonder they don’t make it an article of diet, stands now as ever in a hollow of the hills, remote; for although Budleigh Salterton has expanded into a townlet, I do not suppose the village of East Budleigh has grown appreciably in all these centuries. Bating that stucco, and the sixty-year-old brick outhouses, the farm must be much the same, and you may still see the old woodwork and the old stone flags of the lower rooms, and may even, by courtesy, peep into the bedroom—that is the window of it, the upper window in the left-hand gable—where that gallant soul first saw the light of day.
Here, in this modest farmstead, that great Elizabethan was born, in 1552, son of Walter Raleigh and his wife Katherine, who came of that old Devon family, the Champernownes of Modbury. She had first married Otto Gilbert, who died leaving her with two sons, themselves to grow up explorers and colonists. She would seem, therefore, to have been a woman of remarkable character.
HAYES BARTON: BIRTHPLACE OF SIR WALTER RALEIGH.