“W. Ralegh.”
It is surely no unamiable trait in a man, that he should wish to purchase the house in which he was born; but Mr. Duke, “from that jealous disposition which can bear no brother near the throne,” did not choose to sell or to have so great a man for so near a neighbour, and so the Raleighs never again entered into possession of Hayes Barton.
CHAPTER VIII
BUDLEIGH SALTERTON—LITTLEHAM—EXMOUTH—TOPSHAM—ESTUARY OF THE AXE
Budleigh Salterton lies at the foot of a steep descent. Only within quite recent years has it been connected by railway with the outer world, and so has not yet quite woke up and found itself, and become self-conscious; although there are plenteous evidences that attempts will be made to convert it into a small modern watering-place, pitifully emulative of its betters. It is not fulsome to say that up to the present it has had no betters, for it has been an individual place, without its fellow anywhere. Conceive a brook running in a deep bed down one side of a village street, and bridged at close upon half a hundred intervals with brick and plank footbridges, leading across into cottages and cottage-gardens; and conceive those cottages, partly the humble homes of fishermen, and partly the simple villas of an Early Victorian, or even a Regency, seaside, and midway down the street imagine that stream crossing under the road, taking the little beach diagonally, and there percolating through the giant “popples.” That is Budleigh Salterton.
The Otter flows out to sea farther to the east, along that beach, obscurely, but still one speculates idly—no help for it but to do anything “idly” in South Devon—by what strange and exceptional chance Budleigh Salterton is not “Ottermouth” in this county of Axmouth, Sidmouth, Exmouth, Teignmouth, and other places which own rivers as their godfathers and godmothers. Yet one is not too idle to discover that East Budleigh and this Budleigh “Saltern,” as it was originally named, do, after all, in a way, follow the general rule, for they are named after the contributory streamlet, the Buddle, on which they stand and the “leas,” or meadows, that border it.
It is the same old story, with regard to the haven at the mouth of the Otter, that has already been told of other places. Leland, writing close upon four hundred years ago, tells us that: “Less than an hunderith yeres sins shippes usid this haven, but it is now clean barred,” and so it remains. Salterton and its neighbourhood are therefore without the convenience of a port.
The front of the townlet is, as an Irishman might say, at the back, for in times before the invention of the seaside as a place of holiday, the inhabitants seem to have had a surfeit of the sea by which they got their living, and built their houses on the low crumbly cliff, not only with the faces turned away from it, but in many cases with high dead walls, enclosing back-gardens, entirely excluding any sight of the water. And so the “front” remains; nor is it clear how, without a wholesale rebuilding, it will ever be otherwise. It is a curious spot for a seaside resort, and in places more resembles an allotment-garden, or the side of one of those railway embankments, where frugal porters and platelayers cultivate vegetables; for between the pathway and the sea, on the fringe of that beach where the gigantic popples lie, ranging in size from a soup-plate down to a saucer, and forming the raw material of the local paving, there are rows of potatoes, cabbages, peas, and scarlet runners! The effect is a good deal more funny than the humour of a professional humourist, for it has that essential ingredient of real humour, unexpectedness; and he who does not laugh at first sight of the peas among those amazing popples, and the boats amid the beans, must be a dull dog.