CHAPTER XI
TEIGNMOUTH
Teignmouth is the “second largest watering-place in South Devon” and the most entirely delightful. It was more delightful when it was smaller; but that is a fact known only to people old enough to have acquired memories of the Has Been and to drag the clanking chains of reminiscence and unavailing regret at their heels. In the Teignmouth of yesterday there were no pavements but those made of pebbles gleaned off the beach, of the size and shape—and considerably more than the hardness—of kidney potatoes. It was a picturesque time, but painful for people with tender feet and thin shoes, for the pavements thus constructed were excruciatingly knobbly, and were only worn down to the level after some two generations and a half of wayfarers had progressed over them. To-day you shall find those old-style pavements only in the back streets and alleyways of the town: in the main thoroughfares you have paving-stones worthy of London itself.
There was doubtless a time when these kidney-potato pavements were looked upon as concessions to a growing spirit of luxury, and it is conceivable that, from the time when Teignmouth first arose beside the azure main (somewhere about the time of Edward the Confessor) until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the place did very well without pavings or sidewalks of any description. Sea-boots and shore-going footgear an inch thick in the sole, and well hobnailed, overcame any little difficulties with water, mud, or shingle; and it was only when seaside holidays first came into fashion and “visitors” appeared that any fine distinctions were drawn between roads and paths.
When the railway came to Teignmouth in 1846, it found a quiet, rather out-of-the-way little town and port, of narrow and winding streets, lined with rustic Devonian cob-built cottages, alternating with what had been modish little plaster-fronted villas with skimpy little balconies and bow fronts. Many of them still remain in the older part of the town, in French Street and Hollands Road. If they were larger, they would remind one of Brighton and the Regency, but, in the miniature sort, they are oddly reminiscent of Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell and their ringleted heroines.
APPROACH TO TEIGNMOUTH.
In pre-railway days Teignmouth lay, as it were, in an eddy of traffic. The mail coaches went from Exeter to Plymouth far inland, and only strictly local stages hugged the coastwise roads; but with the opening of the South Devon Railway, as it then was, Teignmouth at once was placed on the main route from London to the West. There should certainly be a statue of Brunel on the Den at Teignmouth, for by planning the railway to run along the coast he not only made the fortune of the town, but added magnificently to the picturesqueness of the shore, in building that two and a half miles of massive sea-wall on which the railway comes into the town.
Teignmouth is one of those very few places the railway does not vulgarise, by bringing you in at the back door, so to speak, and through the kitchen and the scullery. You are brought along that sea wall, in full view of a gorgeously-coloured coast, into a fine airy station, expectant of the best, and are not disappointed in that expectation; if, indeed, a little mystified as to your bearings. To acquire those bearings, the proper way, after all, here as elsewhere, is to enter the town by road, whether by the extravagantly hilly high road along the cliff tops, or along the sea wall. That is the geographically educative way, by which you shall see how the original Teignmouth was built on a flat sandy spit at the mouth of the Teign estuary, and how by degrees it has grown upwards and backwards, away from river and sea, even to the lower slopes of the lofty moorland of Haldon.