Beyond Watcombe begins St. Marychurch. At the threshold of that suburb a long lane leads to the left, down to Pettitor, where there are busy quarries of Devon Marble, so greatly in favour with church-furnishers that specimens of it are nowadays to be found in use, not in England only, but in remote parts of the world.
You would not for a moment suspect the Domesday antiquity of St. Marychurch, but it appears in that remarkable work—as a church—the earliest, it is said, in Devon. Rebuilt in 1861, it is now merely one of the many ornate places of worship in which Torquay, with its large, rich and idle residential classes, greatly priest-ridden, abounds. Only the ancient font, sculptured with a number of engaging devils, remains.
St. Marychurch would probably not produce so much disfavour in the beholder were it not for its natural surroundings. This is a parable, but one easily resolved into a plain statement. The place is, in short, a bad nightmare of plaster. Quâ plaster, not so very shocking, but taken in conjunction with the exceptionally lovely nature of the scenery, nothing less than a crime. A wanton, indefensible crime, too, for the neighbourhood abounds with excellent limestone, most suitable for building. I conceive there must be something radically wrong—beyond a mere error of taste—with the generations that will go out of their way to use a short-lived pretence like plaster, when limestone, calculated to last until the universe shall again be thrown into the melting-pot, offers. But there, it is done, and not unless all Torquay itself were razed to the ground, and the place begun anew, could it be remedied. Oddly enough, the first signs of enlightenment in this direction are shown by the various banks, which are being substantially and tastefully built of honest materials.
The long, long streets lead past Furrow Cross, where, turning to the left, along the Babbacombe Down Road, that lovely opening, looking out upon the sea, is disclosed. Here, from the carefully railed-in cliff-edge, one looks sheer down on to the white pebble beaches of Oddicombe and Babbacombe, with winding walks through luxuriant greenery, leading hundreds of feet down to them. Red cliffs, white beaches, dark blue sea, light blue sky, and the cool green of the vegetation; what a feast of colour is the South Devon Coast! And the abounding growth of flowers and shrubs in the gardens on these heights! Geraniums, putting to shame the best efforts of ivy a-clinging and climbing: fuchsias, making growth like trees, with substantial trunks; veronica shrubs in hedges, the lovely blue masses of the heliotrope-like ceanothus, and others of the acclimatised beauties of the Southern Hemisphere: all these glories are rendered possible by the soft climate, which laps you as in cotton wool, and takes all the energy out of you, and has rendered the folk of Devon the kindly lotus-eaters they are.
CHAPTER XIV
BABBACOMBE—THE PEASANT SPEECH OF DEVON—ANSTEY’S COVE—KENT’S CAVERN
There are winding walks as I have said, down to Babbacombe, but for all their circumbendability (what a lovely word that is!) they are so steep that by far the easiest way to descend would be to get down on to your hinder parts, and slide. To those who are not so young as they were, the view down upon the beach of Babbacombe, and upon the roof-tops of its few houses is the better part, for the walking down jolts the internal machinery most confoundedly. Why, there are few more pitiful sights on this earth—which we know, on eminent authority, to be a “wale”—than that of a middle-aged and stout gentleman gingerly descending these walks, and sighing with envy as a troop of children dash, whooping, past him. Their actions have not yet begun to be regulated by their digestive apparatus!
But for all that indiarubber-like infantile irrepressibility, I have seen a little childish disaster here. It was a fall and a bruise and a scratched face that meant little, after all; but the howls of that child were worthy of an occasion infinitely more tragical. It were not worth dwelling upon, except that it opened out some rustic Devon talk, when a son of the soil set that injured innocent upon his feet again and said: “Well done! My eymers: ’av ’ee valled down?”
