The South Devon Coast
Torquay to Plymouth and the Tamar
CHAPTER XV
ILSHAM GRANGE—MEADFOOT—TORQUAY
In this quiet and wooded nook near Kent’s Cavern, tucked away from the octopus arms of Torquay, is Ilsham Grange, a chance survival of those old times when Tor Abbey ruled the roast in these parts. Everything here was then agricultural. Not even a village, only the monks’ farm, relieved the solitude. Traces of those old farmers remain in the grey turret in the farmyard, where the pigeons flutter and the pigs grunt contentedly, blissfully unconscious of what pork, ham, and bacon mean. In this turret, now with the floors gone, Brother this, that, or t’other, sent over from the Abbey round the headland, lodged, and ruled from it the conversi, or lay-brothers, whose business it was to conduct the practical farming and to be as the Children of Gibeon, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the community.
From Ilsham you come, over the hill, to Meadfoot, a particularly noble bay, where the road is protected from the sea by a wall calculated to make a builder of cheap houses and nine-inch party-walls faint with horror at so prodigal a use of material. I do not know exactly how thick the Meadfoot sea-wall is, but a wheeled conveyance could be driven along it, if it were not so rough. And the roughness of these rudely quarried, undressed rocky boulders is just the fitting character for the spot; which is, as I have said, a very noble piece of coast-scenery indeed, rough-hewed by nature in the large, and coloured by her in the rich and sober hues of the rocks, alternating with the brighter tints of sea and grass. Great islanded rocks stand off-shore, glooming over the blue sea like ogreish strongholds: the black monstrous forms of the Ore Stone and the Thatcher Rock, with the smaller Shag Rock close in, and a scatter of reefs just off the sands.
Near by, but hidden from view by its enclosing grounds, is that semicircular group of villa residences, Hesketh Crescent, built, some forty years ago, on the model of the classic terraces of Bath and Buxton. Little postern gates lead from the grounds on to the road at Meadfoot, and from them the early riser on summer mornings may observe strange figures, clad in gorgeous dressing-gowns, shuffling in bath slippers to the sea, the bright sunshine making heliographs of their bald and shining pates. It all looks like some newer version of Robinson Crusoe, or the Swiss Family Robinson; but these old gentlemen are only the retired generals and colonels of Hesketh Crescent, out for their morning dip, and are so little like marooned inhabitants of uncivilised isles that they will presently enter their postern-gates again, and go home to breakfast and the morning paper, over which they will with fervour and unction damn the War Office and the Army from head to foot—a valued privilege denied to Robinson Crusoe.
MEADFOOT, AND THE ORE STONE AND THATCHER ROCK.