As the South Devon Coast is the most beautiful of coasts, so is it also among the most hilly. One hesitates to say that it is not the coast for exploring by means of a cycle, but certainly those who perform their touring in that sort must expect severe gradients, and must not anticipate, even so, an uninterrupted view of the actual coast; for there are many and considerable stretches along which you come to the sea only by unrideable footpaths. The pedestrian alone can explore this seaboard thoroughly, and he will find, in the tourist season, at least, that his progress is limited by the climate, which not infrequently in the months of July and August, resembles the moist and enervating heat of the great Palm House in Kew Gardens.
Lyme Regis, whence this exploration starts, is at the very door of Devonshire, and was, indeed, in recent years within an ace of being transferred from Dorset. At Lyme, which lies, as it were, at the bottom of a cup, you perceive at once the sort of thing in store for those who would fare westward: exquisite scenery combined with extravagantly steep roads.
CHAPTER II
ROUSDON—THE DOWLANDS LANDSLIP
Close by the border-line of the two counties, as you make from Lyme Regis, across the pleasant upland meadows to Uplyme, which is in Devonshire, is Middle Mill. The mill has seen its best days and no longer grinds corn, and the great wheel is idle, for the very excellent reason that the stream that once sent it ponderously revolving has been diverted. The thatched mill-house and its adjoining cottage, together with the silent wheel are, in short, in that condition of picturesque decay which spells romance to artists, who, discovering it, cannot resist a sketch. It appealed irresistibly, some years ago, to an artist in another craft; to none other, in short, than that distinguished novelist, Sir Walter Besant, who laid the scenes of his eighteenth-century story, ’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay, chiefly here and at Rousdon.
He describes Middle Mill just as it is situated: “At the back of the mill was an orchard, where the pink and red cider apples looked pleasant—they could not look sweet. Beyond the orchard was a piggery, and then you came to the bed of a stream, which was dry in summer, save for a little green damp among the stones, by the side of which was a coppice of alder-trees, and behind the alders a dark, deep wood, into which you might peer all a summer’s day and dream boundless things.”
MIDDLE MILL.
The only objection that can be taken to the verisimilitude of this description is the reference to the cider apples. As a matter of fact, they do look sweet—and are not. The novelist refers to the richly ruddy “Devonshire reds,” whose beautiful colour presupposes in the mind of strangers to cider-apples a fruit luxuriously sweet and juicy. Devonshire farmers take little care to fence their cider-apples from the stranger, who steals and tastes as a rule only one, finding with the first bite that sweetness is by no means necessarily housed within that captivating exterior.