The South Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

The coastguard path is rugged and perilous, and the whitened stones of it are apt to fail one at critical moments, like moral resolutions in the pathway of life. Sometimes they are not there at all, and in some spots they are so overgrown with bracken that you barge into them unawares, with painful results.

Up at Clewer signal station, where the coastguard, outside his tiny whitewashed hut, does incomprehensible things with strings of flags, the wild growths of these downs run riot, kept in subjection only by the winds, which have imposed the oddest shapes upon them. The gorse-bushes have been buffeted by them into closely compacted hummocky figures, the heather is disposed in hemispherical groups, the brambles, turn in upon themselves in a way the free-born hedgerow bramble would despise, and only the bracken, which is a summer growth and, like the grass of the field, here to-day and gone to-morrow, is independent and upstanding. The beautiful bracken! Come here in July, and you will think all the strawberries in the world are on t’other side of the next shoulder of hill; for in that month the bracken has a perfume like that of the ripest and choicest and sweetest strawberries ever grown.

There are rabbits on these uplands, as with a painful wrench of the ankle you are not unlikely to discover, when your foot plunges unexpectedly into one of their burrows. There are moles, too, evidently, and slow-worms wriggle plentifully across the path.

And thus, now up, now down and around, with the perspiration streaming from you in the still, close hollows, and drying off on the breezy heights, you come by astonishing rocks down to a little sandy rock-girt cove, solitary, without even a Man Friday’s footprints on the yellow sand, through which a little stream trickles. But though no human footprint may be seen, the sands are patterned by the thousand with the broad-arrow prints of the gulls’ feet, as though the War Office had descended upon the place and thus prodigally marked it for its ownest own.

One could and two could even better—go a-Robinson-Crusoeing here very comfortably for awhile in the summer, with the aid of a tent, despite the unlovely name of the place, which is Sewer Mill Cove.

What’s in a name? Not much here, at any rate, for it has really nothing to do with drains. There are several “sewer” farms in the neighbourhood, east and west, and the district in general is called “The Sewers”: the name deriving from the Anglo-Saxon description of the folk living here, the “Sæware,” the sea-folk, as distinguished from those who, living a little more inland, obtained their livelihood from the land. The process by which the place took its name is not an unusual one; and Canterbury—the “burgh of the Kent-ware,” or Kentish folk—may be taken as a prominent and familiar instance.

Sewer Mill Cove was the scene in 1885 of one of the many wrecks that have made this coast dreaded by mariners, for then the Hallowe’en teaship was cast away here, fortunately without loss of life.

The downs here, at the summit of the cliffs between this and Hope, are those of Bolberry, whence comes, some consider, the name of Bolt Head. Heather clothes them and the cliff-tops with a more than imperial magnificence. Imperial mantles are poor things and tawdry beside such purple splendour. If Solomon in all his glory were not arrayed like the lilies of the field, certainly no emperor has ever attained to the gorgeousness of the heather.

It is an untameable wilderness on these heights, for the land is of such negative quality that it is worth no farmer’s while to touch it, and moreover, great fissures and holes, like those of earthquakes, partly masked by undergrowth, exist here. The country people speak of them as Ralph’s Pits, Vincent Pits, Rotten Pits. Ralph, they tell you, was a smuggler, and that is the closest touch you can make to him. Ralph is as insubstantial as the mists that come streaking over the downs.

Now we come to Bolt Tail and the signal-station, overlooking Ramilies Cove, where the Ramilies man-o’-war was wrecked in 1760. Seven hundred and eight of the seven hundred and thirty four men on board perished. Down below lies Hope village, in its tiny cove, where an island can be seen in the making; a great mass of rock dividing the cove in two being joined to the mainland only by strips of sand and heaps of tumbled boulders. It was here that one of the many ships of the Spanish Armada was wrecked: so many ships and so many wrecks that the pen revolts from writing about them, even as the London apprentices revolted, in the centuries gone by, against salmon every day. These Spanish Armada ships are the “salmon every day,” or the toujours perdrix, if you like to put it in terms of a surfeit of game, of the historian of the coasts. Scarce a cove but they dashed their stout timbers to pieces upon its rocks, and those beaches are few that have no legends of silver ingots, pieces of eight, moidores, doubloons, dollars, and all the glittering galaxy of treasure-trove deriving from such a romantic source; but devil a dollar has rewarded the quest of this pilgrim, errant with the best will to it.