The South Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

At Bantham Ferry the boatman puts you across for twopence, or however much or little he thinks you will stand—and it is only the matter of a dozen strokes at low water. And then you have the sands, the loose stones, and the rustling bennets and the sedges all to yourself; a kind of seashore Sahara. Then you round a rocky point; and there before you is Burr Island, a majestic reek of acetylene, or other gas, and people. Wide stretch the sands at ebb, but they are not so wide but that the prints of footsteps have disfigured them pretty thoroughly; for where the land slopes down to the shore in grassy fields, the Plymouth people have built bungalows, and are building more. Burr, or Borough, Island is tethered to the mainland at ebb by this nexus of sand. It is in this circumstance a kind of minor St. Michael’s Mount, and like it again in that it once owned a chapel dedicated to St. Michael. The chapel disappeared in the lang syne, and when the solitary public-house—whose deserted roof-tree may still be seen—ceased business, civilisation and Borough Island wholly parted company.

Beyond this point is the little sand-smothered bight of Challaborough, with a coastguard station, where this explorer, at least, met coastguards of exceptional stupidity and astonishing ignorance of the coast beyond their own insignificant nook. Why, they could not even spell or pronounce the name of their own station properly, and made it “Shellaborough.” “Erme Mouth?” they had never heard of it, nor of the Erme River, but dimly conceived “Muddycombe,” to be meant. And as for the coast, they spoke of it in such awestruck terms that (it shall be confessed) the time drawing on towards evening, I made inland, and so do not know’ what manner of dragons and chimeras those are, which no doubt inhabit the three miles and a half of a not very rugged shore, awaiting the advent of a fine juicy tourist.

Primitive, indeed, are those villages that lie away back from the sea in these parts. First comes Kingmore, where the rock outcrops from the macadam in the main road, where the cottages are half-smothered in flowers, and where the domestic fowls that squatter and plunge in dust-baths in the middle of the street are the only signs of life. Reminiscences of the old window-tax are called up by a house with a walled-up window, carefully painted with a pretence of being a genuine one of panes and sashes. Even the brass catch has not been forgotten by the artist in illusion, whose treatment is so literal, he must have been the forerunner of the Newlyn School. The brass catch is rendered more than a thought too brassy, and the unfortunately painted panes are by no means convincing. But the deception although so grotesquely obvious, could not, under such opaque circumstances, be called transparent, could it?

Like the Reverend Mr. Snell of Thurlestone, William Lane, rector of Ringmore, was a militant Royalist. He raised and trained a company of men and, laying hands upon some cannon, opened out a battery against the Parliamentary forces on their way to the leaguer of Salcombe. His exploit made him a marked man, and he was considered sufficiently important for an expedition to be sent against him by sea from the Parliamentary stronghold of Plymouth. The orders given the commander of this force were to capture and shoot the combatant cleric; but Mr. Lane, advised of what was afoot, took refuge in the tower of his church, where the secret room, provided with a fireplace, in which he hid is still to be seen. Here he lay three months, fed by his faithful parishioners, but was at last obliged to escape to France. At last, venturing to return, he worked for awhile as a labourer in the limestone quarries near Torquay, until his little dwelling was pillaged by a French privateer. He died at last when on his return from London, whither he had journeyed on foot to ventilate his grievances.

The ancient church of Ringmore contains a relic of more recent strife, in the shape of an icon from Sebastopol.

At Kingston, on the way across to the river Erme, there is but one inn. The “Sloop” is the name of it, and there, if you wait half-an-hour, while the cocks and hens run in and out of the rooms and passages, they will get you tea. There is very little of a Lyons’ or other tea-shop about the “Sloop.” And Kingston village is to match; primitive Devonian in style, which is a style partaking of all the characteristics belonging to the untamed villages of Cornwall, Ireland, and the Highlands of Scotland. There are very few of the type left now, which is a cause for thankfulness, or regret, as you will, and they ought to be preserved on ice and kept for the admiration, or otherwise, of posterity.

Out of Kingston the road runs deep down below the level of the fields, in true Devonshire sort, with high banks and tall hedges on either side, so that no view is possible. Nor would it have mattered had it been otherwise when this Stanley of these remote parts passed this way, for the whole face of the land and sea and the blue of the sky was blotted out on this warm and close evening of a hot summer’s day by a white pillowy fog, which, the nearer the shore, grew more dense.

After long tramping comes a left-hand turn, with a signpost inscribed “Mothecombe.” The name suggests some moth-eaten hamlet that would be all the better for plenty of camphor and a good airing; but presently one realises that this is the place called by the coastguards “Muddycombe,” and more usually, in local speech, “Muthycombe.”

It is a solitary road that leads down from this signpost, and the fog discloses only one person on the way: a boy, driving a cow. “Coom oop, Primrose,” says he, and that mild-featured dame and he turn into a field, the whiteness engulfs them at once, and the wayfarer is alone in the world.