This ruined church of St. Peter, near Stoke Point, nearly overhangs the cliffs of a rocky inlet, but the building itself is so shrouded with ivy, even to the apex of its saddle-backed roof, that it is almost reduced to terms of vegetation, and is, moreover, so overhung with trees that neither from the sea nor from any distance inland is it visible.
The nice taste generally exhibited by newly ennobled personages in their selection of titles is worthy of all praise. When Edward Charles Baring was created a baron, in 1885, he had a choice, among his surrounding properties, of such names as Membland, Battisborough, Noss, Newton, and Worsewell. Noss and Worsewell, I should think, were, on the score of euphony, quite out of the question. But—in the phrasing of the newest slang—what was wrong with Membland, Newton, or Battisborough? Nothing at all; but there is doubtless a something about the sound of Revelstoke that suggests aristocratic devilry and high jinks, infinitely pleasing. Not that the name necessarily signifies anything of the kind, for the Middle-English meaning of “revel” was not so much a jollification as a disturbance; which seems to have been the inevitable result of those ancient drinking-bouts. The “Revel” of this place-name is said to derive from reafful, meaning rapacious. The place, according to this view, is christened after some early reafere, rover, or robber, a progenitor, possibly of that “Sir Ralph (or Rafe) the Rover,” familiar to us in the poem of the Inchcape Rock, off the coast of Scotland; and the “Stoke” was his stockade, the defence of his robber’s lair. Who this robbing rover was—or who they were, for there must needs have been a band of them—there can be little doubt. They were an isolated party of the marauding Danes or vikings of the ninth century, whose main body was defeated in A.D. 851 at Wembury.
THE YEALM: FROM NOSS.
NOSS MAYO AND NEWTON FERRERS.
There is no difficulty raised against the pedestrian following the private drive made by Lord Revelstoke round the coast. In this manner the great piled-up slabs of rock forming Stoke Point can be seen, with Yealm Head and the woodlands on the way. But most pilgrims who have already made a long walk of it will undoubtedly feel disposed to cut that detour out and make for the modern church of Revelstoke inland, overlooking a creek of the deep sea-channel of the Yealm and the villages of Noss Mayo and Newton Ferrers. “Newton” and “Noss” those villages are familiarly styled. They confront one another like Putney and Fulham across the Thames, the old church of Newton Ferrers in outline the fellow of the new one of Revelstoke. But the new building is the veriest upstart. It was built by Lord Revelstoke in 1882, at a cost of £29,000, and is a very prominent example of great cost, much pretension, and little real art. Less of the ecclesiastical furnishers’ work and more solid, if less showy, fittings would have made the church more worthy its beautiful site. That riches take to themselves wings is exemplified here; for in less than ten years from the completion of this church and the ornate rebuilding of Membland Hall, came the great Baring financial crash, and with it the impoverishment of Lord Revelstoke.
The Yealm runs up, as a deep, narrow and beautiful salt estuary for some three miles inland, and excursion steamers from Plymouth penetrate so far as Steer Point, where Kitley and Coffleet creeks branch right and left to Yealmpton—“Yampton” locally—and Brixton, and in the middle the smaller creek of Puslinch. The fresh water stream of the Yealm, like all the streams of South Devon, comes from Dartmoor. The banks of the estuary are deeply wooded and extremely picturesque; presenting, more than any of those numerous inlets that are so notable a feature of this coast, the appearance of a gorge; Noss Mayo standing on its branch creek, deriving, indeed, the first part of its name from the projecting height—the “ness” or “nose”—on which it stands. Noss in 1849 suffered terribly from cholera, and even more terribly two centuries ago, when only seven of its inhabitants survived.