Poor Claude could not even get up a smile: but his sorrows were coming swiftly to an end. The rock clefts grew sharper and sharper before us. The soft masses of the lofty bank of wooded cliff rose higher and higher. The white houses of Clovelly, piled stair above stair up the rocks, gleamed more and more brightly out of the green round bosoms of the forest. As we shut in headland after headland, one tall conical rock after another darkened with its black pyramid the bright orb of the setting sun. Soon we began to hear the soft murmur of the snowy surf line; then the merry voices of the children along the shore; and running straight for the cliff-foot, we shipped into the little pier, from whence the red-sailed herring-boats were swarming forth like bees out of a hive, full of gay handsome faces, and all the busy blue-jacketed life of seaport towns, to their night’s fishing in the bay.
IV.—Clovelly.
A couple of days had passed, and I was crawling up the paved stairs inaccessible to cart or carriage, which are flatteringly denominated ‘Clovelly-street,’ a landing-net full of shells in one hand, and a couple of mackerel lines in the other; behind me a sheer descent, roof below roof; at an angle of 45°, to the pier and bay, 200 feet below, and in front, another hundred feet above, a green amphitheatre of oak, and ash, and larch, shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, across which the low, soft, formless mist was crawling, opening every instant to show some gap of intense dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam of sunshine upon the white cottages, with their grey steaming roofs, and bright green railings, packed one above another upon the ledges of the cliff; and on the tall tree-fuchsias and gaudy dahlias in the little scraps of court-yard, calling the rich faint odour out of the verbenas and jessamines, and, alas! out of the herring-heads and tails also, as they lay in the rivulet; and lighting up the wings of the gorgeous butterflies, almost unknown in our colder eastern climate, which fluttered from woodland down to garden, and from garden up to woodland, and seemed to form the connecting link between that swarming hive of human industry and the deep wild woods in which it was embosomed. So up I was crawling, to dine off gurnards of my own catching,—excellent fish, despised by deluded Cockneys, who fancy that because its head is large and prickly, therefore its flesh is not as firm, and sweet, and white, as that of any cod who ever gobbled shell-fish,—when down the stair front of me, greasy as ice from the daily shower, came slipping and staggering, my friend Claude, armed with camp-stool and portfolio.
‘Where have you been wandering to-day?’ I asked. ‘Have you yet been as far as the park, which, as I told you, would supply such endless subjects for your pencil?’
‘Not I. I have been roaming up and down this same “New Road” above us; and find there materials for a good week’s more work, if I could afford it. Indeed, it was only to-day, for the first time, that I got as far as the lodge at the end of it, and then was glad enough to turn back shuddering at the first glimpse of the flat, dreary moorland beyond,—as Adam may have turned back into Eden after a peep out of the gates of Paradise.’
He should have taken courage and gone a half-mile further,—to the furze-grown ruins of a great Roman camp, which gives its name to the place, ‘Clovelly,’—Vallum Clausum, or Vallis Clausa, as antiquarians derive it; perhaps, ‘the hidden camp,’ or glen,—perhaps something else. Who cares? The old Romans were there, at least 10,000 strong: and some sentimental tribune or other of them had taste enough to perch his summer-house out on a conical point of the Hartland Cliffs, now tumbling into the sea, tesselated pavement, baths and all. And strange work, no doubt, went on in that lonely nook, looking out over the Atlantic swell,—nights and days fit for Petronius’s own pen, among a seraglio of dark Celtic beauties. Perhaps it could not be otherwise. An ugly state of things—as heathen conquests always must have been; yet even in it there was a use and meaning. But they are past like a dream, those 10,000 stalwart men, who looked far and wide over the Damnonian moors from a station which would be, even in these days, a first-rate military position. Gone, too, are the old Saxon Franklins who succeeded. Old Wrengils, or some such name, whoever he was, at last found some one’s bill too hard for his brain-pan; and there he lies on the hill above, in his ‘barrow’ of Wrinklebury. And gone, too, the gay Norman squire, who, as tradition says, kept his fair lady in the old watch-tower, on the highest point of the White Cliff—‘Gallantry Bower,’ as they call it to this day—now a mere ring of turf-covered stones, and a few low stunted oaks, shorn by the Atlantic blasts into the shape of two huge cannon, which form a favourite landmark for the fisherman of the bay. Gone they all are, Cymry and Roman, Saxon and Norman; and upon the ruins of their accumulated labour we stand here. Each of them had his use,—planted a few more trees or cleared a few more, tilled a fresh scrap of down, organized a scrap more of chaos. Who dare wish the tide of improvement, which has been flowing for nineteen centuries, swifter and swifter still as it goes on, to stop, just because it is not convenient to us just now to move on? It will not take another nineteen hundred years, be sure, to make even this lovely nook as superior to what it is now as it is now to the little knot of fishing huts where naked Britons peeped out, trembling at the iron tramp of each insolent legionary from the camp above. It will not take another nineteen hundred years to develope the capabilities of this place,—to make it the finest fishery in England, next to Torbay,—the only safe harbour of refuge for West Indiamen, along sixty miles of ruthless coast,—and a commercial centre for a vast tract of half-tilled land within, which only requires means of conveyance to be as fertile and valuable as nine-tenths of England. Meanwhile Claude ought to have seen the deer-park. The panorama from that old ruined ‘bower’ of cliff and woodland, down and sea, is really unique in its way.
‘So is the whole place, in my eyes,’ said Claude. ‘I have seen nothing in England to be compared to this little strip of paradise between two great waste worlds of sea and moor. Lynmouth might be matched among the mountains of Wales and Ireland. The first three miles of the Rheidol, from the Devil’s Bridge towards Aberystwith, or the gorge of the Wye, down the opposite watershed of the same mountains, from Castle Dufferin down to Rhaiadyr, are equal to it in magnificence of form and colour, and superior in size. But I question whether anything ever charmed me more than did the return to the sounds of nature which greeted me to-day, as I turned back from the dreary, silent moorland turnpike into this new road, terraced along the cliffs and woods—those who first thought of cutting it must have had souls in them above the herd—and listened to a glorious concert in four parts, blending and supporting each other in exquisite harmony, from the shrill treble of a thousand birds, and the soft melancholy alto of the moaning woods, downward through the rich tenor hum of innumerable insects, who hung like sparks of fire beneath the glades of oak, to the bass of the unseen surge below,
“Whose deep and dreadful organ-pipe,”
far below me, contrasted strangely with the rich soft inland character of the deep woods, luxuriant ferns, and gaudy flowers. It is that very contrast which makes the place so unique. One is accustomed to connect with the notion of the sea bare cliffs, breezy downs, stunted shrubs struggling for existence: and instead of them behold a forest wall, 500 feet high, of almost semi-tropic luxuriance. At one turn, a deep glen, with its sea of green woods, filled up at the mouth with the bright azure sheet of ocean.—Then some long stretch of the road would be banked on one side with crumbling rocks, festooned with heath, and golden hawkweed, and London pride, like velvet cushions covered with pink lace, and beds of white bramble blossom alive with butterflies; while above my head, and on my right, the cool canopy of oak and birch leaves shrouded me so close, that I could have fancied myself miles inland, buried in some glen unknown to any wind of heaven, but that everywhere between green sprays and grey stems, gleamed that same boundless ocean blue, seeming, from the height at which I was, to mount into the very sky. It looked but a step out of the leafy covert into blank infinity. And then, as the road wound round some point, one’s eye could fall down, down, through the abyss of perpendicular wood, tree below tree clinging to and clothing the cliff, or rather no cliff; but perpendicular sheet of deep wood sedge, and broad crown ferns, spreading their circular fans.—But there is no describing them, or painting them either.—And then to see how the midday sunbeams leapt past one down the abyss, throwing out here a grey stem by one point of burnished silver, there a hazel branch by a single leaf of glowing golden green, shooting long bright arrows down, through the dim, hot, hazy atmosphere of the wood, till it rested at last upon the dappled beach of pink and grey pebbles, and the dappled surge which wandered up and down among them, and broke up into richer intricacy with its chequer-work of woodland shadows, the restless net of snowy foam.’
‘You must be fresh from reading Mr. Ruskin’s book, Claude, to be able to give birth to such a piece of complex magniloquence as that last period of yours.’