Speaking of the Tiverton inns reminds me that John Ridd and Fry lodged, on the eve of their departure, at the “White Horse,” in Gold Street. This tavern is still in existence, and as it is not specially picturesque, the reader may be at a loss to conceive why Blackmore should have selected this particular house of entertainment. The novelist, however, knew what he was about. In the seventeenth century it may have been the most important inn in the town. On the entry of the Royalists into the town in the month of August, 1643, they were stoned by the mob, many of whom were killed or wounded by the fire of the soldiers; “and,” says Harding, in recounting the circumstance, “the effect produced was a dispersion of the remainder, when one, John Lock, a miller, was taken and executed at the sign of the White Horse, on the north side of Gold Street” (History of Tiverton, vol. i., p. 58).
CHAPTER VI
THE WONDERS OF BAMPTON
The country between Tiverton and Bampton reminds us how comparatively new are many of our main roads. Beginning with the town, although Bampton Street is one of the principal thoroughfares, this is not the case with Higher Bampton Street; and of both it may be stated with absolute assurance that they do not owe their names to accident or caprice. They were christened thus because they were a direct continuation of the old road from Bampton, the whole of the present route through the picturesque Exe valley not having been constructed until long after the days of John Ridd and the less mythical Bampfylde Moore Carew. For this reason “Jan,” on his way home, would have proceeded first to Red Hill, with the inn at its foot;[7] and hereafter we shall cease to wonder that Carew and his companions fell in with the convivial gipsies at the same “Brick House,” since it adjoined the king’s highway. Hence, he climbed the steep ascent of Knightshayes, from whose summit he might have cast a last lingering look at the town. Afterwards he would, for some time, have seen nothing but the hedgerows and a stretch of desolate road.
Even to Ridd, however, the glory of the Exe was not utterly forbidden, inasmuch as from Bolham onwards there was some kind of road. Moreover, on the opposite side of the river was an accommodating lane, from which lesser lanes scamper off to the “weeches” of Washfield and Stoodleigh Church, and which, steadily pursued in its northward trend, has coigns of vantage imparting grateful visions of Rock, with its sweet old cottages, and the romantic Fairby Gorge, and the woody amphitheatre of Cove Cliff, together with such pretty accessories as a wayside spring, trim dairies, rich orchards, a modern suspension bridge, an old-world bridge, and beside it a quaint little lodge, with its porch and its bonnets of thatch—a miracle of rustic beauty! But it really matters not from which side the landscape is viewed, the prospects are equally charming; and the only cause for regret, from an æsthetic standpoint, is the railway, whose rigid track, bisecting the valley as far as the Exeter Inn, brusquely intrudes on its soft contrasts of forest, stream, and lea.
From the inn, one branch of the new road still follows the river through a sylvan paradise, while another, nearly parallel with an older lane, yclept Windwhistle, leads on to Bampton along the tributary Batherum, On quitting that highway of loveliness, the Exe, one is conscious of a difference—the outlook is more tame. However, as one approaches the town, the scenery improves, and of the town itself it must be conceded that it is beautifully situated among the hills.
For me, Bampton is a place with sacred memories; but I am well aware that, to sound its depths of sentiment, an initiation is necessary. A stranger strolling listlessly through the churchyard, or seated with callous heart against a walled-up yew—to him it is all a void. What can he know of all the unrecorded history which, for certain souls, has transfigured the spot into a shrine? Moreover, although a fair resident informed me recently that Bampton “stands still,” I have an uncomfortable conviction, forced upon me in a brief visit, that this is not quite the case, that it has exchanged some of its old Sabbatic calm for an irreverent spirit of enterprise and strivings to be “up-to-date.” Thanks to a disciple and friend of the late Mr Cecil Rhodes, the quarries have been galvanised into stupendous energy, and, aided by the contrivances of modern science, are now working at high pressure, and all Bampton is cock-a-whoop over the same. Well, well, one must have patience. Only suffer me to write of my Bampton, which was also Blackmore’s Bampton, not the Bampton that now is.
In those far-off days of 1891-3, the quarries were not wholly quiescent; even then they were shedding their riches, but in a decent, leisurely way, leaving many a grass-grown plot and fern-clad lovers’ walk, and tokens of vanished industry in what we termed “the rubble-heaps.” The distinctive feature of Bampton stone is that it contains a large proportion of “chert” or flint, which makes it good for roads. The principal structures in the neighbourhood—including the county and other bridges—are built of it, and, judging from the age of the church tower, these black limestone beds have been worked for at least six hundred years.
The topography asks some explaining. A noter hies here, noting. Somebody has told him of Bampton Castle, and forthwith the heady ass swoops on a circular shed on the quarry plane as a relic. To be sure, at the south-east entrance of the town there are plentiful suggestions of military operations. The wind-swept knoll, whence you catch the first glimpse of Bampton, would be a fine station for a park of French artillery, to which the exposed railway station, with its less warlike engines, could offer but a faint resistance. A few paces further on, and you come to what is uncommonly like a bastion, crowned by the pseudo-Bampton Castle. Of the real Bampton Castle, at the opposite end of the town, nothing remains but the site and some rather doubtful fortifications in what is now an orchard.
But there was a castle, for in 1336 Richard Cogan had a licence from the Crown to castellate his mansion-house at Bampton, and to enclose his wood at Uffculme, and three hundred acres for a park. The exact site of the castle is believed to have been on a lower level, but closely adjacent to the existing Mote. The origin and purpose of this great mound, which is artificial, is not perhaps free from obscurity, but a former resident favours the following elucidation: The name of