From John O'Groats to Land's End / Or, 1372 miles on foot; A book of days and chronicle of adventures by two pedestrians on tour

by John Anderton Naylor; Robert Anderton Naylor

We passed by Powderham Castle, and saw some magnificent trees in the park, and on a wooded hill the Belvedere, erected in 1773. This was a triangular tower 60 feet high, with a hexagonal turret at each corner for sight-seeing, and from it a beautiful view over land and sea could be obtained.

With regard to the churches in this part of England, we learned that while Somerset was noted for towers and Cornwall for crosses, the churches in Devonshire were noted for screens, and nearly every church we visited had a screen or traces where one had existed, some of them being very beautiful, especially that in Kenton church, which we now went to inspect. Farther north the images and paintings on the screens, and even the woodwork, had been badly disfigured, but some of the old work in Devon had been well preserved. The screens had been intended to protect the chancel of the church from the nave, to teach people that on entering the chancel they were entering the most sacred part of the church, and images and paintings were placed along the screens. The same idea, but in another direction, was carried out on the outside of the churches; for there also the people, scarcely any of whom in those days could read or write, were taught, by means of images and horrible-looking gargoyles worked in stone placed on the outside of the church and steeple, that everything vile and wicked was in the world outside the church. The beautiful pictures and images inside the church were intended to show that everything pure and holy was to be found within: the image of the patron saint being generally placed over the doorway.

BELVEDERE TOWER.

KENTON CHURCH.

The village of Kenton was hidden in a small dell, and possessed a village green, in the centre of which were the remains of an old cross. The church tower was one hundred feet high, surmounted by an unusually tall pinnacle at each corner, the figure of a saint appearing in a niche, presumably for protection. Kenton must have been a place of some importance in early times, for Henry III had granted it an annual fair on the feast of All Saints. The magnificent screen in the church not only reached across the chancel, but continued across the two transepts or chapels on either side, and rose in tiers of elaborate carving towards the top of the chancel arch. No less than forty of its panels retained their original pictures of saints and prophets, with scrolls of Latin inscriptions alternating with verses from the Old Testament and clauses from the Apostles' Creed. Most of the screen was fifteenth-century work, and it was one of the finest in the county; much of the work was Flemish. On it were images of saints, both male and female, and of some of the prophets, the saints being distinguishable by the nimbus or halo round their heads, and the prophets by caps and flowing robes after the style of the Jewish costumes in the Middle Ages. There was also a magnificent pulpit of about the same date as the screen, and so richly designed as to equal any carved pulpit in Europe. It was said to have been carved from the trunk of a single oak tree and ornamented in gilt and colours.

The number of screens in the churches near the sea-coast caused us to wonder whether some of them had been brought by sea from Flanders or France, as we remembered that our Cheshire hero, and a famous warrior, Sir Hugh de Calveley, who kept up the reputation of our county by eating a calf at one meal, and who died about the year 1400, had enriched his parish church with the spoils of France; but the lovely old oak furniture, with beautifully figured panels, some containing figures of saints finely painted, which he brought over, had at a recent "restoration" (?) been taken down and sold at two pounds per cartload! We sincerely hoped that such would not be the fate of the beautiful work at Kenton.

We now came to Star Cross, a place where for centuries there had been a ferry across the River Exe, between the extreme west and east of Devon. The rights of the ferry had formerly belonged to the abbots of Sherborne, who had surmounted the landing-place with a cross, which had now disappeared. The ferry leads by a rather tortuous passage of two miles to Exmouth, a town we could see in the distance across the water; but troublesome banks of sand, one forming a rabbit warren, obstructed the mouth of the river. We also passed through Cofton, a small village noted for its cockles, which the women gathered along the shore in a costume that made them resemble a kind of mermaid, except that the lower half resembled that of a man rather than a fish. About two miles from Cofton was the village of Mamhead, with its obelisk built in 1742, one hundred feet high, on the top of a spur of the Great Haldon Hill. The rector of the church here at one time was William Johnson Temple, often mentioned in Boswell's Life of Johnson. He was the grandfather of Frederick Temple, Bishop of Exeter at the time we passed through that city, afterwards Bishop of London, and finally Archbishop of Canterbury, to whose harsh voice and common sense we had once listened when he was addressing a public meeting in Manchester. In the churchyard at Mamhead was an enormous yew tree, over eight hundred years old. In 1775, when Boswell came to see Lord Lisburne at Mamhead Park, and stayed at the vicarage, he was so much impressed by the size and magnificence of this great tree, that he made a vow beneath its great branches "never to be drunk again"—a vow he soon forgot when he was out of sight of the tree.

We soon arrived at the pretty little town of Dawlish, and perhaps it was its unique appearance that gave us the impression that we had reached another of the prettiest places we had visited. There we halted for refreshments and for a hurried excursion in and about the town, as we were anxious to reach Torquay before night, where we had decided to stay until Monday morning. We walked towards the source of the water, which comes down from the higher lands in a series of pretty little waterfalls, spreading out occasionally into small lakes adorned at the sides with plots of grass and beds of flowers. The name Dawlish, we learned, came from two Cornish words meaning "deep stream," or, as some have it, "Devil's Water"; and behind the town on Haldon Hill was the "Devil's Punchbowl," from which descended the water that passed through the town, but which is in much too pleasant a position, we thought, to be associated with his satanic majesty.