Lynton and Lynmouth: A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland

by John Presland

The villages indeed are beautiful: Selworthy, Luccombe, and Wootton Courtney, each with its lovely grey church, embowered in trees, its street of whitewashed houses, its angles of light and shadow, and gardens filled with colour. Luccombe, which is said to contain the same Anglo-Saxon word locan, to enclose, as Porlock, lies under one of the spurs of Dunkery on a little stream which falls into the Horner Water, and is, indeed, enclosed in a steep wooded combe. The church stands behind a tall row of cypresses, which, though planted only seventy years ago, have grown as tall as the church-tower, and bear witness to the fertility of the soil and the mildness of the climate; they give the churchyard a foreign and outlandish look, I think, and harmonize less perfectly with the characteristically English architecture of the church than their neighbour, the old yew. The tower is battlemented, and has some individual gargoyle heads around its gutter, and the barrel roof of the interior has richly carved wooden bosses, with the remains of painting upon them.

The church at Selworthy has also a carved and painted wooden roof, though of finer workmanship than Luccombe; the church itself was originally built of red stone, but the tower is the only part remaining, and this has been covered with stucco. The window and tracery of the south aisle is of the lightest and most delicate Perpendicular, but the interior has been a good deal restored. The church is beautifully situated. It lies high above Selworthy, and before it stretch the long flat curves of Exmoor; below, Luccombe Church tower can just be seen above its surrounding trees; to the south-east, beyond the green luxuriance of Horner Woods, rises the outline of Dunkery. From it a path leads down to Selworthy Green, which is rather a famous beauty-spot, lying on the slope of a hill, neatly surrounded by trees—and the woods here are very beautiful by virtue of the great variety of the trees, beech, oak, chestnut and very fine walnut, and of the fair growth and dignity of the individual tree—amid a little circle of seven cottages which form Sir Thomas Acland's almshouses. The cottages are old and whitewashed, and the thatched roofs sink into beautiful curves and hollows where the shadows lie smoothly; in the summer, when visitors from Minehead mostly see them, the windows stand open to the warm air, and in the shade of the porches, sweet-scented with climbing roses, they can be given tea by the old pensioners.

It is beautiful indeed, and yet to me it has lost something of the appeal of those lovely and desolate little villages—of Brendon, or Parracombe, or Oare—more bleak and windswept, more sun-scorched and barren, thrusting each into some cleft or hollow of the high brown lands, with the wide sky over each, and each its small square church to witness to the fear of God. Some quality of freedom and individuality which is their charm is not in Selworthy.

This is a mere question of taste; we are all apt to look at a place with the eye of extraneous opinion. The beauty of Selworthy is not, indeed, except fancifully, affected by its being a landowner's village, a swept-and-garnished village where the roofs are repaired by Sir Thomas Acland's thatcher, for fear they should fall into the evil ways of slate, and spoil the lovely contours of the village. A landlord has as much right to preserve the beauty of his property as he has to the upkeep of his fences, and we are indeed fortunate to live in an age when the mellowed beauty of ancient buildings has become almost a religion. But to me there is a smugness about such a village, which has become the hobby, the by no means selfish or unenlightened hobby, of a single man, which does much to temper my enjoyment. Selworthy, with its thatch and cob, its neat old pensioners, its suavity, its absence of what is unsightly, is an anomaly; it can only be preserved against the growing pressure of the twentieth century by the artificial barriers erected by wealth. Parracombe, smaller, lonelier, with its white farms and outbuildings and cottages, is the natural outcome of a small and scattered population, who are not rich enough to build newer houses, and who live as their forefathers did because their isolation on Exmoor, and the barren land on which they live, has not induced men from other districts to come and "expand."

The little village of Culbone, near Porlock—if one may call half a dozen cottages a village—is not an anomaly; indeed, it is a kind of geographical whim. The cleft in which it lies faces towards the north, and it is so deep and so deeply wooded that for four of the winter months there is no direct ray of sunlight in the gorge, only the sky or the light high up on the summits to remind the score of folk who live there that they are not shut in a green prison. Even at midsummer their sunrise is several hours later than for the rest of the world. Among the darkest part of the green thickets stands the church, which is probably the smallest parish church in England, or shares that distinction with the church of Lullington in Sussex or St. Lawrence's in the Isle of Wight. One or two of the tiny churches in Cornwall are smaller. There is St. Piran's, but that is now a ruin on a beach, with only the low walls of the very early building remaining; and there is the church of St. Enodoc, near Wadebridge, which the saint must have forgotten and the world overlooked, for it got lost among the low sandhills and the sand drifted over, and it is only fifty years since it has been found again, a delight to the few who ever see it, with its squat grey tower barely seen over a tall hedge of tamarisk, and before it the short grass rich with thyme, giving place to the sand-hills which run out to the long level stretch of the beach, and behind it the sand-hills yielding to the clean dry grass of the downs.

But these charming small buildings are mostly of very simple and primitive construction, and St. Culbone has the construction of a perfect parish church within the limits of its thirty-four feet from east window to west door, with a nave, and a tiny chancel thirteen feet long, and a small truncated spire, similar to that of Porlock Church. Its patron saint is the Celtic St. Columban—Culbone is a simple corruption of his name—who lived about the same time that St. Dubricius crowned Arthur at Caerleon, about A.D. 517; of how this tiny church came to be built (for the present fifteenth-century building stands on the site of a pre-Saxon foundation, which was dedicated to the Celtic saint), or what refuge or sanctuary it was, there is no historical record; doubtless a remnant of the British, harassed by Saxon raids on Porlock, hid themselves in this dark gorge, and there built and dedicated a church to their own saint of the dove's name, in the hope that he would save them from the claws of the invaders.

Of Minehead as it is now, no greater contrast can be imagined with Porlock and St. Culbone, except that of Ilfracombe, with the grand desolation of Heddon's Mouth and the solitariness of Trentishoe or Morthoe. For both Ilfracombe and Minehead have become so popular for summer visiting that most of their original character is lost under a flood of new houses, trim streets and shops, which have grown to meet the requirements of a large but fluctuating population. Unduly to deplore this is, I suppose, a form of intellectual snobbery. Both Minehead and Ilfracombe are still undoubtedly beautiful in their setting of sea and moorland, the one upon lofty cliffs, the other among gently rounded and wooded hills; and it is fitting that more people than the favoured and aristocratically-minded few, who elect to stay in cottages and shun their fellow-men, should be given opportunity to enjoy them.

Minehead is a place with a history; its position on the Bristol Channel made it a port of considerable value, and throughout the Middle Ages it did a large trade with Ireland, and a foreign trade with France and Spain, only second to that of Bristol from the West of England. In the seventeenth century, like Bristol also, it had an extensive trade with Virginia and the West Indies, and it exported annually forty thousand barrels of herrings to the Mediterranean. But the herrings left these coasts, as I have already had occasion to state in speaking of Lynton, and an Act passed in the reign of Charles II, forbidding the import of Irish cattle, though passed with the intention of protecting the English farmers against Irish competition, had the usual result of such short-sighted policy, and, while it crippled the Irish trade and ruined the prosperity of such ports as Minehead, it ultimately benefited nobody. Any ship smuggling cattle, that was captured, was sold, and a part of the proceeds went to charity and a part to the Crown. The "Cow Charity" is a fund which is still administered in Minehead.

Minehead was a "manor" in Domesday Book, and was given along with Dunster by the Conqueror to William de Mohun, who was one of the first of his nobles to support his English expedition, and who brought to the standard of Duke William fifty-seven knights in his retinue, with their esquires and their men-at-arms. The name Minehead is a corruption of the Norman lord's name with the Anglo-Saxon word heved, a head; it used to be written "Manheved."

The Mohuns held it until the time of Henry IV, when, there being only daughters, it passed out of the direct line, and was sold by Lady Mohun to the Luttrells, who have held it until the present time. It was incorporated by Queen Elizabeth, and governed by a "port-reeve," and later by two constables. The place was then of a size to consist of a Lower, Middle and Upper Town; the Lower Town, now called Quay Town, is the oldest remaining part. It lies under the high hill of Culver Cliff, around the harbour, and has more of the look of a Devon or Cornwall fishing village—the steep, narrow streets, the whitewashed cottages with their large chimney-stacks and leaded windows—than the aspect of modern Minehead would lead one to expect. It was here, indeed, that the sea broke in the great gale of 1860, when the shipping in the harbour tore from its moorings, and was driven literally upon the houses of Quay Town, as the sea-wall gave way under the pounding of the waves, and the Royal Charter, getting clear from Culver Cliff, was driven on to the rocks off Anglesea, and lost with all hands.