Lynton and Lynmouth: A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland

by John Presland

The custom of "beating the bounds," which was familiar enough in many country districts in the last century, is also a remains of primitive tribal rites; it is a summer festival, falling usually at Ascensiontide, and is held with greater or less ceremony. Now, indeed, it has become just a holiday affair for children, who dress up and parade the town or village with a hobby-horse and a few vague ceremonies, now become shadowy and meaningless, as in the beating of the bounds which takes place in the older part of the town of Minehead.

There are many scores of superstitious practices, as distinguished from these remains of actual ritual of which I have spoken, still in use among country-folk. In Devonshire they still take a sick child, very early in the morning, and hold it over a stream which is running east, with a long thread tied to its finger, so that as the water carries the thread eastwards away from the child the sickness will also be carried away. This, which seems to us so incomprehensible a belief, is one of that very large class of primitive practices which imitate a certain desired condition, as in the rain-making of certain tribes of red Indians, when, having danced ceremonially round a large tub of water, one of the number takes a mouthful and spirts it into the air in imitation of rain. This is what they call a "charm"; there are charms for the stanching of blood, for making the cows yield well, for the cure of toothache, for averting evil from a young child; when a Devonshire woman is asked to a christening, she still takes with her a saffron cake, and gives it to the first stranger that she meets on her way to church. But when the cattle are diseased, they have, or had as late as 1883, when the ceremony was witnessed and recorded, a rite which is more than a charm; for a sheep or calf is taken from the herd and sacrificed, and either burned, or buried in a corner of the field belonging to the farmer whose cattle are diseased.

But there is another practice in Devon and Cornwall which we may proclaim a superstition, but to which the tragedies of these wild coasts give but too grim an earnestness to those who practise it. When a ship is long overdue, and a woman can bear the suspense no longer, she goes down to the seashore and calls her husband by name. Over and over again she calls him, her neighbours standing by, until over the waters the voice of her drowned husband comes in answer. Then she turns and goes to her desolate cottage, with hope put out of her heart. How often these cries of sorrow and bereavement have gone out from these rocky coasts, calling the drowned men by their simple, homely names of field and cottage use from under the grey waters, how often the waiting women have been comforted or strengthened by a despairing certainty, we cannot know or realize who do not live and die by the sea.

Apart from those customs and practices, which contain the germ of some very ancient ritual or primitive belief, there is another class of tradition which is purely fantastic, such as ghosts, witches who change into rabbits and cats, fairies, dragons, and strange portents. Of such kind is the story of the Ghost of Porlock Weir, a buccaneer named Lucott, and no unlikely personage to haunt any of these seaside hamlets. He was a malicious and obstinate ghost who appeared boldly a week after his funeral—when the inhabitants might reasonably have supposed they had at last got rid of the bad old man—and though he was exorcised by no less than eleven clergymen he refused to be laid. At last the Vicar of Porlock tamed him with a consecrated wafer, compelled him to ride with him to Watchet, and there imprisoned him in a small box, which was straight-way thrown into the sea, and he was seen no more.

There are elements in this story like that of Anstey's novel, where a genie is imprisoned in a brass pot, which is fished up out of the sea and opened, with startling results to a quiet modern community; and it is to be hoped that nobody will bring Lucott ashore again, along with a catch of fish.

There is another strange tale, also, concerning one John Strange of Porlock, who, on August 23 of 1499, was hewing wood, and upon sitting down to his midday meal on a log at the edge of the clearing, and cutting a piece of bread, observed blood to flow from the incision. He went to his neighbours about it, and with them to his parish priest, and the matter became one of importance, for I find that a Commission was appointed and recorded in the Register of Wells, to inquire into this strange occurrence. Witnesses were called and examined, oaths taken, the learned Commission sat upon it as solemnly as if it had been a case of heresy. John Strange, summoned from his little cottage at Porlock, was, we can well imagine, a half-unwilling hero. Nobody seems to have arrived at any conclusion, and nobody seems to have suggested that perhaps John Strange had cut his finger!

There is an even stranger and more splendidly fantastic story in Westcote's "View of Devon," of fiery dragons seen flying about certain barrows or tumuli near Challacombe, and alighting on them, and how a certain labouring man, having bought a small plot of waste land near by, began depleting Broaken Bunow to build himself a house with the material. And how, digging into the hillock, he came upon "a little place, as it had been a large oven, fairly, strongly and closely walled up," and breaking into this he discovered an earthen pot, which, hoping it might contain some treasure, he stretched out his hand to seize, when, as he put his hand upon it he heard a noise as of a great trampling of horses coming towards him. So he rose and looked about him, but, seeing nothing, knelt again to secure the pot, when the same thing happened again, and so a third time also. Nevertheless he drew out the pot and took it home, and found it to contain no treasure, but only a few ashes and little bones. And a very little time after he lost his senses both of sight and hearing, and died within three months.

There is another barrow also, near the same place, where I am inclined to believe that a "mystical sciencer" worked a trick on two worthy fellows, whom he promised to enrich with silver and gold if they would dig into the hillock for him and find therein a great brass pan which contained the treasure. This they did, and came to the brass pan covered with a large stone, which the strongest of them tried to lift, and was taken with such a faintness "that he could neither work nor stand," and therefore called to the other to take his place. This the man did, and was also taken with faintness; and when they both recovered, which was in a very short space of time, the "mystical sciencer" told them that the birds were flown and the nest only left. And sure enough they found this true: the empty brass pan, with the bottom bright and clean, as if a treasure had lain there, and all the rest of it cankered with rust. Whether this sciencer was some obscure Roger Bacon, and had discovered the use of a volatile anaesthetic centuries ago, or whether he was enjoying a solitary practical joke at the expense of two simpletons, is impossible to say. "It is at your choice to believe either or neither," as Westcote says of the two foregoing stories. "I have offered them to the shrine of your judgment, and what truth soever there is in them, they are not unfit tales for winter nights, when you roast crabs by the fire, whereof this parish yields none, the climate is too cold, only the fine dainty fruits of whortles and blackberries."

One of the pleasantest of tales for winter nights is given by Westcote himself in his introductory chapters, where he speaks of the air of Devon as "very healthy, temperate, sweet, and pure," and giving long life to the inhabitants, more particularly in the good old times, when men were content to live temperately and frugally, and did not weaken themselves with delicacies, but subsisted on the bare sustenance afforded by the earth. Indeed, in the most ancient times they lived on bark and roots, and on a certain "confection," of which if they took a small quantity no larger than a bean they neither hungered nor thirsted for a long while afterwards—so, at least, Diodorus Siculus and Dio Nicaeus have affirmed, and we can therefore only suppose, in the face of such authority, that the recipe is long since lost, and that the habits of Devonshire men have certainly changed since the days when they lived a hundred and twenty years.

But that must have been before the Phoenicians came to Britain, for they are certainly reputed to have brought the secret of clotted (or clouted) cream with them, and to have landed in Cornwall and Devon with their scald-pans with them, so that the degeneration of the Damnonii in the matter of delicacies is of very ancient date.