The mother came upon her—a child was born—
And, sir, they hurl'd it back into the fire.
St. Peter Port is an admirable centre from which to visit every quarter of the compact little island; but, indeed, as already adumbrated, there is but little in Guernsey (except for the antiquarian) that is really worth seeing outside its capital, except the south coast. St. Sampson's may be visited for its picturesque church, which is one of the oldest and most interesting on the island. The road by which we gain it is so ugly—one continued line of houses—that no one need hesitate to use the electric tram, which was one of the earliest of its kind in the British dominions. It is hardly worth while to get out on the way to visit the poor remains of Ivy Castle: the situation of the ruins is unusually unpicturesque, and the ruins themselves are uninteresting. Opposite St. Sampson's itself, across the busy little harbour, is the rather better ruin of Vale Castle. This would be exceedingly pleasant to look on, were it not for the mammoth granite-quarries that pave the streets of Westminster, but effectually disfigure what were once the charms of Guernsey. The Castle itself, like Ivy Castle, is little more than a shell; in fact, the latter has the additional credit of what is possibly a chapel, with a rudely vaulted stone roof. Ivy Castle, moreover, boasts at least authentic pedigree, having first been built—if the date be really right—by Robert, Duke of Normandy, before the Norman Conquest; whereas of the origin of Vale Castle practically nothing is known. Its ancient title, Le Château de St. Michel l'Archange, is perhaps responsible for the tradition that it was built by monks from Mont St. Michel as a place of protection for the neighbouring priory in case of a sudden invasion. From Vale Castle, if we like, we may cross the island—here less than a couple of miles broad—to Vale Church, built on the edge of what was once a sea-creek, but has long since silted up, or been reclaimed. It is pleasanter, however, to follow round the coast, past Bordeaux Harbour, and across breezy L'Ancresse Common, especially as this takes us past the L'Autel de Déhus, and the L'Autel des Vardes, the two finest remaining dolmens in the Channel Islands. The finest of all is supposed to have been that which was discovered behind St. Helier in 1785, and which was "unanimously voted" to the then Governor, Marshal Conway, "in a moment of enthusiasm." The Marshal, unfortunately, in another moment of enthusiasm, carried it off and re-erected it at his country seat in Berkshire. These Channel Island dolmens are of wholly different type from the familiar cromlechs of the mushroom pattern of Kits Coty House, near Aylesford, or of Pentre Evan, in Pembrokeshire. They are, in fact, considerable, stone-built, subterranean burial-chambers, with traces in some instances of a long succession of interments. The islanders call them "pouquelayes"; which is derived by Miss Carey from either the Celtic pwca, a fairy, and lies, a place, or from pouq, an excavation, and lekh, a stone. In this connection it is interesting that they are supposed to be haunted by fairies—one is called the Creux des Fées, and another the Roche à la Fée—who are supposed to "bring ill-luck on those who interfere with them, a fact which has saved many of them from the spoiler." "The restorer, however," adds Mr. Bicknell dryly, "has unfortunately not been idle, and the Little People do not appear to have found a punishment to 'fit the crime' in this case." Unhappily the same must be admitted in the case of the navvies employed on the harbour works in Alderney, who "amused themselves by smashing up all the megaliths that they could lay their hands on." Many of the relics from these cist-vaens—bones and pottery—have found their way into the Lukis Museum at St. Peter Port.
Vale church itself, not far from the Grand Havre, and in a flat, unlovely neighbourhood, is possibly the most interesting, architecturally, in the island. The chancel arch should be noticed, with its chevron ornament; the chancel, vaulted in two compartments (in contrast with the rude, pointed vaults of most of the other churches); the piscina in the aisle; and the wall arcade. Another striking feature is the brackets for images on the columns of the arcade, between the nave and its aisle. A series like this is uncommon; though there is a group of churches in West Yorkshire—sometimes supposed to have been built by the Tempest family—Kirkby Malham is the finest—which has traces of canopied niches in the same position. The finest single niche that the writer knows of this kind is on the south side of the nave in the fine, fifteenth-century church of Lechlade, in Gloucestershire. Towards the west end of the churchyard is another tumble-down dolmen. Thus Christians of the twentieth century are buried in the same soil that received the bones of their neolithic ancestors no one knows how many thousands of years ago.
A FIELD OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS IN GUERNSEY.
The climate encourages the growing of flowers, and the northern half of the island is mostly devoted to this industry.
Though Vale is not uninteresting, it is with a feeling of relief that one turns one's back on this north corner of the island that once perhaps was so beautiful, but is now so hopelessly spoilt. The glory of Guernsey, as already stated, is now wholly confined to its south coast. Moulin Huet is a gracious bay, too well known from photographs to need further description; whilst the little Saints Bay to the west of it—a shrine within a shrine—is almost equally charming. Westward from Icart Point, itself a splendid promontory, the coast sweeps round in another great curve to La Moye Point; beyond which, again, to Pleinmont, at the south-west corner of the island, the cliffs, though everywhere deeply indented, continue, on the whole, a more uniform direction. The great hollow between Icart and La Moye Points is apparently nameless, unless it be Icart Bay. There is no authoritative Ordnance map of the Channel Islands, to which one might adhere whether right or wrong; and the best map of Guernsey with which I am acquainted, in the late Mr. C. B. Black's guide-book, gives the name Icart to the eastern recess of the great main bay, and Petit Bot and Portelet to the two small recesses to the west of it. Anyhow, Petit Bot is the most secret and intimate of the three, and entirely picturesque with its disused mill and martello tower. This is one of the points on the coast to which the chars-à-bancs descend from St. Peter Port; and the drive down the glen by which we approach it is delightful. The next calling point is Le Gouffre, just beyond La Moye Point, which here runs out into the sea in long ribs of warm red granite. Here the cars generally halt for a couple of hours, whilst the tripper feasts on lobster in the pleasant little inn. The Gouffre may be taken as roughly the centre of the grand seven miles of cliff line of this splendid south coast. The section hence to the west is less frequently explored, though the picturesque cave of the Creux Mahie, again roughly halfway, is often paid a visit, and is well worth visiting. Pleinmont and Torteval come into the "Toilers of the Deep"; and this corner of the island, the farthest of all from St. Peter Port, is luckily less injured than the rest. The north-west coast of Guernsey, from Pleinmont Point to Vale, past the huge sweeping hollows—some of them singularly symmetrical—of Rocquaine, Perelle, Vazon, and Cobo Bays, is chiefly a matter of rocky beach and of slight elevations shelving down in gentle declivity to the sea. The glass-houses, moreover, which have languished much at Torteval, flourish again in amazing vigour as we draw near Cobo Bay. There are two points of interest, however, in this corner of the island that justify even the dull, direct journey by which we approach them from St. Peter Port. The first of these is the little Chapel of St. Apolline, which is stated in all the guide-books, on documentary evidence, to have been founded by Nicolas Henry in 1394, or thereabouts. Even documentary evidence, in architectural matters, is not always to be trusted. Only the day before writing these lines the writer was re-visiting the Lady Chapel at St. Albans Cathedral, which is said to have been built—again on documentary evidence—circa 1310; though the Inventory lately published by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments adds cautiously: "The tracery of these windows ... is very advanced in character for the date." The tracery, indeed, is so advanced, if the date be really right, as hopelessly to confuse all previously held notions as to the systematic evolution of English architecture. That the building was at any rate finished by this date is altogether incredible. I notice that the late Lord Grimthorpe, in his pugnacious little handbook, after setting out the evidence from the Abbey Records, adds significantly, "but the style of the windows suggests a much later date." And the case is much the same with this Chapel of St. Apolline. On October 13, 1392, Nicolas Henry received permission from the monastery of Mont St. Michel, in Normandy, to alienate certain fields to provide an endowment for the Chapel of Notre Dame de la Perelle, which he had recently erected; and in an Act of the Royal Court, dated June 6, 1452, we come across the phrase, "La Chapelle de Notre Dame de la Perelle appellée la Chapelle Sainte Apolline." Certainly the identification seems complete. On the other hand, the writer believes that no one visiting this chapel who has previously read Professor Baldwin Brown's beautiful volume on Saxon Architecture—and it so happened that the writer paid his first visit to the Channel Islands almost immediately after its perusal—can fail to detect in this building quite a number of criteria that are there set out as indicating, at any rate in England, a pre-Conquest era of building. Unfortunately I have kept no note of these features, but the impression then made on my mind is vivid. I may, of course, be wrong; but it seems to me at least possible that we have here the solitary survivor—far older than the Fishermen's Chapel at St. Brelade's in Jersey—of those many chapels that are known to have been built in the Channel Islands in the eighth and ninth centuries by the successors of St. Magloire.