THE FAL
The northern coast of Devonshire, with its more bracing air, is no less enchanting than the southern. Charles Kingsley, born under the brow of Dartmoor, has lavished on North Devon raptures of filial praise, but the scenes of "Westward Ho!" fully bear out his glowing paragraphs. It is years ago that I passed an August in Clovelly, but the joy of it lingers yet. Nothing that I have ever seen on this our starry lodging-place, with its infinite surprises of beauty, resembles that white village climbing the cleft of a wooded cliff, its narrow street only a curving slope, a steep passage here and there smoothed into steps, where donkeys and pedestrians rub amiable shoulders. At a turn in this cobbled stairway, your gaze, which has been held between two lines of the quaintest little houses, all diversified with peaks and gables, porches and balconies, window displays of china and pots of flowering vines, suddenly falls to a tiny harbour, a pier built out from the natural rock and hung with fishing-nets, a tangle of red-sailed boats, and a pebbly beach from which we used to watch the sunset flushing sea and cliffs. The five hundred dwellers in this hanging hamlet must all be of a kin, for Clovelly lads, we were told by our landlady, never do well if they marry outside the combe. Kindest of gossips! She tucked us away as best she could in such bits of rooms that, like Alice in Wonderland, we had to thrust one foot up chimney and one arm out of the window among the fuchsias and geraniums that make nothing, in Clovelly, of growing to a height of twenty feet. She would put us up wonderful luncheons of duck sandwiches and heather-honey and lime-water delicately flavoured from the old whiskey bottles into which it was poured, when we were starting out on those long walks to which North Devon air and views allure the laziest. Sometimes we followed the Hobby Drive, a wooded avenue along the top of the cliff, where for considerable distances a wall of noble timber, beech and oak and chestnut, glistening hollies and red-berried rowans, would shut out the view, and again the foliage would open and the eye could range across an opal sea to Lundy Island. On other days we would stroll through Clovelly Court to the summit of White Cliff, known as Gallantry Bower, whence one may look at choice far out over blowing woods or tossing waves. The towering trees of the park, trees that Will Carey may have climbed, are so ancient now that ferns and mosses grow on their decaying branches. Once we picked our way over the shingles to Bucks Mill, gathering only to drop again handfuls of the curiously flecked and banded pebbles. The water seemed to have as many colours as they, tans and russets and copper-tints innumerable, with shifting gleams of turquoise and of beryl. Bucks Mill is a fishing-hamlet of some one hundred and fifty souls, representing two original families, one of which, "the Browns," a swarthy and passionate race, is said to descend from Spanish sailors wrecked off the coast when gale and billow sided with England against the hapless Armada.
Another day we walked to Stoke, seven miles thither and seven miles back, to see the Saxon church raised by the Countess Elgitha in gratitude for the escape from shipwreck of her husband, Earl Godwin. All the way we were passing cottages that seemed to have strayed out of an artist's portfolio. Their rosy walls of Devonshire cob—the reddish mud of the region mixed with pebbles—were more than half hidden by the giant fuchsias and clambering honeysuckles. Even the blue larkspur would grow up to the thatch. Too often our road was shut in by hedges and we trudged along as in a green tunnel roofed with blue. Dahlias and hydrangias, poppies, hollyhocks and roses filled the cottage dooryards and gardens with masses of bloom. We asked a woman smiling in her vine-wreathed doorway how near we were to Hartland. "Win the top of yon hill," she said, "and you'll soon slip away into it." So we slipped away and were refreshed in another cottage doorway by two glasses of skim-milk for a penny. We found a grave old church at Stoke, with legions of rooks wheeling about the massive tower which has so long been a beacon for storm-tossed mariners. The white-bearded verger, whose rolling gait betrayed the sailor, read to us in stentorian tones, punctuated with chuckles, an epitaph which, in slightly varied form, we had seen elsewhere in Devon:
"Here lies I at the church door.
Here lies I because I's poor.
The farther in, the more to pay;
But here lies I as well as they."
Our homeward walk, by a different road, gave us a clearer impression of the ranges of naked hilltops which make up the Hartland parish. Upon those rounded summits rested a mellow western light which had dimmed into dusk when we finally risked our weary bones on the slippery "back staircase" of Clovelly.
We journeyed from Clovelly to Bideford by carrier's cart, sitting up with what dignity we could amidst a remarkable miscellany of packages. Once arrived at Kingsley's hero-town, we read, as in honour bound, the opening chapter of "Westward Ho!" crossed the historic bridge and sought out in the church the brass erected to the noble memory of Sir Richard Grenville, who drove the little Revenge with such a gallant recklessness into the thick of the Spanish fleet, fought his immortal fight, and died of his wounds "with a joyful and quiet mind." The exceeding charm of this Bristol Channel coast made us intolerant of trains and even of coaches, so that at lovely, idle Ilfracombe we took to our feet again and walked on by a cliff path to Combe Martin. Here we were startled, on going to bed, to find packed away between the thin mattresses a hoard of green pears, hard as marbles, and not much bigger, which the small boy of the inn, apparently intent on suicide, had secreted. The towered church, some eight or nine centuries old, was shown to us by a sexton who claimed that the office had descended in his family from father to son for the past three hundred years. However that may be, he was an entertaining guide, reading off his favourite "posy-stones" with a relish, and interpreting the carvings of the curious old rood-screen according to a version of Scripture unlike any that we had known before. Thence our way climbed up for two toilsome miles through a muddy sunken lane, in whose rock walls was a growth of dainty fern. It was good to come out in view of the rival purples of sunny sea and heathery hills, good to be regaled on "cold shoulder" and Devonshire junket in a stone-floored kitchen with vast fireplace and ponderous oaken settles, good to start off again across Trentishoe Common, glorious with gorse, and down the richly wooded combe, past a farmyard whose great black pig grunted at us fearsomely, and still down and down, through the fragrance of the pines. We turned off our track to follow the eddying Heddon to the sea, and had, in consequence, a stiff scramble to gain our proper path cut high in the Channel side of the cliff. We walked along that narrow way in a beauty almost too great to bear, but the stress of emotion found some relief in the attention we had to give to our footing, for the cliff fell sheer to the sunset-coloured waters. We spent the night at Wooda Bay, walking on in the morning for a jocund mile or two through fresh-scented larchwoods, then across Lee Abbey Park and through the fantastic Valley of Rocks, along another cliff-walk and down a steep descent to Lynmouth, where Shelley's "myrtle-twined cottage" stands upon the beach. Lynmouth, where the songs of sea and river blend, was more to our taste in its picturesque mingling of the old and the new, of herring-village and watering-place, than its airy twin, Linton, perched on the cliff-top four hundred feet above, but both are little paradises and, having located ourselves in one, the first thing we did was to leave it and visit the other. We lingered for a little in this exquisite corner of creation, till one blithe morning we could put up no longer with the saucy challenge of the Lyn and chased that somersaulting sprite, that perpetual waterfall, five miles inland, so coming out on the heathery waste of Exmoor.
We would gladly have turned gipsies then and there, if so we might have wandered all over and over that beautiful wild upland, and down through the undulating plain of mid-Devon, with its well-watered pastures and rich dairy-farms for whose butter and cheese the Devonshire sailors, as Hakluyt's narratives tell, used to long sorely on their far voyages. But the genuine garden of Devon is South Hams, below Dartmoor and between the Teign and the Tamar. This is the apple-country of which the poet sings:
"For me there's nought I would not give
For the good Devon land,
Whose orchards down the echoing cleeve
Bedewed with spray-drift stand,
And hardly bear the red fruit up
That shall be next year's cider-cup."
Little as Parson Herrick, the indignant incumbent of Dean Prior, enjoyed his Devonshire charge, the cider industry of the region must have appealed to him.
But this broad county, outranked in size only by York and Lincolnshire, has in its south, as in its north, a desolate tableland. Dartmoor has been described as a "monstrous lump of granite, covered with a peaty soil." The rocks are rich in lead and iron, tin and copper, but the soil is too poor even for furze to flourish in it. Heather, reeds, moss and whortleberries make shift to grow, and afford a rough pasturage to the scampering wild ponies, the moor-sheep and red cattle. It is a silent land of rugged tors and black morasses, of sudden mists and glooms, of prehistoric huts, abandoned mines, and, above all, for "Superstition clings to the granite," of dark stories, weird spells, and strange enchantments. Indeed, it folds a horror in its heart,—Dartmoor Prison, where our American sailors suffered a century ago, and where English convicts are now ringed in by grim walls and armed sentries. It is said that even to-day, when a Dartmoor child gets a burn, the mother's first remedy is to lay her thumb upon the smarting spot and repeat: