Motor Tours in the West Country

by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell

LUSTLEIGH.

That is no reason why we should not see as much of the Moor as we can, and love it dearly in our own poor fashion. There is much, very much of its beauty which he who runs—and even he who motors—may read. And the most beautiful part of it, I think, is this eastern side.

Quite a short run from Moreton is to Bovey Tracey, Hey Tor, and Manaton. We drive out of the little town, as we drove into it, past the seventeenth-century almshouses, whose thatched roofs are supported on a row of granite pillars, and whose features are feebly reproduced on the opposite side of the street—a case in which imitation is very far from flattery. A narrow road follows the course of the Bovey through its pretty valley. At a point where road, rail, and river nearly touch one another a little by-way crosses a bridge to Lustleigh, which has a great reputation for beauty, and deserves it; for with its church and modern cross, its thatched cottages, its stream and little bridge, half hidden in their setting of woods and orchards, it is a very lovable village. Its spaces, however, are limited. Drivers of large cars must turn near the church under the elms, and see Lustleigh on foot, for there is no turning place further on, and the road beyond the village is impracticable. Its beauty is very alluring, but its steepness is serious, and such is its narrowness that even a car of moderate size brushes the hedge on each side. It is far easier to return to the main road, or rather the main lane to Bovey, which has a good surface, though it is narrow and winding.

The fine church that stands above the street of Bovey Tracey was founded, it is said, by the Tracy who was one of Becket’s murderers, to atone for the deed by the convenient method of the Middle Ages. But all its splendour of carving and gilding, its painted screen and pulpit, its porch with the groined roof and grotesque bosses, are of a later century than the twelfth.

There is nothing here to see except this church and some restored stone crosses. For no one knows, I believe, where the cavaliers were quartered on that famous winter evening when Cromwell rode into Bovey with a band of horse and foot, and brought dismay with him. “The Enemy in Bovey,” says Joshua Sprigge, “were put to their shifts, yet through the darkness … most of the men escaped.” The shift the officers made was an ingenious one. They were playing cards when Cromwell’s men marched up to their door, and with admirable presence of mind they flung the stakes out of the window. By the time the soldiers had finished picking up the money the royalists had escaped by the back door, and were beyond the river.

Almost as soon as we have crossed the same river we find ourselves on the fringe of the Moor, and begin to rise slowly on a fine curving road, through a scene that grows in beauty moment by moment. On one side are the sweeping lines and satisfying colours of the moorland, the heather and the yellow grass, the greens and browns of the bracken: on the other are all the graces of a copse of birch-trees. At every turn the view widens, till on the skyline Hey Tor appears, very sharp and dark. As the road sweeps round it the Moor is everywhere about us, an endless series of rounded hills, with the line of their curved shoulders broken here and there by jagged tors. Everywhere the rim of the landscape is blue beyond all experience. When green has melted into grey, and grey has deepened into an indigo so strong that it seems no colour can be bluer, there is still beyond it a line of hills as purely, piercingly blue as the sky in June.

We run on between Saddle Tor and Rippon Tor over hill and dale, till we look down on the famous goal of a certain historic grey mare—Widdecombe-in-the-Moor; then past Hound Tor and round by the pretty village-green of Manaton to the woods through which the Becka’s waters dance and sing. Here by the wayside the car must wait a little time, while we are carried to fairyland on a magic carpet of moss. Long, long ago, say the fairies, this was a stony, barren slope. Some wild spirit of the storm had flung upon it a host of mighty boulders, which lay there bare and grey beneath the open sky. At last the fairies came, and wove their wonderful carpet of moss, soft and green, and laid it gently over the great stones and over the earth, and scattered their enchanted seeds upon the ground so that the tall trees rose thickly upon the hillside, and a mysterious, dusky veil of leaves hid the river from the sky. Then the fairies made their home here; and we may walk with them through the woods to that strange fall that in summer is no waterfall, but a cascade of gigantic rounded stones, flung from the height in a confused mass, through which a thin stream trickles.

As we drive out of the dark and spellbound wood we suddenly find ourselves on a heathery hillside, all space and colour and light; and by a winding road we return to Bovey and Moretonhampstead.

Quite near to Moreton is one of those unforgettable places of charm so rare that they dwell in one’s mind for ever as types of beauty. This is Fingle Bridge, which crosses the Teign where the valley is narrow and its sides are high and very steep, and the brown river flows quickly among woods and beds of fern, and a huge slope, completely carpeted with heather, towers close at hand. The best road is by Sandy Park, and beyond that point even this is by no means good. In Drewsteignton, indeed, a prudent owner of any car that has more than a nine-foot wheel-base will get out and walk, for between that delightful village and the Teign there is an extremely steep and narrow lane, with a surface that is chiefly made of stones both large and loose. There is, moreover, no good turning-place in the narrow gorge through which the river runs.