SOUTH POOL CREEK, SALCOMBE.
To those who do not know Salcombe, the six miles that lie between it and Kingsbridge may be a little depressing. The road leads to no other place, and is preposterously hilly: the country is treeless and discouraging. To the uninitiated it may well seem, as they drive between the imprisoning hedges, that no compensation is likely to be forthcoming. But some of us know better. We reach the edge of the hill, and suddenly the sea, brilliant and soft—a sea of liquid jewels—is shining below us, lapping upon the sands of the little creeks; wooded slopes drop steeply to the rocks that fringe the shore; red and white sails flit about the harbour, dapper yachts lie at anchor in the shelter of the hill, wave-worn barges move heavily towards the land; Salcombe lies at our feet, clinging to the hillside, a tiny town of steep streets and shipwrights’ yards and little quays; and Bolt Head stretches out a long arm to protect it.
There was an evening, not very many years ago, when at the hour of twilight a yacht put out to sea over the bar of Salcombe Harbour, while the sound of the evening bell came clearly across the water. Up the estuary the lights were beginning to shine out one by one through the dusk, and in the dark shadow of the headland the full tide silently “turned again home.” Lord Tennyson, who was on board the Sunbeam that night, has made Salcombe Bar dear to many who have never crossed it. He had been staying at the pretty house that stands on its own little promontory, hidden by trees, between the town and the bar. Here for some years lived Froude the historian among the orange-trees and tamarisks, and it was here he died.
This peaceful anchorage was very useful to pirates in the good old days. They hid safely behind Bolt Head and, when any unwary ship passed by, dashed out and plundered her. Henry VIII., though not above piracy himself, built a little castle for their undoing, upon a small precarious rock nearly circled by the sea. Here are its fragments still. Sir Edmund Fortescue strengthened it and called it Fort Charles, and held it very valiantly for Charles I.: so valiantly that it withstood Fairfax, and when it surrendered at last Fortescue was allowed to take the key with him.
FORT CHARLES AND BOLT HEAD.
To nearly every motorist, as he sits beside his tea-cup on the terrace of the Marine Hotel, or leans against the wall that keeps the sea out of the garden, it will occur at once that this harbour is an ideal place for motor-boating. This is truer than he knows. For these waters that ripple round the garden-walls of Salcombe pass on their way inland in various directions: up South Pool Creek to the thatched farmstead that has its feet nearly in the water at high tide; past Goodshelter to the old mill at Waterhead, and to Kingsbridge four miles away. And beyond the bar are all the little coves and bays of a lovely coast: Hope, where the high rocks entrap the sunshine and keep out the winds: Thurlestone, whose worldly ambitions are greater and whose charms are less: Bantham, between a curve of the Avon estuary and the sea, where the breezes are sweet with the scent of gorse, and worldly ambition seems altogether dormant. Even without a motor-boat we may see these little bays, each at the end of its own little lane; but only such motorists as are staying close at hand will care to explore lanes so narrow and winding and steep.
On our way back to Kingsbridge, however, to take the road to Plymouth, we shall see a narrow turn to the left, near West Alvington, which is a perfectly practicable means of cutting off a mile or two of dull country and avoiding a bad hill in Kingsbridge. As a whole the main road from this point to Plymouth is one of the best in South Devon, though there is a long and very steep descent at Aveton Giffard that is not marked on Bartholomew’s map, and a sharp rise in Modbury that is considerably steeper than the contour-book estimates. There is no very striking beauty of a large sort, but a great deal of the restful, wayside charm that makes Devonshire so comforting. There is no need to loiter on the road, for though it played its part in the Civil War—and indeed possibly on that account—there are few relics of its history to be seen. The bridge that crosses the sedges of the Avon at Aveton Giffard was once important enough to have a fort built on the hill for its defence; but none the less it was taken by the extremely irregular troops whose clubs and pickaxes and saws were wielded here for the Parliament. Champernowne of Modbury was one of the builders of the fort, and one of the greatest sufferers from the “clubmen,” for his house, which stood on the top of Modbury Hill, was fortified and occupied by the royalists. “This Party of ours wᶜʰ was at Modbury,” wrote Sir Bevill Grenville to his wife, “indur’d a cruell assault for 12 howers against many thousand men.” One result of this cruel assault, which could have but one end, is that only a very small fragment of Court House is still standing.