Motor Tours in the West Country

by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell

This is the only memorial, in his birthplace, to the greatest of the “men of Bideford in Devon;” but Charles Kingsley has a full-length statue at the end of the promenade. Kingsley, I imagine, would have preferred a different arrangement.

Two miles away to the west is Westward Ho! We shall see it under the hill if we drive out to Appledore, where the sands are very yellow and the sea is very blue. We shall also see a spot called Bloody Corner, which is said to be the burial-place of the scourge of Saxon England, Hubba the Dane, the devastator of Yorkshire, the marauder of our coasts, the rifler of monasteries. A slab of slate has been fixed in the wall on the right side of the road, and an inscription engraved on it by someone who was a lover of history, but no poet.

The shortest, but not the most direct way to Barnstaple from Bideford is by the coast road, whence we see, across the brown and yellow sands, the river-mouth from which seven ships of Bideford sailed out to fight the Armada. This road is level, but extremely dusty in dry weather except near Barnstaple, where it has a “prepared” surface. The direct road over the hills is so steep in places that its directness is merely nominal; but here the scenery is lovely.

There is a third alternative: to drive up the Torridge valley, cross over by Winkleigh to the valley of the Taw, and follow that river to Barnstaple. This is a course greatly to be commended.

Especially on a hot afternoon this is one of the most desirable runs in Devon. From Bideford to Torrington the road is shaded nearly continuously by high banks of trees rising from the wayside: on the left the cool stream winds beside us. Torrington, on its abrupt hill above the river, must have been a place of dignity when its castle dominated the valley. Through these streets where we are driving Fairfax chased the royalists one night in the dark, after a long resistance “with push of Pike and butt end of Musket”—chased them clean through the town and out of it to the bridges. This engagement, wrote the general, was “a hotter service than any storme this Army hath before been upon.” The royalists meantime had bribed “a desperate villain” to fire their store of powder in the church, lest the army of the Parliament should benefit by it; with the unexpected result that when “the Lead, Stones, Timber, and Ironwork of the Church were blowne up into the Ayre” two hundred royalist prisoners were blown up too. Hardly any of the Parliament-men were injured, though Fairfax himself had a narrow escape, and was obliged to return to “Master Rolls his house” for the night, “in regard the Quarter at Torrington was inconvenient, the Windowes broken in pieces, and the houses so shattered with the great blast that they could not performe a convenient shelter from the raine.” This church on our right among the trees replaced the one that was blown into the air so completely that hardly a fragment of the old building remains; and this street by which we pass through the town is the one by which Fairfax rode back that night to Master Rolls his house. He went straight on to Stephenstone, but we turn away to the right on the road that skirts the castle hill and passes near the Waterloo obelisk.

We see little more of the Torridge; but this splendid Exeter road takes us through very lovely scenery; by woods, and beds of fern, and level heaths, and fields of meadowsweet, and rows of shady beeches, while for the last time our view is bounded by the beloved hills of Dartmoor. It is a curiously lonely road: hardly a village, and indeed for some miles hardly a cottage, breaks the solitude. Between the two valleys, as we pass through Winkleigh and bear round to the left to cross the Taw, the country is less beautiful and the surface rougher; but after the sharp turn at Morchard Road Station we have a splendid run to Barnstaple.

This is the most level road in Devon. This fact alone commends it to us, but there are many other facts to make it memorable: woods of oak, and larch, and mountain-ash, and chestnut-trees, not only shadowing us but filling all the landscape: tall red fir-stems, and ferns beside the road, and wildflowers everywhere. All the way we follow the railroad, swinging past station after station, Eggesford and South Molton and Portsmouth Arms and Umberleigh, while the valley widens and narrows and opens out again; and all the time the Taw is close at hand, growing from a tiny stream between low banks of red earth and grass to a strong river rippling over the shingle, with trees dipping into its sunny waters.

Somewhere in Bishop’s Tawton lies the dust of the first Bishop of Devon. It was here that the see was originally fixed; but when the second bishop was murdered it was thought wise to move to a more central position at Crediton. Beyond the pretty village the estuary widens, and we see Barnstaple before us through the trees.

ON THE TAW.