Turning westwards along the coast, Lundy is often to be seen like a faint blue cloud on the horizon, especially when a softening haze hovers over the land—but on a clear day it is very distinct. And on a fine evening, when the dim blue twilight is creeping up on every side, it has the very air of an enchanted island against the radiant crimson that for a few moments spreads and glows in the west after sundown.
A little distance farther on is Portledge, 'the most antient seat of the name and family of Coffin,' says Prince; and he mentions a boundary deed between Richard Coffin and the Abbot of Tavistock, written 'in the Saxon tongue, which giveth good confirmation thereof.' Sir William Coffin was one of several Devonshire gentlemen who were 'assistants' to Henry VIII in the tournaments of the 'Field of the Cloth of Gold,' being of great courage, and 'expert at feats of arms.' A story which is often told of him gives a good illustration of his strong will. While living on a property that belonged to his wife in Derbyshire, Sir William chanced one day to pass a churchyard, and seeing a group of people standing about, he asked what was happening. Being told that 'they had brought a corps to be buried, but the priest refused to do his office unless they first delivered him the poor man's cow, the only quick goods left,' for a burial fee, he commanded the priest to read the service. But the priest declined to do so until he had received his fee. On this answer, Sir William 'caused the priest to be put into the poor man's grave, and earth to be thrown upon him; and he still persisting in his refusal, there was still more earth thrown in, until the obstinate priest was either altogether or well nigh suffocated.'
Prince is entirely delightful over this story. He goes on: 'Now, thus to handle a priest in those days was a very bold adventure;' as if to bury a priest alive was usually considered a pleasant amusement. Sir William, however, not only lived through the storm that the high-handed action raised, but actually succeeded in moving Parliament to pass an Act regulating the burial fees that might be asked of the poor. So our biographer finishes with the triumphant axiom: 'Evil manners are often the parent of good laws!'
Eleven miles west of Bideford is Clovelly. Here one feels, rather despairingly, that anyone who has seen this wonderful village can listen to no description of it; while to those who have never seen it, no description is of any value.
A road leads towards it through the Hobby, a wood overhanging the sea, which Kingsley describes as 'a forest wall five hundred feet high, of almost semi-tropic luxuriance.' The road was 'banked on one side with crumbling rocks, festooned with heath, and golden hawkweed, and London pride, like velvet cushions covered with pink lace, and beds of white bramble-blossom alive with butterflies; while above my head, and on my right, the delicate cool canopy of oak and birch leaves shrouded me so close that I could have fancied myself miles inland, buried in some glen unknown to any wind of heaven, but that everywhere between green sprays and grey stems gleamed that same boundless ocean blue.'
The village itself lies in a ravine of the rock, and the 'street' is so precipitous that the eaves of one house are on a level with the foundations of its next neighbour above. Kingsley and Dickens have written descriptions that, scarcely overlapping, seem to complete each other.
'I was crawling up the paved stairs, inaccessible to cart or carriage, which are flatteringly denominated Clovelly street; ... behind me a sheer descent, roof below roof, at an angle of 75°, to the pier and bay, two hundred feet below and in front of me; another hundred feet above, a green amphitheatre of oak and ash and larch, shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, across which the low, soft, formless mist was crawling, opening every instant to show some gap of intense dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam of sunshine upon the white cottages, with their grey steaming roofs and bright green railings packed one above another upon the ledges of the cliff; and on the tall tree fuchsias and gaudy dahlias in the little scraps of courtyard; calling the rich faint odour out of the verbenas and jessamines, and, alas! out of the herring heads and tails also, as they lay in the rivulet, and lighting up the wings of the gorgeous butterflies, almost unknown in our colder eastern climate, which fluttered from woodland down to garden, and from garden up to woodland.'
The human element tinges the other sketch more strongly:
'The village was built sheer up the face of a steep and lofty cliff. There was no road in it, there was no wheeled vehicle in it, there was not a level yard in it. From the sea-beach to the cliff-top two irregular rows of white houses, placed opposite to one another and twisting here and there, and there and here, rose like the sides of a long succession of stages of crooked ladders, and you climbed up village or climbed down the village by the staves between, some six feet wide or so, and made up of sharp, irregular stones. The old pack-saddle, long laid aside in most parts of England, as one of the appendages of its infancy, flourished here intact. Strings of pack-horses and pack-donkeys toiled slowly up the staves of the ladders, bearing fish and coal, and such other cargo as was unshipping at the pier from the dancing fleet of village boats and from two or three little coasting traders. As the beasts of burden ascended laden, or descended light, they got so lost at intervals in the floating clouds of village smoke, that they seemed to dive down some of the village chimneys and come to the surface again far off, high above others. No two houses in the village were alike in chimney, size, shape, door, window, gable, roof-tree, anything. The sides of the ladder were musical with water, running clear and bright. The staves were musical with the clattering feet of the pack-horses and pack-donkeys, and the voices of the fishermen urging them up mingled with the voices of the fishermen's wives and their many children.... The red-brown cliffs, richly wooded to their extremest verge, had their softened and beautiful forms reflected in the bluest water, under the clear North Devonshire sky of a November day without a cloud. The village itself was so steeped in autumnal foliage, from the houses joining on the pier to the topmost round of the topmost ladder, that one might have fancied it was out a-bird's-nesting, and was (as indeed it was) a wonderful climber.'
