Barnstaple and Bideford are towns that the jerry-builders have done their utmost to make hideous with white brick villas banded with red. It is a curious fact, but fact it is, that a builder without a grain of taste, if ambitious to make one of his domestic monstrosities attractive, will look into the pattern-book of a maker of terra-cotta, and select the most obtrusive ridge-tiles and, above all, hip-knobs he can find, frizzle the spine of his roof with the former, clap the latter on his gable, and think that the product is stylish. The foliations of the ridge-tiles get broken after a frost, and the roof acquires a mangy look, but not till after the villa has been let as a handsome suburban residence.
SMITHY, HARTLAND
When one encounters this sort of thing, repeated again and again, the heart turns sick, and the visitor is impatient to fly from towns thus vulgarised.
To Bideford he comes full of thoughts of "Westward Ho!" and expects to find an Elizabethan flavour about the place, only to be woefully disappointed. Even the church is new; only the bridge remains, and that has been menaced with destruction.
Bideford has memories, but modern Bideford has made herself æsthetically unworthy of them.
To begin with, the old Roman, or pre-Roman, road from North Cornwall passing through Stratton, that takes its name from the street or road, ran to the ford on the Torridge and passed on to Barnstaple.
At the beginning of the ninth century the estuary of the Taw and Torridge (Dur, water, and Dur-rhyd, the water ford[13]) invited the entry into the land of the Northmen.
A memorable incident in one of these incursions is connected with a romantic story that shall be told in full.