The Project Gutenberg eBook, Motor Tours in the West Country, by Mrs. Rodolph Stawell, Illustrated by R. De S. Stawell

MOTOR TOURS IN THE WEST COUNTRY

THE “MOTOR TOURS” SERIES

BY MRS. RODOLPH STAWELL

Bound in red cloth and boxed, price 6/- net each. Profusely Illustrated.

MOTOR TOURS IN WALES

With 63 Illustrations from Photographs, and Map.

SECOND EDITION.

Max Pemberton in the Sphere:—“… Will be read and reread by all who have toured Wales a-wheel. Mrs. Stawell is a charming writer; she has a fine sense of the road, and she adds to it a literary insight that is always captivating.… I have rarely encountered a book so full of pleasant literary gossip and yet so very practical.”——World:—“This most artistic book … gives a sympathetic description of all that is worth seeing in Shropshire, North Wales, the Heart of Wales, South Wales, and the Wye Valley. I do not think I have ever seen such beautifully-arranged photographs in any book of travel.”

MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE

With 48 Illustrations from Photographs, and Map.

SECOND EDITION.

“This charmingly-written account of motor travels in Yorkshire has no feature in common with the ordinary dry-as-dust matter of fact guide-book. The volume is one of the most fascinating books of home travel, within its own assigned limits, with which we are acquainted.… Full of exquisitely finished photographs.”—Standard.——“Motorists require a new order of guide-book, which shall be as independent of show places and beaten tracks as the happy possessor of a car. Mrs. Stawell has gauged by practical experience the new requirements, and has now done for the county of broad acres what her previous volume did for the Principality.”—Outlook.

MOTOR TOURS IN THE WEST COUNTRY

With 48 Illustrations from Photographs, and Map.

In common with Mrs. Rodolph Stawell’s other books of Motor Tours, this delightful volume is specially written for those who like to know something of the history and antiquities of the places through which they pass, and for lovers of beautiful scenery. At the same time all the principal roads of Devon and Cornwall are discussed in considerable detail, and though Somerset is not fully dealt with, there are two chapters on that county. Each chapter is preceded by a summary of distances, &c. The book is illustrated by 48 photographs by R. de S. Stawell, and contains an index and map of the routes.

LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON

CASTLE ROCK, LYNTON.

MOTOR TOURS IN
THE WEST COUNTRY

BY
MRS. RODOLPH STAWELL
AUTHOR OF “MOTOR TOURS IN WALES,” “MOTOR TOURS IN
YORKSHIRE,” ETC.

WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY R. DE S. STAWELL

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON MCMX

The photographs in Chapter III. are reproduced by the kind permission of the Editors of “Country Life” and the “Car Illustrated.”

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

A RUN ACROSS SOMERSET

SUMMARY OF RUN ACROSS SOMERSET

Distances.

Roads.

No bad gradients except near Chard—1 in 8.

Surface: from Clifton to Ilchester, poor; Ilchester to Crewkerne, fair; Crewkerne to Border, extremely good.

I
A RUN ACROSS SOMERSET

To most of us the very thought of the West Country is full of enchantment. In this grey and strenuous island, where a man must move quickly if he would be warm, this is the nearest approach to a Lotus Land—a land of green hills and hollows all lapped in an emerald sea, a land where the breezes are sleepy and scented, and the flowers grow because they want to see the view, and the sunshine is really encouraging, and the very rain is soft and kind. Even here the weather has its moods; but they are all lovable, and in any case cannot touch our happy memories. We who are but wayfarers, and have chanced to see the sun shining on the blue distances of Dartmoor, and warming the little sandy coves of South Devon, and peering into the depths of the wooded valley of Lynmouth, and lighting up the dark granite of the Land’s End, may keep the remembrance of it unspoiled for ever. Like the figures on Keats’ Grecian Urn, our vision of sunny hours suffers no change. “For ever shalt thou love, and she be fair.”

Even in Somerset the spell begins to work. We feel at once there is no need for haste. We begin to loiter, and stray from the straight path, and saunter through the orchards of the “Summerland;” though all the time the thought of the Devon border is never absent from our minds.

Very slowly the car creeps over Clifton Suspension Bridge. The Avon, a long way below us, flows between its high red-and-white cliffs towards the Severn Sea, to whose shore we too are bound before we turn southwards and make our leisurely way to Exeter, through Cheddar, and Glastonbury, and Chard.

It is a fairly hilly road that takes us by way of Failand to Clevedon. The surface is a little rough, too, but this is unfortunately a quality that is shared by many of the roads of Somerset. After passing through some pleasant scenery—here a dark plantation, and there a wide landscape bounded by the grey waters of the Bristol Channel, and here on the slope a pretty village—it leads us into the bright, clean, breezy streets that have been trodden by Coleridge and Thackeray and the Brookfields, by Tennyson and the Hallams.

When Coleridge came to Clevedon with his bride, and “only such furniture as became a philosopher,” there was no more than a village here. There was no esplanade, nor pier, nor bandstand to try his philosophy, when he took the one-storied cottage with the jasmine-covered porch and the tall rose that peeped in at the window, and settled there with the woman whom he loved “best of all created things” and by whom he was bored at the end of two months. Except in the matter of the jasmine on the porch, and the garden that contains—in the words of the sarcastic Cottle—“several pretty flowers,” there is little likeness between the Coleridge Cottage in the Old Church Road and the poet’s “Valley of Seclusion.” Local tradition would have us believe, however, that this red-tiled cottage with the two sentinel trees is the very one that “possessed everything that heart could desire”—for two months; the one that was supplied at the philosopher’s request with a dustpan and a small tin kettle, a Bible and a keg of porter; the one in which poor Sara sat so often by herself, uncheered even by Mr. Cottle’s gift of “several pieces of sprightly wall-paper.”

In those days Clevedon Court, which we passed as we drove into the town, was really in the country, no doubt. It is still shaded and sheltered by trees, and its mellow walls, its stately arches and mullions and terraces, contrive to keep an air of academic calm in defiance of the highway that passes near them, and of the neat little villas that make modern Clevedon look so tidy. If we should chance to be here on Thursday we may see the gardens. The rare beauty of this ancient house is inevitably tinged with sadness now; but it was not sad, we may be sure, when boyish Brookfield did his wooing here, and Thackeray paced these paths, as novelists use, with the visionary Henry Esmond at his elbow, and Tennyson walked with Arthur Hallam among the flowers, and there was as yet no tablet “glimmering to the dawn” in the dark church on the cliff.

Quite solitary still, and undisturbed by any sound but the faint murmur of the sea, is the grey church “by the broad water of the west” where Arthur Hallam lies. It must always have been a desolate, haunting spot, even before the song of the sea became a dirge and the old walls were consecrated anew to the memory of a poet’s sorrow. In those days, doubtless, the fragments of Saxon work and the moulding of the chancel-arch received more attention than now, when every eye wanders instantly to the white tablet on the wall of the south transept, and every foot is fain to stand where Tennyson stood with his bride, above the grave of Arthur Hallam and his father.

From Clevedon, turning inland to Wells, we cross a level land of orchards and meadows on a very poor surface, through Yatton with its curious church-tower, and Congresbury with its old cross-steps, and Churchill with its historic name. Before us is the long shoulder of the Mendips, changing from blue to green as we pass Churchill and climb, on a road that suddenly becomes good, through a gap in the hills. There are fine views from these uplands, and here and there a glimpse, far behind us, of the Severn estuary. Very slowly we drive through the narrow, winding streets of Axbridge, shadowed by overhanging eaves and gables of every height and angle; and quickly through the level strawberry fields beyond, to Cheddar under the hills.

CHEDDAR GORGE.

Cheddar Gorge is a surprising—almost a startling—place, and we must leave our highway for a little time to see it. From the village at the foot of the Mendips a road—and a very good road it is—climbs to the table-land above through a natural cleft between two mighty cliffs, which rise sheer from the roadway and stand out against the sky in a mass of towers and pinnacles. And all this sternness is softened and made beautiful by hanging draperies of green. Masses of ivy trail from crag to crag; high overhead the little birch-trees find a precarious footing on invisible ledges; every tiny cleft and ridge holds a line of grass and wildflowers across the grey face of the cliff. Gradually, as the road sweeps higher, the towering sides of the gorge change into steep slopes of grass and fern, strewn with boulders and broken here and there by clumps of firs. The slopes become lower and lower, more and more open, till at last the landscape widens into undulating fields. Then we turn, and glide down again round curve after curve, while the grandeur grows, as the huge walls of the gorge close in upon us and reach their climax in the Pinnacle Rocks.

And deep in the heart of these wild cliffs is a strange, uncanny world. Surely in these caverns the gnomes ran riot till they were frightened away by an elaborate system of electric lighting and an exuberance of advertisement. It is plain that they have left Gough’s Cave, for it is more than a little artificial; but none the less there is an ethereal beauty in the myriad stalactites and stalagmites through which the light gleams so softly on roof and floor. As for the poor prehistoric man who guards the entrance of the cave that has served him for dwelling-house and tomb, it is an indignity for him, I think, after his seventy thousand years or so of rest in the heart of the earth, to be set up thus in a glass case to grin at tourists.

Between Cheddar and Wells a pretty, winding, undulating road dips in and out of several red-roofed villages shaded by trees. In the distance the unmistakable outline of Glastonbury Tor is dark against the sky.

This is not the best way into Wells, for the cathedral is hidden. It is from the Shepton Mallet road that we may see “the toune of Wells,” as John Leland saw it nearly four hundred years ago, “sette yn the rootes of Mendepe hille in a stony soile and ful of springes.” It has not changed very much: the clergy here being secular, the Dissolution did not affect them, and Wells has never greatly concerned itself with worldly matters and has been all the more peaceful on that account. There have been disturbing moments, of course; as when Perkin Warbeck set up his claim, so confusing to the minds of quiet folk; and when the Parliament-men made havoc in the cathedral; and when Prince Maurice and his troops were billeted on the town, to its great impoverishment; and when King Monmouth passed this way. But on the whole Wells has suffered little. Leland, when he visited the cathedral, entered the close by one of these gates that are standing to-day: came through the Chain Gate, under the gallery and past the great clock that was made by a monk of Glastonbury, or through Browne’s Gate from Sadler Street, or on foot through Penniless Porch in the corner, once the haunt of beggars; and saw Jocelin’s famous west front rising above the greensward, with the embattled deanery hard by; and passed from the market-place to the moated palace under the archway of Beckington’s “right goodly gatehouse,” the Bishop’s Eye. This fifteenth-century Bishop Beckington did much for the beauty and benefit of Wells; built, not only three gateways, but also “xij right exceding fair houses al uniforme of stone, high and fair windoid,” in the market-place, and set a conduit there, “for the which the burgeses ons a yere solemply visite his tumbe, and pray for hys sowle.”

We may visit his tomb ourselves. His dust lies in the cathedral at the entrance to the choir, beyond that ugly inverted arch that was set up for safety’s sake in the fourteenth century; but in later days his tomb has been treated less reverently than of yore. Its carved and painted canopy stands broken and empty in the chapel of St. Calixtus, and in the south aisle of the choir is the rather ghastly tomb—bishop above and skeleton below—which the burgesses visited so gratefully. It is a rare and delightful custom here that allows one to walk alone through the choir and exquisite lady-chapel; to linger at will by the throne where William Laud and Thomas Ken have sat; to picture Lord Grey standing with drawn sword before this altar, to defend it from the rabble that followed Monmouth; to seek out Bishop Button’s tomb, which cured so many mediæval toothaches; to mount the long flight of footworn steps to the chapter-house, and rest beneath its lovely vault in silence. These same steps lead also to the gallery that was built by Beckington for the use of the priest-vicars, whose peaceful close is reached by a gateway of its own, outside the Chain Gate.

THE BISHOP’S EYE, WELLS.

Beyond the cloisters is the palace: the fortified gatehouse, the towers and drawbridge that Ralph of Shrewsbury found it wise to set between himself and the citizens; the moat that is filled every day from St. Andrew’s Well; the shattered banquet-hall where Edward III. once ate his Christmas dinner; the great red dwelling-house that has passed for nearly seven centuries from hand to hand. “Many bisshops hath bene the makers of it, as it is now,” says Leland. It has had Wolsey for its master though not its inmate; it has been stolen by Somerset the Protector; it has been the home of Bishop Laud. Saintly Thomas Ken went from its seclusion for a little time to join the rest of the Seven Bishops in the wild uproar of their trial and acquittal, and later on was driven from its doors by William of Orange. Here is Ken’s summer-house, at the upper corner of the garden that he loved. Local tradition, whose wish is usually father to its thought, declares that he wrote his Evening Hymn in this little summer-house at the end of the terrace; but history, I believe, says otherwise. It is tradition, too, that accuses Bishop Barlow of stripping the lead from the roof of the banquet-hall, whose great windows we see so plainly from this terrace. Barlow’s misdeeds at St. David’s have given him a well-deserved bad name; but, on this occasion only, he was more sinned against than sinning, for the palace and many other things were wrung from him by Protector Somerset, from whom they passed to one Sir John Gates. This vandal was the destroyer of the banquet-hall, and would probably have done more mischief than he did, if he had not been most justifiably beheaded.

It is behind the palace that we find the loveliest spot in Wells. Here, overlooked by sixteenth-century oriels, are the springs that long ago gave the city its name—the wells of St. Andrew, whose still surface has reflected for hundreds of years the beautiful east end of the cathedral. For hundreds of years, too, its waters have fed the moat. It is only at certain hours, of course, that strangers may walk in the palace garden; but the moat that circles it and the towers that guard it are visible to everyone. So is the swan who rings for his dinner when it is late, with all the jerky impatience of a man in the same plight.

WELLS CATHEDRAL.

There is something that takes a hold on the imagination in the very dulness of the country that lies between Wells and Glastonbury. For the reason that this road with the rough surface is so level, and has such uninteresting surroundings, is that all this country was once the swampy land that lay round the Isle of Avalon. There is Glastonbury Tor before us, conspicuous for many a mile with its steep sides and crowning tower; and here on our left is the orchard-clad slope of Avalon itself, where “golden apples smile in every wood.”

We drive slowly down the long High Street of Glastonbury.

Many, many pilgrims have come this way before us: have passed the great Tudor-rose and mullioned windows of the old stone court-house on the right, have stopped before the panelled front, the wreathed vines and carven beasts, of the “George” Inn, and have entered it beneath the painted arms of Edward IV. For this inn is the New Guesthouse that Abbot Selwood built and embattled and made so fine, for such of the pilgrims as paid for their lodging.[1] It was Selwood’s successor, Abbot Bere, “a grave, wise, and discreet man, just and upright in all his ways,” who raised the grey Tribunal that has been in turn an abbot’s court-house, a boys’ school, and a lawyer’s office. Exactly opposite this house is the passage that leads to the abbey.

It is not in the stones of Glastonbury that we shall find her history; not in this soaring broken arch that leads our eyes and our hearts upwards; nor even in the splendours of arcading and moulding that are the glory of the Ealde Chirche, the chapel usually called St. Joseph’s, though it is really St. Mary’s. Many centuries before these walls were raised, many centuries before Norman hands ever laid one English stone upon another, the soil beneath our feet—this dust that is the dust of saints and kings—was held sacred by Saxon and Celt. “This place,” says Camden, “was by our Ancestors call’d the first ground of God, the first ground of the Saints in England, the rise and fountain of all religion in England, the burying-place of the Saints, the mother of the Saints.”

ST. MARY’S CHAPEL (OFTEN CALLED ST. JOSEPH’S), GLASTONBURY.

The mind loses itself here in a cloud of legend. Dim forms of early saint and holy grail give place to visions, almost as dim, of St. Patrick and St. David and St. Bridget. Every holy man and woman came to Glastonbury, according to the chroniclers, sooner or later, alive or dead; so that the very floor, says William of Malmesbury, and the sides of the altar, and even the altar itself above and beneath, were laden with the multitude of relics. From Northumbria, from Ireland, from Wales, came the bones of the saints in search of safety: Paulinus and Aidan and Bede, and Hilda from her wild cliff by the North Sea, and David from his Rosy Valley in the west. How much of this is true we not know and need not greatly care, seeing that in any case the fact that gives interest and beauty to these stories is the fact of Glastonbury’s immense age and sanctity, the undoubted fact that it was “the first ground of the Saints in England, the burying-place of Saints, the mother of Saints.” We may even be informed by some officious person that the real name of the Glastonbury Thorn is Cratægus oxycantha præcox, and that it will blossom at Christmas elsewhere; yet nothing can rob us of the picture of Henry VIII.’s lying and thieving commissioner, when he came hither to despoil and desecrate, carefully wrapping up two sprigs of the sacred thorn in a piece of white sarcenet, and sending them as a present to Thomas Cromwell; nor of that other picture of the zealous puritan, solemnly hacking the thorn-tree to death for the good of his soul.

When St. Dunstan was a boy, living here in the primitive monastery founded by King Ina, he dreamt that he saw, on this spot where we are standing among the ruins, a glorious fabric of “fair alleys and comely cloisters.” The splendours of his vision have come and gone, but we too may see them in dream: the mighty church with its towering arches, its many chapels, its marble floors and sapphire altar; the enclosing wall with the two great entrances; the acres of domestic buildings—cloisters and dormitories, library and refectory, and the abbot’s stately lodging. Over there among the trees his kitchen still stands. The steam of much good cheer rose to its quaint octagonal roof when Henry VII. was here as the guest of that wise and discreet man, Abbot Bere; and when Leland visited his “especial friend,” Richard Whiting; and when Henry VIII.’s commissioner came on his mean errand, and found to his annoyance that the brethren were “so straight kept that they could not offend.”

It was not the magnificent building of Dunstan’s dream, but the simple church he knew, that was the burial-place of kings. He himself, as abbot, laid Edmund the Elder in his grave; and here in the monastery “which he ever loved beyond all others” lies Edgar the Pacific, “the flower and pride of all kings, the honour and glory of England,” and near him his grandson Edmund Ironside, who was merciful and kind, says Matthew of Westminster, “to the just persons in his kingdom, and terrible to the unjust.… And all England mourned for him exceedingly.” And somewhere deep beneath the turf, near the spot where the high altar used to stand, is the dust of those bones and that golden tress of hair that some would have us believe were the actual remains of Arthur and Guinevere. Edward I. and his Eleanor believed it, and came to the great church here when it was new to gaze, adoring and credulous, at the skulls of their predecessors. But now our minds—like that of the blameless king himself—are “clouded with a doubt”: for the historic Arthur, we are told, died almost certainly in Scotland, and never came to the Island Valley of Avilion to heal him of his grievous wound.

The first Norman abbot of Glastonbury, Thurstan, set to work at once to improve the old building, and would have done more if his abbacy had not suddenly ended in an unseemly skirmish on the very steps of the altar. “He would have taught the monks amiss,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle severely. In point of fact he was resolved to abolish the use of Gregorian chants, to the great scandal of the monks, and, like many another, thought that the introduction of the soldiery would have a convincing effect. “Rueful things happened there on that day,” says the chronicler, “for the French broke into the choir and threw darts towards the altar where the monks were collected, and some of their servants went upon the upper floor and shot down arrows towards the chancel, so that many arrows stuck in the crucifix which stood above the altar, and the wretched monks lay around the altar, and some crept under it … and they slew some of the monks and wounded many, so that the blood ran down from the altar on the steps.” Rueful things indeed!

The dogmatic Thurstan was removed, and a year later the monastery was burnt to the ground. It was then that this beautiful chapel began to rise, with all its profusion of ornament; and round it for hundreds of years the great abbey continued to grow slowly into the perfection of Dunstan’s dream. How great was the magnificence of it we may judge from the “dyverse parcells” that were ultimately “delyvered until his Majestie”—the spoils of many shrines, gold and silver vessels, jewelled altars, and “the great saphire of Glastonburg.” Poor Abbot Whiting did his best to save them before he went to his death on Glastonbury Tor.

THE CHOIR, GLASTONBURY.

There is Glastonbury Tor before us, framed in the piers of the broken chancel-arch. It was to the summit of that hill that Richard Whiting, last Abbot of Glastonbury, who had been wont to travel in all the pomp of a prince, was dragged upon a hurdle to the gallows. Over the great gate through which his guests had so often crowded—sometimes five hundred in a day, they say—his head was set up, lest men should forget that the King loved “parcells of gilte plate” more than justice. For there was hardly a pretence of justice in the trial of Richard Whiting. Like the Abbot of Fountains, he hid the treasures of his abbey from the King’s commissioners, and, since he must be proved a traitor before these riches could be wrung from him, this act was called high treason. Neither his immense charities, nor his simple, saintly life, nor even his submission to the Act of Supremacy could save him. It was with “businesslike brevity,” says Green the historian, that Thomas Cromwell “ticked off human lives.” “Item,” he wrote among his memoranda, “the abbot of Glaston to be tryed at Glaston and also executyd there.” So Richard Whiting was hanged and quartered at the foot of that tower that still stands upon the hill, and serves him for a monument.

I am not sure whether the main entrance to the abbey, over which Whiting’s head was set, was the vanished gateway on the north side, or the still existing entrance in Magdalen Street. We pass the latter as we drive out of the town. Its newly restored archway stands on the left, beside the house that was once the “Red Lion” Inn, and quite close to the modern market-cross that is so unusually graceful. Our road skirts the foot of Wearyall Hill, where once the sacred thorn-tree grew—the miraculous tree that had been, said the monks of Glastonbury, the staff of Joseph of Arimathea.

After a few minutes of level running we climb the Polden Hills—no very arduous work—and look down upon the wide green plain of Sedgemoor. It lies on our right as we glide down the hill, and stretches far away from us to Bridgwater. It was from some spot in that blue distance that “a volley of shot and huzzas” rang out into the night, when Monmouth and his peasant army made their futile attempt to “vindicate their religion, laws, and rights;” and it was far away across those level fields that Feversham’s grim line of gibbets rose on the following day. In all this peaceful country there was not a ditch from which some poor wretch was not dragged to make sport, later on, for Jeffreys: but the ditch that hid Monmouth himself was not here, but in Dorset. As we look out upon the scene of his undoing let us forget that distant ditch, and the weakness of an exhausted, starving man, and remember only that he made a gallant end. “I shall die like a lamb,” he said on the scaffold. “I have now no fear, as you may see by my face; but there is something within me which does it, for I am sure I shall go to God. I will make no speeches: I come to die.”

Again the road is level, or nearly so; but, as is rare in level country, the surface is bad. We pass under the railway-bridge of the new Great Western line, and soon see Somerton on the crest of a hill. The road to Ilchester climbs the hill at the outskirts of the town, without actually passing through it; but it would be a pity to turn our backs on the ancient capital of the Somersœtas without a glance at its picturesque streets and old houses, whose mellow walls are so characteristic of Somerset. In the silent square that was once dominated by the castle, and is now made beautiful by an arcaded, stone-tiled market-cross, there is nothing to show that Somerton is a town of varied experiences. It has seen a vast amount of life, but prefers to say nothing about it.

Here where the “White Hart” stands, without a sign of age, once stood the palace of King Ina and his pious wife. Ina, King of the West Saxons, was “a rare example of fortitude,” we are told; “a mirror of prudence, unequalled in piety”—though he ascended the throne, as the same chronicler delicately expresses it, “more from the innate activity of his spirit than any legitimate right of succession.” Active he certainly was: a conqueror of the British, a builder of monasteries and churches and castles. We meet the records of his activities at Wells and Glastonbury, at Taunton, and here in Somerton; and even when his determined Ethelburga had persuaded him to abdicate, with some reluctance, he continued to build in Rome. It was on this hill he chiefly lived and made his laws, I believe, but his castle was burnt by the destroying Danish princes, Hinguar and Hubba. On its foundations rose the later castle that served as a prison for King John of France; but even this has left no remnant but some thick masonry in the modest walls of the “White Hart.” In this scene of long past revelry and war there is hardly a sign of life. Somerton is inhabited, apparently, by one man, two children, and a cat.

MARKET PLACE, SOMERTON.

Through cornfields and orchards and over Kingsdon Hill, on a surface that is gradually improving, we go on our way to a town that is older still than Somerton, but by no means so attractive. Indeed, Ilchester has a very dull air, though it stands on the Fosse Way and has a few relics of its Roman origin. A little more than two hundred years ago, however, its sombre streets were lively enough on a certain August day, when gay young Monmouth rode through them on a carpet of flowers and scented herbs, and the crowd swept after him along the narrow ways. What schemes for the future were in his mind we cannot guess, but at this time—during his father’s life—there was nothing on his lips more treasonable than the smiles that made the people love him. He had come “into the country to divert himself,” and for a week or two all these lanes round Ilchester and Ilminster, Chard and Yeovil, were ringing with cheers. “God bless King Charles and the protestant Duke,” the people shouted, as he rode smiling between these hedges. For he, like ourselves, left Ilchester by the Roman road, which was probably even more badly kept in those days than in these. It has, of course, the charm—in a motorist’s eyes—of straightness, but the irregular fringe of grass at the sides gives it an unkempt air that is unworthy of its origin, and it is only in patches that the surface is good. The abrupt hill on the left with the tower on its summit is the “sharp mount” that gave its name to Montacute.

We turn away from the Roman road by a lane that climbs a long hill between high hedges, and quickly runs down again. Below us, in a fold of the low hills, lies Crewkerne.

Joshua Sprigge, in his enchanting history, “compiled for the Publique good, and to be sold at the Parot in Paul’s Churchyard,” describes how the army of the Parliament came to Crookhorn by “ill and narrow” ways in a very hot season, “the foot weary with their long and tedious march, the carriage-horses tyred out;” and how, only an hour later, they left it again with all their weariness forgotten. “They leapt for joy that they were like to be engaged.” As they were following the enemy to Petherton it was probably by this very road that they marched away, probably on this very road that Fairfax and Cromwell came riding side by side.

We need not stay in Crewkerne even so long as they, for there is nothing to be seen except the church. There is hardly a church in Somerset that is not worth seeing, either for its beauty or its interest; but the church here is more than ordinarily stately. Like all the rest it is built of the stone whose grey and yellow tints make even the simplest cottage in Somerset a lovely thing, and add greatly to the beauty of this elaborate church, with its crockets and statues and niches, its embattled turrets and parapet, and all its intricate gargoyles. In an angle of the south transept is a curious recess such as I have never seen elsewhere, with a canopy and a stone seat. It is said to have been a hermit’s cell; but a hermit who frequented the outer wall of a large church must have been very fond of society.

Here we strike the London and Exeter road, and therefore the surface, which has hitherto been indifferent at best and at worst very bad, becomes almost perfect. As we climb the long hill of St. Rayne to the height that is ominously known as Windwhistle, the scenery grows very lovely: the breezy road passes along a ridge, a wide park skirts the wayside, and to right and left the landscape sweeps away into the distance. Indeed, I have heard that at one point near Windwhistle inn—at the fourth milestone from Chard—it is possible on a clear day to catch a glimpse of the two seas, to north and south. A run of two miles on an easy downward gradient takes us to the “prepared” road that leads into the long, wide, sloping street of Chard; then a steep climb lifts us to the hilltops again; and a few minutes later we glide down into the soft green woods of Devon.

THE HEART OF DEVON

SUMMARY OF RUN ACROSS MID-DEVON

Distances.

Roads.

Hills steep and frequent.

Surface: rather rough on the Moor; between Exeter and Launceston, variable; between Exeter and Plymouth, good.

II
THE HEART OF DEVON

To hurry in Devonshire is absurd. In the first place, it is contrary to the spirit of the country: no one does it. In the second place, it is impossible.

I cannot conscientiously recommend Devon as a motoring field for those who find great speed essential to their happiness, for to them the alternate use of the gear lever and the brake is apt to be exasperating. But to many of us the reduction of our average mileage is a small matter in comparison with certain important things; such as scarlet poppies in the corn, and high banks fringed with ferns, and cottages smothered in flowers, and wide purple moors, and the rippling of emerald seas, and the complete serenity that fills the heart in Devon.

Here, on the very border, there is a long rise and an extremely sharp turn, on the hill where Yarcombe stands. After this winding climb we run down easily through lovely wooded country into the straight, wide street of Honiton. This is a name that rouses deep emotion in every female heart, and to the female ear I will confide the fact that Honiton lace, as made to-day in Honiton, is perhaps more really beautiful than it has ever been; and there is a certain little upper room, not hard to find, where the enthusiast may watch swift fingers and flying bobbins. Except these filmy bramble-leaves and roses there is nothing of interest in Honiton. Sir William Pole summed it up three centuries ago, and his words describe it accurately to this day. “This towne is a very prety towne indifferently well bwilded, and hath his market on the Saterday.”

By the direct road Exeter is only fifteen miles away, but by making quite a short détour we may see the birthplaces of Coleridge and Sir Walter Raleigh, and catch a glimpse of the sea. A mile or two of splendid Roman road, and a shady lane, take us to Ottery St. Mary and its famous church; the church, says Pole, that John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, “bwilded in imitatinge of ye church of St. Peter’s in Exon, with ye cannons’ howses round about, standinge in a sweete wholsom advanced ground.” He did not actually “bwild” it, however, but rather enlarged it and made it collegiate, and left upon it the marks of that taste for splendour in which he indulged more fully at Exeter. Not only a great part of the fabric itself is his, but the painted reredos and the stone screen and the choir-stalls were his gifts. The pulpit is of a much more modern date; but it is the very same from which Coleridge’s father was in the habit of addressing his congregation in Hebrew, “the authentic language of the Holy Ghost.” The grammar-school in which the poet spent his childhood with his twelve brethren no longer exists; but we may still see the narrow lanes where little Samuel, a visionary already, curvetted on an imaginary horse and slew the enemies of Christendom as represented by the wayside nettle. And here, close at hand, is the little Otter, and the “marge with willows grey” by which he loved to dream.

Long before Coleridge played his warlike games there were horsemen of a sterner sort riding hither and thither through these lanes. Fairfax spent a busy fortnight here, resting his army, “who never stood in more need of it,” but by no means resting himself: visiting the works at Broad Clyst, caring for his dying soldiers, and doing his best to make peace between King and Parliament. “To be general raised him onely to do more, not to be more than others,” said a man who was with him here. Where he lodged I do not know, nor the spot where he was presented with a “fair jewel” in the name of both Houses, in gratitude for the services “he performed for this kingdome at Naseby Battel.” It is certain, however, that a deputation brought it to Ottery, and “tyed it in a blue Ribband and put it about his neck.”

SIDMOUTH.

Sidmouth is only five miles away from Ottery, and lies so prettily between its two headlands that it is worth seeing, though the lanes that lead to it are hilly. It is quite an old place, really. Its prettiness, however, does not at all depend upon its age, but on the ruddy cliffs that bound the bay, and the little brown stream that runs down through the shingle to the sea, and the tiny cascade that glitters in the sun, and the groups of boats that lie upon the beach. Yet, driving through the western part of the town, we see that Sidmouth after all is merely a typical watering-place. Here is the esplanade we know so well, and the row of bathing-boxes, and the shrill-voiced nursemaid with her shriller charge, and the dreaded pierrot. Beyond that western end rises the Peak Hill, and up its steep side lies our way.

It is steep indeed; both steep and very long. Before it is faced the hill-climbing powers of the car should be carefully considered, for the gradient at one point is at least one in five, and is extremely steep for a considerable distance. But from this height the blue bay and red rocks of Sidmouth look very lovely through the trees, and at the top of the hill there are colours enough on a sunny day to repay us for much climbing: pale blue hills and a dark blue sea, and a wide expanse of varying greens, and to the left a red cliff, and to the right, perhaps, a patch of brilliant heather. Very carefully—for the lanes are narrow and steep—we run down the other side of the hill that has just been laboriously climbed, and reach the pretty street of Otterton, with its runnel and little bridges, and thatched cottages, and background of trees. We cross the Otter, and are soon in East Budleigh, the twisting, straggling village near which Sir Walter Raleigh was born.

In the grey church on the knoll above the street we may see the Raleigh arms, and with them the three “horsemen’s rests” that figure in so many shields—the arms of the great Grenvilles. The bench-end that bears them is the first on the left side of the aisle, and was carved early in the sixteenth century, when one of the Raleighs married Honor Grenville. Sir Walter’s mother, we need not doubt, sat in this pew many a time, for the Raleighs lived only a mile away at Hayes Barton. We can find the house quite easily, standing beside a little sloping green: a low, gabled, grey house, with a thatched roof and a gay old-fashioned garden. There have been many changes here, of course, since that sixteenth-century baby first blinked at the world he was destined to explore; but even then this was a humble home for the daughter of the Champernownes, the mother of two great men. For through this heavy oaken door that swings slowly open to admit us has passed not only Walter Raleigh in his nurse’s arms, but also the Eton boy who was his big half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert. Of the life that was lived and the ideals that were taught under the gables of Hayes Barton we may perhaps guess something, not over rashly, from the last words of these two boys when they came to die, each his tragic death. “This,” said Sir Walter with a smile as he felt the axe, “is a sharp medicine that will cure all diseases.” “We are so near Heaven at sea as on land,” said Sir Humphrey as his last storm broke over him.

That Sir Walter loved this house, of which his father was only a tenant, we have good evidence; for when he was a man he tried in vain to buy it. Here, in the room on the left side of the doorway, is a copy of the letter he wrote to Mr. Duke. “I will most willingly give you what so:ever in your conscience you shall deeme it worthe.… You shall not find mee an ill neighbore.… For the naturall disposition I have to that place, being borne in that howse, I had rather seat mysealf ther than any wher else.”

The little room where he was born, the room upstairs with the high ceiling and the latticed windows, has not been changed, they say. They say too—and for this one was prepared—that he smoked his first pipe in England in the room over the porch. Sir Walter’s first pipe had evidently some of the qualities of the widow’s cruse. Wherever his name is heard the tradition of the first pipe lingers. He smoked it, we are told, on a rock in the Dart, and beside a Devon fireplace, and in an Irish garden, and here at Hayes.

And now, returning first to East Budleigh, we go on our way to the Ever Faithful City by lovely woods of fir and beech, and wide heaths, and hills and dales of richest green, with here a glimpse of sea and there a wealth of heather. Through Woodbury we go; and Clyst St. George, where the Champernownes lived; and Bishop’s Clyst, which was once Clyst Sachvill. The last of the Champernownes of Clyst was the unconventional Elizabeth, who married her first husband three days after her father’s death, and her second husband two days after her first husband’s death. “A frolic lady,” says John Prince. As for the Clyst that once belonged to the Sachvills and afterwards to the bishops, it changed hands in this manner. Sir Ralph Sachvill, being about to go to France in the service of Edward I., was in sore need of a large sum of money, and mortgaged the manor of Clyst to Bishop Branscombe of Exeter. The bishop, prudent man, forthwith built largely on the land, and made so many improvements that poor Sachvill, coming home from the wars with empty pockets, could not redeem his estate. So Clyst Sachvill became Clyst Episcopi, and the Bishops of Exeter visited it when they needed change of air. The time came, however, when “as Brounscomb cuningly gott it, soe did Bishop Voisey wastefully loose it.”

It was by this road that we are travelling on, this very excellent road from Otterton, that the Duke of Monmouth once came riding into Exeter; and it was somewhere near Bishop’s Clyst, I think, that a curious spectacle met his eyes. Twenty thousand people came out to welcome him, “but that which was more remarkable,” says the historian—and who will deny it?—“was the appearance of a brave company of stout young men, all clothed in linen waistcoats and drawers, white and harmless, having not so much as a stick in their hands.” There were nine hundred or a thousand of these innocents drawn up on a little hill. The Duke reviewed them solemnly, riding round each company. Then the stout and harmless youths marched two by two, hand in hand, before him into the city.

The story of Exeter has no beginning. To Norman and Saxon, Roman and Celt, it was a fortified stronghold, the Gate of the West. For centuries it was the desire of kings, the first thought of the invader, the forlorn hope of the rebel. Yet, as we drive through the dull suburb of Heavitree—which owes its grim name to the gallows—and pass into the heart of the town we see no sign of the walls that endured so many sieges, the walls that were built by Athelstane, that were attacked by Alfred, that fell before the Conqueror, that withstood Warbeck, that defended the cause of Charles: no sign of the towered archway that was once the entrance to Exeter and had Henry VII.’s statue above it: nothing to show us where poor Perkin, the king of straw, battered in his futile way upon the gate, “with casting of stones, heaving of iron barres, and kindling of fire,” nor where William the Conqueror, in ways that were not futile, battered so successfully—“although the citizens smally regarded him”—that it was believed “some part of the walls miraculously of his owne accord fell downe.” Nor is there any sign of the western gate that once stood at the further end of the High Street, the gate through which another William, seeking the same crown, came in a later century. Through this street, which Leland calls the fairest in Exeter, the great procession of William of Orange swept in all its splendour of bright armour and banners. Here where we are driving they passed by: the English gentlemen on Flanders steeds; the two hundred blacks in embroidered fur-lined caps with white feathers; the two hundred men of Finland in bearskins and black armour, with broad flaming swords, very terrible to unaccustomed eyes; the motto of the cause—“God and the Protestant Religion”—fluttering on fifty banners borne by fifty gentlemen; the led-horses and the pages and the grooms; and the prince himself, all glittering in armour upon his milk-white palfry, surrounded by his running footmen and followed by a mighty host. The billeting of this host upon the citizens of Exeter, says an eye-witness in a Letter to a Person of Quality, “was done so much to the content and satisfaction of the inhabitants, and such just payments made for what the soldiers had, and such civil behaviour among them, without swearing and damning as is usual among some armies, that it is admiration to behold.”

GUILDHALL, EXETER.

Of this brave show that meant so much to England there is no relic left; but there is still a memorial to be soon of another kingly procession that once passed down this street. Perkin Warbeck, after “mightily and tempestuously,” but quite vainly, assaulting the walls of Exeter, was pursued by Henry VII. to Taunton, and “about midnight departed in wonderful celerity” to the sanctuary of Beaulieu. Then the King rode into Exeter in state, and in his gratitude unbuckled the sword that Perkin had not waited to see, and took the beaver from his head, and gave both sword and hat to the citizens in acknowledgment of their “lusty hearts and manly courage.” Here, in this old grey building that projects across the pavement on our left, we may see them still. In this fairest street of Exeter there is nothing now so fair as the Guildhall with the granite pillars and the massive door of oak and the fluted panelling of Tudor days. In the gallery above the great hall are the two swords that won the crown of England, so to speak: the simple sword of Edward IV. and the splendid gilded one of Henry VII.; and with them, cased in rich embroidery, the black beaver hat in which Henry gained his easy triumph over Perkin. And among the pictures on the dark walls of the hall itself are two that have a special meaning in this place: Sir Peter Lely’s portraits of the young Duchesse d’Orléans and of the Duke of Albemarle. For it was in Exeter, in a house that has now vanished, that Charles I.’s daughter Henrietta was born; and when the Articles of Surrender were drawn up at Poltimore after the long siege, there was special provision made for the safety of the little princess; so that it was in a “fit and convenient carriage” that she started on that famous journey to Dover which she ended, to her great annoyance, in the disguise of a French peasant-boy. It was in Exeter, too, that young George Monk began his fighting career by thrashing the under-sheriff of Devon. The exploit drove him into the army, and when his talent for fighting had made him Duke of Albemarle the civic authorities let bygones be bygones, and set up his portrait here. Perhaps they recognised that the under-sheriff had richly deserved his chastisement.[2]

Unfortunately the same Articles that provided a convenient carriage for Princess Henrietta also decreed the destruction of Rougemont Castle, and there is nothing but a tower and a gateway left of the stronghold that Athelstane founded and William the Conqueror rebuilt. Yet even in this fragment there is one window, they say, of Saxon date, one window that has looked out on all the wild scenes that have been acted round the Red Mount. Exactly how many sieges this scrap of masonry has endured I do not know, nor how many crowned heads it has helped to shelter. William the Conqueror and Stephen took possession of it in person; Edward IV. and Richard III. visited it; and it was probably here that Henry VII. stayed when he came to Exeter at the time of the Warbeck rebellion, to try “the chief stirrers and misdoers.” “The commons of this shire of Devon,” he wrote to the Mayor of Waterford, “come daily before us in great multitudes in their shirts, the foremost of them having halters about their necks, and full humbly with lamentable cries for our grace and remission submit themselves unto us.” In the same vivid letter he expresses a hope that Perkin’s wife will soon come to Exeter, “as she is in dole.” It is not from Henry himself that we learn, however, that when the poor lady actually arrived in this city he “wondered at her beauty and her attractive behaviour.”

When William of Orange rode into the town with all his retinue of blacks and Finlanders it was not to Rougemont that he came, for Fairfax had nearly altogether destroyed it. He slept at the deanery, and on the following day entered the cathedral in state. It has not altered since then. He saw the stately Norman towers as we see them, and like ourselves passed into the building through the vaulted porch and rich mouldings of the west doorway. Over his head was the splendid tracery that is over ours, and on each side of him were the clustered pillars that we see. “And as he came all along the body of the church the organs played very sweetly, and the quire began to sing Te Deum.” Whether that Te Deum rang quite true upon the vaulted roof is open to doubt, for the choir, apparently, sang it with much reluctance and left the church hurriedly when their work was done, lest trouble should come of it. Meantime the prince sat down beneath the towering canopy of the throne that the bishop had deserted, and Burnet, standing at the foot of the pulpit, read aloud the declaration that gave England her liberties.

On the base of the throne are the painted effigies of the four bishops who made Exeter Cathedral what it now is: Warelwast, who built the towers; Quivil, who designed the Decorated building as it stands; Stapledon, who set up this carved and pinnacled throne, and the beautiful sedilia, and the “sylver altare” that has vanished; and Grandison the magnificent, who made the vaulted roof. Close at hand on the north side of the choir, with a restored canopy and a figure “very lively cut in the same stone,” is the tomb where Stapledon’s desecrated dust was laid. The enthroning of this bishop, says Carew the chronicler, was more than ordinarily splendid. Canons and vicars-choral in their habits led him to the throne, while “abundance of gentlemen of place and quality” followed after. Very splendid, too, was his burial in this choir. There had, however, been a burial of another sort in London; for, having been made Keeper of the City by Edward II., he was attacked by the mob who took the part of Queen Isabel. They dragged him from his refuge in St. Paul’s, “and having grievously beaten and wounded him, haled him along the streets to the great cross in Cheap, where those sons of the devil most barbarously murdered him.” His headless body lay buried in a sand-heap till the Queen ordered it to be brought hither in great honour.

CLOISTER, EXETER CATHEDRAL.

The “grave, wise, politic” Grandison, though much addicted to pomp, was personally simpler than the murdered bishop, who possessed no fewer than ninety-one rings. Grandison’s splendour was shown in hospitalities and lavish gifts to his cathedral. It owes much to him: among other things, I believe, the minstrels’ gallery that we see above us on our right as we walk down the nave—the gallery that was built, they say, in order that the Black Prince might be fittingly welcomed with music when he visited his duchy. The west front is Grandison’s, too. He once defended it and the dignity of his office with a body of armed men, on an occasion when the Archbishop of Canterbury came on a visitation. Here at the west door the angry prelates faced each other. Grandison won the day, and the archbishop, says Fuller, died of a broken heart.

It was possibly owing to the presence of Fairfax, who reverenced all that was ancient and beautiful, that the soldiers of the Parliament did so little harm to the cathedral, beyond destroying the cloisters. How much else they destroyed in the close I do not know: it is certain that much has vanished, for in Leland’s day it had four gates, and was “environid with many fair housis.” There are still several fair houses in Cathedral Yard that have survived the Civil War, but not all of them have been admired by Leland. He did not see, for instance, the curious outline and picturesque bow-windows of “Mol’s Coffee House,” nor the panelled room that is emblazoned with the shields of heroes and statesmen, of Talbot and Somerset, of Cecil and Throgmorton, of Drake and Raleigh and Gilbert. Tradition says that the bearers of these sounding names were wont to discuss the affairs of the nation in this room.

Before leaving Exeter we have a weighty matter to settle: our choice of a road. There are four ways of reaching Cornwall. Of these the shortest is by Okehampton to Launceston, and this has the advantage of passing through the bewitching village of Sticklepath: the best as regards surface is by Ashburton and Ivybridge to Plymouth: the most beautiful is the road that leads across the Moor by Moretonhampstead and Two Bridges to Tavistock: the most interesting and varied is the long way round by the coast, by Torquay and Dartmouth, Kingsbridge and Modbury. In the matter of hills the second of these roads is the least severe, and therefore on the whole I advise those who desire to reach Cornwall quickly to skirt the Moor upon the south; passing through Buckfastleigh, which has a new abbey on an old site, and Dean Prior, where Herrick lived so reluctantly, and Plympton, where old Bishop Warelwast died. There is no really steep gradient on this road, and though near Exeter there is a long climb followed by a long descent, there are several surprising miles, near Plymouth, that are almost level. The surface is usually very good. The scenery is not so strikingly beautiful as on the other roads, but in places it is very lovely, and everywhere there are the special charms of Devonshire: the shadowing trees, the high banks and trailing ivy, the stone walls green with myriads of tiny ferns, the gardens full of sunshine and flowers. Dean Prior, where Herrick lived for many quiet years, singing in sweet measures “how roses first came red and lilies white,” and dreaming wistfully of “golden Cheapside” and his Julia—and others—seems at first sight an unlikely place to be hated. Indeed, I think his hatred of it and its inhabitants was merely a mood. The same kind of mood that made him hurl the manuscript of his sermon at his congregation made him describe his neighbours as

“A people currish, churlish as the seas,

And rude almost as rudest savages,”

while all the time he was well aware that Robert Herrick was ruder than either. There were other days when he wrote very affectionately of his little house and his placid life in this village where he has so long been lying at rest. There is an ugly modern monument to him in his church, but his grave and that of his housekeeper Prue are unmarked by any stone. The beautiful epitaph he wrote himself will serve them well:

“Here’s the sunset of a tedious day:

These two asleep are; I’ll but be undressed,

And so to bed; pray, wish us all good rest.”

The Plympton through which this road passes is not the birthplace of Sir Joshua Reynolds, but has an interest of its own in being the site of a monastery that was founded by Warelwast, the bishop who built the towers of Exeter Cathedral. When he was very old he came hither to die. But Plympton Earle is not a mile away; and most of us will find time to drive into the little town and pause for a moment by the old house with the colonnade, wherein a little boy used long ago to sit studying perspective “with avidity and pleasure,” or copying his sister’s sketches. Sir Joshua loved this place where he first held a pencil, and in after years painted his own portrait for the town. The town sold it.

This road, then, is not without its attractions. Infinitely greater, however, are the charms of the two other alternative ways from Exeter to Cornwall—the one that bisects Dartmoor and the one that skirts the coast more or less closely. Those whose object is a short tour in South Devon I would advise to combine these two routes by driving from Exeter across the Moor to Tavistock, thence turning south to Plymouth on a splendid road through beautiful scenery, and returning to Exeter leisurely by way of Dartmouth and Torquay.

The traveller who chooses to leave Exeter by the Moretonhampstead road is likely to feel that he has chosen well.

Like all these roads that run towards the west it begins by crossing the river Exe, the river that for three centuries was commercially useless because two men quarrelled about a pot of fish. In the market of Exeter—so runs the story—three pots of fish were waiting to be sold one day, more than five hundred years ago. Upon this fish the retainer of the Earl of Devon cast an appreciative eye at the very moment when the servant of the Bishop of Exeter had determined to buy it. In the fourteenth century there could be but one result of this coincidence. The matter, after a lively quarrel, was laid before the mayor, and he, with prudence that deserved to be more successful, apportioned one pot to each customer and the third to the market: whereupon the Earl of Devon revenged himself upon the corporation, against whom he already had a grudge or two, “by stopping, filling, and quirting the river with great trees, timber, and stones, in such sort that no vessel or vessels could passe or repasse;” and Topsham became the port of Exeter. Now Topsham was on the Earl of Devon’s land.

We go out of the town on a perfect surface, and although, of the twelve miles between Exeter and Moretonhampstead, there is only one that is level and eleven that are steep in varying degrees, the beauty that surrounds us leaves us with no breath for complaint. Whether we are climbing slowly to the summit of a ridge, with valleys dipping deeply on each side and beyond the valleys fold on fold of wooded hills, or gliding down past Culver into the shade, or running softly through a little green glen, there is nothing but content in our hearts. Presently we cross the Teign upon an old stone bridge. Beneath us the river makes slow, soft music on its mossy stones; on each side the hills rise steeply; here and there a great red rock pierces the green and purple of the slopes; and as the road winds up the long hill through the woods we are shadowed by hazels and larches and birches, and the scarlet tassels of the mountain-ash hang heavily over our heads. When at last we finish the long climb Moretonhampstead lies below us. From this height it appears to be in a hollow, but after running down a steep hill for a mile and a half we find ourselves unexpectedly looking up to it.

Moreton is the best centre, I think, from which to see the Moor. Chagford is in a lovelier position, hemmed about with hills, and is larger and more ambitious, with electricity to light its streets; but it is not nearly so central as Moreton, which stands at the junction of four good roads. Gray’s Hotel, though it makes no profession of smartness, is comfortable and clean, and has a capital new garage. The importance of staying in this neighbourhood for a day or two lies in the fact that there are several lovely places within a radius of a few miles which cannot easily be seen en route. Of course, those who prefer more stately quarters can use Exeter as their centre very comfortably.

It is not to us who move at various speeds from place to place—by motor-car, or bicycle, or train, or even on foot—that Dartmoor will reveal itself. Do not let us deceive ourselves. We may have driven on every road and every tortuous lane between the Teign and Tavistock, yet we need not dream that we know the Moor. That knowledge comes only with the slow years, only with the passionate love that begins in childhood and lasts for life.

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.

A longer run than either of these is through Bovey Tracey and Ashburton, and across the Moor to Two Bridges by a road whose hills are grimly described in the contour-book as “all highly dangerous.” The description is justified, and it cannot even be pleaded that the surface is good; but the sweeping moorland, and the woods that veil the hurrying Dart near Charles Kingsley’s birthplace at Holne, and the valley at Dartmeet, will compensate for much. From Two Bridges the road to Moreton is the same by which we must cross the Moor on our way to Tavistock.

HOLNE BRIDGE.

It is no hardship to travel twice upon this road. The run from east to west, from Moreton to Tavistock, is one to repeat as often as may be, and to remember whenever life seems dull. It is a glorious run. The road is hardly ever level, of course, but the surface for the most part is fairly good, and the hills, if steep, are straight. And from our feet a wide sea of fern rolls away on every side, billow beyond billow, till its waves break at last upon the rocks of a hundred tors. There are certain scenes that remain with one, a possession for ever. One of them is on the hill where Grimspound lies. A little by-road takes us quickly to the wild spot where neolithic man built himself this dwelling, with the object, doubtless, of keeping an eye upon his neighbours rather than that of enjoying the view. Whatever his motive he chose well. He saw this splendid panorama—a pageant of green and purple and indescribable blue. One thing only he did not see: the tragic thing that gleams so suddenly and whitely in the far distance, when a sunbeam chances to fall upon it—Dartmoor Prison.

When we have passed the stony stream and pack-horse bridge of Postbridge the scenery is less interesting for a mile or two, for this is the more civilised part of the Moor—a fact that has a brighter side in a comfortable luncheon at Two Bridges. Unless we change our minds and take the beautiful road to Plymouth, we turn to the right here after crossing the stream, and leave Princetown and all its heavy hearts behind us on the left. When the highest point of this road is passed and the long descent begun, the scenery is again of that well-wearing kind that can be stored and put away for the winter. And if I pay scant attention to the vast host of most venerable relics with which Dartmoor is dotted—I had almost said crowded—this is not because neolithic man seems to me a person of little account, but because the study of his life and times is not one that can be taken up suddenly on a motor-tour. For one wayfarer who takes heed of the menhir, and the stone-row, and the pound near Merivale Bridge, there will always be a hundred to gaze eagerly from the hilltop at the long line of dark and rugged tors that stretches across the immense landscape, and at the gleaming Hamoaze on the left, and at the clear outline of Brent Tor Chapel on its rock, and above all at blue Cornwall meeting the blue sky. In the middle of this picture Tavistock lies, and we run down into it on a splendid road.

The abbey that once gave renown to Tavistock has nearly vanished, but even its fragments—an archway and an ivy-covered tower—are enough to bring beauty and distinction into these pleasant streets. Ordgar, the man who founded it, was the father of Elfrida, the wicked Queen who gave her stepson a stirrup-cup, and had him stabbed while he was drinking it. It was in Tavistock or near it that she spent her childhood, and to Tavistock that Ethelwold was sent by the King, to see if her beauty deserved a crown. Ethelwold, seeing her, forgot all else and married her himself. “She is in noe wise for feature fitt for a king,” he told King Edgar. Then the King, whom men did not lightly deceive, came hither to Tavistock to judge for himself, and Ethelwold at bay told the truth to his wife, begging her—poor ignorant man!—“to cloath herself in such attire as might least set forth her lustre.” Elfrida smiled; and when her lord was gone arrayed herself in all she had that was most rich and beautiful, so that “the sparkle of her fair look” made the King mad for love of her. The next day he took Ethelwold out upon the Moor to hunt, and left him there with an arrow through his heart; and after all Elfrida became a queen.

The abbey her father founded was famous, not only for its splendour, but also for its learning. Though nearly all its stones are gone there are still some of its documents to be seen in the church, and certain ancient books which were printed, I believe, in the printing-press of these progressive monks.

It was in the year after the monks were driven from their abbey that Francis Drake was born to bring fresh glory to Tavistock. At the end of a long, wide street his statue stands—the familiar figure by Boehm, all fire and energy, the “Francie Drake” we know. His ardent face is turned towards the town whose pride he must ever be; behind him is the ivy-covered gateway of Fitzford House. Through that embattled archway Sir Richard Grenville—“Skellum Grenville” as he was called—came home with his bride to her own house; the house in which he afterwards shut her up, and “excluded her from governing the affaires within dore,” and even, it is reported, gave her a black eye. This was the Richard Grenville who was the King’s General in the West, and was described by the Parliament as “a villain and skellum.”[3] He raised an army in Cornwall “with most extrem and industrious cruelty” and brought it to this place; and I believe it was here that young Prince Charles stayed when he came to Tavistock and complained so bitterly of the weather. The soldiers of the Parliament afterwards sacked the house, of which nothing is now left but this gateway.

There may be some who have been led to think that they have but to drive a few miles from Tavistock to see the house that belonged to the earlier, and far greater, Sir Richard Grenville, the house of which an old writer says: “The abbey scite and demesnes was purchased by Sir Richard Grenvill, whereon hee bwilt a fayre newe howse, and afterward sold it unto Sir Francis Drake, that famous travailer, wᶜʰ made it his dwellinge-plaice.” These I must sorrowfully inform that Buckland Abbey is no longer open to the public.

From the statue of that “famous travailer” we turn to the right upon a fine road, and presently, crossing the Tamar by a beautiful bridge, climb into Cornwall on a gradient of one in seven.

THE SOUTH COAST OF DEVON

SUMMARY OF RUN THROUGH SOUTH-DEVON

Distances.

Roads.

Hills steep and frequent.

Surface poor, except from Kingsbridge to the outskirts of Plymouth.

III
THE SOUTH COAST OF DEVON

If our object in choosing to cross Devon by the coast road were simply to cling to the shore as closely as possible we should, of course, drive to Torquay by way of Dawlish and Teignmouth. But in that case we should miss the beautiful views of Exeter and the Moor from the slopes of Great Haldon, and the gorse and pines on the summit of Telegraph Hill, which most of us will think more desirable things than the beaches and lodging-houses of popular watering-places. It is true that no esplanade nor row of bathing-boxes can altogether spoil a Devon sea. It is also true that the last words of Endymion were written at Teignmouth; but as Keats, being unfortunate in the matter of weather, disliked the place very heartily, we shall be following in his footsteps most truly if we are faithful to “Nature’s holy face.” Her face is very beautiful on the summit of Great Haldon.

We glide easily down the wooded slopes, with the wild outline of Dartmoor against the sky before us and the green valley of the Teign below us, and after an almost continuous descent of seven miles run into the uninspiring streets of Newton Abbot. Let us pause for a few minutes in Wolborough Street, and picture the scene that brought this little town for a moment into English history: the throng of troops; the crowding onlookers, half curious, half afraid; in the midst of them the keen face of the foreigner who had come to be their king; the prince’s chaplain, here where the stone is set, proclaiming William III.; and over all the pouring, drenching rain. At the outskirts of the town we may see the house that sheltered William from the weather that night, and has at various times sheltered many incongruous guests of note—Charles I. and “Steenie,” Oliver Cromwell and Fairfax. William was at Ford House without a host, or the Courtenay who owned it at that time doomed it wiser to be absent; but when Charles I. was there Sir Richard Reynell’s hospitality was such that a hundred turkeys figured in a single menu.

Only five or six miles of a comparatively level road lie between Newton Abbot and Torquay. The valley through which we drive bears a familiar name, for it is in this Vale of Aller that the well-known pottery is not only made, but designed, in vast quantities. I think it must have been along this road that part, at least, of William’s wet and motley army marched through the mud from Brixham. As for the prince himself, his course must have been truly erratic if he slept at all the places in this neighbourhood that claim to have sheltered him.

Torquay is one of those rare watering-places that upset all one’s prejudices. Its houses are many and modern, its streets are populous; but the harbour under the hill is so snug, the sea so blue and bright, the boats so gay, the buildings so softly framed in trees and flowers, that the most churlish heart must be won. And near at hand the little sheltered coves, and wild paths above the cliffs, and woods almost dipping into the sea are quite as peaceful as though there were no crowded little harbour on the other side of the hill. This harbour was not here, nor any town at all, when the Spanish Armada, as Kingsley says, “ventured slowly past Berry Head, with Elizabeth’s gallant pack of Devon captains following fast in its wake.” Only a few fishermen’s cottages were on the shore, and the empty walls of William Bruere’s abbey, and below the abbey “a peere and socour for fisshar bootes.” Indeed, even when the Bellerophon and the Northumberland rode on the blue waters of this bay together, and Napoleon sailed away to St. Helena, there were more trees here than houses.

To-day there are so many houses on this shore that there is hardly a gap between Torquay and Paignton. There is nothing to keep us in Paignton, for though it has an old church, and a tower that is called the Bible Tower out of compliment to Miles Coverdale, it has none of the charm of Torquay. Only a few miles away, however, is a place of very definite charm. There is a better way than this, certainly, of seeing Totnes, but this hilly and not always very good road has the advantage of passing near the castle of Berry Pomeroy, one of the few ruins in Devonshire.

The peculiar spell of Berry Pomeroy lies, not in splendour of masonry nor grandeur of outline, but in the silence and romance of the deep woods in which the castle rock is closely wrapped. From the old church where Pomeroys and Seymours lie in their graves we run down noiselessly through the green shadows into a strange and dusky world of legend and far-off history. Through the towered gateway that fronts us generations of Pomeroys have ridden forth to defend or flout their various kings; and many a Seymour, coming homeward by this path, has lifted his proud eyes to the house his fathers built within the Norman wall. For when the last Pomeroy had “consumed his estate and decayed his howse,” he sold it to the Protector Somerset; and the Seymours who came after him raised the dwelling that is now a shell and was never altogether finished, though very magnificent, according to John Prince, with curiously carved freestone, and stately pillars of great dimensions, and statues of alabaster, and rooms “well adorned with mouldings,” and a “chimney-piece of polished marble, curiously engraven, of great cost and value.” These splendid Seymours were descended from the Protector’s eldest son. “I believe,” said William III. to the last of them, “you are of the Duke of Somerset’s family.” Sir Edward bowed. “The Duke of Somerset, sir,” he said, “is of my family.”

It was to this very gate, I believe, after Henry de Pomeroy had taken up arms for Prince John, that Cœur-de-Lion’s sergeant-at-arms came on his sinister errand. Out of the gate, however, he never rode. He “received kind entertaynment for certaine days together,” says the historian, “and at his departure was gratified with a liberal reward; in counterchange whereof he then, and no sooner, revealing his long-concealed errand, flatly arrested his hoaste … which unexpected and ill-carryed message the gent took in such despite as with his dagger he stabbed the messenger to the heart.” One cannot honestly regret it.

This is the kind of place where legend grows round history as naturally and quickly as the ivy grows over the stones. The walls themselves, it is easy to see, were raised by a magician; for the castle, seen from one side, is standing high upon a rock, while from the other it seems to be deep in a wooded valley. This is plainly due to a spell, and prepares the mind for tales of imprisoned ladies, and of wild horsemen leaping desperately into the chasm when they could no longer defend their castle from an angry king. It is only on emerging from the dim and haunted wood that one remembers regretfully how the last of the Pomeroys “decayed his howse”—so far was he from defending it—and sold it quite peacefully to the Duke of Somerset.

There was no very exciting rivalry, I suppose, between the castle of Berry, even at its best, and the castle that stands only about two miles away on the “high rokky hille” of Totnes; for the stronghold of Judhael de Totnais and William de Braose, of Zouches and Edgecumbes, was the citadel of a walled town. If we climb the rocky hill in question—through the old east gate of the town, and past the fifteenth-century church and the hidden guildhall that was once a priory—we may see for ourselves how proudly the tower of Totnes once dominated the valley of the Dart. There is only a fragment of the keep standing now, and even in Henry VIII.’s time “the logginges of the castelle” were “clene in ruine.” The story of their decline and fall seems to be unknown, but I think the place must have been treated with some indifference by the Edgecumbes, who were, unless I am mistaken, rebuilding their beautiful house at Cothele when Totnes Castle came to them. If this were the case we could forgive them, and indeed be grateful for their absorption in the lovely treasure-house above the Tamar.

The various signs of age that make these steep streets so attractive must not make us forget that the antiquity claimed by Totnes is a far more venerable affair than any such thing of yesterday as a Norman castle. It was on a certain stone in Fore Street that Brutus of Troy, father of all Britons, first set his adventurous foot when he discovered this island. So at least says Geoffrey of Monmouth in his brave, imperturbable way. Brutus, we must suppose, sailed up the Dart; or perhaps at that early date Totnes was on the coast. In any case it was the charms of these woods and waters that attracted the voyagers to land in the new island, and “made Brutus and his companions very desirous to fix their habitation in it.” That is easily understood.

We too shall do well to come to Totnes by water. It is the best way, and can be done by steamer from Dartmouth. As this, however, probably means the neglect of Berry Pomeroy, which is far more serious than the missing of Brixham, I advise every motorist whose car can travel without him to drive from Paignton to Totnes, and to send the car by road to Dartmouth while he himself goes thither by water. For the banks of the winding Dart are, in their gentle way, incomparable, with their soft woods hanging over the stream, and their cornfields streaked with scarlet, and the little creeks where thatched cottages are clustered on the shore and white-sailed boats flutter beside the tiny quay. And among the trees of the left bank are Sandridge, the birthplace of John Davis, and Greenway, the home of the Gilberts, where Sir Humphrey lived before his widowed mother married Raleigh.

In the meantime those who drive their own cars must return to Paignton by road, and follow the railway to Brixham past Goodrington sands, where Charles Kingsley loved to spend the summer days searching for the orange-mouthed Actinia and dreaming of the Spanish Armada. There is not a spot upon this Devon coast but is the stuff that dreams are made of! Dreams of gallantry and war, of conquest and deliverance and wide adventure haunt us hour by hour as we pass from haven to haven, from Torquay to Brixham, and from Brixham to Dartmouth, and from Dartmouth to the climax of Plymouth Sound; with the great names of Drake and Gilbert and Hawkins, of Raleigh and Grenville ringing in our hearts as we spin across the soil that bred them, and, shining below us, the green sea that carried them to their renown.

The sea was not green, but grey and misty, on the day that “the Protestant wind” blew William the Deliverer into Torbay. The fleet, says a letter written “on the first day of this instant December, 1688,” had met with “horrid storms,” but “was not so damnified as was represented by the vulgar.” It was here, in this harbour of Brixham—now hemmed in by busy quays, and crowded with trawlers whose flaming sails might well be meant to commemorate Orange William—it was here where the statue stands that the prince first stepped ashore. On his flag, as on the statue, was the motto of his family: I will maintain. The statue is not flattering—or so, at least, we hope—but its presence, with its calm promise of liberty, is not without dignity amid all the bustle of the fishing-fleet. The scene was busy enough that day, when William stood here with Burnet, and the guns roared, and the drums and hautboys made music, and from every headland and housetop the people shouted their welcome; and, as the fog lifted, the fleet, lying out there beyond the breakwater, which was then unbuilt, “was a sight would have ravished the most curious eyes of Europe.”

William, and gradually all his regiments of horse and foot, climbed these narrow streets to the top of the hill. Though we take another road than theirs we by no means escape the climbing. Two slow miles, on gradients varying from one in twelve to one in ten, lead us to the point where we immediately begin to descend, on a rough steep road of sharp turns, which runs down to the shore of Dartmouth Harbour and the slip of Kingswear Ferry.

These are classic waters that lap upon the clumsy sides of the ferry-boat. We move slowly, and that is well, for there is much to see: much beauty of wooded headlands, of old streets drawing nearer, of boats and ships upon a blue-green sea. To the left are the two points that shelter the harbour, and on each its ruined tower, the guardians that did their work so long and well, and perished in the doing of it: to the right the river winds away into the land and the old Britannia lies at rest, and the great buildings of the Naval College crown the hill. It was from this harbour, more than three hundred years ago, that the Sunshine and Moonshine sailed away to the North West Passage with John Davis and his “company of goodlie seamen, not easily turned from any good purpose;” and it was between those two green headlands that Francie Drake came home from “singeing the King of Spain’s beard” at Cadiz, with the San Philip and all her spoils behind him. Historic fleets have ridden at anchor in the shelter of these hills: ships for Cœur-de-Lion’s crusade; and for Edward III.’s siege of Calais no fewer than thirty-one, all furnished by Dartmouth; and on one grim occasion, at least, an unwelcome fleet from France, which left the town a ruin. Many years later another French ship came sailing in unsuspiciously with letters from the Queen, a few days after Dartmouth Castle had surrendered to Fairfax. The captain, when he heard the news, flung the precious packet into the sea; “but God provided a Wave,” says the historian, “to bring it to the Boat that went out to seek it, and so it was brought unto His Excellency.”

BUTTERWALK, DARTMOUTH.

Round the quays on the Dartmouth side of the harbour the queer old houses are huddled into streets that climb and twist and turn in bewildering irregularity. Crooked gables and overhanging eaves nod at one another across the way: the carved beams and corbels of the wider streets rouse memories of departed merchant princes: rows of young trees are planted by the waterside: and always, behind the trees, behind the gables, is a glimpse of the turquoise sea. Everywhere are signs of the splendid past: in the fourteenth-century church, with its magnificent screen and pulpit, and the tomb of John Hawley, “a riche marchant and noble warrior again the French men”: in the houses of the Butterwalk, with their heraldic beasts and granite pillars and mullioned windows, their moulded ceilings and carved chimney-pieces. It is worth while to climb a rickety staircase, if only for the sake of hearing the Merry Monarch numbered among the saints.

A narrow shady lane near the shore of the harbour leads to the castle and the old church of St. Petrock. The oldest part of the fort, the round tower whence the chain passed across the mouth of the harbour to Kingswear Castle, is said to date from the time of Henry VII. There must have been some kind of fort here earlier than that, I suppose, for when the lively men of Fowey forfeited their chain of defence, we are told, Edward IV. presented it to Dartmouth. This castle changed hands twice during the Civil War. Prince Maurice took it and strengthened it, but could not save it from Fairfax. “Being Master of all but the Castle,” wrote the general, “I summoned that. The Governour was willing to listen unto me.… I can say I find it to be in the hearts of all here, in all integrity to serve you.”

The road from Dartmouth to Slapton Sands is almost entirely composed of astonishing hills. Only in Devon could hills so many and so fierce be compressed within so small a space. But only in Devon, surely, is the coast at the same time so wild and so luxuriant, so stern and yet so tender; only in Devon can we look down from the clifftop through so soft a veil of trees, and see far below us sands so yellow and rocks so red, and the ripples of so very, very green a sea. This road that rises steeply out of Dartmouth is characteristically deep in the shade of rocky banks, and walls built of thin mossy stones. Long hart’s-tongues hang in clusters by the wayside, and every cranny of the walls is filled with tiny ferns. Having climbed to Stoke Fleming by a variety of steep gradients we promptly descend, by two miles of gradients nearly as steep, to the idyllic cove of Blackpool, whose golden sands once flowed with the blood of four hundred Frenchmen. They, and many more, had landed here; but the men of Dartmouth, who had not forgotten the sacking of their town, came swarming down these cliffs upon them, so that the survivors were glad to put to sea again. Another steep climb takes us up to Strete, and another steep descent to Slapton Sands.

Here is a dramatically sudden contrast! From the very foot of the hill the road runs, for two miles and more, over what is probably the most level strip of land in Devon. It is no more than a strip. Close beside it on the left runs the long strip of the sands, and close beside it on the right an equally long strip of water, the reedy mere called Slapton Ley. “There is but a barre of sand,” says Leland, “betwixt the se and this poole. The waite of the fresch water and rage of the se brekith sumtime this sandy bank.” It is along this bar of sand and shingle that our road runs. If we turn away from it for a few minutes, on the by-road that crosses the pool near the hotel, we shall see Slapton itself.

SLAPTON.

The village has no very striking beauty; but its steep little streets, its thatch and whitewash and flowers, its air of remoteness, its maidens with their pretty blue pinners and prettier faces, make it a very attractive place. Nor is it without distinction. Not only is it dignified by a thirteenth-century spire of extreme austerity, but it also has the remains of a collegiate chantry. The chapel tower, with its graceful arch and fragment of groining, rises alone among the flowers of a lovely garden, where wild olive and camphor grow as serenely as the Devon apples that hang above them. It is a private garden, but as it skirts the road we may drive almost into the shadow of the tower. For several centuries, from the days of Henry II. to those of Henry IV., this generous soil belonged to a Guy de Brian. It was Joan Pole, the wife of the Guy de Brian of Henry III.’s time, who founded Pole Priory upon this spot: we have it on the word of a Pole. The later Brian who made it a college was one of the original Knights of the Garter, and a very versatile person, being Edward III.’s standard-bearer in “that notable fight he had with the French at Calais,” as well as an ambassador and an admiral-of-the-fleet. In the reign of Henry IV. this manor of Slapton became the property of Harry Hotspur’s crafty father; but to many of us the most stirring memory in this place is that of Sir Richard Hawkins, the third great sailor of his name. He bought Pole Priory—now corrupted into Poole—before he set sail on that adventurous voyage that lasted so much longer than he expected. During the ten years of his absence, years of imprisonment in the South Seas and elsewhere, this was the home of his “dearest friend, his second self,” Judith, Lady Hawkins. For some reason—whether to impress the neighbours or because she suffered from rheumatism I do not know—this lady was in the habit of walking to church on three quarters of a mile of red velvet carpet. Possibly life was not very gay at Slapton at the end of the sixteenth century, and this mild ceremonial may have been a comfort to her. The time came when she sought another kind of consolation in her loneliness. The story goes[4] that when Sir Richard came home at last to Slapton he found a strange air of festivity astir in these precipitous streets. The red carpet was laid, we may be sure, from Pole Priory to the church, for when he asked what matter was afoot he found it was his Judith’s wedding-day. It was fortunate he came in time, for one cannot quite see Richard Hawkins in the part of Enoch Arden.

The main road to Kingsbridge pursues its level way between salt water and fresh till it reaches Torcross, a most desolate-looking village with a reputation for fishing. Here, sad to say, we must turn inland. The scenery between this point and Kingsbridge is no great matter, but there are some pretty villages, and Stokenham Church has a good screen. The road is fair, and the hills less formidable than usual.

There is no means of seeing, as a whole, this beautiful coast between Torcross and Plymouth, except on foot or from the sea; but most happily it is possible for motorists of inquisitive habits to find their way, here and there, to various little havens of the greatest charm. These, however, are all beyond Kingsbridge. Kingsbridge itself is a place of no particular attraction nor interest. It has a few picturesque corners and old houses, but its real claim on our affections is that the only way to Salcombe lies through it. Now a road that leads to Salcombe is something to be grateful for.

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.

We go on our way through Yealmpton and Brixton, on a surface that gradually becomes very rough, and cross the toll-bridge into Plymouth.

This is a name that stirs the blood of every true child of Britain. In the days of Elizabeth’s great sailors it was from Plymouth that Britannia ruled the waves. And to-day there is no end to the interest that this place holds for those who love the navy and the sea as is the wont of Englishmen; no end to the modern interests of port and harbour, of dockyard and battleship, nor to the crowding memories on Plymouth Hoe.

DRAKE’S ISLAND, FROM THE HOE.

Here on the Hoe, with Drake’s statue beside us, and his island below us, and behind it those fair woods of Mount Edgecumbe on which Medina Sidonia cast a covetous eye, we are looking down at the channel through which all the gallant adventurers of the sixteenth century sailed out to their distant goals. This statue is the symbol of them.[5] “He was of stature low,” says John Prince of Francis Drake, “but set and strong grown; a very religious man towards God and his houses, generally sparing churches wherever he came; chaste in his life, just in his dealings, true of his word, merciful to those that were under him, and hating nothing so much as idleness.” The words fit the statue well. It was here where we are standing that he and the other captains played their memorable game of bowls, while the Armada called Invincible swept nearer and nearer. His ship and her half-fed crew lay down there in the Sound, under the lee of the island that has borne his name ever since that day, and the flagship, further out, “danced lustily as the gallantest dancer at Court.” Through that channel he and the rest sailed out into the gale when their game was done, to do their thorough work. Many times he had sailed through it already on various quests of war and adventure—and, it must be owned, of pillage: and it was from this harbour, afterwards, that he went on the voyage that “was marred before it was begun, so great preparations being too big for a cover,” the voyage to Nombre de Dios Bay, where he lies “dreaming all the time of Plymouth Hoe.”

Very long and very stirring is the visionary pageant that rises before us here: the Black Prince, triumphant, sailing in with his prisoner, the King of France; poor Katherine of Aragon, landing here in an outburst of welcome; John Hawkins, setting forth on those dubious but gallant undertakings that the Queen called “private enterprise” and Hawkins called “the Queen’s business.” His son Sir Richard long remembered a scene that took place when he was a boy, under that green hill that faces us. A fleet of Spaniards, bound for Flanders to fetch a new bride for Philip II., dared to sail between the island and the mainland “without vayling their top-sayles, or taking in of their flags; which my father Sir John Hawkins perceiving, commanded his gunner to shoot at the flag of the admiral, that they might thereby see their error.” They saw it quickly, and the matter ended with feasting.

Sir Richard’s own ship, too, takes part in the ghostly pageant, sailing close to the land to bid goodbye, for many more years than he suspected, to the throng that stood here on the Hoe to do him honour. Amid blowing of trumpets, and music of bands, and roaring of guns he left the harbour, with his thoughts full of the lady who took pleasure in red carpets. And it was there, below us, that the brave heart of Blake gave its last throb as he entered English waters—the heart that is buried, they say, in St. Andrew’s Church.

The long procession of adventurous ships winds endlessly on, past the island, and out of the harbour, and away into the world of the past. The ships of Frobisher and Gilbert, of Grenville and of Raleigh are there, and the Mayflower with the Pilgrim Fathers, and the ship of Captain Cook. And at the last I see a little ship sail in alone, and on her deck a disappointed, disillusioned woman; the woman whom the French have never forgiven because, when they broke her heart, she omitted to repay them with smiles—the daughter of Marie Antoinette. The Duchesse d’Angoulême came hither from Bordeaux, in exile for the second, but not for the last time, with the marshals’ vows of fidelity and the news of their joining Napoleon still ringing in her ears together.

SOUTH CORNWALL

SUMMARY OF RUN THROUGH SOUTH CORNWALL

Distances.

Roads.

Hills steep and very frequent.

Surface: on main roads good. By-roads often very narrow and rather rough.

IV
SOUTH CORNWALL

One approaches Cornwall diffidently: one leaves it with a sense of profound ignorance. There is no county, of course, of which any true knowledge can be gained in one visit, whether the visitor be a motorist, or a bicyclist, or that very superior person the pedestrian; but perhaps this is truer of the Duchy than of any other part of England. The knowledge of Cornwall is a special study with many branches, familiar only to Cornwall’s devoted sons. It is easy to love her beautiful face at first sight, and easy to learn the part of her history that is also the history of England, but behind and within these superficial things is the vast hoard of her local legends and traditions, and the bewildering story of her unnumbered saints. A slight knowledge of tin-mining, too, were not amiss. One can only admit ignorance, and drive on happily.

Those who elect to approach the coast of Cornwall from Tavistock, through Callington and Liskeard, will travel on a fine road, which four times dips down to streams and forthwith climbs up again. On so hilly a road as this, one may depend on finding beautiful scenery. After passing through Liskeard the better road to take is the upper one by Morval, as it is less rough than the road that follows the Looe.

LOOE RIVER.

On the whole, however, I think the most satisfactory way to enter Cornwall is by Plymouth and Torpoint Ferry. Indeed, I would even suggest that those who have crossed the Moor to Tavistock should choose this route; for the road from Tavistock to Plymouth is magnificent in itself, and overlooks some of the finest views in Devon. And moreover the park of Mount Edgecumbe[6] is but a little way from Torpoint. It is true that beautiful Cothele is but a little way from the Callington road; but Cothele is not open to the public, though by the kindness of Lord Mount Edgecumbe its granite walls and historic furniture may sometimes be seen. But Mount Edgecumbe, says John Prince, is “the most beauteous gentile seat in all those western parts.” The commander-in-chief of the Armada, looking at it from the sea, “was so affected with the sight thereof” that he determined to keep it for his share “in the partage of this kingdom.” His taste was better than his seamanship. The house that stands in this lovely park was built by the grandson of the builder of Cothele—a gentleman, according to Carew, “in whom mildness and stoutness, diffidence and wisdom, deliberateness of undertaking and sufficiency of effecting, made a more commendable than blazing mixture of virtue.” However commendable, he was less attractive, I think, than his grandsire, whom deliberateness of undertaking would not have saved when he was pursued by his enemies among the woods of Cothele. He pushed a large stone into the Tamar, and flinging his cap after it, hid among the trees. Richard III.’s messengers of death, hearing the splash and seeing the floating cap, thought he was drowned and went away. “He afterwards builded in the place of his lurking a chapel.”

The road from Torpoint to Polbathick is excellent, and where it winds round the creeks of the Lynher estuary there are woods on the river’s very verge, as is the lovely custom beside these West Country waters. Across the valley is St. German’s, wherein are some of Cornwall’s most venerable memories and the home of the famous Eliot who died nobly in the Tower. At the fork just beyond Polbathick it is advisable to take the road to the right, for though it is a good deal the longer it is also a good deal the smoother, and avoids a pair of steep hills at Hessenford. The direct road is quite practicable, however, and those who choose it may take the opportunity of running down the wooded valley of the Seaton to the shore. On the other hand, if we go by the longer road we shall see more of the Looe estuary, which is far more beautiful.

LOOE HARBOUR.

To it the Liskeard road runs suddenly down; then turns and follows it very closely to the sea. Even closer to the water is the little railway, which clings to the bank under the hanging trees, and at one point actually goes on its adventurous way in mid-stream. The water, gorgeous as a peacock’s breast, flows evenly between thickly wooded hills, and as the valley widens the town appears at the end of it, climbing its steep sides.

As one approaches a place that is a byword for beauty there is always a lurking fear of disappointment. But the fishing-towns of Devon and Cornwall are so disarming, so personal in their charm, that they never disappoint. Indeed, the trouble is rather that they win the heart too quickly. Each one in turn appears the ideal spot in which to settle for life. So is it here. As we cross the bridge that joins East Looe to West, and look down at the green timbers of the little quays and at the countless boats, or up at the many-coloured gardens above the road; as we drive round the point, and find the open sea rippling in upon a rocky shore, it seems obvious that this, and no other, is the place to live in. The conviction lasts until we reach Polperro.

This we cannot do by way of the wide road that runs round Hannafore Point, for this ends abruptly opposite Looe Island. We must return to the bridge, and without crossing it take the road that rises on the left. As we mount the steep hill we see below us the meeting of the two rivers and their two wooded valleys, and behind us among the trees the scattered houses of the town. At a point about two miles from Looe we turn to the left, and run down a long and winding hill into a tiny green gorge, with steep sides rising almost from the roadway. It ends in the narrow street of Polperro. Here, at the beginning of the street, is the stable-yard of a little hotel, where standing-room may be found for the car. Beyond this point it is practically impossible for a large car to turn, for the twisted alleys of this cramped and cabined village are hardly more than paths, and owing to their contortions on the hillside are often broken by steps.

STREET OF POLPERRO.

Why anyone should want to turn I cannot imagine; for this is certainly the place to live in! We knew all about it, of course, before we came here: a thousand artists have painted it. Large numbers are painting it at this moment; a group at every corner. Since there are so many of them it is fortunate that artists—even amateurs—are among the few human beings who are not blots upon a landscape. They may give us lovely pictures of this place: of the headlands that clip the huddled houses so closely between them; and the stream that rushes under weed-grown walls to the sea; and the landlocked harbour with its crowd of little boats; and the cobbled lanes and whitewashed cottages and flights of footworn steps; and the flowers that brighten every narrow alley; and, best of all, the outer haven with its warm red rocks, and white sails reflected in the sea, and the stately outspread wings of innumerable gulls. Yet none but a magic picture could give us the magic of Polperro. For no one could paint this sea but a wizard whose medium was molten jewels, and no one can feel the spell of the place without the pathetic, haunting, insistent sound of the seabirds’ cry. Indeed, it is this sound that gives reality to Polperro. If it were not for this one might think it had been designed and built for the use of artists. The fisher-folk who live here could tell a different tale; and the wild cry of the gulls reminds us of a sea that is not always green and glassy. Moreover, there was once a time, I believe, when it seemed as though Polperro had been designed and built for the use of smugglers.

POLPERRO.

Very reluctantly we climb out of the gorge and take our way to Lostwithiel by Pelynt and Lanreath, on a road of variable surface and everlasting hills. In Pelynt church is the restored crozier of Bishop Trelawny, whose threatened death, as we all know, determined twenty thousand Cornishmen to “know the reason why.” There are various monuments here too, some beautiful and all interesting, of Trelawnys and Bullers; and at Lanreath a lovely screen and a carved wood cover to a Norman font, and on the south wall a painted copy of Charles I.’s letter of thanks to the men of Cornwall. From the top of the first steep hill beyond Lanreath we see the rounded outlines of Braddock Downs before us, and at their feet the woods of Boconnoc. Over those grassy hills the soldiers of the Parliament were pursued by the royalists. “They were possest of a pretty rising ground,” wrote Sir Bevill Grenville to his wife upon the day of the fight, “… and we planted ourselves upon such another against them within muskett shott; and we saluted each other with bulletts about two hours or more.… We chast them diverse miles … and we lost not a man. So I rest yours ever.” A year later these slopes were stained again—but not so darkly as the royalist honour—when the infantry of the Parliament, having surrendered, were shot down as they passed the King’s army unarmed, and were robbed of clothes and horses. The King himself at that time was staying at Lord Mohun’s place down there among the trees. We pass one of the gates presently, and skirt the park where Bevill Grenville’s men, “upon my lord Mohun’s kind motion,” were quartered by good fires under the hedge.

This park that we see over the fence has been owned by Mortains and Courtenays, Mohuns and Pitts. The last Lord Mohun did not, I fancy, spend much of his time under these trees—preferring those of the Mall and of Richmond Park. When, after surviving three trials for murder, he died at last in his famous duel with the Duke of Hamilton, his widow sold Boconnoc to Thomas Pitt for half the sum, it is said, that he received from the Regent Orléans for the Pitt Diamond. It was here that the great Lord Chatham was born.

We run down a long hill into Lostwithiel. This is a place that has seen better days; for Henry III.’s brother, the Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans, made it his headquarters in the rare moments when he was not trying to make up the quarrels of others nor fighting in his own, and even in the sixteenth century it was the “shyre towne.” Of the “ruines of auncyent buyldinges” that Leland saw there are only slight traces; but, if we cross the pretty old bridge that spans the Fowey and turn to the right at once, we may see “the little rownd castel of Restormel.” It is reached by a steep lane, and there is no turning-room at the top except in a private field.

RESTORMEL CASTLE.

“Only there remaineth,” says Carew, “an utter defacement.” But indeed there is something more. This straight avenue of pine-trees with its carpet of turf, the double entrance across the moat, the heavy, gloomy ivy, give to Restormel that air of mystery and romance that seizes the imagination. Like its founder—the prince whose strange exotic name haunts Cornwall far more persistently than he ever did himself—like Richard, King of the Romans, this castle was more warlike than domestic. Only the “fair large dungeon,” or keep, and the “onrofid” chapel are left standing now on the mound that overlooks the valley so commandingly. It is a fine position; yet, though it was hastily strengthened for the Parliament, Sir Richard Grenville[7] took it for the King.

The road from Lostwithiel to Fowey is for the most part winding and stony, and extremely narrow. In places it is also very steep; and the hedges are high and comparatively uninteresting. But a road that leads ultimately to Fowey is entitled to do as it pleases on the way. The last part of it is quite good.

On a very steep hill we creep slowly into “Troy Town.” We look out, over the sloping streets and the roofs of the houses and the church, at the blue harbour and the hill beyond it and all the busy traffic of the port. Over this hill, hundreds of years ago, the men of Normandy crept into Fowey in the night and fell to fighting in the streets, with a whole century of wrongs to avenge—a century of raids and robberies on the part of the truculent Gallants of Fowey. The spoils of French harbours had made the townsmen here “unspeakably rich and proud and mischievous.” So the Frenchmen came to Fowey “without the Foymen’s knowledge or notice,” and killed everyone they met, and burnt the town. Thomas Treffry—Hals calls him John—gathered some of the “stoutest men” round him in his new house of Place, and defended it; while his wife Elizabeth, like a true help-meet, mounted to the roof and poured molten lead upon the besiegers, with excellent effect. Place stands there still, below us on the left; yet not the same that was besieged, since the tall tower is plainly of Victorian date, and the very beautiful bays that appear above the wall are Tudor. It was after this exciting experience that Thomas Treffry—or John—“builded a right fair and stronge embatelid towr in his house: and embateling al the waulles of the house in a maner made it a castelle: and onto this day”—and unto this—“it is the glorie of the town building in Faweye.”

If we stand close below the church tower, and look carefully at the stones above us, we shall see the familiar badge of the ragged staff, the cognisance of the Kingmaker. The Foyens, when Warwick allowed them to go on with their piracies, naïvely put his badge upon their new church in acknowledgment of his kindness, and persevered in their filibustering ways. Edward IV., however, subdued them by a most unkingly trick. His first messenger they returned to him shorn of his ears, “at which affront the King was so distasted” that he sent a body of men to Lostwithiel, the shire town, ostensibly to enlist volunteers. The Gallants, who never asked for anything better than to fight the French, trooped to Lostwithiel at the summons of their King. They were all arrested; and the chain that guarded their harbour was given to Dartmouth. I believe there are two links of the chain still to be seen at Menabilly, behind the hill.

From the windows of the Fowey Hotel we can see, at Polruan, one of the square grey forts to which the ends of this chain were fastened. The ruins of the other are opposite to it. These valiant little forts have seen a good deal of service, and defended their port long after their chain was forfeited. There was a Dutch ship that came to this harbour-mouth one day in pursuit of an English fleet, and defied the forts in the insolence of her seventy guns—“to the great hurt,” says Hals, “of the Dutch ship … and the no small credit and reputation of Foy’s little castles.”

BODINNICK FERRY.

Fowey’s fighting reputation has always been great, since the day when she owned “sixty tall ships” and sent forty-seven of them to the siege of Calais. To see the harbour that has done so much for England we must loiter in a boat beside the jetties and among the creeks; we must pass the dripping walls of gardens, and the flights of steps where the seaweed clings, and the houses whose back-doors open on the water; we must watch the lading of the ships with china-clay—ships from Sweden and Russia and France—and pause before the picture that Bodinnick makes on the hillside. It was to this hillside, says the story, that Sir Reynold de Mohun came to fetch his hawk, when it killed its quarry in the Fitzwilliams’ garden up there at Hall. Walking in the garden was the fair Elizabeth Fitzwilliam, and on the moment he lost his heart to her, and as she thought him “a very handsome personable young gentleman,” they became the first Mohuns of Hall. Whether they were really introduced by the hawk is doubtful, but they were certainly married—and that not merely once but twice: for the bishop divorced them against their will, and it was only by appealing to the Pope that they won leave to live happily ever after.[8]

Even if we cannot see all the bends and creeks of the river from Fowey to Lostwithiel, we must at least take our boat between the woods and slopes of Pont Pill, where it is only at the water’s very edge that the ferns and heather yield to rocks and crimson weed. Landing at Pont, we may climb the steep hillside to Lanteglos Church among the orchards, and see the old stone cross beside the porch, and the wonderful bench-ends within, and the elaborately painted shields that bear so many famous arms. On this little lonely church, buried among the trees, things of beauty have been lavished, not only long ago but lately; carvings both old and new, and magnificent embroideries, and pavings of marble. There is no other church like this, I think: none, so small and simple and lonely, that has been so generously treated.

PONT PILL, FOWEY.

Fowey town is a maze of little streets; but when we have climbed out of them—with heavier hearts than seems reasonable—we drive away past the lodge of Menabilly on a very fair road. It will add little to the journey if we go round by Tywardraeth and see the old church, and the tombstone of the prior whose monastery has so strangely vanished. A few carved stones in the churchyard are all that remains of the priory that was founded by William de Mortain, “a person of a malicious and arrogant spirit from his childhood.” It was well named Tywardraeth, the house on the sand, for great was the fall thereof; but why it has disappeared so utterly, and how, is curiously obscure. Gilbert tells the story of the last prior’s resignation—an edifying tale. Thomas Cromwell wrote to him a letter full of compliments, praising his virtues as a man and a prior, and telling him how deeply the King appreciated his services. These had been so unremitting, added Cromwell, that his Grace, being mindful of his age, would allow him to resign his post. To this Prior Collyns answered briskly that he was most grateful for the King’s kind thought, but as a matter of fact his health was excellent. So my Lord Privy Seal tried again. This time the astonished prior was informed that “the savour of his sins, crimes, and iniquities had ascended before the Lord, and that unless he immediately relinquished an office he had most grossly abused a commission would inquire into his misdeeds and punish him accordingly.” This, Collyns understood. Here is his gravestone in the church, in the wall of the north transept; a slab of slate with a cross incised on it. Some old bench-ends have been made into a pulpit, and others inserted in new seats of pitch-pine; but these are not relics of the priory.

Leaving St. Blazey on the right, we run on through some lovely scenery to St. Austell, where a church-tower of wonderful splendour and richness rises from the dull streets of stuccoed and slated houses. Our road to Truro is wide and has an excellent surface, but one hill succeeds another with exasperating regularity and promptitude. The scenery varies from dulness to beauty: the villages seem, to eyes that have lately looked upon those of Devon, a little uninteresting, for we are in the land of the Celt. Thatched cottages are rare, but in Probus there are several of them clustered round the churchyard very prettily. This tower of Probus is the highest in Cornwall, and very rich in sculptured stones: within the building are the granite pillars that are common to nearly all Cornish churches, and a screen whose Latin legend alludes to the two patron-saints St. Probus and St. Grace.

It is only a little way beyond Probus that we cross the head of the Falmouth estuary. By the rushy banks of this calm stream a little band of horsemen once settled weighty matters; for it was here, at Tresilian Bridge, that the royalist general, driven into a cul-de-sac by Fairfax, made his final surrender by the mouth of his commissioners. They met Ireton and Lambert at this spot, and the end of their meeting was the disbandment of the royal troops. The generals of the Parliament rode back to Fairfax by this road of ours, beside the banks of grass and rushes, and the mud-flats and the woods, and down the hill to Truro.

Except the cathedral there is little to see in Truro, and even the cathedral lacks the glamour of age, for, of the masonry, only the south aisle is part of the old church of St. Mary: the rest is new. The general effect of the inside of the building is fine, if a little severe. There is, however, a very gorgeous baptistery in the south transept, whose coloured pavements and crimson font are in rather startling contrast to the prevailing austerity. The roof, I believe, came from the old church, with a few of the monuments. The tomb on which John Robarts and his wife are lying in such obvious discomfort must be the one, I think, that was repaired in the eighteenth century by a mason whose bill included these items: “To putting one new foot to Mr. John Robarts, mending the other, putting seven new buttons to his coat, and a new string to his breeches knees. To two new feet to his wife Phillipa, and mending her eyes.”

Those of us who are intending presently to drive through the country of the Grenvilles may be glad, when they come to Stratton and Kilkhampton, to have seen Kneller’s picture of Anthony Payne. It is here in Truro, on the staircase of the museum in Pydar Street: a burly figure in scarlet, with a face that tries to be fierce but cannot hide its tenderness and humour. This is Sir Bevill Grenville’s giant henchman, who fought at his master’s side at Stratton and Lansdowne, and taught the children to ride and shoot.

A fine road leads from Truro to Falmouth, through hilly but beautiful country; by pine-woods, and distant views, and the green flats of the estuary, and a valley full of trees. Near pretty Perranarworthal we see, crossing a little gorge upon our right, one of the old wooden viaducts that have so nearly disappeared. In Penryn we cling closely to the estuary, following it to Falmouth Harbour. A hundred years ago the main road to Falmouth from London, as it passed through Penryn, “ran up and then down through streets so steep and narrow,” says a writer of that time, “as to make the safe passage of the mail-coach a wonder.” To-day, however, Penryn is one of the few towns in the West Country out of which we can drive on level ground.

When Sir Walter Raleigh came to stay with the Killigrews in their fine new house at Arwenack, he suggested to his host that he should make a town here, on the shore of this splendid harbour. The Killigrews were men of action, and the town was built; to the acute annoyance of Penryn, which petitioned in vain against its upstart rival. We make our slow way through the narrow, crowded streets of the Killigrews’ town, and find the last remaining fragment of their house still “standing on the brimme within Falemuth Haven.” Only a crumbling wall is there, and a window, and on the hill the avenue by which the vanished Killigrews went in and out; nothing to show that Arwenack was the very source of Falmouth’s existence and the very core of her history. For with every concern of Smith-ike and Pen-y-cwm-wick and Falmouth a Killigrew was connected, from the day when they settled here in the fourteenth century till the day when the last of the name set up this pyramid that is beside us—not with the justifiable object of honouring the Killigrews, but for the astonishing reason that he thought it beautiful. He called it a darling thing. “Hoping it may remain,” he wrote, “a beautiful Imbellishment to the Harbour, Long, Long, after my desireing to be forgott.”[9]

ARWENACK AVENUE, FALMOUTH.

No Killigrew is likely to be forgot. It was a Killigrew who gave the land on which Henry VIII.’s castle of Pendennis still stands out there upon the point; a Killigrew who helped to build it and became its first governor; a Killigrew who made Falmouth and fostered it; and the eagle of the Killigrews is borne to this day on the shield of the town. The Killigrews are not forgotten.

It was the round tower of Pendennis that brought Arwenack low. It is used as barracks now, and to see the old building we must have an order; but from the pretty shaded road that circles it we can see nearly all there is to be seen with the bodily eye. Yet if we pass through the grey stone gateway there are other things that we may see, perhaps: Henrietta Maria carried in upon her litter, “the most worne and weak pitifull creature in ye world,” seeking a boat to take her to France; her son a year later coming on the same errand: the Duke of Hamilton brought hither “to prevent his doing further mischief,” by order of the King for whom he lost his head a little later: Fairfax’s messenger summoning Sir John Arundel to surrender his castle. “Having taken less than two minutes’ resolution,” answered old John-for-the-King, “I resolve that I will here bury myself before I deliver up this castle to such as fight against his Majesty, and that nothing you can threaten is formidable to me in respect of the loss of loyalty and conscience.”[10] Five months the garrison held out; and when at last the remnant of them filed through the gate—a pathetic procession of sick and starving men tottering out with flying colours and beating drums—they left no food behind them but one pickled horse.

The belief that the little room above the gate was used by Henrietta Maria is probably due to what might be called the law of local tradition; the law that masonry attracts picturesque associations in direct proportion to its own picturesqueness, and in inverse proportion to the quantity of building that survives. If one room only of an old castle remains, it is that room, according to local tradition, that was the scene of every event that ever took place in the castle. A gatehouse is an improbable shelter for a queen in time of war. As for Prince Charles, there was once a tiny room in which he was reputed to have hidden. Here we have another invariable rule. Charles II. never occupied any place larger than a cupboard; and even in a fortress garrisoned by royalists he systematically “hid.” In this case even his reputed hiding-place is gone, and the legend has not as yet been transferred to the gatehouse; but if we enter the fort itself beneath the sculptured arms of Henry VIII., and mount the long staircase to the leads, we shall see below us on the shore the little blockhouse from which he escaped to France. On our left lies the crowded harbour with St. Mawe’s beyond it, and the round grey tower that was built at the same time as Pendennis: on our right is the bay of Gyllyng Vase, named William’s Grave in memory of the prince who was drowned in the White Ship. Headland stretches beyond headland; and far away on the horizon the Manacles show their cruel teeth.

During the siege John-for-the-King set fire to Arwenack lest the Parliament-men should make a battery of it. It is a common saying that the Killigrews, in their loyalty, put a light to it themselves. But strangely enough the owner at this time was “ye infamous Lady Jane,” who had been divorced by Sir John Killigrew but kept possession of his house for her life—a curious state of things that definitely settles the question of the firing of Arwenack. It was this Lady Jane who gave the famous chalice to the town of Penryn, “when they received mee that was in great miserie.” It was not this lady, however—as is often said—but Dame Mary of Elizabethan days, who boarded the Spanish ship in a true Elizabethan spirit and took her cargo home to Arwenack.[11]

KING HARRY’S FERRY.