A West Country Pilgrimage Part 1

A West Country Pilgrimage.

by Eden Phillpots.

HAYES BARTON

[Ill.u.s.tration: HAYES BARTON.]

East of Exe River and south of those rolling heaths crowned by the encampment of Woodberry, there lies a green valley surrounded by forest and hill. Beyond it rise great bluffs that break in precipices upon the sea. They are dimmed to sky colour by a gentle wind from the east, for Eurus, however fierce his message, sweeps a fair garment about him. Out of the blue mists that hide distance the definition brightens and lesser hills range themselves, their knolls dark with pine, their bosoms rounded under forest of golden green oak and beech; while beneath them a mosaic of meadow and tilth spreads in pure sunshine. One field is brushed with crimson clover; another with dull red of sorrel through the green meadow gra.s.s; another shines daisy-clad and drops to the green of wheat. Some crofts glow with the good red earth of Devon, and no growing things sprout as yet upon them; but they hold seed of roots and their hidden wealth will soon answer the rain.

In the heart of the vale a brook twinkles and b.u.t.tercups lie in pools of gold, where lambs are playing together.

Elms set bossy signets on the land and throng the hedgerows, their round tops full of sunshine; under them the hawthorns sparkle very white against the riot of the green. From the lifted spinneys and coverts, where bluebells fling their amethyst at the woodland edge, pheasants are croaking, and silver-bright against the blue aloft, wheel gulls, to link the lush valley with the invisible and not far distant sea. They cry and musically mew from their high place; and beneath them the cuckoo answers.

Nestling now upon the very heart of this wide vale a homestead lies, where the fields make a dimple and the burn comes flashing. Byres and granaries light gracious colour here, for their slate roofs are mellow with lichen of red gold, and they stand as a bright knot round which the valley opens and blossoms with many-coloured petals. The very b.u.t.tercups shine pale by contrast, and the apple-blooth, its blushes hidden from this distance, ma.s.ses in pure, cold grey beneath the glow of these great roofs. Cob walls stretch from the outbuildings, and their summits are protected against weather by a little penthouse of thatch. In their arms the walls hold a garden of many flowers, rich in promise of small fruits. Gooseberries and raspberries flourish amid old gnarled apple trees; there are strawberries, too, and the borders are bright with May tulips and peonies. Stocks and wallflowers blow flagrant by the pathway, murmured over by honey bees; while where the farmhouse itself stands, deep of eave under old thatch, twin yew trees make a dark splash on either side of the entrance, and a wistaria showers its mauve ringlets upon the grey and ancient front. The dormer windows are all open, and there is a glimpse of a cool darkness through the open door. Within the solid walls of this dwelling neither sunshine nor cold can penetrate, and Hayes Barton is warm in winter, in summer cool. The house is shaped in the form of a great E, and it has been patched and tinkered through the centuries; but still stands, complete and st.u.r.dy in harmony of design, with unspoiled dignity from a far past. Only the colours round about it change with the painting of the seasons, for the forms of hill and valley, the modelling of the roof-tree, the walls and the great square pond outside the walls, change not. Enter, and above the dwelling-rooms you shall find a chamber with wagon roof and window facing south. It is, on tradition meet to be credited, the birthplace of Walter Ralegh.

Proof rests with Sir Walter's own a.s.sertion, and at one time the manor house of Fardel, under Dartmoor, claimed the honour; but Ralegh himself declares that he was born at Hayes, and speaks of his "natural disposition to the place" for that reason. He desired, indeed, to purchase his childhood's home and make his Devonshire seat there; but this never happened, though the old, three-gabled, Tudor dwelling has pa.s.sed through many hands and many notable families.

"Probably no conceivable growth of democracy," says a writer on Ralegh's genealogy, "will make the extraction of a famous man other than a point of general interest." Ralegh's family, at least, won more l.u.s.tre from him than he from them, though his mother, of the race of the Champernownes, was a mother of heroes indeed. By her first marriage she had borne Sir Walter's great half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert; and when Otho Gilbert pa.s.sed, the widow wedded Walter Ralegh, and gave birth to another prodigy. The family of the Raleghs must have been a large and scattered one; but our Western historian, Prince, stoutly declares that Sir Walter was descended from an ancient and n.o.ble folk, "and could have produced a much fairer pedigree than some of those who traduc'd him."

The tale of his manifold labours has been inadequately told, though Fame will blow her trumpet above his grave for ever; but among the lesser histories Prince's brief chronicle is delightful reading, and we may quote a pa.s.sage or two for the pleasure of those who pursue this note.

"A new country was discovered by him in 1584," says the historian, "called in honour of the Queen, Virginia: a country that hath been since of no inconsiderable profit to our nation, it being so agreeable to our English bodies, so profitable to the Exchequer, and so fruitful in itself; an acre there yielding over forty bushels of corn; and, which is more strange, there being three harvests in a year: for their corn is sow'd, ripe and cut down in little more than two months."

I fear Virginia to-day will not corroborate these agricultural wonders.

We may quote again, for Prince, on Sir Walter's distinction, is instructive at this moment:--

"For this and other beneficial expeditions and designs, her Majesty was pleased to confer on him the honour of Knighthood; which in her reign was more esteemed; the Queen keeping the temple of honour close shut, and never open'd but to vertue and desert."

Well may democracy call for the destruction of that temple when contemplating those that are permitted entrance to-day.

Then vanished Elizabeth, and a coward king took her place.

"Fourteen years Sir Walter spent in the Tower, of whom Prince Henry would say that no King but his father would keep such a bird in a cage."

But freedom followed, and the scholar turned into the soldier again.

Ultimately Spain had her way with her scourge and terror. James ministered to her revenge, and Ralegh perished; "the only man left alive, of note, that had helped to beat the Spaniards in the year 1588."

The favour of the axe was his last, and being asked which way he would dispose himself upon the block, he answered, "So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lieth."

"Authors," adds old Prince, "are perplexed under what topick to place him, whether of statesman, seaman, soldier, chymist, or chronologer; for in all these he did excel. He could make everything he read or heard his own, and his own he would easily improve to the greatest advantage. He seemed to be born to that only which he went about, so dextrous was he in all his undertakings, in Court, camp, by sea, by land, with sword, with pen. And no wonder, for he slept but five hours; four he spent in reading and mastering the best authors; two in a select conversation and an inquisitive discourse; the rest in business."

We may say of him that not only did he write _The History of the World_, but helped to make it; we may hold of all Devon's mighty sons, this man the mightiest. Fair works have been inspired by his existence, but one ever regrets that Gibbon, who designed a life of Ralegh, was called to relinquish the idea before the immensity of his greater theme.

In the western meadow without the boundary of Hayes Barton there lies a great pool, where a cup has been hollowed to hold the brook. Here, under oak trees, one may sit, mark a clean reflection of the farmhouse upon the water, and regard the window of the birth chamber opening on the western gable of the homestead. Thence the august infant's eyes first drew light, his lungs, the air. He has told us that dear to memory was that snug nook, and many times, while he wandered the world and wrote his name upon the golden scroll, we may guess that the hero turned his thought to these happy valleys and, in the mind, mirrored this haunt of peace.

THE SAD HEATH

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SAD HEATH.]

Through the sad heath white roads wandered, trickling hither and thither helplessly. There was no set purpose in them; they meandered up the great hill and sometimes ran together to support each other. Then, fortified by the contact, they climbed on across the dusky upland, where it rolled and fell and lifted steadily to the crown of the land: a flat-headed clump of beech and oak with a fosse round about it. Only the roads twisting through this waste and a pool or two scattered upon it brought any light to earth; but there were flowers also, for the whins dragged a spatter of dull gold through the sere and a blackthorn hedge shivered cold and white, where fallow crept to the edge of the moors.

For the rest, from the sad-coloured sky to the sentinel pines that rose in little detached cl.u.s.ters on every side, all was restrained and almost melancholy. The pines specially distinguished this rolling heath. They lifted their darkness in clumps, ascending to the hill-tops, spattered every acre of the land, and sprang as infant plants under the foot of the wanderer. Scarcely a hundred yards lacked them; and they ranged from the least seedling to full-grown trees that rose together and thrust with dim red branch and bough through their own darkness.

There was no wind on the heath, and few signs of spring. She had pa.s.sed, as it seemed, lighted the furzes, waked a thousand catkins on the dwarf sallows in the bogs, and then departed elsewhere. One felt that the deserted heath desired her return and regarded its obstinate winter robes with impatience. It was an uplifted place, and seemed to shoulder darkly out of the milder, mellower world beneath. Far below, an estuary shone through the valley welter and ran a streak of dull silver from south to north; while easterly rose up the grey horizons of the sea.

In the murk of that silent hour, a spirit of thirst seemed to animate the heather and the marshes that oozed out beneath. The secret impressed upon my conscious intelligence was one of suspense, a watchful and alert att.i.tude--an emotion shared by the trees and the thickets, the heath and the hills. It ascended higher and higher to the frowning crest of the land, where round woods made a crown for the wilderness and marked castramentations of old time. So unchanging appeared this place that little imagination was needed to bring back the past and revive a vanished century when the legions flashed where now the great trees frowned and a hive of men, loosed from a hundred galleys, swarmed hither to dig the ditches and pile these venerable earthworks for a stronghold.

Thus the place lay in the lap of that tenebrous hour and waited for the warm rain to loose its fountains of sap and brush the loneliness with waking and welcoming green. It endured and hoped and seemed to turn blind eyes from the pond and bog upward to question the gathering clouds.

Nigh me, a persistent and inquiring thrush clamoured from a pine. I could see his amber, speckled bosom shaking with his song.

"Why did he do it? Why did he do it? Why did he?"

He had asked the question a thousand times; and then a dark bird, that flapped high and heavy through the grey air, answered him.

"G.o.d knows! G.o.d knows!" croaked the carrion crow.

DAWLISH WARREN

[Ill.u.s.tration: DAWLISH WARREN.]

There is a spit of land that runs across the estuary of the Exe, and as the centuries pa.s.s, the sea plays pranks with it. A few hundred years ago the tideway opened to the West, not far from the red cliffs that tower there, and then Exmouth and the Warren were one; but now it is at Exmouth that the long sands are separated from the sh.o.r.e and, past that little port, the ships go up the river, while the eastern end of the Warren joins the mainland. So it has stood within man's memory; but now, as though tired of this arrangement, wind and sea are modifying the place again, for the one has found a new path in the midst, and the other has blown at the sand dunes until their heads are reduced by many feet from their old alt.i.tude.

These sands are many-coloured, for over the yellow staple prevails a delicate and changing harmony of various tones, now rose, now blue, as though a million minute shining particles were reflecting the light of the sky and bringing it to earth on their tiny surfaces. But in truth these tender shades show where the sand is weathered, for if we walk upon it and break the thin crust created by the last rain, the dream tints depart, and a brighter corn colour breaks through. Coa.r.s.e mat-gra.s.s binds the dunes and helps to hold them together against the forces of wind and water; but their tendency is to decrease. Perhaps observation would prove that their ma.s.ses shift and vanish more quickly than we guess, for the sand is the sea's toy, and she makes and unmakes her castles at will.

As a lad, I very well remember the silvery hills towering to little mountains above my head; and again I can hear the gentle tinkle of the sand for ever rustling about me where I basked like a lizard in some sun-baked nook. I remember the horrent couch gra.s.s that waved its ragged tresses above me, and how I told myself that the range of the sand dunes were great lions with bristling manes marching along to Exmouth.

Presently they would swim across to the sh.o.r.e and eat up everybody, as soon as they had landed and shaken themselves. And the mud-flats I loved well also, where the sea-lavender spread its purple on sound land above the network of mud. I flushed summer snipe there and often lay motionless to watch sea-birds fishing. Many wild flowers flourished and the gla.s.s-wort made the flats as red as blood in autumn. It was a dreamland of wonders for me, and now I was seeking mermaids' purses in the tide-fringe and sorrowing to find them empty; now I was after treasure-trove flung overboard from pirate ships, now hunting for the secret hiding-places of buccaneers in the dunes.

The ships go by still; but not the ships I knew; the flowers still sparkle in the hollows and brakes; but their wonder has waned a little.

No more shall I weave the soldanella and sea-rocket and grey-green wheat gra.s.s into crowns for the sea-nymphs to find when they come up from the waves in the moonlight.

It is a place of sweet air and wonderful sunshine. On a sunny day, with the sand ablaze against the blue sky, one might think oneself in some desert region of the East; but then green s.p.a.ces, scarlet flags and a warning "fore!" tell a different story. For golfers have found the Warren now. Where once I roamed with only the gulls above and rabbits below for company, and for music the sigh of the wind in the bents and the song of the sea, half a hundred little houses have sprung up, and bungalows, red and white and green, throng the Warren. At hand is a railway-station, whence hundreds descend to take their pleasure, while easterly this once peaceful region is most populous and the Exmouth boats cross the estuary and land their pa.s.sengers.

One does not grudge the joy of the place to townsfolk or golfers; one only remembers the old haunt of peace, now peaceful no more, the old beauties that have vanished under the little dwellings and little flagstaffs, the former fine distinction that has departed.

Dawlish Warren now gives pleasure to hundreds, where once only the dreamer or sportsman wandered through its mazes; and that is well; but we of the old brigade, who remember its far-flung loneliness, its rare wild flowers, its unique contours, its isolation and peculiar charm, may be forgiven if we forget the twentieth century for a season and conjure back the old time before us.

Topsham, in the estuary, wakens thoughts of the Danes and their sword and fire, when Hungar and Hubba brought their Viking ships up the river, destroyed the busy little port, and, pushing on, defeated St. Edmond, King of the East Angles. The pagans scourged this Christian monarch with whips, then bound him to a tree and slew him.