A West Country Pilgrimage Part 4

"Siward's Cross" is mentioned in the Perambulation of 1240. "It is named," says Mr. Crossing, "in a deed of Amicia, Countess of Devon, confirming the grant of certain lands for building and supporting the Abbey of Buckland, among which were the manors of Buckland, Bickleigh and Walkhampton. The latter manor abuts on Dartmoor Forest, and the boundary line, which Siward's Cross marks at one of the points, is drawn from Mistor to the Plym. The cross, therefore, in addition to being considered a forest boundary mark, also became one to the lands of Buckland Abbey, and I am convinced that the letters on it which have been so variously interpreted simply represent the word 'Bocland.' The name, as already stated, is engraved on the western face of the cross--the side on which the monks' possessions lay."

Elsewhere he observes that Siward's Cross, "standing as it does on the line of the Abbot's Way, would seem not improbably to have been set up by the monks of Tavistock as a mark to point out the direction of the track across the Moor; and were it not for the fact that it has been supposed to have obtained its name from Siward, Earl of Northumberland, who, it is said, held property near this part of the Moor in the Confessor's reign, I should have no hesitation in believing such to be the case."

No matter who first lifted it, still it stands--the largest cross on Dartmoor--like a sentinel to guard the path that extended between the religious houses of Plympton, Buckland and Tavistock. And other crosses there are beyond the Mire, where an old road descended over Ter Hill.

But the Abbot's Way is tramped no more, and the princes of the Church, with their men-at-arms and their mules and pack-horses, have pa.s.sed into forgotten time. Few now but the antiquary and holiday-maker wander to Siward's Cross; or the fox-hunter gallops past it; or the folk, when they tramp to the heights for purple harvest of "hurts" in summer-time.

The stone that won the blessings of pious men, only comforts a heifer to-day; she rubs her side against it and leaves a strand of her red hair caught in the lichens.

The snow began to fall more heavily and the wind increased. Therefore I turned north and left that local sanct.i.ty from olden time, well pleased to have seen it once again in the stern theatre of winter. It soon shrank to a grey smudge on the waste; then snow-wreaths whirled their arms about it and the emblem vanished.

COOMBE

[Ill.u.s.tration: COOMBE.]

Life comes laden still with good days that whisper of romance, when in some haunt of old legend, our feet loiter for a little before we pa.s.s forward again. I indeed seek these places, and confess an incurable affection for romance in my thoughts if not my deeds. I would not banish her from art, or life; and though most artists of to-day will have none of her, spurn romantic and cla.s.sic alike, and take only realism to their bosoms; yet who shall declare that realism is the last word, or that reality belongs to her drab categories alone?

"There is no 'reality' for us--nor for you either, ye sober ones, and we are far from being so alien to one another as ye suppose, and perhaps our goodwill to get beyond drunkenness is just as respectable as your belief that ye are altogether _incapable_ of drunkenness."

A return to romance most surely awaits literature, when our artists have digested the new conditions and discovered the magic and mystery that belong to newly created things--whether Nature or her human child has made them; but for the moment, those changes that to-day build revolution, stone on stone, demand great seers to record the romantic splendour of their promise, sing justly of all that science is doing, write the epic of our widening view and show man leading the lightning chained in his latest triumph. For us, who cannot measure such visions, there remains Nature--the incurable romantic--who retains her early methods, loves the sword better than the pruning-hook, and still sometimes strikes jealously at her sophisticated child, who has learned to subst.i.tute a thousand wants for the simple needs that she could gratify.

At Coombe, on the coast of North Cornwall, there yet lies a nest of old romance, wherein move, for dream-loving folk, the shadows of an old-time tale. Nature reigns unchanged in the valley and her processions and pageants keep their punctual time and place; but once a story-teller came hither, and the direct, genial art of a brave spirit found inspiration here. From this secluded theatre sprang _Westward Ho!_ and none denies willing tribute to him who made that book.

Seen on this stormy December day with a north-wester raging off the sea and the wind turning the forest music to "a hurricane of harps," Coombe Valley lives with music and movement. Far away in the gap eastward rises a blue mound with Kilkhampton Church-tower perched thereon, and thence, by winding woods, the way opens to the historic mill. Full of tender colour are the tree-clad hills--a robe of grey and amber and amethyst, jewelled here and there, where the last of the leaves still hang.

Wind-beaten oak and larch, beech and ash twine their arms together and make a great commotion where the woven texture of their boughs is swaying and bending. Their yield and swing challenge the grey daylight, and it plays upon them and flings a tracery of swift brightness over the forest. The light is never still, but trembles upon the transparent woods, so that every movement of their great ma.s.s wins an answering movement from the illumination that reveals them. Beneath, under the tremulous curtain and visible through its throbbing, lies the earth's bosom, all brown with fallen leaves. It swells firm and solid under restless branch and bough, and listens to the great song of the trees.

Sometimes a sunburst from the sky touches the woodland, and the ramage aloft sparkles like a gauze of silver over the russet and gold beneath.

In the heart of the valley there runs a river, and, freed from her work, the mill-stream leaps to join it. The mill-wheel thunders, as it did when little Rose Salterne set stout hearts beating and dreamed dreams, wherein no sorrow homed or horror whispered. But time has not forgotten Coombe Mill, and, to one who may love flowers, the evidence of progress chiefly lies among them. There is a garden here and many a plant, that had not yet faced the buffets of an English winter when Kingsley's heroine tended her clove-pinks and violets, now thrives contented in this little garth.

Beside the mill-pond, flogged by the December storm, Kaffir lilies wave their crimson and the red fuchsia flourishes. A bush of golden eleagnus is happy, and a shrubby speedwell thrives beside it; honeysuckles climb to the thatch of the white-washed homestead; a rambler rose hangs out its last blossoms; and a yellow jasmine also blooms upon the wall.

Marigolds and lavender and blue periwinkles trail together in a bright wreath against the darkness of the water-wheel; there are stocks and Michaelmas daisies, too, with the silver discs of honesty and the fading green of tamarisk.

Many suchlike things flourish in this cradle of low hills, for winter is a light matter here, and great cold never comes to them. They push forth and creep into the lanes and hedges; they find the water-meadows and love the shelter of the apple trees and the brink of the stream.

Beside the mill there towers a great ivy-tod in fruit, and rises the weathered mill-house, stoutly built to bear the strain within. Once granite mill-wheels ground the corn, but now their day is over and they repose, flower crowned, in the hedges outside. The eternal splashing of water has painted a dark stain here, and ferns have found foothold. One great hart's tongue lolls fifty wet green leaves out from the gloom of the wheel-chamber.

All is movement and bustle; the mill-stream races away to the river, and the river to the sea. The tree-tops bend and cry; the clouds tell of the gale overhead, now thinning to let the sunshine out, now darkening under a sudden squall and dropping a hurtle of hail.

From the mill-pool to the west opened another vision of meadows with a little grey bridge in the midst of them. Hither winds the stream, trout in every hover, and the brown hills rise on either side, barren and storm-beaten. Then, at the mouth of the land between them, a great welter of white foam fills the gap, for the storm has beaten the sea mad, and the roar of it ascends in unbroken thunder over the meadows.

Behind the meeting-place of land and ocean, there roll the lashed and stricken seas, all dim and grey; and their herds are brightened with sunshine or darkened by cloud, as the wind heaves them to sh.o.r.e. But there is no horizon from which we can trace them. They emerge wildly out of the flying scud of cloud that presses down upon the waters.

OLD DELABOLE

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD DELABOLE.]

Where low and treeless hills roll out to the cliffs, and the gulls cry their sea message over farms and fields, a mighty mouth opens upon the midst of the land and gapes five hundred feet into the earth. In shape of a crater it yawns, and its many-coloured cliffs slope from the surface inwards. The great cup is chased and jewelled. Round it run many galleries, some deserted, some alive with workers. Like threads of light they circle it, now opening upon the sides of the rounded cliffs, now suspended in air under perpendicular precipices. In the midst is the quarter-mile incline that descends to the heart of the cup and connects the works above with the works below; and elsewhere are other gentle acclivities, where moraines of fallen stone ooze out in great cones beneath the cliffs. Under them stand square black objects, dwarfed to the size of match-boxes, which wrestle with this huge acc.u.mulation of over-burden. Steam puffs from the machines; they thrust their scoops into the fallen ma.s.s; at each dig they pick up a ton and a half of rubbish and then deposit it in a trolley that waits for the load hard by. A network of tram-lines branches every way in the bottom of the cup, and extends its fingers to the points of attack; and where they end--at smudges of silver-grey scattered about the bottom of the quarry--there creep little atoms, like mites on a cheese.

Centuries have bedecked and adorned the sides of this stupendous pit; and while naked sheets and planes of colour, the work of recent years, still gleam starkly, all innocent of blade and leaf, elsewhere in deserted galleries and among cliff-faces torn bare by vanished generations of men, green things have made their home and flourished with luxuriance, to the eternal drip of surface water. Ferns and foxgloves and a thousand lesser plants thrive in niches and crevices of the stone; and there is a splendid pa.s.sage of flame, where the mimulus has found its way by some rivulet into the quarry, and sheets a precipice with gold.

By steps and scarps the sides fall, narrowing always to the bottom; but the cliff planes are huge enough for sunshine and shadow to paint wonderful pictures upon them and find the colours--the olive and blue and mossy green, or the great splashes and patches of rose and russet that make harmony there. They melt together brokenly; and sometimes they are fretted with darkness and spotted with caverns, or mottled and zigzagged by rusty percolations of iron.

One n.o.ble cliff falls sheer five hundred feet to a wilderness of rock, and across its huge front there hang aerial threads, like gossamers, while at its crown black wheels and chimneys tower into the sky. Below, upon the bluff of a crag, there turns a wheel, and a great pump, with intermittent jolt and grunt, sucks the water from the bottom of the quarry and sends it to tanks up aloft. This machine, with its network of arms and wheels, hangs very black on the cliff-side, and a note of black is also carried into the midst of the grey and rosy cliff-faces by little wheels that hang from the gossamers and tiny threads depending from them. They drop to the mites in the silver-grey cheese beneath, and from time to time ma.s.ses and wedges of nearly two tons weight are hoisted upward and float through the air to the surface, like thistle-down.

The quarry is full of noises--the clank of the pumps, the rattle of the trucks, the hiss of pneumatic and steam drills, the clink of tampers and the rumble and rattle of the great rocks dislodged by crowbars from the cliffs. Men shout, too, and their voices are as the drone of little gnats; but sometimes, at the hour of blasting, an immense volume of sound is liberated, and the thunder of the explosion crashes round and round the cup and wakes a war of echoes thrown from cliff to cliff.

Once there were dwellings within the cup; but the needs of the quarry caused their destruction, and now but two cottages remain. The ragged cliff-edges creep towards them, and they will soon vanish, after standing for a hundred years.

Everywhere the precious stone, now silver-green, now silver-grey, is being dragged up the great incline, or wafted through air to the workers above; and once aloft, another army of men and boys set to work upon it and split and hack and chop and square it into usefulness. On all sides the midgets are burrowing below and wrestling with the stone above; thousands of tons leave the works weekly, and yet such is the immensity of the ma.s.s, that the sides of the quarry seem hardly changed from year to year. For more than three hundred and fifty years has man delved at Old Delabole. Elizabethans worked its rare slate; and since their time, labouring ceaselessly, we have scratched out this stupendous hole and covered our habitations therefrom, through the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. Cathedrals and cottages alike send to Delabole for their slates; there are extant buildings with roofs two hundred years old, that show no crack or flaw; while more ancient than the stones that cover man's home must be those that mark his grave, and Delabole slates in churchyards, or on church walls, might doubtless be found dating from Tudor times.

Five hundred men and boys are employed at Old Delabole, and their homes cl.u.s.ter in the little village without the works. Their type is Celtic, but many very blonde, high-coloured men labour here. All are polite, easy, and kindly; all appear to find their work interesting and take pleasure in explaining its nature to those who may be interested. The slate fills countless uses besides that of roofing, and the methods of cleaving and cutting it cannot easily be described. Steam plays its part, and the ma.s.ses are reduced to manageable size by steel saws which slip swiftly through them; then workmen tackle the imperishable stuff, and with chisel and mallet split the sections thinner and thinner. It comes away wonderfully true, and a ma.s.s of stone gives off flake after flake until the solid rock has turned into a pile of dark grey slates, clean and bright of cleavage and ready for the roof. Green-grey or "abbey-grey" is the ma.s.s of the quarry output; but a generous production of "green" is also claimed. This fine stuff runs in certain veins, and offers a tone very beautiful and pleasant to the eye. Lastly, there are the reds--jewels among slates--that shine with russet and purple. This stone is rare, and can only be quarried in small quant.i.ties. All varieties have the slightest porosity, and take their places among the most distinguished slates in the world.

TINTAGEL

Ragged curtains of castellated stone climb up the northern side of a promontory and stretch their worn and fretted grey across the sea and sky. They are pierced with a Norman door, and beyond them there spreads a blue sea to the horizon; above it shines a summer sky, against whose blue and silver the ruin sparkles brightly. Beneath, a little bay opens, and the dark cliffs about it are fringed with foam; while beyond, "by Bude and Bos," the grand coastline is flung out hugely, cliff on cliff and ness on ness, until Hartland lies like a cloud on the sea and little Lundy peeps above the waters. Direct sunshine penetrates the haze from point to point, now bringing this headland out from among its neighbours, now accentuating the rocky islands, or flashing on some sea-bird's wing.

Shadow, too, plays its own sleight; the cliff that was sun-kissed fades and glooms, while the scarps and planes before shaded, shine out again and spread their splendour along the sea. Light and darkness race over the waves also, and now the fringes of foam flash far off in the sunshine and streak the distant bases of earth; now they are no more seen, when the cloud shadows dim their whiteness and spread purple on the blue.

A ewe and her lamb come through the gateway in the castle wall. They share the green slopes with me and browse along together. Overhead the gulls glide and a robber gull chases a jackdaw, who carries a lump of bread or fat in his beak. The gull presses hard upon the smaller bird, and Jack at last, after many a turn and twist, drops his treasure.

Whereupon the gull dives downward and catches it in mid-air before it has fallen a dozen yards.

The flora on these crags is interesting, though of little diversity.

Familiar gra.s.ses there are, with plantain and sheep's sorrel, the silene and cushion pink, the pennywort and blue jasione, the lotus and eye-bright; but unsleeping winds from the west affect them as alt.i.tude dwarfs the alpines, and these things, though perfect and healthy and fair to see, are reduced to exquisite miniatures, where they nestle in the crannies of the rocks and flash their pink and white, or blue and gold, against the grey and orange lichens that wash the stones with colour and climb the ruin in the midst.

In sheltered nooks the foxglove nods, but he, too, is dwarfed, yet seems to win a solid splendour of bells and intensity of tint from his environment.

Other castle fragments there are--scattered here and on the neighbour cliff to the east; but they are of small account--no more than the stumps of vanished ramparts and walls. Even so, they stood before any word was printed concerning them, or pictures made. An ancient etching of more than two hundred years old shows that their fragments were then as now, and only doubtful tradition furnishes the historian with any data.

But the castle is perched on a n.o.ble crag, whose strata of marble and slate and silver quartz slope from east to west downward until they round into sea-worn bosses and dip under the blue. The story of gigantic upheavals is written here, and the weathered rocks are cleft and serrated and full of wonderful convolutions for dawn and dusk to play upon. Here more wild flowers find foothold, and the wild bird makes her home. The cliffs are crested with samphire, and the white umbels of the carrot; they are brushed with the pale lemon of anthyllis, and the starry whiteness of the campion; they are honeycombed beneath by caverns, where the sea growls on calm days and thunders in time of storm.

Westward of the mount, guarding the only spot where boat can land from these perilous waters, a fragment of the ruin still holds up above the little bay, within bow-shot of any adventurous bark that would brave a landing.

Here is all that is left of the last castle on this famous headland. Of the so-called "Arthurian" localities, the most interesting and richest in tradition is that of North Cornwall, and at its centre lie these ancient strongholds. In addition to the Castle of Tintagel one finds King Arthur's Hall and Hunting Seat, his bed and his cups and saucers, his tomb and his grave.

It is a long and intricate story, and none may say what fragment of reality homes behind the acc.u.mulated ma.s.ses of myth and legend. With the bards of the sixth century and those that followed them we find the English beginnings of Arthur and his celebration as a first-cla.s.s fighting man. Then it would seem he disappeared for a while, and takes no place, either in history or romance, until the ninth century. In 858, however, one Nennius, a Briton, made a history of the hero, some three centuries after his supposed death in 542. The "magnanimous Arthur" of Nennius fought against the Saxons, and, amid many more n.o.ble than himself, was twelve times chosen commander of his race. The Britons, we learn, conquered as often as he led them to war; and in his final and mightiest battle--that of Badon Hill--we are to believe that 940 of the enemy fell by Arthur's hand alone--a Homeric achievement, una.s.sisted save by the watching Lord. Thereafter his activities ranged over other of the Arthurian theatres and campaigns before he died at Camlan.

But alas for song! From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Tennyson, that last prodigious battle on the Camel has been the joy of poetry, and the mighty adventure between Arthur and Mordred has been told and retold a thousand times; yet if those warriors ever did meet, it was certainly in Scotland, and not Cornwall, that the encounter took place. Camlan is Camelon in the Valley of the Forth, and here a tolerably safe tradition tells that the King of the Picts, with his Scots and Saxons, defeated the Britons and slew their King.

Leland reported to Henry VII. that "This castle hath been a marvellous strong fortress and almost _situ in loco_ inexpugnabile, especially from the dungeon that is on a great and terrabil crag environed with the se, but having a drawbridge from the residue of the castel on to it. Shepe now feed within the dungeon."