Lynton and Lynmouth Part 3

It was King Stephen, I believe,

"who was a luckless clown; His breeches cost him half a crown;"

but King Stephen had to contend with rebellion and civil war the whole of his unhappy reign, so doubtless popular sentiment would a.s.sign him a smaller share of the world's goods than King William Rufus.

In Westcote's time, in the early seventeenth century, the wool that was worked here in Devon was brought from all over England--Dorset, Gloucester, Wales, London, and also Ireland; and clothmaking had become so large an industry that agriculture had suffered considerably. "And every rumour of war or contagious sickness . . . makes a mult.i.tude of the poorer sort chargeable to their neighbours, who are bound to maintain them . . . the meanest sort of people also will now rather place their children to some of these mechanical trades than to husbandry, whereby husbandry-labourers are more scarce, and hirelings more dear than in former times."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Woody Bay and Duty Point, West Lynton]

This little pa.s.sage in Westcote is, I think, of great interest, as showing the difficulties which had already arisen in the time of James I, with the extension of industry, which must always flourish at the expense of agriculture, and which seems to tend, nevertheless, both to personal and to national prosperity.

It is a problem for which we have not yet found a solution, and at the present time it comes before us with especial vividness and force.

Westcote gives a list of the various fabrics that are made in Devon; some of them seem to be materials no longer in use, from the unfamiliarity of the names. Exeter manufactured serges, both fine and coa.r.s.e; Crediton (the famous locality of the burning of Crediton Barns, in the Middle Ages) made kersies; and Totnes a stuff called "narrow pin-whites," which is, I believe, a coa.r.s.e, loosely woven white material; Barnstaple and Torrington were noted for "bays," single and double (perhaps of the same texture as our modern baize), and for "frizados"; and Pilton, adjacent to Barnstaple, was notorious rather than celebrated for the making of cotton linings, so cheap and coa.r.s.e a stuff that a popular "vae" or "woe" was locally p.r.o.nounced against them. "Woe unto you, Piltonians, that make cloth without wool!"

It was in the woollen trade that the family of De Wichehalse, afterwards so intimately connected with Lynton, made the fortune that enabled them to become one of the leading houses of Barnstaple, and to acquire the beautiful estate near Lynton, which is now known as Lee Abbey. It may, perhaps, be of interest to the "curious-minded" to give an inventory of his shop, taken in 1607 at the death of Nicholas de Wichehalse, who had married Lettice, the daughter of the Mayor of Barnstaple.

The following are the chief items of the inventory, collected from ma.n.u.script records by Mr. Chanter for the Devonshire a.s.sociation:

182 yds. of coloured bays at . . . . . . 1s. 4d. a yd.

49 " kersey at . . . . . . . . . . . 2s. 4d. "

broadcloth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8s. 0d. "

147 yds. of coa.r.s.e grey ffrize at . . . 11d. "

buffyns in remnants (whatever they may be!) . . . . . . . . . . L1 9s. 4d.

Also lace, silk, black velvet, broad taffeta, leaven taffeta . . . and 5 small boxes of marmalade.

Mr. Chanter conjectures that this last item is marmalade, and can read it as nothing else, though he was not aware that it was a preserve of Queen Elizabeth's time, nor why, even if it were, it should be in De Wichehalse's shop.

It was the prosperity of the De Wichehalses, the Salisburys, the Deamonds, and other enterprising merchants, which beautified the town with public buildings, almshouses, and their private residences--for the enrichment of which, as I have already stated, Italian workmen were brought over--and the seventeenth century was the time of the town's greatest importance and prosperity, when Barnstaple traded with Virginia and the West Indies, the Spaniards in South America and on the Continent.

The Customs receipts show a very great import of tobacco, and there was a considerable manufacture of pipes, as a branch of local pottery. "The Exchange," or "the Merchants' Walk," as Queen Anne's Walk was then called, before it was rebuilt, must have witnessed the inception of many a venture, been paced by many an anxious foot when the weather was bad and the returning ship was long overdue, and seen many a bargain struck by richly dressed merchants, with pointed beards lying over their ruffs, gravely smoking their pipe of "Virginny" over the deal.

That picturesqueness of dress and custom has pa.s.sed away, but Barnstaple is still a prosperous and pleasant city, lying on the sleek curve of the River Taw, and surrounded by low smooth hills. Seen from the opposite side of the river on a spring afternoon, from the steep road that leads to Bishop's Tawton over Codden Hill, it has a fair aspect. The tall modern Gothic tower of Holy Trinity stands out commandingly above the cl.u.s.tered roofs by the river, and beyond the town, which is small enough, seen from this height, to come within a single glance, lie the green and fertile fields, and gentle, wooded hills. The road to Bishop's Tawton--which was formerly an episcopal seat of the Bishops of Exeter--is a typical Devonshire road, steep and stony, with high green banks and hedges, which, on such an afternoon in spring, are starred with primroses and clumps of dog-violets, celandines and wild-anemones, and wonderfully green. It climbs from the London and South-Western Station, after crossing the great thirteenth-century bridge from the Square, and within a few minutes all signs of a town have dropped away, and we are in the country of fields and farms. In less than a mile, indeed, we come upon an old fortified farm; the ma.s.sive whitewashed wall, three feet thick, rises steeply from the hilly road. At one corner a giant yew has thrust out part of the wall with its knotted roots, which are so huge that some recent owner of the farm has cut a little summer house out of them, with a thatched roof. The dwelling part of the farm faces this way, and, being built on the hillside above the road, I catch only a glimpse of steep gables and tall brick chimneys; but I looked in the open gateway of the cobbled yard, and saw the great thatched barns, and the ma.s.sive white walls which surrounded them. The rear of the farm presented an almost blank surface, save for one small door, which was open, a sudden black oblong of shadow in the mellow whiteness. A cat sat cleaning itself in the mild sunshine; otherwise there was no life nor movement. It looked an enchanted place.

Farther on I came to a fork of the road, where a little stream ran swiftly past the thatched and whitewashed cottages, their tiny gardens profusely bright with flowers--hyacinths, daffodils, forget-me-nots, and the deep red of climbing j.a.ponica. In one of them an old woman in a pink sunbonnet was leaning on a stick gossiping with a neighbour, while two or three sunburned children with yellow hair were dabbling in a brook. It was idyllically and typically English, that ideal England of artists which is dreamed of and loved by the sons and daughters of the Colonies, who, thinking of "home" which they have never seen, think of such a scene of verdant and homely peace.

Just beyond was a great barrow, a steep green mound perhaps twenty feet high, with a little cottage beside it, and the small garden encroaching on its green sides. I asked a child what she knew about it, wondering if some local legend still lingered round the spot; but she told me "they had dug a pond, beyond there, and this was the earth they had thrown up."

I did not explain to her the unlikeliness of such a heavy undertaking, with a clear stream running by, but went on, wondering what British chieftain or maraudering Dane lay buried under that great mound, awaiting the last trump.

Bishop's Tawton is said to have been the seat of the Saxon Bishops of Devon, established here in the tenth century; a farm now occupies the site of the old episcopal palace, but the church is Perpendicular, and the only Saxon remains I could discover was the base of a stone Saxon cross in the churchyard. On the opposite bank of the river is Tawstock church, standing in the grounds of Sir Bourchier Wrey, and close to his house. The church is built on rising ground, and set round by trees in which rooks have built; clamorous and noisy, they fly round and round the old grey tower morning and evening. When the October gales are tossing the trees, and the rain-clouds are gathering on the hills their cawing has a sound of ill-omen, which makes them seem the unresting and malignant spirits of those fierce lords of the Dark Ages, evil-doers and unrepentant.

From Barnstaple to Lynton there are several methods of travel. Either one may take train to Ilfracombe, and there take coach, following the coast-road through Watermouth, Lydford, Combe Martin, Trentishoe, and the Hunter's Inn, twenty miles of the most magnificent coast scenery in England; or, if one has the courage to take pack on back, one may walk it, past Watermouth Castle, and the tiny land-locked harbour beneath, which was said by Kingsley to be the safest harbour on this coast, smooth and sheltered always, however high the seas are running outside; past the tiny village of Lydford, which bears the same name and reminds one of the seventeenth-century poem of "Lydford Law," though the poem was written of the town on the Lyd, near Tavistock. But here are a couple of verses:

"Oft have I heard of Lydford law, How in the morn they hang and draw, And sit in judgment after.

At first I wondered at it much, But since I find the matter such As it deserves no laughter.

"They have a castle on a hill; I took it for some old wind-mill The vanes blown off by weather.

To lie therein one night 'tis guessed 'Twere better to be stoned or pressed Or hanged, ere you come thither."

"Lydford law" and "Jedburgh justice" seem equally to have been synonyms for arbitrary and summary punishment.

But, leaving this digression, we proceed on our way, past Berrynarbor and the old farm of Bowden, where Bishop Jewel was born, and the beautiful church where he was baptized, with its great Perpendicular tower, built of red and grey sandstone, rising above the wooded combe, and its old lich-gate, set in the thickness of the churchyard wall, and almost hidden by the luxuriant summer foliage; past Combe Martin, famous for its ancient silver-mines rather than its beauty, yet with a very beautiful church, with a Perpendicular tower even higher than that of Berrynarbor, soaring above the sheltering elms, and throwing its long shadow across the stream which curves round the church-yard among the old yew-bushes--a church worth stepping aside to see, with a fine carved oak screen in the interior, of the fifteenth century, the doors of the screen made in such a way that they will not entirely close, in order to show plainly forth to all sinners that the gates of heaven are always open; past Martinhoe village, which was the scene of one of the most cruel and cold-blooded of all the Doone murders, when they carried off the wife of Christopher Badc.o.c.k, a small tenant farmer, and, in rage at finding nothing in the poor home but a little bacon and cheese, murdered her baby in a fit of senseless brutality, reciting over it this couplet:

"If any man asketh who killed thee, Say 'twas the Doones of Bagworthy."

And so we come to Heddon's Mouth, and of the seven miles from there to Lynton I shall speak in the next chapter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Shepherd's Cottage, Doone Valley]

But the twenty miles of hilly road may prove too much even for good walkers, and as the coach service between Ilfracombe and Lynton is suspended at present, owing to the war, it is best to take the little narrow-gauge railway that runs from Barnstaple to Lynton. There might be many more unfavourable ways, too, of seeing this stretch of country. The narrow line twists and winds across the hills, seeming to hang, sometimes, on a tiny viaduct, while many feet below a mountain stream pours down its rocky bed, and, owing to the narrowness of the gauge and the steepness of the gradients, the train progresses hardly quicker than a horse-drawn carriage, and one has leisure and opportunity to observe all that one is pa.s.sing.

From Barnstaple to Chelfham the railway runs along the valley of the Yeo, through the woodyards and past the whitewashed cottages of the town, and then alongside of the river itself. This valley is most beautiful. I came through it on a hot afternoon in spring. Just beside me ran the clear brown water, breaking into swirls and eddies over the white stones; on my right hand the hills rose, steeply wooded, with the lovely and various colours of many trees, the rich brown of the yet unopened beech-buds, the black buds of the ash, the twisted grey of alders, the green of hawthorn, and yet more vivid green of early larches, the delicate silver of palm, the bare branches of oak; on my left hand lay the rich green pasture of the valley, and beyond the bare hills, brown in the afternoon sunshine. Ten minutes away from Barnstaple Station, and I saw a hawk hovering above the hillside, so quickly do the signs of habitation drop away among these hills and valleys.

We leave the valley of the Yeo, and climb the steep gradients to Bratton Fleming and Blackmoor Gate, across the wind-swept open moors, bare and brown in the afternoon sunshine. Fold behind fold lies the countryside in great brown curves, here a cl.u.s.ter of trees in a sheltered valley, there a lonely farm; sometimes a group of whitewashed buildings under thatched roofs, more often a bleak granite building, built to withstand the buffeting of winter storms, grey amid its setting of bare grey ash-trees or twisted grey alders, with the brown hills behind and the brilliant blue of the sky overhead. The air here is keen and brilliant; there is an edge to all outlines, and a keenness to all colours, which the softer and more humid air of sheltered country does not give. The yellow of the primroses which cl.u.s.ter thickly in hollow and on bank has a brilliance and delicacy which I have never seen in valley primroses, and I cannot describe the exquisite clear rose of apple-blossom, above the gnarled and twisted grey trunk, seen against this background of sombre brown and dun, and the penetrating blue of moorland sky.

CHAPTER IV

LYNTON

And so, round a spur of the hills, and high above the wooded gorges of the West Lyn, we come to Lynton.

It lies upon the north-western slope of a hill, deep among trees; the few houses and hotels--which is all that it consists of--seem to have their roots stuck deep into the ground, while their tall chimneys soar above the tree-tops. If you are freakish-minded, indeed, you may pitch cherry-stones down your neighbour's chimneys, for the houses stand one atop of each other, cl.u.s.tering along the North Walk, which is cut round the side of the cliff; some built high above the road, with steep green banks of laurel and glossy dark myrtle; some built below it, so that as you walk the chimney-pots and tall pointed gables lie within touching distance of your hand. It is curiously unfamiliar to see houses from such an angle, a perspective of the roofs, with the windows and doors become unimportant; it is an aeroplane view of the world, or perhaps, more properly, a bird's view, for you may pause and poise to look down on Lynton and Lynmouth as no aeroplane at present can.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lynmouth Bay and Foreland]

The stony white road from the station and from Lynmouth struggles up the hill to a small open s.p.a.ce--what in any Italian hill-town would be called a piazza, though it is only a few score feet in extent--opposite the church and the Valley of Rocks Hotel. This, I believe, is the only level spot in the village, save a club tennis-ground, which has been levelled out of the hillside, for the few shops or houses run precipitately down the little side-streets, or up towards the top of Hollerday Hill. It is also the original site of the old village of Lynton, when it had no fame as a holiday resort, and barely a history, being left alone on its lofty cliff, as of no special value to anyone; for, although the present parish church is partly Perpendicular and partly of a later date, while the chancel is modern, it stands upon the foundations of a small earlier church, which, surrounded by a few poor cottages, with walls of cob and roof of thatch, a rough ladder leading to a sort of loft, which was the sleeping apartment of all the family, and a little patch of herb garden in front of each, comprised the village of Lynton when we find it first, in the thirteenth century, mentioned as a parish in the "valor" of Pope Nicholas.

Below it, then as now, lay the small fishing village of Lynmouth--or Leymouth, as it was formerly called--a similar group of rude small cottages, cl.u.s.tered in isolation, with the sea before and the great moors behind, the people subsisting chiefly on coa.r.s.e bread, salted meat, and fish--often stale fish, for fish was the one thing of value that Lynmouth yielded, and that would go to some representative of Ford Abbey, under whose rule Lynton and Lynmouth came. Yet it should surely have been easy, with a little help and instruction, to have grown many varieties of vegetable food, for flowers grow in abundance, and evergreens grow to a great size and beauty, while the variety of trees is remarkable--larch, chestnut, sycamore, oak, ash and birch, elm and beech, showing the fertility of the soil and the temperateness of the climate, in spite of the seaward position of the village.

But it is not the history of Lynton, nor its old a.s.sociations, which calls us to it, but its beauty entirely. Stand upon one of the terraces of Lynton on a still summer evening, looking east to Countisbury Foreland, and see the water of the bay still and gleaming in the evening light, the great headlands ruddy and golden above it.

The steep sides of the gorge of the East Lyn are warm and sunlit, they glow richly with purple and russet; over the rocks of the valley a faint flicker of grey mist begins to hang above the stream. From the trees around and below comes a great cawing of rooks, drowning the rush of the water below; they settle into their nests in the great green elms, then suddenly there is a caw, a scurry, a rush, and they fly up as if shot out of the tree-tops. There is a flapping of wings, and much angry sound; they circle once or twice, and then sink back to their homes again. It is a beautiful sight to watch a rook volplaning down to a tree as you can watch them from the terraces at Lynton; moving on a level with your eye, you can see the detail of each movement of their wings, see them let themselves drop through the air, yet with muscles taut and legs and claws stretched ready for a foothold on the particular slender branch which is home.

As you watch, amused and interested, as this protracted nightly programme is enacted--and never yet, throughout England, have any rooks gone to bed quietly--the colour fades from the headland and the sea, the mist has gained on the valley, drawing its grey wisps and streamers higher and higher up the sides of the gorge; the tide has gone out, very smooth and still, leaving a broad flat stretch of wet sh.o.r.e in the little bay, which shines with the last of the daylight like a clear mirror; the lights of the houses in Lynmouth begin to show through the trees, pale yellow in the twilight, patches of soft colour, rather than light; and the rushing of the river sounds very loud because of the silence of the birds. Inland the hills lie, fold behind fold, in gentle, misty curves; it is that exquisite hour which only northern summers give, when the slowly-fading twilight and the slowly brightening moon hold earth and sky in a faint pellucid light.

Or take a walk, on a bright May morning, from Lynton to Heddon's Mouth, along the cliffs, and see open before you, step by step, seven miles of the loveliest coast scenery, perhaps, in England.

First there is a wooded strip of road, called the North Walk, which runs round the side of Hollerday Hill. The shadows are dewy in the early morning, and birds are singing from the green ma.s.s of the trees on either hand; there is a faint smell of wood-fires from the houses below, acrid and very pleasant; the chestnut leaves are just opening, and the sycamores have still the early flush of red on their tiny leaves; it is very cool and fresh under the trees. Then the wood stops abruptly, and the road runs out on the bare hillside and winds round the great headland to the Valley of Rocks. Behind, the wall of cliff rises steeply, great boulders and outcrop of rock, fantastic in the sunlight; below it falls sheer to the sea, where the misty blue turns green at the base of the cliff. Looking down the sheer slope, which is dull brown with last year's heather, and grey with the wiry grey gra.s.s that grows on moors and mountains, I could see the grey backs of the gulls, flying far below me. It was a very still morning, but I saw a fishing-smack, which had been lying motionless, catch a sudden rise of wind and come about, leaving a white circle of foam in her wake. From the height where I walked she looked infinitely little, like a ship in a fairy-tale, no bigger than a walnut sh.e.l.l; I could see the clear small reflection of her tiny hull in the smooth water, her sails rosy-tinted in the morning sunlight, very beautiful and magical. There was no fleck of cloud in all the wide blue of the sky, but the horizon was hidden by a faint haze, sunlit but impenetrable, and from somewhere in the mist came the reiterated wails of a siren, from some ship groping its way up the Bristol Channel.

I rounded a corner from shadow into sun, and below me lay a tiny creek, a churn of foam round its rocks, the blue water running green and sandy in the shallows, and a flock of wheeling gulls to possess it; before me rose the great crag of the Castle Rock, each plane and angle of its twisted slate pile cut sharply in light and shadow, and against this sullen grey background a newly flowered gorse bush blazed in the sunlight.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Valley of Rocks]

The Castle Rock stands at the mouth of the Valley of Rocks, about which so much has been written, which has been compared to an amphitheatre of giants, or the scene of some t.i.tanic conflict, where the huge granite crags and boulders have been torn up and tossed about by supernatural and terrific forces. In honesty I must admit that this seems to me an exaggeration. Any walker who goes with this in his mind must, I think, be disappointed; the place is wild enough, and barren enough, a bleak, bare, waterless brown dip in the high lands, without tree or stream to soften it, except in a stone fold, a winter shelter for sheep, where a few twisted and stunted alders exist stubbornly; but the outcrops of rock from the brown gra.s.s are not specially remarkable to anyone familiar with cliff scenery, and there are many gorges within twenty miles of Lynton which are, to my mind, wilder and grander. There are hut-circles of the neolithic age in the valley, though many of them have been destroyed by the people who live round, to build the walls of their own cottages; but the often-repeated fantasy of this valley as the haunt of Druid rites seems to me, not only unsupported by evidence, but without justification, in the formation of the valley or the wildness of the rocks.

Brown under the sunlight, shadeless and glaring, when a bl.u.s.tering north-easter is blowing down it, the Valley of Rocks is a bitter and inhospitable spot; I have been glad to go into the sheep-fold and crouch under the lee of the stone wall for a moment's respite from the wind and the stinging particles of sharp dust that it flung in my face as I battled up the road. Once, in such a wind, I climbed the Castle Rock, and squeezed myself between two great boulders looking seaward over the choppy water--it was a land wind, which does not send the waves rolling in great breakers, very splendid to see, but worries it and dirties it, leaving broken cross waves of muddy grey water--and I startled a pair of ravens who had built a nest on a sharp ledge of rock, just beyond where I sat, and had not heard me coming, because of the noise of the wind. They startled me also, as one of them flapped out, close to my face, and flew screaming away, as I pulled myself up into shelter, but the other stood on its jut of rock, almost within arm's length, and looked at me. I saw its ugly long head as it turned, its great beak and its neck of a bird of prey, and then it flew off; and though I sat very still for a long time, hoping they might return, they only flew round me and past me, showing me the great black sweep of their wings as they went. But as I sat there, on that wild crag and that wild morning, I noticed a tuft of dog-violets, growing out of a fissure in the grey rock, and shaken and pounded by the bitter wind.