bisects the moor, we found ourselves in a country as barren as
any we had seen in England. The road, though winding and steep,
is generally visible for some distance ahead, and we found little
hindrance to a swift, steady flight that carried us over the long
hills far more quickly than we anticipated. The day, which had begun
in mist and rain, became lighter and a rapidly clearing sky gave us
the opportunity of seeing the wild beauty of the moor at its best.
Despite its loneliness and cheerlessness, there was a wonderful play
of color: the reds and browns of the broken granite, the purple blaze
of the heather, the vivid yellow of the gorse and the metallic green
of the whortle, all intensified by golden sunshine, have marvelously
transformed the somber tone of the moorland of scarce an hour before.
But where is the "forest"? Only stunted trees appear here and there,
or a fringe of woods along the clear streams; we learn that "forest"
once meant a waste, uncultivated tract of land, and in later days
has been applied to woodlands alone. We run for miles with no human
habitation in sight save an occasional cottage in a small, barren field
surrounded by stone walls. We come upon a large, attractive-looking
inn unexpectedly--though it ought not to be unexpected to find an inn
anywhere in England--the Two Bridges, situated near the head waters
of the Dart, here no more than a brawling streamlet. We leave the
car by the roadside and enter the homelike hall, where an array of
fishing-tackle makes clear the excuse for this pleasant hotel in the
moor. The day has been chilly and, strange to say, a fire flickers
in the grate. We are just in time for luncheon and a goodly number
of guests respond to the vigorous beating of the gong--that almost
universal abomination of the provincial English hotel. It appears that
the quiet and seclusion of Dartmoor is not without its attractions to
many people. We ourselves leave the pleasant inn with regret; we should
have liked a day's rest in the cozy ingle-nook.
[Illustration: IN SUNNY DEVON.
A view of the old town of Totnes from the upland road. Original
Painting by George Bowman, 1908 Royal Academy.]
The walls and battlements of Prince Town Prison soon loom in sight.
This was established in 1800 as a military prison for French soldiers,
and a few Americans were confined here in 1812. It then fell into
disuse until 1850, but for the half-century since it has served its
present purpose as a penal institution and has been greatly added to
from time to time.
An English writer says: "Dartmoor is so huge that one must be born
and spend a lifetime near it to really know it, and the visitor can
merely endeavour to see typical examples of its granite tors, its
peaty streams, its great stretches of boulder-strewn heather, and its
isolated villages." Evidently he must mean that it is huge in its
mysteries and its moods, for it is really only fourteen by twenty-two
miles--perhaps half as large as the average county in the United States.
At Tavistock we are well beyond the confines of the moor and follow a
fine road to Launceston, where we glance at the huge circular keep of
the castle and look longingly at the White Hart, which recalls only
pleasant memories. But we are bound for an enchanted land and, like
many a gallant knight of yore, we would hasten past "many-towered
Camelot" to the castle of the blameless king. The declining sun, toward
which we rapidly course, seems to flash across the Cornish hills the
roselight of the old Arthurian romance, and the stately measures of
the "Idyls of the King" come unbidden to our minds. But we soon have
something less romantic to think of, for in attempting a short cut
to Tintagel without going to Camelford, we run into a series of the
crookedest, roughest lanes we found in all England. These appear to
have been quite abandoned; in places mere ravines with myriads of sharp
loose stones and many long steep hills. But we push on and almost ere
we are aware, find ourselves in Tintagel village, which with its long
rows of boarding-houses hardly accords with one's preconceived romantic
notions. Then we catch a glimpse of the ocean out beyond the headland,
upon which is perched a huge, square-towered building--King Arthur's
Castle Hotel, they tell us--and thither we hasten. This hotel, only
recently completed, is built on a most liberal scale, though it can
hardly accommodate many guests at a time. The public rooms are most
elaborately furnished and of enormous size. The great round table in
the reading room is a replica of the original at Shrewsbury, at which,
declares tradition, King Arthur sat with his fifty knights. The guest
rooms are on an equally generous scale and so arranged that every one
fronts on the sea. The rates are not low by any means, yet it is hard
to conceive how such a hotel can be a paying investment.
After we reached the hotel, the long twilight still gave time to
contemplate the weird beauty of the surroundings and to explore the
ruins of the castle so famed in song and story. We scrambled down the
high headland, upon which the hotel stands, to the level of the blue
inlet of the sea, depicted in such a masterly manner in the painting
by Mr. Moran, the towering cliffs crowned by the fragmentary ruins
looming far above us. A path cut in the edge of the cliff leads to a
precarious-looking foot-bridge across the chasm and a still narrower
and steeper path hugs the face of the precipice on the opposite side
until a heavy oaken door is reached. This door, to which the old
caretaker in the cottage below had given me the key, opens into the
supposed site of King Arthur's castle. Only a few scattered bits of
masonry remain and these are probably of a later time than that of the
early Briton.
[Illustration: KING ARTHUR'S CASTLE, OFF TINTAGEL HEAD, CORNWALL.
From Original Painting by Thos. Moran, N. A.]
The spot is lonely and quite barren save a few patches of greensward
upon which were peacefully grazing a flock of sheep--one finds them
everywhere in Britain. I was quite alone--there were no other visitors
at that late hour and my companions had given up the dizzy ascent
before it was fairly begun--and I strove to reconstruct in imagination
the castle as it stood in the days of the blameless king. How the wild
old stories crowded upon me in that lonely twilight hour! Here, legend
declares--and I care not if it be dim indeed and questioned by the
wiseacres--was once the court of the wise and faultless Arthur, who
gathered to himself the flower of knighthood of Christendom and was
invincible to all attacks from without, but whose dominion crumbled
away before the faithlessness and dishonor of his own followers. Here,
perchance, the faithless Guinevere pined and sighed for her forsworn
lover and gazed on the sea, calm and radiant as it is even now, or saw
it lash itself into unspeakable fury upon the frowning bastions of the
coast. But, alas! how dim and uncertain is all that is left, and how
the tales vary save that they all center in the king! Little remains
in local tradition of all the vanished splendors of those ancient days
save that the king did not die; that in the form of a chough he haunts
the scenes of his glory and his downfall, and that he will come again--
But I am quite forgetting the flight of time, and with a lingering
look at the storied spot, I slowly descend. Then I climb to the more
extensive ruin on the landward side, much shattered but grim and
massive in decay. There must have been a connection between the castles
on either side of the great ravine, though it is hardly apparent how
this could have been. Perhaps the gap has widened much in the long
course of time. It is dusk when we return to the hotel and sit long
on the open terrace fronting the sea, contemplating the beauty of the
scene.
Never have I beheld a more glorious sunset than that which lightened
the wild Cornish coast and ocean on that particular evening. A dark
band of cloud lay low along the western horizon, with a clear,
opalescent sky above, and below a thin strip of lucent gold with
silvery clouds floating in it like fairy ships. Suddenly the sun
dropped from behind the cloud, which had obscured his full splendor,
into the resplendent zone beneath, flooding the sea, into which he
slowly sank, with a marvelous though evanescent glory. Then followed
all the indescribable color changes and combinations, which varied
momentarily until they faded into the dusky hues of a moonlit night.
It marked the close of a perfect day--clear and cool, with sky of
untainted blue and ocean as still and glassy as a quiet inland lake.
Not less inspiring was the scene that greeted us through our open
lattices in the morning--a sea steely blue in the distance, rippling
into bars of frosted silver near the shore, while the stern outlines
of the headlands were softened by a clinging blue haze. We lingered on
the legend-haunted ground until nearly noon and it was with keen regret
that we glided away from the pleasant hostelry back to the village and
past the old church on the headland, whose bells tolled without mortal
hands on the far-off day when the body of King Arthur was borne away to
sepulture in Glastonbury Abbey.
A fine upland road led us nearly due north from Camelford through
long stretches of moorland--or country almost as sterile as the
moors--diversified with great patches of gorse and scattered groups of
stunted trees. We encountered scarcely a village for a distance of
twenty-five miles, for we did not turn aside for Bude or for Stratton,
just opposite on each side of the road. The latter is said to be one
of the most unspoiled and genuinely ancient of the smaller Cornish
villages. At times we were within a mile or two of the ocean and caught
fugitive glimpses of blue expanses of quiet sea. Then the road sweeps
farther inland and the country improves in appearance, though it is
still Cornwall and Devon and far different from the sleek, prosperous
beauty of the Midlands.
[Illustration: OFF THE COAST OF DEVON.
From Original Painting by A. J. Warne-Browne.]
"The most exquisite town in England," writes an enthusiast of Clovelly,
but Clovelly's very quaintness has made it so widely known that it
hardly has a place in a chronicle that seeks rather the untrodden ways.
It is not possible for a motor or any other vehicle to descend the
steep, stone-paved streets, and about a quarter of a mile above the
town we left the car in an exceedingly prosperous-looking stable-yard
filled to overflowing with motors, carriages and chars-a-bancs.
Clovelly well deserves its reputation for the picturesque qualities
that have transformed it from an unpretentious fishing village, lost
among the clifflike hills, into a thronged tourist resort. Fortunately,
as yet there has been no attempt to modernize; no stucco-and-timber
hotel detracts from the antique flavor; the people who come to Clovelly
do not as a rule stay long. Large excursion steamers, usually
crowded, ply from Ilfracombe, and coaches and chars-a-bancs from
Hartland and Barnstaple bring troops of visitors. Coaching parties
come from Tintagel (round trip eighty miles) and one is sure to find
Clovelly crowded in season, especially if the day is fine. And so
we found it, literally thronged, a huge excursion steamer lying at
anchor in the harbor. There was a little disarray and confusion at the
pleasant New Inn--new in name only--evidently due to more patronage
than could easily be taken care of. As we waited for luncheon we looked
about at the collection of antique brass, copper, china and pottery
that almost covered the walls and crowded the mantelpieces and odd
corners about the inn. We were told that the landlady is a famous
collector and that many of the pieces are rare and valuable. A more
amusing if not less interesting feature of the house is the sentiment
expressed in halting doggerel, emblazoned in large red letters on
the walls and ceiling of the dining-room. It is good only from the
standpoint of exceeding badness, and its general tenor is to flatter
Americans, who no doubt constitute a large proportion of the guests.
The old, time-worn churches of England are past numbering and they came
to have an almost weird fascination for us. The tombs, ranging from the
artistic to the ghastly or grotesque, the old stones with their often
queer or even ridiculous epitaphs, the sculptures, the bosses, the
frescoes, the stained windows, the gargoyles and the oftentimes strange
history or still stranger legends connected with nearly every one--but
why prolong the list of curious attractions of these ancient fanes,
often quite peculiar in each case? Just before we entered Barnstaple we
turned into a byroad, and dropping down a hill of appalling steepness
and length, came to Tawstock Church, famed as the finest country church
in Devon--the "Westminster of the West Country," some enthusiast has
styled it. Though hardly deserving such a dignified characterization as
this, Tawstock Church is well worth a visit. Besides some remarkable
tombs and fine Elizabethan pews, it has a peculiar gallery curiously
wrought in vine and leaf pattern from black oak, and now used by the
bell-ringers to reach the tower. Tawstock Mansion, near by, appears
rather modern--a large building shining in a fresh coat of yellow
paint that gave it much the appearance of a summer hotel. The house
and church are located in a deep wooded valley and the towers of the
ancient gateway lend a touch of much-needed antiquity to the scene.
[Illustration: TAWSTOCK CHURCH, DEVONSHIRE.]
Barnstaple, like Bideford, while a very old town, has few old-time
relics now left. It has become a manufacturing town, its chief product
being Barum ware, an inexpensive grade of pottery. The Golden Lion
Inn, once a residence of the Earl of Bath, is famed as a place of
solid comfort, and still retains much of the gorgeous decorations done
by its former occupant. The poet Shelley had an odd association with
Barnstaple. When living at Lynton, after his marriage with Harriet
Westbrook, he came to Barnstaple and spent some time in bringing out a
pamphlet scurrilously attacking the chief justice who had sentenced to
prison the publisher of the works of Thomas Paine. One of the poet's
associates, who distributed the pamphlets, was sentenced to six months
in jail, and Shelley narrowly escaped by hastily leaving the town.
The road from Bideford through Barnstaple and Ilfracombe is rather
uninteresting, save the last few miles, which pass through wooded hills
and along deep verdant valleys. Ilfracombe is a resort town, pure and
simple, and we found few hotels on a grander scale than the Ilfracombe,
standing in beautiful grounds facing the sea, which murmured almost
directly beneath our open windows. It was a beautiful evening; the tide
was just receding from the jutting rocks scattered along the coast,
whereon the sea, even in its mildest moods, chafes into foam; and one
can easily imagine a most awe-inspiring scene when the angry ocean,
driven by a westerly wind, assails these bold, angular rocks. After
having visited every resort town of note in England, our recollection
is that of all, Ilfracombe is the most strikingly situated; nor do any
of them command views of a coast line more rugged and picturesque.
The rain was falling heavily when we came to Dunster on the following
day and the abbey church was gloomy indeed. And what can be gloomier
than an old church on a gray day, when the rain pours from the low-hung
clouds and sweeps in fitful gusts against the mossy gravestones
and crumbling, ivy-clad walls? A scene that renders one solemn and
thoughtful on almost any occasion becomes positively depressing under
such conditions. And though we recall Dunster Church with associations
not unpleasing in perspective, the surroundings were not altogether
pleasing at the time. We found the caretaker, a bent old woman, in the
church, but she informed us that there were really two churches and
that she had jurisdiction over only one of them. However, she conducted
us about the dimly lighted building, gloomy indeed from the lowering
skies without, and our recollection of her story of the quarrel that
resulted in the partition of the church has faded quite away. But we
do remember the rood screen which has fourteen separate openings, no
two wrought in the same pattern and altogether as marvelous a piece of
black-oak carving as we saw in England.
Aside from the abbey church, there are other things of interest in
Dunster, especially the market cross and the castle. The latter
overlooks the town from a neighboring hill and is one of the lordliest
fortresses in the West Country. The town lies in one of the loveliest
vales in Somersetshire and is famed for its beautiful surroundings.
This section of Somerset and Devon is rich in literary associations; at
Nether Stowey we pass the square, uncomfortable-looking house, close
to the roadside, where Coleridge lived for three years, beginning
in 1797. Indeed, it was in the autumn of that year that he made the
excursion with Wordsworth and Dorothy, during which the plan of the
"Ancient Mariner" was conceived. A few months before, while in a
lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Lynton, he had the dream which he
started to record in "Kubla Khan." This poem he had composed in his
dream, but while writing it down on awakening, a "person from Porlock"
interrupted, and when the poet essayed to write, not only the words but
the images of the vision had faded away, and the fragment of "Kubla
Khan" remains like a shattered gem. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy
came a little later to Alfoxden House, standing in a pleasant park
in the parish of Halford, and here the literary association between
Coleridge and Wordsworth became intimate and the little volume of
"Lyrical Ballads" was published jointly by them in 1798. Southey,
while storm-stayed by "an unwelcome summer rain" at the Ship Inn in
Porlock, wrote a sonnet in praise of the hills and glens. Hazlitt
and Charles Lamb at times joined their friends here for pedestrian
excursions among the hills. Nor can we forget Blackmore, whose "Lorna
Doone" turned the eyes of the English-speaking world toward the Exmoor
wastes. Shelley's escapade at Barnstaple we have already mentioned
and the cottage he occupied at Lynton still stands. No doubt much of
the weird beauty that pervades his work entered his soul amidst the
glorious surroundings--the sea, the hills and the vales--of the West
Country.
[Illustration: EVENING ON THE CORNISH COAST.
From Original Painting by A. J. Warne-Browne.]
A pause at Cleeve Abbey near at hand gave us perhaps a better idea of
the life of monastic days than any other we visited--and we saw all the
greater abbeys of Britain. In the majority of cases the abbey proper
had been destroyed, but the church escaped, often through purchase
by the citizens. At Cleeve the reverse has happened; the church has
totally disappeared, but the abbey buildings are nearly intact. As a
well-informed writer puts it:
"The whole life of the society can be lived over again with but little
demands on the imagination. We can see the dormitories in which they
slept, the refectory where they fed, the abbot's particular parlour and
the room for accounts, the kitchen, and even the archway through
which their bodies went out to the grave. The church suffered from
despoilers more than any other part of the abbey, and great is the
loss to architecture. Otherwise we get a community of the Middle Ages
preserved in all its essential surroundings, the refectory being in
particular a grand fifteenth-century hall." The ceiling of this great
apartment is of the hammer-beam pattern, the beams richly carved, and,
springing from oaken corbels, figures of angels with expanded wings.
It brings one near indeed to the spirit of monastic days--this gray
old ruin, through which sweep the wind and rain and where under foot
the grass grows lush and green as it grows only in England--the spirit
which the Latin legend over the gatehouse so vividly expresses,
quaintly rendered thus:
"Gate Open be
To honest folk as free."
And the gray-whiskered custodian, so rheumatic and feeble that his
daughter, a husky peasant woman, guides visitors about the abbey,
warmed up to us as we were about to leave and opened his heart about
the ruin in which he dwelt and which he seemed to love. He told us its
story in the broad West Country dialect and pointed out to us many
things of curious interest that we otherwise should have overlooked.
The sky is clearing; the low sun flashes along the hill-crests and
floods the Somerset landscape with ethereal beauty, which we drink in
as we skim swiftly along the smooth, wet road. We catch a final gleam
of the ocean at Weston-super-Mare and pass a long row of imposing
hotels. Then we are away for Bristol, the Queen City of the West
Country.
VI
ODD CORNERS OF THE WELSH BORDER
There are few English castles where the spirit of medievalism lingers
as at Berkeley and few that have darker deeds recorded in their long
annals of crime. It has had a strange fascination for me ever since I
read its story in my boyhood days, and the verse of the poet Gray had
given the castle a weird association in my mind:
"Mark the year and mark the night
When Severn shall echo with affright;
When shrieks of death through Berkeley's roofs shall ring,
Shrieks of an agonizing king."
It was therefore a keen disappointment to learn on arriving in the
quiet Gloucestershire town that it was not a day when the castle was
open to visitors. However, we do not regret this so much in retrospect.
The castle, grim, many-towered, ivy-clad, the very embodiment of the
days of chivalry, still lingers in memory, with nothing to disenchant
its mystery and romance. The old keeper at the imposing entrance was
evidently sincere in his regret that the rule might not be suspended
for our benefit--for indeed we had found such regulations not as the
laws of the Medes and Persians, but there was no such good fortune
here. "But do not fail," said he, "to view the castle from the meadows,
for no finer sight will you find in England."
If there be finer views of other English castles--a mere matter of
opinion, after all--there can hardly be a better viewpoint than the
Berkeley Meadows. It is a wide expanse of lawnlike meadowland lying
alongside the castle, which stretches out its battlemented and turreted
length against a background of majestic trees; from these rises the
square church-tower in stern outline against the bluest of English
June skies. The scene indeed savors more of enchantment than reality,
and the environment seems fitting to the historic pile where a king
was done to death and which Shakespeare mentions more than once. The
present owner is the twenty-seventh in direct descent from Robert
Fitzhardinge, to whom the manor was originally granted and who built a
large part of the present castle in the tenth century.
The view from the castle keep is described by one who has written much
of its legends and history: "Northwards and southwards the broad Vale
of Berkeley, rich with verdure of pasture and woodland, runs on into
the far distance. To the east and southeast are the Cotswolds, rising
abruptly here and there into bold, bare masses whose sides are
clothed with beech woods, and anon retiring into lovely valleys which
seem to invite the eye to range their recesses. On the west flows the
broad estuary of the Severn, studded with many a white sail; beyond it
are the dark wooded hills of the Forest of Dean, veiled by the smoke
of its iron-works and collieries. Under the walls of the castle, on
the north and west sides, the little town seems to nestle, as though
seeking shelter and protection from the grim old fortress, which was
probably its origin and has been its stay and support through so many
generations."
[Illustration: BERKELEY CASTLE.]
Berkeley has another claim to distinction aside from its castle, for
here is the cottage where lived Jenner, whose discovery of vaccination
placed under control the scourge that devastated Europe until quite
recent times. The famous physician is buried in the churchyard. The
church is of imposing dimensions, with stained glass better than the
average and elaborate tombs of the Lords of Berkeley Castle. The bell
tower is detached, standing some distance from the main structure.