LYNMOUTH
Lynmouth would have pleased Dr. Johnson, who held the opinion that the
most beautiful landscape was capable of improvement by the addition
of a good inn in the foreground. We have grown in these days beyond
mere inns, which are places the more luxurious persons admire from the
outside, for their picturesque qualities--and pass on. Dr. Johnson’s
ideal has been transcended here, and hotels, in the foreground, in the
middle distance, above, below, and on the sky-line, should serve to
render it, from this standpoint, the most picturesque place in this
country. One odd result of this complexion of affairs is that when
a Lynmouth hotel proprietor issues booklets of tariffs, including
photographic views of the place, he finds that all his choice pictures
contain representations of other people’s hotels. This is sorrow’s
crown of sorrow, the acme of agony, the _ne plus ultra_ of disgust.
Resting on the commanding terrace of the Tors Hotel, seated amidst its
wooded grounds like some Highland shooting-box, I can see perhaps eight
others; and down in the village a house that is not either a hotel, an
inn, or a boarding-house, or that does not let apartments, is a shop.
And I don’t think there is a shop that does not sell picture-postcards!
There are some few very fine villas, situated in their own grounds, on
the hillsides, but whenever any one of these comes into the market, it
also becomes a hotel.
And yet, with it all, there is a holy calm at Lynmouth. Save for the
murmur of the Lyn, the breaking of the waves upon the pebbly shore,
or the occasional bell of the crier, nothing disturbs the quiet. As
there are no advertisement-hoardings, so also there are no town or
other bands, minstrels, piano-organs, or public entertainers. Rows
of automatic penny-in-the-slot machines are conspicuously not here.
There is not a railway station. Nor is there anything in the likeness
of a conventional sea-front. The Age of Advertisement is, in short,
discouraged, and I am not sure that the ruling powers of the place have
not something in the way of stripes and dungeon-cells awaiting would-be
public entertainers.
But, lest it might be supposed that the advantages of Lynmouth end with
these negative qualities, let something now be said of its own positive
charms. It is daintiness itself, to begin with, and so small and neat,
yet so rugged and unexpected, that it is sometimes difficult to believe
in the _bona fides_ of its picturesqueness, which looks almost as if it
had been created to order. Yet the evidence of old prints proves, if
proof were wanting, that Lynmouth--what there was then of it--was as
romantic a hundred years ago as it is to-day. Indeed, an inspection
of old prints leads one to believe that, though there are more houses
now, the enclosing hills are more abundantly and softly wooded than
then. And, with the exception of the Rhenish tower built on the stone
pier, everything has been added legitimately, without any idea of being
picturesque.
That quaint tower, a deliberate copy of one on the Drachenfels, owes
its being to General Rawdon, who resided here from about 1840, and,
finding his æsthetic taste outraged by a naked iron water-tank erected
on posts, built this pleasing feature to harmonise with the scenery. An
iron basket, still remaining, was provided to serve for a beacon, and
now that Lynmouth is lighted by an installation of electric glow-lamps,
a light is shown from it every night.
But let us halt awhile to learn something of the rise of Lynmouth, as a
seaside resort. At the close of the eighteenth century, the place was
a little hamlet, dependent partly on a precarious fishing industry,
and partly on the spinning of woollen yarn. But presently, fishing
and spinning were at once and together in a bad way, and Mr. William
Litson, the largest employer of the spinners, found himself and his
people out of work. It chanced at this time that the new-born delight
in picturesque scenery, that had already set the literary men of the
age scribbling, had brought some few travellers even into the wilds
of North Devon. They fell into raptures over Lynton and Lynmouth:
raptures rather dashed by the discovery that there was no sufficient
accommodation for them. Litson, pondering upon these things, and
with wits sharpened by threatened adversity, took opportunity by the
hand, and in 1800, opening what is now the “Globe” inn as a hotel of
sorts, and furnishing the cottages on either side for the reception of
visitors, became the pioneer of what is now the great hotel-keeping
interest of the two towns. Litson prospered in an amazing degree. Early
among his patrons were Robert Coutts, famous in those days as a banker,
and the Marchioness of Bute; and the stream of visitors grew so rapidly
that by 1807 he was able to open the original “Valley of Rocks” hotel,
up at Lynton. The adjoining “Castle” hotel soon followed.
About the time when Lynmouth and Lynton were thus first rising into
favour, the poet Southey came this way, and wrote a description that
has ever since been most abundantly quoted. But it is impossible not to
quote it again, even though the comparison with places in Portugal is
uncalled for, absurd, and entirely beside the mark.
Thus, Southey: “My walk to Ilfracombe led me through Lynmouth, the
finest spot, except Cintra and Arrabida, which I have ever seen. Two
rivers join at Lynmouth; each of these flows down a combe, rolling
over huge stones, like a long waterfall. Immediately at their junction
they enter the sea, and the rivers and the sea make but one uproar.
Of these combes, the one is richly wooded, the other runs between two
high, bare, stony hills, wooded at the base. From the Summerhouse
Hill between the two is a prospect most magnificent--on either hand
combes and the river; before, the beautiful little village, which, I
am assured by one who is familiar with Switzerland, resembles a Swiss
village.”
[Illustration: LYNMOUTH AND THE TORS, FROM THE BEACH.]
And so with a host of others, to whom the hills “beetle,” the rocks
“frown savagely,” the sea “roars like a devouring monster.” And all
the while, you know, they don’t do anything of the kind. Instead, the
hills slant away beautifully up skyward, the rocks, draped with ivy and
moss and studded with ferns, look benignant, and the sea and the Lyn
together still the senses with their combined drowsy murmur, as you sit
looking alternately down upon the harbour or up at the wooded heights
from that finest of vantage points, the “Tors” terrace, after dinner,
when the lights in the village and those of the hillside villas twinkle
in the twilight, like jewels. The poetry of the scene appeals to all,
except perhaps Miss Marie Corelli, who, in the “Mighty Atom,” does not
appear to approve of it. This, of course, is very discouraging, but the
inhabitants are endeavouring to bear up; apparently with a considerable
measure of success.
“How soothing the sound of rushing water,” observed a charming young
lady, impressed with the scene. I agreed, but could not help remarking
that there were exceptions. “My dear young lady,” said I, noticing the
incredulous lift of her eyebrow’s, “you do not know the feelings of
a householder whose water-pipes have burst in a rapid thaw. Rushing
water, as it pours out of the bath-room, down the front stairs, does
not soothe _him_.”
The voice of the Lyn has, however, suggested less prosaic thoughts,
and has set many a minor poet, and many minimus poets, scribbling in
the hotel “visitors’” books. Nay, no less a person than the Reverend
William Henry Havergal, staying at the Lyndale Hotel, in September
1849, waking in the night and listening to that voice, harmonised it in
the following chant which he inscribed in the book then kept at that
establishment:--
[Illustration]
It is a beautiful anthem-like fragment, “like the sound of a great
‘Amen,’” and brings thoughts of cathedral choirs and deep-toned organs.
Havergal, of course, as a writer of devotional music, had a mind by
long use attuned to finding such a motive; but I am not sure that
another composer, with a bent towards secular music of a sprightly,
light-opera kind, might not, lying wakeful here, find a suggestion for
his own art in these untutored sharps and trebles.
The Lyn in its final series of falls in the semi-private grounds of
Glen Lyn, at the rear of the Lyndale Hotel, sounds a deeper note, and
comes splashing down with a roar by fern-clad rocky walls and between a
scatter of great boulders. A rustic bridge looks down upon the foaming
water, flecked with sunlight coming in patches of gold through the
overarching foliage.
No description of Lynmouth that has ever been penned gives even a
remote idea of what the place is really like. I care nothing for
Southey and his comparison with Cintra and Arrabida, for I have not
been to those places, and don’t want to go: resembling, I suspect,
in that disability, and in the disinclination to remedy it, most
other visitors, to whom that parallel has no meaning. Lynmouth is
really comparable with no other place. It is essentially individual
and like nothing but itself; or, at any rate, like nothing else in
nature. What it does really resemble is some romantic theatrical set
scene, preferably in comic opera: the extraordinary picturesqueness
of it seeming too impossible to be a part of real life. There is
the quaint tower at the end of the tiny stone jetty, there are the
bold, scrub-covered hills, with rocks jutting out from them, as they
rarely do except in the imagination of a scene-painter, and here
are the grouped little houses and cottages, mostly with the roses,
the jessamine, and the clematis that are indispensable to rural
cottages--on the stage. Even the very fishermen seem unreal. I don’t
believe--or at least find some difficulty in believing--that they,
really and truly, are fishermen, and almost imagine they must be paid
to lounge out from the wings on to the stage--I mean the sea-front--in
order to give an air of verisimilitude. They ask you, occasionally, it
is true, if you want a boat, but with the air of playing a part that
does not particularly interest them, and every moment you expect them
to break into song, after the manner of the chorus in comic-opera,
expressive of the delights of a life on the ocean wave, and the joys of
sea-fishing.
Or, to adopt the conventions of melodrama, as formerly practised
at the Adelphi, and still at Drury Lane; here you expect almost to
see the villain smoking his inevitable villainous cigarette (an
infallible stage symbol of viciousness), and, possibly in evening
dress, that ultimate stage symbol of depravity, shooting his cuffs
by the bridge that spans the Lyn; and on summer evenings the lighted
hotels down in the huddled little street look for all the world like
stage-hotels--abodes of splendour and gilded vice, whence presently
there should issue some splendid creature of infamy, to plot with
another villain, already waiting in his trysting-place, the destruction
of hero and heroine. But, lest I be misunderstood, I hasten to add
that all these expectations are vain things, and that villains really
require a much faster place than Lynmouth.
I have spoken already about the “fishermen” of Lynmouth, but, truth
to tell, that is but a conventional term, for sea-fishing here is not
the industry it is on most coasts, and the jerseyed persons who loll
about the harbour are more used to taking out and landing steamboat
excursionists, or accompanying amateur fishermen with lines on pleasant
days, than to enduring the rigours the trawler knows. Rock Whiting,
Bass, and Grey Mullet give the chief sport in the sea, and in the Lyn
are salmon, salmon-peel, and trout, as you may readily believe by
examining the trophies of sport with rod and line treasured by Mr.
Cecil Bevan, of the Lyn Valley Hotel.
[Illustration: LYNDALE BRIDGE.]
There was formerly, indeed, a herring fishery at Lynmouth. Westcote
speaks of it as existing in the time of Queen Elizabeth. “God,” says
he, “hath plentifully stored with herrings, the king of fishes, which
shunning their ancient places of repair in Ireland, come hither
abundantly in shoals, offering themselves, as I may say, to the
fishers’ nets, who soon resorted hither with divers merchants, and so
for five or six years continued, to the great benefit and good of the
country, until the parson vexed the poor fishermen for extraordinary
unusual tithes, and then, as the inhabitants report, the fish suddenly
clean left the coast.” They were not friends of the Establishment. But
after a while some returned, and from 1787 to 1797 there was such an
extraordinary abundance that the greater part of the catch could not
be disposed of, and vast quantities were put upon the land for manure.
Then they totally deserted the channel for a number of years; a fact at
that time regarded by many as a Divine judgment for thus wasting the
food sent. On Christmas Day 1811 a remarkable shoal appeared and choked
the harbour, and in 1823 another shoal paid a visit; but since then,
the herrings have given Lynmouth a wide berth.
[Illustration: LYNMOUTH, FROM THE TORS HOTEL.]
I have visited Lynmouth in haste and at leisure. To arrive hurriedly
and dustily, and to make a quick survey, and so hasten off, is
unsatisfactory. Under such circumstances you feel a pariah among
a leisured community who are cool and not dusty; and you do not
assimilate the spirit of the place. The utmost satisfaction in the way
of lazy enjoyment (it has been conceded by philosophers) is to watch
other people at work. That is why, to some minds, Bank Holidays, when
the entire population makes merry, are so unsatisfactory; there is no
toil to form the shadow in your bright picture of _dolce far niente_.
Now there is a rustic gallery, with a pavilion, where you can take
tea and be consummately idle, built out from the sloping wooded grounds
of the Tors Hotel, and thence you may, if so minded, spend the livelong
day watching the people immediately below, in the central pool of
Lynmouth’s life. Overhanging the road, you watch the holiday folk who
are taking it easy, and those others who are making such hard work
of it, rushing from place to place. And I, even I, looking down upon
perspiring dust-covered cyclists arriving, thank Providence that I am
not such as them: conveniently forgetting for the while that I have
been and shall be once more!
The “North” in North Devon raises ideas, if not of a cold climate, at
least of bracing air; but really, with the always up and always down
of the scenery, the rather more bracing atmosphere than that of South
Devon is forgotten, in the heated exertions of getting about.
Why do people so largely select torrid July and August for holidays?
For the most part it is a matter of convention, but in part because
by the end of July the schools have broken up. There remain, however,
large numbers of holiday-makers who are unaffected by school-terms
and would resent being thought slaves to convention. They can go
a-pleasuring when they please, yet they wait until the dog-days. Now
Lynmouth, in particular, and the North Devon coast, in general, are
exceptionally delightful in May and June. The early dews of morning,
the cool, fragrant thymy airs, that in July and August are dispelled
long before midday and give place to brilliant sunshine and a great
heat, which are in themselves enjoyable enough, but forbid much joy in
considerable exercise, remain more or less throughout the day in those
earlier months. September, too, when the fervency of summer mellows
into an autumnal glow, has its own particular charm.