THE NORTH WALK--THE VALLEY OF ROCKS--LEE “ABBEY”--WOODA BAY--HEDDON’S
MOUTH--TRENTISHOE--THE HANGMAN HILLS
And so at last to leave Lynmouth.
It is by no means necessary to take Lynton on the way to the Valley
of Rocks and the coast-walk to Wooda Bay and Heddon’s Mouth. The
cliff-path known as the North Walk avoids Lynton, and, climbing up
midway along the hillside, forms a secluded route of the greatest
beauty. It was cut in 1817 by a public-spirited Mr. Sanford. Until that
time, there was no path, and only the most hardy climbers, at the risk
of falling headlong into the sea, ever attempted to make their way by
this route. It is merely a footpath, and so not in any way injurious
to the wild, romantic nature of the scenery. Were some injudicious
person, or local authority, to conceive the idea of forming it into a
broad road, not Nature herself could, short of a convulsion, remedy
the scar that would be made for all the neighbourhood to see. Trees
cannot grow on this stony hillside, to hide such things; the great gash
made for the Lift, or Cliff Railway, which here runs at right-angles
up hill, being only by good fortune screened through ascending by a
route affording foothold for shrubs and undergrowth. It is now, indeed,
hidden in a degree those who saw the raw wound in 1890 dared not hope
for. Kindly Nature, dear, forgiving, long-suffering, immortal mother,
to whom we all come, weary, for rest at last, to your ample bosom, how
great soever be our enormities, you bear with them all and, smiling,
resume your way.
This rocky walk, winding past one grey crag after another, is rich
in towered and spired masses and jutting pinnacles. Sometimes they
rise up for all the world like pedestals rudely shaped to receive
statues; but they would need to be statues of heroic size and pose to
fit these surroundings. The eye ranges along the coast, past Castle
Rock and Duty Point, to the softly rounded masses of woods covering
the hillsides enclosing Wooda Bay; and only the restless, resistless
spirit of exploration forbids long lingering here and there, on those
occasional seats provided by the thoughtful Urban District Council that
rules the twin places, Lynmouth and Lynton, and perseveringly tries
to reconcile their jealousies. But one must needs rest awhile at that
point where the North Walk, bending to the left, enters the Valley of
Rocks. Here a convenient seat is placed, commanding a view backwards
to Lynmouth and the Foreland, and looking down from a sheer height on
to great emptinesses of blue, sunlit sea. Seagulls wheel and cry, or
poise suddenly, on idle extended pinions, whimsically like a cyclist
“free-wheeling”; excursion steamers, to and from Ilfracombe and other
resorts, go by, and in the still August sea leave more than mile-long
creamy wakes of foam traced in the blue, until they become indistinct
in distance.
An elderly gentleman, who had hobbled up the path on gouty feet, sat
down beside me. Like two true Britons, we sat there a minute or two
together, each ignoring the presence of the other. He glanced a greatly
impressed eye upon the short, steep and slippery slope of grass that
alone intervened between his side of the seat and a sheer drop of some
two hundred feet into the sea. “It would not be difficult to commit
suicide here,” he at length remarked.
Was he wearied to extinction with his gout, and so determined here and
now, to make an end? Not at all: it was a purely speculative thought.
“The easiest thing in the world,” I replied; “and one person might
readily push another over, and no one----”
“Yes, yes,” he rejoined with alacrity, and relapsed into thoughtful
silence a moment. Then, suddenly consulting his watch: “Time I was
moving off for lunch.”
Now I don’t by any means, you know, regard myself as a very
desperate-looking person, yet obviously that unlucky remark moved that
nervous old gentleman to go off in quest of his lunch at a very early
hour. I suppose he imagined himself to have experienced a very narrow
escape. “One _does_ read such dreadful things in the papers,” I hear
him, in imagination, saying at lunch; “you never know what lunatic you
may meet in some lonely spot.” True.
[Illustration: THE VALLEY OF ROCKS.]
And so, into the Valley of Rocks. There was a time when every writer
who happened upon the Valley of Rocks felt himself obliged to adopt an
attitude of awe, and to ransack the dictionary for adjectives to fitly
represent the complicated state of mind into which he generally lashed
himself. That time has naturally been succeeded by a revulsion of
feeling; and there is not a guidebook at the present day which does not
apologise for those old transports of feeling, and declare the Valley
of Rocks to be really nothing remarkable. But that later attitude is
just as absurd as the earlier. The valley is very fine indeed, and its
wildness is only impaired by the broad white ribbon of road that runs
through it, and will not let you forget that here, too, however craggy
and precipitous the piled-up masses of granite on either side, and
however remote the feeling, actually the most up-to-date civilisation
is very near indeed.
This is what was written of the Valley of Rocks in 1803: “The heights
on each side are of a mountainous magnitude, but composed, to all
appearances, of loose, unequal masses, which form here and there rude
natural columns, and are fantastically arranged along the summits, so
as to resemble extensive ruins impending over the pass.”
So far, this is literally true, and the name of Castle Rock, given
to one of these stony heights, grimly coroneted with masses of rock,
is excellently descriptive. The rocks so closely resemble towers and
battlements that the stranger is often deceived into thinking them to
be real masonry. A companion rocky hill, isolated midway in the valley,
and called “Ragged Jack,” from its notched outline, is almost equally
castellated.
It is only when the account already quoted proceeds to dilate upon the
“awful vestiges of convulsion and desolation presenting themselves,
and inspiring the most sublime ideas,” that we do not quite follow,
and we suspect this was the outcome of much competitive writing; each
succeeding writer striving to pile phrase upon phrase, very much after
the manner in which the rocks of the Valley of Rocks are heaped upon
one another.
The “Devil’s Cheese-wring” is the name of one of these curious stony
piles, now partly overgrown with ivy. The Valley and the cheese-wring
are mentioned in “Lorna Doone,” a romance no one can escape in North
Devon, strive though he may; although, really, the Doone Valley and
almost every incident of that story, are in, and concerned with,
Somerset.
A wind-swept little wood is almost the only sign of vegetation, except
the coarse grass, in this wild valley of grey stones; but it is the
appalling heat, rather than the wind, which troubles the tourist in his
passage, and he is often fain to shelter awhile in the welcome shade
of some huge crag; thinking, as he does so, of that eloquent passage
in Isaiah, “The shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” And really,
the Valley of Rocks is very like the parched, stony land of Palestine,
which suggested the phrase.
It is at the close of some sultry summer day that the Valley of Rocks
looks its very best. The irradiated sky, throwing into silhouette the
great masses of rock, has the effect of magnifying and glorifying them.
On such summer evenings, the more youthful among the holiday-makers
set out from Lynton, and there, on the rugged hillside of the Castle
Rock or Ragged Jack, you may see the white frocks of the girls, looking
more than a little like the white-robed figures of those Druids, who,
according to old Polwhele, used this place of desolation as a temple,
and carved the roughly shaped rock-pillars and granite hollows into
“rock idols” and “sacrificial basins.” On the summit of Castle Rock
a “white lady” of a different kind may be seen; a curious figure,
resembling a woman, formed by a huge slab of rock fallen between two
upright masses. The resemblance is sufficiently close to startle
strangers coming this way at night.
The road goes under the rugged hills, past the little inlet of
Wringcliff Bay, overhung with ferny precipices, to a gate leading into
the domain of Lee Abbey. All kinds of wheeled traffic may go through by
lodge and gate, except motor vehicles--they are forbidden.
Lee Abbey, occupying the site of the old manor-house of the Wichehalse
family, is an abbey only in name and venerable only in appearance,
having been built in 1850. But although “Abbey” be merely a fanciful
name, and although there yet remain people who have seen the building
of the entire range of mansion and outworks, the ivied entrance-tower
and enclosing walls have so truly mediæval an appearance, that many
people are entirely deceived, and, not seeking to inform themselves,
dream wonderfully romantic dreams of “the old monks” and their
religious life in this secluded spot, and live ever afterwards in happy
ignorance of the deception. Lee “Abbey” is, in fact, nothing more than
a very charming country residence, designed to fit an exceptionally
beautiful site.
High above it is the woody hill with look-out tower overhanging that
spot on Duty Point called “Jennifrid’s Leap,” of which we have already
heard, and down below is the loveliest little bay--Lee Bay--with
Wooda Bay opening out beyond it, and the little tumbled headland of
Crock Point and the swelling, scrub-covered hillside of Bonhill Top
in between. To style the little promontory Crock Point is entirely
correct, for it was the scene of a landslip somewhere about 1796, when,
one Sunday morning, the hillside fields, with their standing crops
of wheat, suddenly slid down to the sea in utter ruin. This was due
partly to the percolation of landsprings acting upon the clay, and the
clay-digging that had for some while been in progress, for shipment
to Holland. The names, “Crock Point” and “Crock Meads,” probably allude
to this old digging for pottery uses.
[Illustration: LEE “ABBEY.”]
Lee Bay looks like the choicest site in some delectable Land of Heart’s
Desire. Down goes the road, through another gate and past the most
entirely picturesque and well-constructed lodge I have ever seen, and
so out of this private domain. Here a shady valley welcomes the heated
traveller; a valley where everything but the generous trees, and the
cool shade they spread, is in miniature. A little stream comes running
swiftly down from the hilltops, as though it, too, were eager to enter
from sunburnt heights into this place, where mossy tree-trunks radiate
a welcome coolness, and hart’s-tongue ferns grow in lichened walls and
look refreshing. The little stream presently falls over a ledge of rock
and becomes a little waterfall, whose purring voice fills the narrow
space; and everything is delightful. And there are not any of those
horse-stingers, which generally infest the most desirable spots and,
instead of confining themselves strictly to horse-stinging, interfere
with inoffensive explorers.
The tiny bay that opens out from this twilight lane is a quiet spot,
where boulders are scattered about amid the sand and shingle, with that
look of studied abandon customary in stage-carpenters’ versions of the
seaside; and surely we can give no higher praise than that! It is a
spot where one might fitly converse with some not too forward young
mermaid (keep your eye off her tail, and such, by all accounts, should
be presentable enough); to be auditor of strange, uncanny legends; a
thousand fearful wrecks “full fathom five,” and dead-men’s bones and
drowned treasure.
But for tales of drowned treasure, or “money sunk” and lost, which,
after all, is much the same to the owner of it--one need not go far,
nor seek the dangerous society of mermaids. Wooda Bay, yonder, across
the intervening neck of land, has a modern story of some interest.
It was somewhere about 1895 that Benjamin Greene Lake, of the London
firm of solicitors, Lake and Lake, conceived the idea of “developing”
this secluded and extremely lovely spot, and of making it, as it
were, a newer Lynmouth. He purchased much land, caused many roads to
be made to the bay, and built an elaborate timber landing-stage for
steamers. A few houses were indeed built here and there: among them the
“Glen” Hotel, but Wooda Bay has not developed to any extent, in the
building-estate sense. How many thousands of pounds were lost here,
seems uncertain; according to some accounts, £25,000, or by others,
much more. Unfortunately, this was one of Benjamin Greene Lake’s
many speculations financed with other people’s money--without their
knowledge or consent. He was sentenced in January 1901 to twelve years’
imprisonment, for converting trust funds to his own use. He had in
various projects made away with no less than £170,000 of his clients’
money.
So there was an end of this great development idea. Only a few
scattered houses and the roads gashed in the hill-tops remain to tell
of it, for the sea speedily washed away every fragment of the timber
pier.
The name of Wooda Bay, therefore, falls ill on the ears of not a
few defrauded persons. It is a pity, for it is one of the loveliest
bays on an exceptionally lovely coast. The Post Office authorities
have adopted the new-fangled spelling, “Woody,” instead of “Wooda,”
as appears by the tree-shaded post-office here; and the Lynton and
Barnstaple Railway, which has a station for it, set down in a far-off
wilderness, appears to spell the name, with a fine air of impartiality,
in both styles. But the old rustic Devonian way was “Wooda”; a form
characteristic of innumerable place-names throughout the country, and
exemplified near by, in “Parracombe,” “Challacombe,” “Fullaford,”
“Buzzacott,” and innumerable others.
Delightful lanes lead round the shores of the bay, amid woods, with
here and there a waterfall; notably at a point where a bridge carrying
a lane over a little stream is inscribed Inkerman Bridge, 1857.
Near the shore is the unpretending manor house of Martinhoe: the church
of that parish being situated high above, away among the wild commons
of a little-visited _hinterland_. It was here and at Trentishoe, many
years since, that the future Bishop Hannington, who met a martyr’s
fate in 1885 in the wilds of his African diocese, was curate. He
dressed the part unconventionally, in a manner fitting a neighbourhood
where there were no Dorcas Societies, mothers’ meetings, or any of the
quaint machinery of a modern parish. Only rough farmers and their men,
and wild and unfrequented footpaths formed everyday experiences. The
typical curate would have soon found his conventional dress very much
out of place. Hannington wore Bedford cord knee-breeches of a yellow
hue, yellow Sussex gaiters with brass buttons, and great nailed boots
that would have suited a ploughboy. A short jerkin of black cloth and a
clerical waistcoat that buttoned up the side gave just a professional
hint. In this costume, covered with the surplice, of course, he would
take the services as well; not from any eccentricity, but simply
because the conditions of these rustic parishes demanded it. They
demanded much walking, too. “I see you’ve got fine legs,” Dr. Temple,
the rather grim Bishop of Exeter, said: “mind you run about your
parish.”
Over the wooded hill called Wringapeak, the way now lies on to Heddon’s
Mouth.
[Illustration: WOODA BAY.]
There is no hint of monotony in this grand stretch of coast scenery.
Here nature is full of resources and surprises, and each cliff-profile,
valley, wooded hillside, or little bay is strikingly different from
the last. Leaving Wooda Bay behind, having already, as you think,
tasted every variety of scenic splendour, yet another aspect of these
boundless resources is revealed, in an exquisite wood of dwarf
oaks. Through this delightful boscage, delightful in itself and in the
shade it gives on fervent days, the way lies, as a grassy path. Great
grey boulders, covered with lichen, show on either side, in the half
light, and the foliage of the oaks grows in wonderfully large lustrous
leaves, by favour of this wonderful climate. It is all so quiet. Few
people are ever met here; but, here and there, at infrequent intervals
one finds a retired villa, three-parts hidden behind the shrubs of its
ample grounds. One such you pass, and see amid the woodland trees a
little tombstone to a pet dog; “‘Bruiser,’ a good dog”: concise, yet
all-comprising.
When rounding successive points, new and ever more beautiful views
are disclosed, and sublime thoughts rise, but they do not find full
expression in that form, because of the loose stones and fragments of
rock that everywhere prodigally strew the cliff-paths. Midway between
Wooda Bay and Heddon’s Mouth, a lovely waterfall comes spouting down
the face of the cliff, in a little bight, the sides of it fringed with
moss and ferns, and at the foot a tangle of trees and bushes that
have found a precarious foothold. Here fragments of rock, like some
prehistoric rubbish-heap, threaten unstable ankles.
These cliffs are simply huge masses of loosely compacted
rubbish--laminated stone embedded in ochreous, friable earth--held
together largely by surface vegetation: gorse, grass, and rock-plants,
and in places the hillsides resemble engineers’ spoil-banks.
But the horned breed of sheep that browse here keep a wonderful
foothold, in places where no human being would dare trust himself on
the slopes, covered with slippery grass. The cliff-path is usually
solitary, and the occasional, nearly human cough of these only living
creatures is therefore at first somewhat startling, in its apparently
half-apologetic note, like that of some Paul Pry, who “hopes he don’t
intrude.” Their clattering walk along the loose flakes of stone, so
plentifully strewn about, is oddly like unseen people roughly handling
piles of dinner-plates.
[Illustration: HEDDON’S MOUTH.]
Presently Heddon’s Mouth bursts upon the view, with all the force of a
revelation. To observe the coast-line from the deck of a vessel--for
example, from one of the big steamers that pass quite close in, on
the way to Ilfracombe--may seem (and is) a luxurious way of seeing
these cliffs and their openings. No foot-soreness, no scrambling amid
incredible rocks: only a patronising passing in review from an easeful
attitude of observation. But then, strangely enough, this majestic
succession of headlands, of bays, and “mouths” is flattened and
fore-shortened and depreciated in a degree incredible to those who have
not tried both methods. Heddon’s Mouth, for example, looks by no means
remarkable from the sea. But viewed from either above or below, on
land, its grandeur is exceptional. From this cliff-path on High Veer,
whence you first see the deep and narrow valley, or gully, or, as a
Central American might say, “cañon,” you look far up the valley in one
direction, and in the other out to sea. The hills on either side are
not rocky. They impress rather by their enormous size and simplicity
of outline. Shelving down steeply to where the Heddon flows at the
bottom, only an occasional outcrop of rock stands up. For the rest,
they are clothed in patches and streaks with bracken and with a short,
wiry innutritious grass, and very largely strewn from top to bottom
with countless thousands of tons of rocky rubbish, blue-grey in general
effect of colour, and in appearance like the refuse on the tip banks
of mines. Oddly enough, such a generous distribution of waste material
does not help to spoil the scenery. The hillsides end, seaward, in
grey, red and yellow-brown cliffs, where an old limekiln, like a stone
blockhouse fort, lends a specious air of historic assault and battery
to the scene. Here the Heddon stream comes trickling down among the
boulders of the beach; sometimes indeed, when thunderstorms have vexed
the uplands, swirling down in a coffee-coloured tumult and staining a
calm sea for a long distance out.
[Illustration: “HUNTER’S INN.”]
Winding footpaths lead up the lonely valley and through a wood, and
then conduct to a well-known hostelry in these parts, the Hunter’s Inn.
For many long years this was a picturesque thatched house, but it was
burnt down at last, in 1895, and the new “Hunter’s Inn,” although it is
built very charmingly and in good taste, and really is as picturesque
as the one it replaces, has not yet existed long enough to compel the
affections of the sentimental. There is a nameless something in these
things, an elusive flavour, an unexpected feeling, it may be, that the
old inn was picturesque by accident, as it were, and was the natural
product of its era and surroundings, while the new was created to be
self-consciously pretty. It is a favourite resort of anglers, who,
except in summer, when pedestrians and carriage-parties come this way,
have the inn and the whole valley very much to themselves, for there is
no neighbourly village and Trentishoe is a mile distant, half-way up
one of the steepest of hills.
Trentishoe has a church of the Early English extremely rural type, with
a little insignificant tower; but, although it possesses this church
of its own, no one would accuse it of being a village. Two cottages by
the church, a little group half-way up hill, and another little group
below, by the Heddon, constitute Trentishoe.
The moorland to which the traveller comes is the wild windy waste of
Trentishoe Down and Holdstone Down, considerably over a thousand feet
above the sea, scorching and drouthy in summer and ferociously cold in
winter; but these disadvantages, each in its season, have not prevented
hopeful, would-be sellers of building-sites from erecting the usual
notices of “this desirable” land to be on offer. It has come to this at
last, that all land is in land-agents’ jargon, “desirable,” just as,
conventionally, a naval or military officer is “gallant,” members of
Parliament are “honourable,” and barristers “learned”: to name but a
few of those tags and labels that nowadays mean so little.
[Illustration: TRENTISHOE CHURCH.]
Few are those who explore to the right hand on this upland, where
Trentishoe Barrow seems to witness that, however _un_-desirable the
site may really be for residences, Prehistoric Man found it eminently
suitable as a burying-place. The “Great Hangman,” the crowning height
of these cliffs (1187 ft.), obtains its ill-flavoured name from an
ignorant perversion of _Pen an maen_: the old Cornu-British for “the
Hill of the Stone,” namely, a rude, post-like monolith, standing
something over five feet high. The “Pen” was lost in course of time
and “an-maen” became by degrees “Hangman,” when the legend that now
attaches to the stone was duly invented to account for the name.
According to this thoroughly unveracious story, which old Fuller,
who does not appear to have disbelieved it, no doubt heard from the
peasantry, a sheep-stealer was crossing the hill with a sheep slung
over his back, and sat down here to rest awhile, and, doing so, the
sheep in its struggles slipped, and the rope tightening round the
man’s neck, he was strangled. Two difficulties, however, meet us
here (supposing, for the moment, we take this tale seriously)--(1)
How the sheep-stealer could have sat down to rest on a post over
five feet high, and (2) How this strangling accident could possibly
in any way have happened. Probably we may be met with the reply
that the standing-stone is merely a monument of the affair, but the
final quietus should be given the legend by the fact that there are
numerous tales identical in every respect, all over England: and it is
unthinkable that sheep-stealers were always being accidentally hanged
in such numbers--and in a manner demonstrably impossible.
This region between Heddon’s Mouth and Great Hangman Point is without
doubt the most inaccessible nook along the coast. Roads avoid the
neighbourhood of the gigantic cliffs that for the most part go sheer
down into the sea, without sands or beaches at their base, six or
seven hundred feet. And the combes, mouths, and valleys, that here and
there let down some streams to the sea, are, if on a smaller scale
than the gorge of Heddon’s Mouth, even more rugged and difficult of
exploration. Sherracombe--or “Sherry-come-out,” as the fishermen name
it--is particularly notable for its stream that, rushing down this
cleave in the hills, pours out in a fall of seventy feet over the
rock-face. Somewhat east of it, over the hillside and down a perilous
climb, is “Wild Pear Beach,” a lonely spot overhung with brambles and
hawthorn bushes: the haws upon the thorns in autumn being the “wild
pears” in question.
The Great Hangman ends in Blackstone Point and beach; a savage spot,
now absolutely solitary, but once the scene, together with the
neighbouring cliffs, of busy mining operations. Combemartin, round the
next bend of coast, was for centuries famed for its silver mines, and
in a less degree for its lead, iron, and copper; and here also rich
lodes were evidently discovered at some remote period, for the cliffs
are honeycombed with tunnels and caves excavated in the pursuit of
wealth. No road exists to these old excavations, and the rock and ore
extracted must either have been shipped off by long-vanished stagings,
or hoisted hundreds of feet above by ropes. One of these tunnels
extends nearly 350 feet into the rock, and with a plentiful supply of
matches it is possible to stumble along it to a great distance. But
scrambling in these wilds, in a climate such as this of Devonshire,
is an undertaking of the most exhausting kind, and not to be embarked
upon by any except the agile or the robust. This explorer, at any
rate, is not likely to forget the scramblings up and scramblings down
involved, in company with showers of the loose stones that encumber the
hillsides; nor the astonishment exhibited at West Challacombe Farm on
beholding a stranger, stumbling upon the place by accident, on the way
to Combemartin.
There are remains in this old farmstead of a vanished importance, both
in the thick walls carefully disposed and loopholed for defence, and in
the old porch surmounted by a defaced coat of arms and the word “Pruz.”
It is said to have been the manor-house of a family of that name, long
ago extinct, or its identity lost in the debased form, “Prowse.”
And so at last, steeply--always steeply up or down in these parts--down
a typical Devonshire lane to Combemartin, meeting on the way a truly
Devonian farm-labourer, who remarked of the sultry heat that it was,
“Law bless ’ee proper St. Lawrence weather.”
“St. Lawrence weather?”
“Ees, fay; braave an’ hot, sure.”
“But why St. Lawrence?”
“Aw, then; daunt ’ee knaw? St. Lawrence wer’ king o’ th’ idlers, he
wer’.”
But why St. Lawrence should have that unenviable distinction is more
than I can tell. There is, at any rate, an obvious connection between
hot weather and the gridiron martyrdom of St. Lawrence.
“Lazy as David Lawrence’s dog,” is said to be a Scottish phrase: the
“Lawrence” in this instance being originally an imaginary “Larrence”
who presided over the indolent. In Essex, on the other hand, your
typical lazybones is “Hall’s dog”: _e.g._ “you’re like Hall’s dog, who
was too lazy to bark.”