CHAMBERCOMBE AND ITS “HAUNTED HOUSE”--BERRYNARBOR
The modern suburban extensions of ’Combe are devouring the rustic
lanes far in the rear, and the natural wildness of Devonian landscape,
that seems so untamable, is being pitifully bridled. New terraces of
cheap houses climbing unimaginable steeps, deploy their battalions of
“desirable residences” over the hills: each house with its pretentious
name--“Hatfield,” “Blenheim,” “Burghley,” maybe--their sponsors,
without humour themselves, the cause of much satiric humour in others
who chance by them. You must pass many such on the way to Chambercombe
(originally Champernowne’s Combe), one of the places no visitor to
Ilfracombe is bidden to miss seeing; Chambercombe being a still rustic
valley where there even yet nestles an ancient farmhouse, formerly a
manor-house of a branch of the Champernowne family, and long enjoying a
rather vague and ineffectual reputation as a “haunted house.”
Suddenly, passing “Champernowne Terrace,” the uttermost outpost of
’Combe, and a bankrupted mineral-water factory, you come to the
opening of Chambercombe; a road steeply descending, hollow, rutty,
with tall hedgerow elms--in a word, Devonian. Down at the bottom, the
eye rests gratefully upon a steep-roofed old whitewashed building,
enclosed within high and thick courtyard walls, and approached through
a gateway: the old home of those North Devon Champernownes, extinct,
equally with their South Devon namesakes of Modbury, long generations
ago. For many years it has been a farmhouse, and in all this time
its uncertain legendary fame has grown, so that now, by dint of its
nearness to the town, and of the constant stream of curious visitors
who plagued the very life out of the farming folk, the present
occupants have taken Opportunity by both hands and exploit the legend
to commercial ends; as the notice, with a generous profusion of capital
letters displayed at the gateway, discloses. Tea and refreshments may,
you read, be obtained, and even lodgings had, at Chambercombe Farm,
“With its Haunted Room And Coat of Arms Shown To Visitors.”
[Illustration: CHAMBERCOMBE.]
It is the only instance in which this explorer has observed ghostly
associations so thoroughly exploited; but, truth to tell, they are of
the vaguest. When a “ghost story” has many and diverse variants, you
instinctively discredit every one, and here the versions are many.
Most of them, also, are irreconcilable with the hard, uncompromising,
indisputable facts of building construction. For example, the most
popular variant, that which tells how, at some period unnamed, the
farmer discovered by accident the “haunted room,” is wildly wrong in
describing the appearance the house now wears, and has always worn.
According to this precious effort of a disordered imagination, the
farmer was seated one summer evening in the courtyard, lazily smoking
his pipe and thinking, with the typical farmer’s usual dissatisfaction
upon matters agricultural, while his wife was down at Ilfracombe (or
rather, “down _tu’_ Cume,” as we say in these parts) selling her
poultry, butter, and eggs. While thus occupied, he suddenly bethought
him of a hole in the roof, through which the rain leaked into his
wife’s store-room. He had promised her he would see to it, and, as he
went rather in fear of his “missus,” faced his chair round suddenly
and contemplated seeing to the business before her return. Now the
store-room window was the only one with a parapet in front, and
therefore easily distinguishable from the other four that looked down
from the roof on to the courtyard. But now (he had never before thought
of counting them) he totted up five windows. This was odd! He reckoned
up: “Our Sal’s bedroom--window lighting passage--store-room--our
bedroom: total four windows accounted for. What unsuspected chamber
did the fifth light? He settled that by calling some half-dozen of his
farm-hands. Together, with pick and spade, they entered the house and
ascended the stairs, and commenced operations on the staircase wall,
at a likely spot, where blows resounded hollow. Soon the cob wall
went down before the onslaught, and presently the farmer and his men
found themselves in a long, low room, hung with moth-eaten, mouldering
tapestry, whose every thread exhaled the moist rank odour of forgotten
years; black festoons of ancient cobwebs in the rattling casement and
round the carved work of the open cornice; carved oak chairs, wardrobe,
and round table, black too, and rickety, dust-covered, and worm-eaten;
the white ashes of a wood fire on a cracked hearthstone, and a bed,
whose embroidered hangings were drawn closely around the oaken posts.”
The farmer’s wife had by this time returned home, and was seen and
heard in the choking dust, urging her astonished husband, “if he were
a man,” to “dra’ them cuttens.” Thus impelled, he drew them--with
a trembling hand, be sure of that--and there, resting on the bed,
was disclosed an ancient skeleton. The woman fainted and her husband
carried her out. That night he saw to it that the mysterious room was
again securely walled up.
[Illustration: THE “HAUNTED HOUSE” OF CHAMBERCOMBE]
This is all very well, as an effort of the imagination, but it does
not, by any means, bear relation to the facts of the case. As the
accompanying illustrations of the old farmhouse show, there is not, nor
could there have been, a parapet, and there are but three windows in
the roof. Moreover, the “Haunted Room”--so to style it--is really only
an ancient hiding-hole (and a not very cleverly constructed hiding-hole
either) at the head of the staircase; a dark and cramped cranny
without a window, and too small ever to have contained a bed. The next
most popular story is to the effect that the skeleton of some unhappy
foreigner, murdered in long past years by wreckers, was found here; but
the two most plausible theories are that this was either a smugglers’
store, or the hiding-place, in an era of religious persecution, of
Roman Catholic recusants.
Near by, but not in any way connected with this hole, is the so-styled
Banqueting Room, anciently the principal apartment, now a bedroom; with
coved ceiling, a plaster pendant, and a band of plaster Renaissance
ornament. The shield of arms of the Champernownes, a lion rampant
within an engrailed bordure, is seen, carved in stone, over the
fireplace. The lower rooms are stone-flagged, and in one of them they
show you the corner where, according to legend, was the entrance to an
underground passage leading to Hele Strand, a mile distant!--the usual
preposterous legend. There was possibly a secret way into the valley at
the back, just as there is a defensible gateway in the front; for just
as the old lords of Chambercombe felt the necessity for defence, they
also provided for stealthy retreat when defence should become at last
hopeless.
Berrynarbor is one of those easily accessible places that no visitor
to Ilfracombe who claims to have done his duty can afford to neglect.
The village lies in a valley, three miles away, and, except for a
long stretch of allotment gardens, making a streak of squalor on the
hillside above, is a very pretty place. Its church, more imposing than
that of ’Combe itself, has been zealously stripped of much old carving;
but the family pew of the Bassets of Watermouth, with its fireplace and
comfortable seats, remains to show with what a degree of comfort the
squires, at any rate, took their devotions.
Westcote, so long ago as 1630, recorded the curious epitaph on one
Nicholas Harper, with its inevitable play upon the name:
Harper, the musique of thy life,
So sweet, so free from jarr or strife,
To crowne thy skill hath raysed thee higher,
And placéd thee in angels’ quier:
For though that death hath throwen thee down,
In Heaven thou hast thy harp and crowne.
In the chancel is a tablet to the memory of Mary Westcott, who died in
1648. Some curious verses compare her to a marigold:
This Mary-gold lo here doth shew
Marie worth gold lies neer below
Cut downe by death, the fair’st gilt flow’r
Flourish and fade doth in an hour.
The MARYGOLD in sunshine spread
(When cloudie) clos’d doth bow the head
This orient plant retains the guise
With splendid SOL to set and rise
Even so, this Virgin MARIE rose
In life soon nipt, in death fresh growes
With CHRIST her Lord shall rise againe
When shee shall shine more bright by farre
Than any twinkling radiant starre
For be assur’d that by death’s dart
MARY enjoys the better part.
An anagram follows, in this wise:
MARIE WESTCOTT
_Mors evicta tuta_,
and the representation of a yellow marigold concludes the curious
monument. Not the least curious part of it is the fact that these
verses do not commemorate a girl who died untimely, but a spinster aged
seventy.
The old farmhouse of Bowden, where Bishop Jewell, the apologist of the
Anglican Church, was born in 1522, remains. His defence of the newly
established church was at the time thought so admirable that it was
directed by the Government of Queen Elizabeth to be chained in the
parish churches of the kingdom.