LEE--MORTE POINT--MORTHOE AND THE TRACY LEGEND--WOOLACOMBE--GEORGEHAM--
CROYDE--SAUNTON SANDS--BRAUNTON, BRAUNTON BURROWS, AND LIGHTHOUSE
The way out of Ilfracombe to Lee, for the pedestrian, is through the
Tors Walks, and so by clearly defined cliff paths for two miles.
The carriage road leads past Ilfracombe parish church, and, turning
to the right, goes up hill to Slade. Finally, having climbed to an
extravagant height, it plunges alarmingly down, and still down, steep
and winding, through a luxuriant valley, where you encounter the hot
steamy air, like entering a conservatory. Fuchsias in full-bloom take
the place in the hedgerows generally occupied by privet, thorn, or
blackberry-bramble, for this is the locally famed “Valley of Fuchsias,”
where frost comes rarely and the keenest winds are robbed of their
sting. At the foot of this descent, the village of Lee is gradually
disclosed; a graceful little Early English Church, built in 1836, the
old Post Office, where visitors do most resort for tea, a few clusters
of cottages, and then the sea, furiously rushing into a little rocky
bay, or calmly lapping among the rocks, or retired at low tide,
leaving exposed a thick bed of seaweed that sends up a strong bracing
scent; all according to the mood and circumstances of the moment. A
strikingly handsome hotel--the “Manor Hotel,” standing amid lawns and
gardens, for it was once the manor-house--occupies the middle of the
tiny bay, and is the resort of those who like to be within easy reach
of Ilfracombe, and yet out of its exuberant life; and that is all there
is of Lee. The coastguard path clambers round to Bull Point lighthouse,
and there is a steep and rocky, but hopeful-looking, lane on the
left which promises a short cut for the stray cyclist to Morthoe.
Appearances are deceptive, and, quite a long way up hill, the lane
ends and the aggrieved stranger finds himself in an almost trackless
succession of fields of oats. Negotiating these with what patience he
may, and floundering through the fearsome mud of the two farmyards
(Heaven send it be not wet weather!) of Warcombe and Damage Bartons,
he comes at length to a road, which, to his dismay, he finds is a
private road to Bull Point lighthouse. From it there is no exit towards
Morthoe save through a formidable padlocked gate eight feet high, but
a notice (on the outer side of the gate only, and therefore likely to
be overlooked by the raging cyclist within) directs those who want to
drive or ride to the lighthouse to call for the keys at a neighbouring
cottage. As for the lighthouse, it is own brother to dozens of other
modern structures of the kind, and was built in 1874. It was built
especially to guard against the dangers of Morte Point, and in
addition to its occulting light has a lower fixed red beacon on the
west, to mark the position of Morte Stone. A reef-strewn indentation,
known as Rockham Bay, separates this spot from Morte Point.
Morte Point does not impress me, and although I have every wish to
“write it up” to its grim name--as every journalist who properly
understood what is expected of him would most assuredly do--I cannot
see the grimness of it; only a projecting tongue of land that runs
down to the sea and ends in low, insignificant cliffs, with a chaotic
scatter of formless rocks projecting from the waves, and the “Morte
Stone,” rather larger than the others, seaward. And there are, you
know, squalid little gardens of the allotment type in the fields, and
Morthoe village itself is so commonplace that the tragical names,
“Death Point,” “The Hill of Death,” seem absurdly misapplied. But
Morte Point is a great deal more deadly than it looks, and although
the landsman who sees with his own vision, rather than at second hand,
may slight the name, seafaring men dread it more than the really
magnificent spectacular bulk of Hartland Point. It is not the size, but
the awkward situation, of Morte Point, together with the currents which
set about it, that make it dangerous to shipping. The removal of Morte
Point is, naturally enough, beyond the powers of man, but it should at
any rate, in these days of high explosives and engineering skill, not
be impossible to abolish the isolated rock of Morte Stone, in spite of
the ancient sardonic jest that the only person to remove it will be the
man who can rule his wife.
Morthoe (locally “Morte”) village is a wan, desolate-looking collection
of a few houses on the cliff-top, overlooking the wide expanse of
blue sea and yellow sands of Woolacombe Bay. It can never have worn
anything but a stern, stark, weather-beaten appearance, but that
is giving way in these times to something even less attractive;
commonplace plaster-fronted houses, that would not pass muster in even
one of the less desirable London suburbs, having sprung up around the
ancient weatherworn church, while a grocer’s shop, styling itself
“stores,” looks on to the churchyard. At a place named so tragically
“Morthoe,” you do most ardently demand that the scene be set somewhat
in accordance with the ominous name. The stranger does not insist upon
a mortuary full of shipwrecked sailors, as (so to say) a guarantee
of good faith, but he does resent, most emphatically, the sheer
commonplace that dashes his anticipations remorselessly to extinction.
The ancient family of Tracy, associated closely with Barnstaple, and
with many another locality in North and Mid Devon, are mentioned in
histories of the neighbourhood as early as the beginning of the twelfth
century. Ever after the murder of Thomas à Becket in 1170, in which
William de Tracy bore a part, the Tracys were said, in the wild legends
of old, to have always “the wind in their faces.” The belief provided
a rough rhyme, and satisfied a queer idea of retributive justice by
which root and branch alike of that unfortunate family suffered for
the acts of one who it appears was not himself, after all, of that
race: having been a de Sudeley by birth, and only assuming the name of
Tracy after his marriage with Grace, daughter of Sir William de Tracy.
The legends that have gathered like the incrustation on old port-wine
bottles, round the assassination of Becket and the after-history of
the four knights who murdered him, tell how Tracy fled to Morthoe and
passed the rest of his life in prayers and penitence, but it seems to
be fully established that he fled the country and died three years
later, in Calabria; after having, according to a yet further variant,
thrice unsuccessfully attempted to make pious pilgrimage to the Holy
Land, and being beaten back on every occasion by adverse winds.
[Illustration: MORTHOE.]
The legend associating the assassin with Morthoe would appear to have
been invented to account for the ancient altar-tomb, covered with an
inscribed slab of black marble, bearing the name of one William de
Tracy, that still stands in the south chapel of the old church. There
was not, in the days when this tale originated, the disposition to
criticise any story that imaginative persons might choose to tell.
Research, for the purpose of recovering facts obscured by lapse of
time, was unthinkable in the days when travel to the repositories of
learning could be undertaken only at great risks and incredible cost;
and so, what with both the will and the power wanting to arrive at
mere facts, many an incredible tale has been started on its career.
It seems, in this instance, never to have occurred to the people of
Morthoe, who long accepted this story, that among the numerous Tracys
with whom they were in old times surrounded, there must have been more
than one William. William, indeed, appears to have been a favourite
name among them. In short, the man whose tomb remains here was a Tracy
who from 1257 to 1322 was rector of Morthoe. He thus died close upon a
hundred and fifty years later than Becket’s assailant.
Remains of the incised figure of a priest are yet traceable on the
tomb, together with an inscription which has been deciphered, “Syre
Guillaume de Tracy, gist ici. Dieu de son alme eyt merci.” The
interior of the tomb was rifled long ago. In the quaint description
by old Westcote, who wrote in 1620, “He rested in ease until some
ill-affected persons, seeking for treasure, but disappointed thereof,
stole the leaden sheets he lay in, leaving him in danger to take cold.”
This Early English church with aisleless nave and two chapels, has
few other memorials, none of them ancient; but many of the old carved
bench-ends remain, the balance of them being imitations, carved
locally, when the church was restored in 1857. In recent years the
east windows of chancel and north and south chapels have been filled
with beautiful stained glass, designed by Henry Holiday, and the space
above the chancel-arch decorated in gold and coloured mosaic, with four
stiffly decorative angels in the Burne-Jones convention, by Selwyn
Image. The dangers of Morthoe, not only to seafaring folk, but also to
bathers, appear in the memorial window to Thomas Lee, architect, of
Barnstaple, who was drowned off Barricane Beach in 1834. The memorial
of a more recent tragedy is seen in the churchyard, where a tombstone
records the drowning of “Winifred, youngest daughter of Sir Walter
Forster, M.P., who was swept away by the treacherous ground-swell,
while bathing in Coombes Gate, Morthoe, Aug. 14, 1898, aged 21.” Near
by is a rhymed epitaph upon one “Albion Bale Harris, aged 13,” who was
killed in 1886 by falling off a cliff at Ilfracombe.
The long, steep road that descends from Morthoe to the flat shore
of Woolacombe Bay, is becoming plagued with a growth of tasteless
lodging-houses, whose neutral-tinted stucco is put to shame by the
splendour of sea, sky, and sands. When last I came this way, two
Italian piano organists, with a cage of canaries, were grinding out
their mechanical music-mongery in an exceptionally lone spot, away from
those new houses; wasting, like the flowers in the wilderness, their
sweetness on the desert air. None but the rocks heard them, for not
another living soul was near. They were not drunk, neither did they
appear to be mad. I have not yet discovered the true inwardness of it;
is it possible that here at last were two artists, for Art’s sake,
piano-organing for the very love of it? Dark doubts cloud the idyllic
picture!
Below the road, before you come to Woolacombe Bay, is the little inlet
of Barricane Beach, shut in between two projecting reefs. Charles
Kingsley, many years ago, writing of Woolacombe Sands, referred to them
as really composed of shells, but it would seem that Barricane Beach
alone can claim his remarks:
“Every gully and creek there among the rocks is yellow, but not with
sand. Those are shells; the sweepings of the ocean bed for miles
around, piled there, millions upon millions, yards deep, in every stage
of destruction. There they lie, grinding to dust, and every gale brings
in fresh myriads from the inexhaustible sea-world. The brain grows
dizzy and tired, as one’s feet crunch over the endless variety of their
forms--and then one recollects that every one of them has been a living
thing--a whole history of birth, and growth, and propagation, and
death.”
The little inlet, so shut in, has an exclusive air, in contrast
with the open semicircular three-miles sweep of Woolacombe Sands;
but refreshment caterers have descended upon the place with tents.
They have done the like at Woolacombe Bay itself, for in these days
Woolacombe Bay is a name denoting more than an expanse of water with a
sandy fringe. The safe bathing in the sea, and the extensive golfing
on the sand hills or in the flat fields have converted what was,
literally, a “howling waste”--for the winds occasionally blow great
guns here--into the semblance of a seaside resort. There were, but a
few years ago, only some three houses here, including the old manor
mill, whose water-wheel formed a picturesque object beside the little
stream that empties itself into the bay; but now there is a great red
brick hotel with the usual “special terms to golfers,” and a little
red town has sprung up around it, with a fringe of rather blear-eyed
shops facing the sea, and some better, turned at right angles to it.
There is so impossible a look about the whole thing, that “here we
have no abiding place” is a quotation that rises promptly to the mind
of the observer. It looks, with its refreshment booths and array of
chairs on the shore in summer, like some camp-meeting in a desolate
part of America. But it is intended to last; a permanent water-supply
has been installed and a kind of modern missionary tin church,
dedicated to St. Sabinus, who voyaged across from Ireland a thousand
years ago, to convert the heathen of this neighbourhood--and was
wrecked on this shore--has been erected. Woolacombe Bay, however, is a
melancholy place. It has had no past, and it is difficult to imagine
it with a future. Only a fanatical golfer to whom the world beyond his
putting-greens and his bunkers is merely incidental, could long find
occupation here.
That is a terrible road--preposterously steep, deep in loose sand,
and strewn with large stones--which leads up from this resort in
the making to the high table-land down on whose other side lies the
village of Georgeham, whose inhabitants, quite exceptionally, insist
upon it being styled, not “Georg’m,” but emphatically “Georg_ham_.”
That is their pronunciation, and they bid you use none other. In the
fine, but rebuilt church, is the cross-legged effigy of an ancient St.
Aubyn--one Sir Mauger of that ilk, who died in 1293--and an ugly and
greatly-decayed monument of the Chichesters, with medallion-portraits
of many seventeenth-century bearers of that name. In the churchyard,
where the humbler sleep just as comfortably, is the epitaph of Simon
Gould and his wife Julian, who died in 1817, after seventy-five years
of married life, each aged 107, and near by may still be found a stone
to one William Kidman, who, with all his mates, was drowned in the
wreck of H.M.S. _Weazel_, guardship stationed off Appledore, at Baggy
Point, in February 1799. An epitaph upon Sergeant Job Hill, of the 40th
Foot, completes this list of interesting relics, on a martial note:
Nor cannon’s roar nor rifle shot
Can wake him in this peaceful spot.
With faith in Christ and trust in God,
The sergeant sleeps beneath this clod.
Leafy lanes and rugged lead to the hamlet of Putsborough, very much
removed from the snares and pitfalls of the world of affairs, and on
the road to nowhere at all, unless it be the rocks of Baggy Point,
which forms the southern horn of Morte Bay. Putsborough takes its name
from some Saxon earl, just as Croyde derives its own from Crida; and
doubtless it was to convert the people of Putta and Crida, or their
descendants, from the fierce heathen rites of the Saxons, that St.
Sabinus, St. Brannock, and many another Irish missionary landed in the
long ago on these shores.
Putsborough lies embedded in leafy seclusion. A farmstead or two, and
their attendant cottages, together with a most delightful thatched
manor-house, overhung with tall trees, comprise the whole place. The
manor-house and its lawn and garden stand whimsically islanded by
surrounding roads, and a little stream trickles by, in a water splash.
It is a most primitive place and some of the lanes leading on to Croyde
are fit fellows with it, being cut deeply into the rock and overhung,
ten feet high, with brambly growths.
Croyde is not so entirely removed from social intercourse. It is still
a pretty, scattered rustic village lining a road running down a valley
to the sea, with a brawling stream beside the road; but on the shore of
Croyde Bay, where there are yellow sands, some recent seaside houses
have been built. It is a pretty and cheerful little bay; not large
enough to look melancholy and desolate, like that of Woolacombe, and
the road on to Saunton is excellent; having really been remade across
Saunton Down, as part of a “development” scheme. Excellent, that is
to say, from the point of view of a motorist, for it is broad and
straight, and the surface is beyond reproach. But it is, it must be
added, more than a trifle bald and uninteresting to those who do not
regard roads as the nearer perfection the more closely they resemble a
race-track.
Whether Saunton be “sand-town” or whether it was originally named
“Sainct tun,”--as, in some sort, a holy district--is still a vexed
question; and likely to remain undecided, for these shores are
remarkable both for saints and sands. We have already told briefly
how St. Sabine--or Suibine, as he was known in Ireland--landed in
disorder on Woolacombe sands in the dim past. Here were chapels of
Saint Sylvester, Saint Michael, and Saint Helen; and here St. Brannock
came ashore in A.D. 300, to convert the heathen, and incidentally
to found the church called after him at what is now Braunton, in
“Brannock’s-town.” More of him anon. But legends tell how he built his
early church of timber cut in forests by the seashore, and dragged
inland by harnessed stags. Where, it has been asked, did these forests
stand? No one knows where legend begins and fact ends; but it is
certain that underneath these miles of blown sand, on to Braunton
Burrows, and again at Northam Burrows and on to Westward Ho, there lie
the remains of a prehistoric forest, overwhelmed by sea and sand, or in
some ancient subsidence, many centuries ago.
There is no _town_ at Saunton, and the mere fringe of houses beside
the road is very new; this coast having been of old too dreary and
inhospitable to afford a home for honest folk. Smugglers, wreckers, and
such shy cattle, were among its scanty frequenters, and sometimes (the
place being so lonely and secretive) refugees landed amid these wastes.
Among them was the Duke of Ripperda, who landed one dark night in the
beginning of October 1728, out of an Irish barque. He “had no one with
him but the lady who had procured his deliverance, the corporal of the
guard, and one servant.” This fugitive had escaped from the castle of
Segovia. He was entertained the night by one “Mr. Harris of Pickwell,”
and then went to Exeter. Thus the Duke of Ripperda, who is no national
concern of ours, flits mysteriously across country to disappear again
in foreign parts. It would puzzle a biographer to give him a domicile.
Born a Dutchman, he seems to have been sent on a diplomatic mission to
Madrid, and there to have renounced Holland and the Protestant religion
and to have become a Spaniard and a Catholic. Philip the Fifth rewarded
him with a dukedom. Eventually he is found in Morocco, as a Moorish
subject of the deepest dye. At one period, we are told, he became a
Jew, but that is scarcely credible. At last, having been everything it
was possible to be, he died in 1737.
[Illustration: SIR JOHN SCHORNE AND HIS DEVIL.]
Old rotting ribs of wrecked ships, protruding like fangs from the wet
margin of the sands, tell their own tale of unexpected and disastrous
landfalls on the lonely shore.
On the left hand of the road is still to be seen “Saunton Court,” an
old farmhouse mentioned with glowing description in Blackmore’s “Maid
of Sker,” but the interest of the house in the novel is not reflected
in the present circumstances of the place.
The road leads directly into Braunton; a large, sprawling village of
cob-walled, whitewashed cottages; a place that has, so far, not been
affected in the slightest degree by modern change. What Braunton was
a hundred years ago, it remains to-day. Risdon, in “Survey of Devon,”
1630, says: “Brannockston, so named of St. Brannock, the king’s son of
Calabria, that lived in this vale, and 300 years after Christ began
to preach His holy name in this desolate place, then overspread with
brakes and woods; out of which desert, now named the Boroughs (to tell
you some of the marvels of this man), he took harts, which meekly
obeyed the yoke, and made them a plow to draw timber thence, to build
a church. I forbear to speak of his cow, his staff, his oak, his well,
and his servant Abel, all of which are lively represented in that
church, than which you shall see few fairer.” Brannock’s cow is really
well worth speaking of; for, after it had been killed and carved into
joints, the pieces reunited at the word of the saint, and the animal,
restored to life, began to quietly graze in the meadows, as though
nothing had happened. That, at any rate, is the legend. A legend that
demands faith of a character not quite so robust is that of the vision
which led Brannock to build his church here. In a dream he was shown a
sow and her litter, and directed to select the spot where next day he
should find the sow. A carved boss in the roof of the church represents
the pig and her family, and St. Brannock himself, with his cow, is
carved boldly on one of the old bench-ends.
It is a remarkable church, inside and out; with tower and lead-sheathed
spire out of the perpendicular. Most of the old carved oak bench-ends,
dated about 1500, remain, decorated with a large number of devices;
among them, not only St. Brannock and his cow, but a bishop with his
crozier; the head of St. John Baptist held up by the hair; Judas’s
thirty pieces of silver, and Master John Schorne, the charlatan rector
of North Marston, Buckinghamshire, late in the thirteenth century,
who imposed upon the credulous folk of that age by pretending to have
conjured the devil into a boot. To convince the most sceptical by
ocular demonstration, he contrived a mechanical impish-looking figure,
fastened on a spring at the bottom of a long boot, of the kind worn
by hunting-men. When the spring was released, the imp would fly up to
the edge of the boot, in what was in those times, you know, a really
terrifying manner. The good Master Schorne, however, had him well
under control, and, as so powerful a devil-compeller, was naturally
feared and respected. He was further revered as a certain exorciser
of the ague. Schorne and his devil in a boot are the originators of
the children’s toy, “Jack-in-the-Box”; for to that complexion did his
supernatural terrors come at last, when the springs that actuated the
jumping imp were laid bare.
But Schorne was in his day, and for long after, something very
nearly like a saint, in popular estimation, and is indeed sometimes
represented fully furnished with the saintly nimbus. Pictures, or
carved effigies, of him are extremely rare, for there are probably
not more than six or seven in England. Here, no doubt, through some
confused version of the legend, the carver has shown him holding what
appears to be a cup, instead of a boot.
[Illustration: BRAUNTON CHURCH.]
Braunton church is full of old pieces of carved woodwork, notably the
Jacobean gallery in the north chapel, and the churchwardens’ pew, dated
1632. In the south chapel stands a richly decorated Spanish chest with
undecipherable inscription; and another relic of the wreck of H.M.S.
_Weazel_ in 1799, a tablet to the memory of William Gray, surgeon of
the ship, one of the one hundred and six who lost their lives on that
occasion.
A prominent church-like tower, standing on the crest of a tall hill
east of the church, and by the site of a hilltop chapel of St. Michael,
is less ecclesiastical than it looks, being in fact a political
monument commemorating the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832.
Braunton Burrows are best explored by setting forth from Braunton
village as for Barnstaple; but, when some little distance out, turning
to the right, over the Vellator railway crossing, and the little river,
or creek, called the Caen. Thenceforward, the way is clear enough for
those who are content to follow the creek to its junction with the
estuary of the Taw, and so along the sands, past the ship that forms
the port of Barnstaple hospital, to the lighthouse. But the true
inwardness of the Burrows is only to be found by continuing straight on
past the level crossing, and so into a lane that finally turns to the
left and then loses itself in loose sand.
[Illustration: BRAUNTON BURROWS.]
There is a world of desolation in Braunton Burrows, and he who would
thus come, overland, to the queer lighthouse that is perched at
the seaward end of the estuary of the river Taw, must needs quest
doubtfully and with some physical discomfort, before reaching that
point where the waste of shifting sand slopes down to the waves. Just
as no one becomes irreclaimably wicked in one plunge, but descends
irretrievably by a series of slight moral lapses, so does the unwary
traveller come by degrees into the baffling sand-wreaths of the
Burrows. A good riverside road from Braunton village by degrees becomes
an indifferent road; then, ceasing to be a road of any kind, becomes a
more and more sandy lane, which, in its turn, insensibly degenerates to
a track, and--there you are! You must not, however, imagine this sandy
waste to be without its own peculiar beauties, or barren of vegetation.
The winds have blown the immense accumulation of shifting sand into
fantastic hummocks and weird hollows, where the dry surface is ribbed
by their eddies, just as the retreating tide ribs the wet sand of the
shore; but here and there coarse grasses have taken root and achieved
the seemingly impossible task of anchoring the elusive substance:
crowning the ridges with a wan growth; and in some sheltered hollows,
where the wind comes scouring with less insistence, there are nurseries
of pretty wild flowers which, although the unskilled explorer knows
it not, are botanical treasures, some of them sought almost vainly
elsewhere. Mats and patches of candytuft form exquisite carpetings, the
wild pansy blooms abundantly, and in July, beautiful above all else,
the intense blue of borage competes vigorously with the yellow-brown
of the sand. It has been affirmed that eight hundred varieties of wild
flowers are found here, including the rare _Asperugo procumbens_ and
_Teucrium scordium_; while near the quaint lighthouse the curious will
discover the mud-rush (_Isolepis holoschænus_), and a bad smell.
Near the lighthouse! There’s the rub. To reach that goal is a matter
of considerable difficulty; for, amid the labyrinth of hillocks and
dales of sand, it cannot be seen afar off, and to come to it in
anything like a straight course is, therefore, impossible. I know not
which, among the inevitably uncomfortable and arduous circumstances
of this enterprise, is the most distressing time. To wander here in
rain, or in the bitter blast, must certainly be terrible; but no less
terrible, in its own particular way, is it to explore this wilderness
on some blazing hot day of August. The hollows are stifling, the sand
everywhere soft and yielding, and in unexpected places lurk those
“pockets,” or holes filled with yet more yielding sand, that, equally
with the rabbit-runs, give the place the name of “Burrows.” Into these
unsuspected places you may easily sink suddenly up to the knee of one
leg, while the other remains on the surface. This sandy waste is,
therefore, not without its dangers.
The lighthouse that guides mariners safely into the Taw--or “Barnstaple
River,” as sailors prefer to call it--is an odd structure; not so
ferociously ugly as every writer who has mentioned it would lead the
stranger to believe. It has character. No one, for instance, would
be in the least likely to confuse it with any other lighthouse; and
that is a great point. Nowadays, when the Trinity House builds a new
lighthouse, it is as exactly like the last in general appearance as
that was like its predecessor. Now Braunton lighthouse is a very
old affair, that came into being when a considerable amount of
individuality survived. It stands here, sturdily performing in its
secular way what the neighbouring St. Ann’s Chapel did for sailors as a
religious duty, long, long ago. Some few scanty remains of that little
oratory and lighthouse combined were to be found, some years since,
but they have now disappeared. The chapel measured fourteen feet six
inches, by twelve feet. Neighbouring farmers requisitioned its stones
so freely that what was left, even a century ago, was little more than
a ground-plan.
[Illustration: BRAUNTON LIGHTHOUSE.]
The existing lighthouse looks like the design of some one who set
out to build an ordinary, four-square dwelling, and then conceived
the idea of placing a tower on its roof; and this tower, tapering
towards the lantern and carefully hung with slates, is strongly
shored up with metal-sheathed timbers, lest the stormy winds that
blow pretty constantly in winter overturn it. The lighthouse-man, who
spends his summer days gasping for air on the shady side, holds the
infrequent stranger in converse as long as possible, and does not
appear altogether contented with his existence on a spot where, he
says, you cannot bear to sit down on the sands in summer, for the heat,
which is strong enough to almost scorch your breeks, to say nothing of
your person, and in winter dare hardly put your nose out o’ doors, on
account of the cold. He will illustrate for you the especial dangers of
this point, against which the lighthouse is placed here to guard, and
will explain that, on account of the shifting, sandy bar of the river,
there are two lights provided: the fixed one on his tower, and another,
low down, on a movable white- and black-striped box on rails. This is
moved backwards and forwards, according to the movement of the bar, so
that ships entering the river and keeping their course safely, shall
get the two lights aligned.
The way between Braunton and the approach to Barnstaple, at Pilton,
is uninteresting. The road runs for the most part out of sight of the
river and the sea. Only one thing attracts the wayfarer’s attention;
and that for its singularity, rather than for any intrinsic beauty.
This object, beside the road, and so close to it that the wayfarer
cannot fail to notice the queer, would-be Gothic battlements, is
Heanton Court, now a farmhouse; the “Narnton Court” of Blackmore’s
“Maid of Sker.”