ABBOTSHAM--“WOOLSERY”--BUCK’S MILL
A steep road leads up out of Bideford on the way to Clovelly, and goes,
quite shy of the sea, and altogether out of sight of it, all the way.
It is a quite unremarkable road. Here and there, subsidiary roads lead
off to the right, giving access to entirely unsuspected habitations
of men, lying variously from a quarter to half a mile distant on the
seashore, or neighbouring it. First comes the village of Abbotsham, in
its pretty valley, with a small church, chiefly remarkable for a little
unpretending monument, dated 1639, to one Anthony Honey. He died aged
nineteen; and some one, who loved him much, wrote the following epitaph
upon him, in which humour and sorrowing affection peep out, really most
plainly to be seen, you know, like the mingled sunshine and showers of
an April day:
_Hoc parvo in tumulo situs est
Antonius Hony. Melleus ille suo nomine,
more fuit. Obiit June 1639, ætati, suæ 19._
“His manners were as sweet as his name”; it is a pretty fancy.
Another bye-road leads down to the old mansion of Portledge, seat of
the Coffin family, who rather intensified the gruesome suggestions of
their name by adding that of Pine to it. The Pine-Coffins have been
seated here for generations. Half a mile along the cliffs, Peppercombe
is found; a few cottages seated in a hollow.
The main road passes at intervals, Fairy Cross, Horns Cross, and the
Hoops Inn, and presently comes to Buck’s Cross; where one of many
signposts continues a long series of pointing arms to “Woolsery.”
I have successfully resisted that repeated invitation inland, and
do not know what Woolsery is like: only this, that the village of
Woolfardisworthy is indicated. But even in North Devon, where time goes
something slowly, life is not long enough to always pronounce the word
as spelt of old, and certainly the arm of no signpost is long enough
to contain the whole of it; and so the district has cast away, like so
much useless lumber, half its length.
Down on the right hand goes the road, staggeringly steep, to Buck’s
Mill, a little cranny in the towering wooded cliffs, where a huge
limekiln and a few white cottages hang crazily over the water.
Turner has made a pretty picture of “Bucks,” as it is called for
short--or more properly, “Bucksh”--with a distant glimpse of the houses
of Clovelly, pouring like a cataract down the face of the cliffs, and
a still more distant peep of Lundy. The old, old tale of the original
inhabitants of Buck’s Mill having been wrecked Spaniards is still told.
You hear that story of many seaside hamlets in the West; but I, for
one, fail to see the swarthiness, the obvious foreign origin, of the
present men, women, and children of Bucks, so dwelt upon in guide-books.
[Illustration: CLOVELLY, FROM BUCK’S MILL.
[_After J. M. W. Turner, RA_
]
When I found myself down at the bottom of that profound descent and at
Buck’s Mill, it began to rain: the hopeless dogged rain that comes down
out of a leaden sky, deliberately, as though it were determined to rain
all night. I sat in a leaky shed on a heap of sand and waited....
Still waiting! Some one has written, somewhere, that ignorance is
the parent of wonder, and all this while I had been wondering many
things--wondering if it were going to rain all night; wondering if it
were not better to push on to Clovelly; wondering if one would get
very wet if a start were made now; wondering why it should be a law
of Nature that hopeless rain should set in when one was in an exposed
situation and with a considerable distance yet to go.... Better chance
it.
And so, pushing the bicycle up that long, steep ascent, which in
descending had seemed only a quarter the length, I slithered through
a sea of mud along the lonely road and in a dense white fog. It had
ceased raining, on the way, but the fog exuded almost as much moisture.
And so, cautiously, from Clovelly Cross down to the Court and the head
of that precipitous staircase called Clovelly “street.” The promised
lingering approach, as the sun went down by the famed Hobby Drive, had
to be abandoned for the while, and reserved for a more favourable day.