ROUSDON—THE DOWLANDS LANDSLIP
Close by the border-line of the two counties, as you make from Lyme
Regis, across the pleasant upland meadows to Uplyme, which is in
Devonshire, is Middle Mill. The mill has seen its best days and no
longer grinds corn, and the great wheel is idle, for the very excellent
reason that the stream that once sent it ponderously revolving has been
diverted. The thatched mill-house and its adjoining cottage, together
with the silent wheel are, in short, in that condition of picturesque
decay which spells romance to artists, who, discovering it, cannot resist
a sketch. It appealed irresistibly, some years ago, to an artist in
another craft; to none other, in short, than that distinguished novelist,
Sir Walter Besant, who laid the scenes of his eighteenth-century story,
_’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay_, chiefly here and at Rousdon.
He describes Middle Mill just as it is situated: “At the back of the mill
was an orchard, where the pink and red cider apples looked pleasant—they
could not look sweet. Beyond the orchard was a piggery, and then you came
to the bed of a stream, which was dry in summer, save for a little green
damp among the stones, by the side of which was a coppice of alder-trees,
and behind the alders a dark, deep wood, into which you might peer all a
summer’s day and dream boundless things.”
[Illustration: MIDDLE MILL.]
The only objection that can be taken to the verisimilitude of this
description is the reference to the cider apples. As a matter of fact,
they do look sweet—and are not. The novelist refers to the richly ruddy
“Devonshire reds,” whose beautiful colour presupposes in the mind of
strangers to cider-apples a fruit luxuriously sweet and juicy. Devonshire
farmers take little care to fence their cider-apples from the stranger,
who steals and tastes as a rule only one, finding with the first bite
that sweetness is by no means necessarily housed within that captivating
exterior.
The story is one of smuggling and of rival loves. At Middle Mill lived
the miserly Joshua Meech, whose unrequited affection for Pleasance Noel,
and whose revengeful jealousy, bring about all the trouble. To punish him
for his betrayal of his friends to the Revenue Officers, Pleasance by
night steals eight bags of his hoarded wealth from under the hearthstone,
where Joshua kept his domestic bank, and hides them under the millwheel.
The wheel “stood there, under a broad, sloping penthouse of heavy thatch,
which made it dark in the brightest day”; and so you may find it, exactly
as described, except that the penthouse is tiled, and not thatched.
The actual coast, for the six miles between Lyme Regis and Seaton is
a roadless, and in parts an almost trackless, stretch of strenuous
clambering among rocks and tangled thickets; among landslips old and new,
and undercliffs overgrown with such a wilderness of trees and shrubs
and bracken, and blackberry brakes as only Devon can produce. But for
all these difficulties, perhaps because of them, the way is preferable
to the hard high road that goes, a little way inland. Here, at least,
“exploration” is no straining after effect, no misuse of the word.
When you have left the Cobb at Lyme Regis behind and passed the
coastguard station, you have come to sheer wildness; the deserted cement
works, standing amid a waste of wrecked earthy cliffs, themselves
forming a not inappropriate prelude to the perfect abandonment of nature.
Here the low promontory of Devonshire Point ends the Ware Cliffs; and
the tangle, with the gaping fissures between the rock and earth half
hidden by grass and bushes, becomes so nearly impenetrable as to render a
retreat up along the boulders into Holmbush Fields absolutely necessary;
Holmbush Fields, with their rustic stiles and hedgerow timber, and the
winding footpath across, giving a sober and graceful interlude; and then
you come upon a mile or so of wonderful pathway, roughly shaped amid the
wild jungle that here has overgrown a tract of oozy and boggy undercliff,
formed by a century or more of continual landslides. There surely is no
more beautiful wilderness of the particular type in England, than this:
a very great deal of its beauty being due to the happy circumstance that
neither Lyme Regis nor Seaton are as yet large enough to admit of it
being overrun. Hardy pioneers have beaten out the devious pathway, and
the few who have followed in their footsteps have kept it from being
again overgrown. Spring—the month of May—is the ideal time for this part
of the coast; when the birds have again wakened to song, and the young
foliage is tender and the landsprings have not been dried up.
Even the pioneers have not made all the way easy; for you come at last to
what Devonshire people call “zoggy plaaces,” where the willow and hazel
bushes stand in mossy ground, and the primroses grow an unwonted size,
by reason of the excessive moisture. Here you must calculate every step
and nicely test the mossy hummocks before fully trusting them; finally
emerging upon an open plain midway between the sea below and tall cliffs
above; a plain where rocks of every shape and size have been hurled down
in extraordinary confusion. Here the explorer requires not a little of
the suppleness and agility of the chamois, and growing at last weary
of bounding hazardously from crag to crag, climbs with extraordinary
labour, past monstrous grey, ivy-grown spires and pinnacles of limestone,
up a winding footpath in the face of the cliff, to where the Whitlands
Coastguard station looks down upon the tumbled scene. From this point the
coastguard-path lies along the cliffs’ edge, to where the cliffs die down
to the waterside in the deep coombe in whose woods the sea comes lapping
at Charton Bay. Here a limekiln, that looks romantic enough for a castle,
stands on the beach, with the dense woods climbing backwards, and on the
skyline the roofs and tower and chimneys of Rousdon.
[Illustration: ROUSDON.]
Rousdon is a remarkable place. It shows you what may be done in the
wholesale grocery way of business, for the estate was enclosed, and
the great mansion built by Sir Henry Peek, between 1871 and 1883. When
that wealthy baronet set about becoming a landed proprietor here, he
found a wild expanse stretching down from the high land by the main
road between Lyme and Seaton, toward the sea, and he enclosed some two
hundred and fifty acres, and on the upper part built a magnificent house,
whose beauties we will not stop to describe in this place, because, if
a beginning were made with it, and the collections of various sorts
within, it would be no easy task to conclude. He found here, amid these
solitudes, the ruinous little church of St. Pancras, of Rousdon, used as
the outhouse of a farm. Its rector was an absentee, not greatly needed,
for the entire parish numbered but sixteen persons, all employed on the
farm itself. A new church was built in the grounds, and a member of the
Peek family appointed rector; and thus we see the remarkable spectacle
of a parish as self-contained as any box of sardines; with the whole of
the inhabitants employed upon the estate, and free trade in religion
abolished. I think no monarchy is quite so absolute.
A remarkable feature of Rousdon mansion is the extensive use, internally,
of Sicilian marble. The great staircase, and other portions of the house
are built of it, and a beautiful dairy is wholly decorated with this
material. It came here in a romantic and wholly unexpected way; having
been the cargo of a ship wrecked on the rocks off Rousdon at the time
when plans for the building were being made.
By more undercliff footpaths you come at length, through the steamy
hollows of Rousdon, to that “lion” of this district, the great Dowlands
landslip, an immense wedge of cliff and agricultural land that on the
Christmas night of 1839 suddenly parted its moorings with the mainland
and made for the sea, halting before quite immersing itself, and ever
since presenting the extraordinary spectacle of a jagged gorge winding
between two sheer walls of cliff, with weird isolated limestone pillars,
from one to two hundred feet in height, thrusting up here and there. It
is the Landscape of Dream, and only saved from being that of nightmare
by the soft beauty of the enshrouding verdure that has clothed the place
since then. The well-known landslip in the Isle of Wight is altogether
smaller and inferior to this: and more hackneyed.
The cause of this extraordinary happening is found in the geological
features of this immediate neighbourhood; the limestone and other rock
resting on a deep stratum of sand, which in its turn was based on blue
clay. Springs percolating through the sand were probably obstructed, and
the water found its way in unusual quantities to the blue clay, which
in course of time became one vast butterslide, and thus brought about
a landslip that engulfed fields and orchards, and sunk two cottages,
unharmed fortunately, to a level one hundred and seventy feet lower than
they had before occupied.
A charge of sixpence is attempted at a farm at the Seaton end, to
view this remarkable place, and it is worth an entrance-fee; but
explorers coming from Lyme Regis are not unlikely to stumble into the
place, unaware; and in any case the attempt is an impudent and illegal
imposition, for the question of free access was fought out successfully
some years ago by the Lyme Regis corporation.
[Illustration: THE LANDSLIP.]
Word-painting is all very well as a pastime, but the result makes poor
reading. We will, therefore, not emulate the local guide-books; which,
to be sure, transcend the descriptive art so greatly as to come out at
the other end, as works of unconscious humour. Thus, when in those pages
we read of “Dame Nature,” and “Old Father Time,” working these miracles
of landslides, we get a mental picture of a stupendous old couple that
fairly takes the breath away. Moreover, the scene is compared with “the
island home of Robinson Crusoe,” and likened to “the wildness of Salvator
Rosa or the fairy scenes of Claude,” while “the huge boulders you can
convert into sphinxes,” and find “deep and thickly wooded dingles, in
which lions and tigers could lurk unseen.” Still more, we read: “If
you give full scope to your imagination, you may fancy that the pale
moonlight would inhabit the ruins with the spirits of those who lived
in the ages of mythology.” In short, if these directions are faithfully
followed, and these lions and tigers and these spirits of mythological
creatures—the “Mrs. Harrises” of ancient times—are duly conjured up,
the too-imaginative explorer is likely to emerge fully qualified for a
lunatic asylum.
The exceptional beauty of the scene does not require any of these
fantastical aids to appreciation, and the hoar ivied rocks, the fairy
glades, the brakes and willow woods are sufficient in themselves.
The mile-long beauty of the great Dowlands Landslip having been
traversed, the way lies across the down over Haven Cliff, the striking
headland that shuts in Seaton from the east.