THE DART—DITTISHAM—STOKE GABRIEL—“PARLIAMENT HOUSE”
The eight miles steamboat trip up or down the Dart is one of the finest
things Devonshire has to show, for the river Dart is rightly thought
the most beautiful of rivers. The Dart chiefly known in this manner by
tourists is not the mountain-stream that rises in the heart of Dartmoor,
but the tidal, salt-water estuary between Dartmouth and Totnes. Not only
tourists, but all who have business between those two places, use the
Dart and its steamers; for the district, hilly as it is, knows nothing
of railways. The Dart is known well enough by tourists from the decks of
these little steamers, but its shores and creeks, and the quiet villages
along them, are rarely explored. The picturesque village of Dittisham
is perhaps an exception, for the steamers call off its quay, and picnic
parties penetrate so far. Dittisham is a large village occupying a rather
puzzling geographical position on one of the numerous capes or headlands
formed by the amazing windings of this romantic river. It looks upon the
water from two directly opposite outlooks, and is partly the home of
salmon-fishers, builders of fishing-smacks, and, in these latter days,
a sprinkling of independent “residential” people, who enjoy the “quiet
life.” A little row of white-washed and pink-washed and blue-washed
houses faces upon a quay, and the “Passage House” inn marks where the
boat plies across to Greenaway; but apart from this quayside there is
scarce a level square yard of ground in Dittisham, whose lanes, bordered
for the most part by old, heavily thatched cottages and gardens, where
flowers and shrubs grow in prodigal luxuriance, are steep and stony in
the extreme. Dittisham is always beautiful, but especially lovely in
spring, when the surrounding orchards are in blossom: particularly the
damson orchards, for which the place is locally famous.
[Illustration: SALMON NETS AT DITTISHAM QUAY.]
[Illustration: GREENAWAY FERRY.]
A great deal of the supreme beauty of the Dart is due to the dense woods
that cover the bold hillsides of either shore and are reflected with
solemn loveliness in the tide. The Anchor Rock, prominent in mid-stream,
lends its more or less authentic story to guide-book students, for legend
tells us that the scolding wives of the community were landed upon it and
given ample leisure to repent; although the very name of this solitary
crag would lead the student to suppose that it was originally the spot
whereon some early hermit, or anchorite, voluntarily secluded himself.
By crossing the river to Greenaway, and walking through woods and
across meadows, the explorer comes, in a scrambly way, to a place very
rarely seen by fleeting tourists. This is Galmpton—or “Gaamton” as
the Devonshire folk call it—hidden away in a lakelike creek. Here the
stranger finds an unexpected scene of industry, for in this nook, where
the tide lazily rolls up and as lazily slides down, with the ooze and
scum, and chance leaves and twigs voyaging back and forth, is a busy
shipbuilding yard.
They do not build ocean liners at Galmpton, but they have had for
some seventy years past a very fine steady business in the building
of trawlers for the Brixham and Lowestoft fisheries; and sometimes a
smart sailing yacht leaves these sheds. Here, for example, as I write,
a teak-built yacht of one hundred tons, to cost £4000 is on the stocks,
and will leave Galmpton fully rigged. The average output of this yard
is twelve trawlers a year, and it gives employment to between sixty and
seventy men, who live mostly at Dittisham, taking boat to and from work
each morning and evening.
Aish, that spot historic in connection with the landing of the Protestant
Defender in 1688, is not so easily discovered by the stranger in these
gates, and its very remoteness was its chief recommendation in the
times when it became historic. It is reached most easily by breaking
the steamboat trip up the Dart at Duncannon Quay, which is also the
landing-place for Stoke Gabriel, tucked away in its own shy creek. Stoke
Gabriel is the least visited and most primitive place on the Dart, and
headquarters of the salmon-fishery; as the nets, drying on long poles,
and the strange jerseyed and booted figures of the fisherfolk proclaim.
With every tide the salt water comes to fill the picturesque creek of
Stoke Gabriel and to make a mirror for the woods to view their own
loveliness, and with every ebb it flows out again in a murmuring cascade
over the rude weir built of mossy boulders. It hushes the children of the
village to sleep at night, and fills the ears on summer days with a lazy
purr.
[Illustration: A SALMON FISHER.]
There is a good deal of Stoke Gabriel when you come to know it well.
Particularly pretty is the little street of cottages leading up to the
church, where the “Church House Inn” by its sign seems to indicate
that it was originally one of those houses provided by the church for
the accommodation of parishioners coming from some distance to attend
service. Such houses were often kept by the parish clerk, who brewed
the “church ales.” In the course of centuries the custom of clerical
ale-brewing and keeping a “church-house” fell into disuse, and the house
itself generally became a village inn. In this manner the singularly
close neighbourhood of village churches and inns, often curiously
commented upon, originated.
The church contains one rather pretty epitaph:
It is “To the memory of Mrs. Tamosin, wife of Peter Lyde, Deceased ye 25
of Febru. MDCLXIII,” and is inscribed upon a heart-shaped mural monument:—
“Long may thy name, as long as marble, last,
Beloved Tamosin, though under clods here cast.
This formall heart doth truly signify
’Twixt wife and husband cordiell unity.
If to be graccius doth requir due praise
Let Tamosin have it, she deserves ye bayes.”
It is curious to observe how the “Mrs.” has been inserted before
“Tamosin,” as an afterthought. We seem to see in it a post-mortem
jealousy on the part of the bereaved Peter Lyde that any one should use
the name of his lost Tamosin without that formal title.
The passengers landing at Duncannon Quay are few; often there are none
at all, and the few are rarely other than country-folk making for their
quiet villages.
For the average tourist to land at Duncannon, instead of completing the
time-honoured trip to Totnes, would be an originality never likely to
enter into the mind of him. He takes the excursion trips as he finds
them, and is content. And, being content, who shall blame him? Not I,
for one; for his satisfaction with the well-worn round is of itself no
ignoble thing in this dear Devonshire, where even the most frequented
circuits are exquisite, and crowds unknown.
So it happens that the explorer making for Aish finds himself the only
passenger for Duncannon, and is like to feel important when for him the
steamer hoots and stops, and he goes over the side into the ferry-boat,
amid the interested and wondering glances of the excursionists for
Totnes.
[Illustration: STOKE GABRIEL.]
Half-a-dozen strokes of the oars, and the boat brings you to the quay,
nestling by the quiet waterside, where low cliffs of red earth dip
to the shore. “One penny, sir, please,” says the old boatman, who,
with straw-hat of primæval plait and design, like a thatched roof,
seems a survival of the old Devonshire rustics, whose speech was so
unintelligible to those tourists who were the first to ever burst into
these unknown wilds. Appearances, it is well known, are deceptive, and
here no less than elsewhere; for when you look upon the raw newness
that has replaced the old ramshackly and delightfully sketchable aspect
of Duncannon Quay, and remark upon the change, this seeming survival
says—oh, the shock of it—“Oh, yes, it’s been thoroughly renovated.” Not
unjustifiably, I think, one feels aggrieved, both at that renovation and
at that departure from the ancient Doric of the countryside. Time was
when this old lank boatman, with the clothes that seem to have grown in
one of his native orchards, rather than to have been made, and with a
tanned and freckled face, the colour of the russet apple;—time was, I
say, when this ferryman, who merely paddles about in this remote nook of
the Dart, would have phrased it differently, and would have said: “’Ee’s
proper did up,” which is certainly more racy of Devon.
The “doing up” or the “renovation”—whichever you will—of Duncannon Quay
is certainly thorough. Its two houses are faced with that pallid stucco
of which they are so alarmingly fond in modern Devon; neat little white
brick piers stand in a neat little row, with neat little railings in
between, on the quayside; and a corrugated tin hut is posted at the end.
The Philistines have descended upon Duncannon, with a vengeance; and
although the ferryman, with his intimate knowledge of the moist Devon
climate, is of opinion that the newness will not last long, we venture to
think that when the edge of novelty has been taken off by the weather, it
is shabbiness, and not picturesqueness, that will result. One thing is
certain; neither moss nor lichen ever yet grew on galvanized corrugated
iron.
Aish, we know, means Ash, and is merely the old-world style of
pronunciation crystallised in writing, and perpetuated on many maps, but
our boatman styles it “Ash.” Yet even he is not without some lingering
relics of the old rustic inflections, for he directs the enquirer to
it by advising him to “volley” the telephone wire. A few years ago,
one would have “volleyed” the “telegraft”; yet another few years, with
wireless communication everywhere and all the poles and wires abolished,
and the chief landmark and standby of local guides gone, what will the
stranger do then but lose his way?
There really are unusual numbers of ash trees on the way to Aish, and
fine ones, bordering the road, or “Parliament Lane” as the rustics yet
know it, between Brixham, Yalberton, and this historic hamlet. Two or
three country seats or villas, with a number of modern cottages, and two
or three ancient thatched dwellings: such is Aish; but “Parliament House”
is, after all, not in Aish, but away, through it, considerably on the
other side, in a fine solitary situation at the foot of a steep hill, in
what is, with a peculiar appropriateness, called Longcombe. It is not
difficult to see into the minds of those who selected this cottage for
that meeting. Aish is a small hamlet now, and must have been very tiny
then, but that place was far too large and crowded, where one house
commanded another and where the foregathering of fine gentlemen could be
noted and remembered against a possible day of reckoning. So, through
Aish and to Longcombe, those cautious negotiators came and conducted
their parley in this leafy solitude. And although it is on the direct
road to Totnes, it is solitary still; a place where on your approach
you hear a child say, in the softly reverberant Devon speech, “Mothurr,
here’s a man”; and mother, thus advised, gazes long after the unwonted
sight.
[Illustration: “PARLIAMENT HOUSE.”]
I wish, for the sake of completeness, I could say that an ash overhangs
the road at this point: but I cannot. It is an oak, and a very fine oak,
which here frames in the picture made by the old cottage at the foot of
the hill.
Built of local ragstone and thatched, the old dwelling has probably not
been altered in any particular since the memorable time of that secret
conclave, and it still belongs to the Seymours, or St. Maurs, as they
now—harking back to the ancient spelling—choose to style themselves. The
historic association is the subject of a diffident allusion inscribed in
recent times on a stone pillar in the garden:—
William Prince of Orange is said to have held his first
Parliament here in November 1688
The remainder of the voyage up the Dart to Totnes is along a gradually
narrowing stream, past the noble hanging woods of Sharpham, to Bridgetown
Quay, where the road-bridge and the narrowed river alike forbid further
progress.
Of Totnes there is a great deal more to be said than can be set down
here. Between the mythical legend of its being founded by Brutus the
Trojan and modern times, it has acquired a history which demands volumes.
It had a mint in Saxon ages, is described as a walled town in Domesday,
and was not without some eminent rottenness as a rotten borough at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. It has a mystical castle mound, with
a circular shell of a keep on the summit, an ancient gateway spanning
the main street, and an interesting old guildhall. Its beautiful church
is among the very finest in Devon, and the quaint old piazza shops vie
with those of Dartmouth. There is, as may well be supposed, much doubt of
Brutus the Trojan having been the founder of Totnes, but the legend is
indestructible, from very inability to disprove it; besides, let into the
pavement outside 51, Fore Street, you are shown the very granite boulder
on which Brutus set foot when he landed! and so he becomes associated, at
the beginning of the town’s long story, with a wanderer, in his own way
equally remarkable, at its close. For in Totnes you may see, in the open
space called “The Plains,” a monument to William John Wills, a native
of the town, and son of a local doctor, which narrates how he was born
in 1834, emigrated in 1852 to Australia, and, having been “the first of
mankind to cross the Australian Continent, perished in returning.” He was
a greater traveller than Brutus; and his exploits, as we see, are matters
of ascertained fact.