THURLESTONE—THE AVON—BOROUGH ISLAND—RINGMORE—KINGSTON—THE ERME
[Illustration: THE THURLESTONE.]
The little headland enclosing the western side of Hope Cove forms the
eastern horn of Thurlestone Bay, and as you rise the neck of land
dividing the two, you see the strange rock with the hole through it—the
Thurlestone—which gives a name, not only to the sandy bay, but to the
village of Thurlestone, which stands with its ancient church on the bare
hillsides beyond. The Thurlestone, is a mass of red conglomerate, oddly
isolated amid the neighbouring slate, standing in deep water, surrounded
by a group of small satellite rocks and reefs, and derives its name from
the Anglo-Saxon, “thyrlian,” to pierce. It is thus “the drilled,” or
pierced stone, and claims philological kin with “nostril,” or nose-hole,
and “thrall,” a slave whose ear has been pierced. That standby of
topographers, the Domesday Book, calls the village “Torlestan,” which
is as near as the Norman-French scribe could arrive at the sound of the
Saxon word. My own respect for the Thurlestone is considerably heightened
by this evidence of its having worn, a thousand years ago, very much the
same appearance it does now. Curiously enough, there is a Thirlestane
Castle in Scotland.
When the south-westerly winds bring great seas raging into the bay, with
towering white combers dashing in upon the sands, the Thurlestone finds
a voice and calls with a sound of roaring, all over this countryside.
The rustics say that at such times you shall hear the bellowing of the
Thurlestone ten miles distant.
For myself, I have come to Thurlestone at a time when there are no
voices, save the cat-like screaming of the gulls and the horrible
squawking noises of the cruiser setting out to sea from Hope Cove, and
bidding a series of half-suffocated good-byes with her steam-whistles,
dreadfully like some one being very offensively sick. Noises are not
common on Thurlestone strand, and I would even say it was lonely, save
that the millions of sand-fleas inhabiting the shore forbid the thought.
I have bought a piece of Dutch cheese and some biscuits, and disregarding
the inmates of the one hideously plastered boarding-house recently
built here, take off shoes and stockings, and sitting on a convenient
rock sliding down into deep water, come into intimate touch with the
infinities, and make these notes. Two pennyworth of Dutch cheese, with
biscuits to match, a comfortable seat on a rocky ledge, your feet
dabbling in the clear water, and sunshine over all, will bring you into
close relation with the Infinite. Here I hew off in the rough a slab of
the Simple Life, and enjoy it hugely. It is, I suppose, the sunshine and
the solitude in collaboration. At any rate, it is obviously enough not
the white ale.
There are cornelians and lovely pebbles on this lonely strand, and
sea-anemones, to the eye appetisingly like fruit-jellies, on the rocks.
Alas! they are _not_ good to eat, and as fairy gold, we all know, turns
to sere leaves, so the translucent pebbles of the wet sea-shore become
the commonplace opaque stones that the next day we turn disgustedly out
of our pockets. In short, it is life in little you find reflected here,
and reduces the heady optimism of a summer noon to something like tears.
I don’t expect, or hope, every one who comes to this salt margin of Devon
will feel thus. This it is to be cursed with temperament, to be, against
your will, a snivelling sentimentalist, whom the lowing of the cattle at
eventide, the distant tinkling of the sheep-bells, or the very beauty of
day or place will suffice to reduce to a chastened melancholy.
Thurlestone church is neighboured on the hillside in these expansive
times by a golf club, which, in the interest of golf-balls, has actually
had the impudence to spread wire-netting over the charming little
rustic stream that here flows to the sea; and near by are the ornate
brand-new villas built and furnished by speculators with an eye on the
possible huge profits to be earned from letting them for the summer
season, in these times of a revived appreciation of the countryside. It
is with a malignant joy that the wayfarer perceives the speculators to
have overreached themselves, and the villas—“white elephants” says the
ferryman at Bantham—to be unlet. How, indeed, should Thurlestone become
a place of resort? It is remote, and its sands, unstable and shelving
steeply to the sea, are extremely dangerous.
The dark, stern, upstanding Perpendicular tower of the old church looks
down grimly upon these white and red and yellow upstarts. It is a fine,
large church, the successor of an earlier, as the great Norman bowl-font
of red sandstone would seem to prove, and the designers of it designed
in a fine, large, broad style, suited to the coarse-grained granite and
limestone of their building-materials. That Rev. Mr. John Snell, chaplain
to Charles I., who was with the Royalist garrison in Salcombe Castle, was
rector here, and although one of the articles of surrender declared that
he was not to be disturbed in his living, he was plundered of his goods,
and his farm-stock was twice carried off by the Puritans, so that he
found it prudent to leave. Unlike so many others, he lived to return to
his parish, and, I have no doubt, rendered things in his turn, extremely
uncomfortable for some. One little natural human touch of him remains, in
the entry in the register under his hand, against the years covered by
the Commonwealth:—
“_Monstrum horrendum informe_,”
Horrible and shapeless monster.
“This is youre houre and ye power of darkness.”
The iron had evidently entered into his soul.
The interior of the church has of late been exquisitely decorated and
repaired: we will not say “restored,” for that word is rightly of
ill-savour in these times. In place of the almost inevitable pitch-pine
pews, or the commonplace chairs, there are green-stained, rush-bottomed
chairs, with woodwork of the same hue: all very artistic and delightful,
and sufficing to show that the more usual order of things is less
inevitable than might be supposed, and only so common because taste is
a quality of the rarest. Only, I would that these things did not so
commonly go with that new reforming zeal which is sending the Church
of England Romewards, so fast as its clergy dare. Here a faculty has
been obtained for a rood-screen, and in general things are developing
at a rate dangerous to that new movement itself and bringing that
counter-reformation which is presently to repeat history. History, it
is true, does repeat itself, but not on precisely identical lines, and
the newer Reformation will be the disestablishment and disendowment of an
unworthy Church, and free-trade in religion.
There are weird rocks out beyond Thurlestone, on the coastwise route
round to the Avon estuary; one of them—it may be glimpsed in the
background of the Thurlestone illustration—resembling some monstrous
growth of the mushroom kind. The direct way to the crossing of the Avon
is through Thurlestone street, and thence by the hillside village of
Buckland, and by Bantham, a hamlet nestling under the lee of the Ham, a
great sandy elbow thrown up, ages ago, by the sea and the winds, in vain
efforts to fling back the Avon upon itself. That river is no rushing
torrent, but just a softly gliding stream; and the sand dunes have not
sufficed to imprison it. All they have done is to turn its course aside,
due west instead of south, and there, denied a direct access to the sea,
it has eaten away the cliffs in a great semicircular mouthful, and goes
gliding out to the Channel through a waste of flat sands.
It was here in 1772 that the _Chanteloupe_, homeward-bound from the West
Indies, was totally wrecked, and of all those on board only one person
saved. Those were the times when the fisherfolk and shore-dwellers
generally prayed for wrecks, and if none was forthcoming, helped
Providence to produce them by exhibiting false lights on shore, to lure
vessels to their doom. They thought no shame of asking, “O Lord, give
us a good wreck,” and were perhaps very little more civilised than the
savages of strange lands, who, thinking shipwrecked sailors, to have
been shipwrecked at all, must be under the high displeasure of the gods,
murder them out of hand, and consider themselves, in so doing, the vicars
of those affronted deities.
“A good wreck,” especially if there were no survivors left to tell the
tale, or to claim anything, would keep the seaboard of half a county in
luxury of sorts for quite a considerable time, and as survivors were
such detrimentals, they were, in those “good old times,” very quickly
made not to survive. It was a rude, but practical application of that
Socialistic doctrine of collectivism, of which we hear so much nowadays,
“the greatest good to the greatest number.”
The story of the _Chanteloupe_ is a dark and repellent instance of those
practices. It narrates how a lady named Burke, familiar with the evil
reputation of these people, and fearful of being murdered, put on all
her jewellery when the ship struck, and was flung ashore glittering
with precious stones. If she had thought to purchase life with that
display, she made the most fatal of errors, for the sight only served
to arouse the worst passions of those beach-combers, who slaughtered
the unfortunate woman for the sake of her rings and other trinkets.
When enquiries were set afoot, her body was discovered in the sands,
bloodstained, with fingers cut off and ears mutilated; but it does
not appear that the guilt was brought home to any one. The fisherfolk,
doubtless, all hung together, lest they should hang separately.
Two years earlier a local Quaker, one Henry Hingeston, had published a
pamphlet denouncing the wrecking propensities of this coast:
“I have been deeply affected,” said he, “to see and feel how sweet the
report of a _shipwreck_ is to the inhabitants of this country, as well
professors as prophane, and what running there is on such occasions, all
other business thrown aside, and away to wreck. … I am verily persuaded
that it hath been more sweet to hear that all the men are drowned, and so
a ‘proper wreck,’ than that any are saved, and by that means hinder their
more public appearance on that stage for getting money. O! the cruelty
that hath been acted by many. My heart hath been often heavy to consider
it, insomuch that I think multitudes of heathen are nothing near so bad.
Remember the broadcloth slupe, stranded in Bigbury Bay, richly laden. O!
for shame, for shame, I am really vext that ever my countrymen should be
guilty of such devilish actions.”
But the estimable Hingeston might just as effectively have preached to
the gulls and the cormorants on the iniquity of catching fish, as to have
denounced wrecking. ’Twas in the blood, and that is all there is to it.
These old tales of long-vanished days seem very remote and indistinct,
but they came very near and vivid when a few years ago some children
digging in the sand of the Ham, turned up a skull, pronounced to be that
of a negro. It was considered, together with heaps of bones afterwards
discovered, to be a relic of the tragedy of the _Chanteloupe_.
The Devonshire folk—the rustic sort, at any rate—generally call their
Avon the “Aune,” and a little hamlet not far from this same Bantham is
“Aunemouth;” while the village of Aveton Gifford, standing up-river,
where the salt estuary becomes a freshwater stream, is impartially
“Aveyton,” or “Auton,” “Jifford.”
At Bantham Ferry the boatman puts you across for twopence, or however
much or little he thinks you will stand—and it is only the matter of
a dozen strokes at low water. And then you have the sands, the loose
stones, and the rustling bennets and the sedges all to yourself; a kind
of seashore Sahara. Then you round a rocky point; and there before you is
Burr Island, a majestic reek of acetylene, or other gas, and people. Wide
stretch the sands at ebb, but they are not so wide but that the prints
of footsteps have disfigured them pretty thoroughly; for where the land
slopes down to the shore in grassy fields, the Plymouth people have built
bungalows, and are building more. Burr, or Borough, Island is tethered
to the mainland at ebb by this nexus of sand. It is in this circumstance
a kind of minor St. Michael’s Mount, and like it again in that it once
owned a chapel dedicated to St. Michael. The chapel disappeared in the
lang syne, and when the solitary public-house—whose deserted roof-tree
may still be seen—ceased business, civilisation and Borough Island wholly
parted company.
Beyond this point is the little sand-smothered bight of Challaborough,
with a coastguard station, where this explorer, at least, met coastguards
of exceptional stupidity and astonishing ignorance of the coast beyond
their own insignificant nook. Why, they could not even spell or pronounce
the name of their own station properly, and made it “Shellaborough.”
“Erme Mouth?” they had never heard of it, nor of the Erme River, but
dimly conceived “Muddycombe,” to be meant. And as for the coast, they
spoke of it in such awestruck terms that (it shall be confessed) the
time drawing on towards evening, I made inland, and so do not know’ what
manner of dragons and chimeras those are, which no doubt inhabit the
three miles and a half of a not very rugged shore, awaiting the advent of
a fine juicy tourist.
Primitive, indeed, are those villages that lie away back from the sea
in these parts. First comes Kingmore, where the rock outcrops from
the macadam in the main road, where the cottages are half-smothered
in flowers, and where the domestic fowls that squatter and plunge in
dust-baths in the middle of the street are the only signs of life.
Reminiscences of the old window-tax are called up by a house with a
walled-up window, carefully painted with a pretence of being a genuine
one of panes and sashes. Even the brass catch has not been forgotten by
the artist in illusion, whose treatment is so literal, he must have been
the forerunner of the Newlyn School. The brass catch is rendered more
than a thought too brassy, and the unfortunately painted panes are by
no means convincing. But the deception although so grotesquely obvious,
could not, under such opaque circumstances, be called transparent, could
it?
Like the Reverend Mr. Snell of Thurlestone, William Lane, rector of
Ringmore, was a militant Royalist. He raised and trained a company of
men and, laying hands upon some cannon, opened out a battery against the
Parliamentary forces on their way to the leaguer of Salcombe. His exploit
made him a marked man, and he was considered sufficiently important
for an expedition to be sent against him by sea from the Parliamentary
stronghold of Plymouth. The orders given the commander of this force were
to capture and shoot the combatant cleric; but Mr. Lane, advised of what
was afoot, took refuge in the tower of his church, where the secret room,
provided with a fireplace, in which he hid is still to be seen. Here
he lay three months, fed by his faithful parishioners, but was at last
obliged to escape to France. At last, venturing to return, he worked for
awhile as a labourer in the limestone quarries near Torquay, until his
little dwelling was pillaged by a French privateer. He died at last when
on his return from London, whither he had journeyed on foot to ventilate
his grievances.
The ancient church of Ringmore contains a relic of more recent strife, in
the shape of an icon from Sebastopol.
At Kingston, on the way across to the river Erme, there is but one inn.
The “Sloop” is the name of it, and there, if you wait half-an-hour, while
the cocks and hens run in and out of the rooms and passages, they will
get you tea. There is very little of a Lyons’ or other tea-shop about
the “Sloop.” And Kingston village is to match; primitive Devonian in
style, which is a style partaking of all the characteristics belonging
to the untamed villages of Cornwall, Ireland, and the Highlands of
Scotland. There are very few of the type left now, which is a cause for
thankfulness, or regret, as you will, and they ought to be preserved on
ice and kept for the admiration, or otherwise, of posterity.
Out of Kingston the road runs deep down below the level of the fields,
in true Devonshire sort, with high banks and tall hedges on either side,
so that no view is possible. Nor would it have mattered had it been
otherwise when this Stanley of these remote parts passed this way, for
the whole face of the land and sea and the blue of the sky was blotted
out on this warm and close evening of a hot summer’s day by a white
pillowy fog, which, the nearer the shore, grew more dense.
After long tramping comes a left-hand turn, with a signpost inscribed
“Mothecombe.” The name suggests some moth-eaten hamlet that would be all
the better for plenty of camphor and a good airing; but presently one
realises that _this_ is the place called by the coastguards “Muddycombe,”
and more usually, in local speech, “Muthycombe.”
It is a solitary road that leads down from this signpost, and the fog
discloses only one person on the way: a boy, driving a cow. “Coom oop,
Primrose,” says he, and that mild-featured dame and he turn into a field,
the whiteness engulfs them at once, and the wayfarer is alone in the
world.
Suddenly the road ends, upon a sandflat. This is really the mouth of
the Erme, the estuary where it slides out to sea, but it is infinitely
mysterious in this smother of fog and woolly silence. The stranger, of
course, assumes a village from the direction of that curt, staccato
signpost up the road, but devil a house can he find here; only a
something looming out from under low cliffs, which at first he takes to
be an inn, and then a blockhouse fort, resolving itself finally into the
inhospitable likeness of a ruined limekiln.
The distant rustle and whispering of waves on the sea-shore comes
fitfully through the fog, which breaks mysteriously and shows the river,
with occasional glimpses of the woody banks opposite. For the rest, all
is silence, save for an odd continuous buzzing or sizzling undertone,
like bacon-frying, _piano_. It is marvellously like, and only the smell
is wanting to complete the illusion, which is produced by the billions
of sand-fleas living their little crowded hour in the sands and among
the drying seaweed. Every time you kick over a tuft of weed you disturb a
little world, and rouse that frying-bacon sound, as though a rasher had
been turned in the frying-pan.
Meanwhile, the way is obviously across that river, but how to win to that
other side? No one, nor any house, is in sight, but here, by fortunate
chance, is a fisherman’s boat, and I up-anchor, cast off, and row myself
to the opposite shore, expectant all the while of an angry shout from
somewhere. But anything, rather than stay the night over yonder with the
sand-fleas. No one, however, witnessed that little act of piracy, and I
walked up out of that steamy laundry-like hollow, where one is reduced to
the limpness of washing hung over a clothes-line, and wondered what yon
fisherman said and thought when he found himself on the one side of the
river and his boat on the other. I hope it is not many miles round to the
first bridge, or ford.