MOTHECOMBE—REVELSTOKE—NOSS MAYO—THE YEALM—WEMBURY—THE MEWSTONE
Mothecombe is a place where explorers and visitors of any kind are
severely discouraged, the local landowners, the Mildmays of Flete, a
magnificent modern mansion whose park extends for several miles along
the Erme and the Pamflete creek, having abolished the inns, while their
tenants dare harbour no such chancey thing as a stranger. It seems rather
mediæval. Far from being aggrieved at this, the chance wayfarer is so
impressed that he is only too grateful to be allowed to live, instead of
being shot at sight. It is, in any case, a difficult matter to explore
the coast at beautiful Mothecombe, for the summer atmosphere is that of
a stewpot, and merely to gently walk the shortest distance bathes one in
perspiration. The only thing to do is to enquire the way to Revelstoke,
the next place marked on the map, and to make for it under as easy
conditions as may be.
[Illustration: THE RUINED CHURCH OF REVELSTOKE.]
When at last, after leaving inhospitable Mothecombe, the explorer comes
to Revelstoke, whose name, at any rate, promises something better, he
finds himself in rather worse case, and understands why it was the
country-people, even within a few miles of it, put their heads together
and consulted with one another so deeply, and with so little result. For,
beyond a ruined church, solitary on the verge of the cliffs, and at the
end of a tangled footpath, overgrown with brambles and nettles, there is
_no_ Revelstoke at all, and the hospitality foreshadowed by its name is
seen to be a thing impossible. It is a very pleasant and romantic place
to come to on a bright summer’s morning, but to come strange to it at
night——! Praise be to the powers that took me, after Mothecombe, inland
to Holbeton instead.
This ruined church of St. Peter, near Stoke Point, nearly overhangs the
cliffs of a rocky inlet, but the building itself is so shrouded with ivy,
even to the apex of its saddle-backed roof, that it is almost reduced
to terms of vegetation, and is, moreover, so overhung with trees that
neither from the sea nor from any distance inland is it visible.
The nice taste generally exhibited by newly ennobled personages in their
selection of titles is worthy of all praise. When Edward Charles Baring
was created a baron, in 1885, he had a choice, among his surrounding
properties, of such names as Membland, Battisborough, Noss, Newton, and
Worsewell. Noss and Worsewell, I should think, were, on the score of
euphony, quite out of the question. But—in the phrasing of the newest
slang—what was wrong with Membland, Newton, or Battisborough? Nothing at
all; but there is doubtless a something about the sound of Revelstoke
that suggests aristocratic devilry and high jinks, infinitely pleasing.
Not that the name necessarily signifies anything of the kind, for the
Middle-English meaning of “revel” was not so much a jollification as a
disturbance; which seems to have been the inevitable result of those
ancient drinking-bouts. The “Revel” of this place-name is said to derive
from _reafful_, meaning rapacious. The place, according to this view, is
christened after some early _reafere_, rover, or robber, a progenitor,
possibly of that “Sir Ralph (or Rafe) the Rover,” familiar to us in the
poem of the Inchcape Rock, off the coast of Scotland; and the “Stoke” was
his stockade, the defence of his robber’s lair. Who this robbing rover
was—or who they were, for there must needs have been a band of them—there
can be little doubt. They were an isolated party of the marauding Danes
or vikings of the ninth century, whose main body was defeated in A.D. 851
at Wembury.
[Illustration: THE YEALM: FROM NOSS.]
[Illustration: NOSS MAYO AND NEWTON FERRERS.]
There is no difficulty raised against the pedestrian following the
private drive made by Lord Revelstoke round the coast. In this manner the
great piled-up slabs of rock forming Stoke Point can be seen, with Yealm
Head and the woodlands on the way. But most pilgrims who have already
made a long walk of it will undoubtedly feel disposed to cut that detour
out and make for the modern church of Revelstoke inland, overlooking a
creek of the deep sea-channel of the Yealm and the villages of Noss Mayo
and Newton Ferrers. “Newton” and “Noss” those villages are familiarly
styled. They confront one another like Putney and Fulham across the
Thames, the old church of Newton Ferrers in outline the fellow of the
new one of Revelstoke. But the new building is the veriest upstart. It
was built by Lord Revelstoke in 1882, at a cost of £29,000, and is a
very prominent example of great cost, much pretension, and little real
art. Less of the ecclesiastical furnishers’ work and more solid, if less
showy, fittings would have made the church more worthy its beautiful
site. That riches take to themselves wings is exemplified here; for in
less than ten years from the completion of this church and the ornate
rebuilding of Membland Hall, came the great Baring financial crash, and
with it the impoverishment of Lord Revelstoke.
The Yealm runs up, as a deep, narrow and beautiful salt estuary for some
three miles inland, and excursion steamers from Plymouth penetrate so far
as Steer Point, where Kitley and Coffleet creeks branch right and left to
Yealmpton—“Yampton” locally—and Brixton, and in the middle the smaller
creek of Puslinch. The fresh water stream of the Yealm, like all the
streams of South Devon, comes from Dartmoor. The banks of the estuary
are deeply wooded and extremely picturesque; presenting, more than any of
those numerous inlets that are so notable a feature of this coast, the
appearance of a gorge; Noss Mayo standing on its branch creek, deriving,
indeed, the first part of its name from the projecting height—the “ness”
or “nose”—on which it stands. Noss in 1849 suffered terribly from
cholera, and even more terribly two centuries ago, when only seven of its
inhabitants survived.
By the row-boat ferry at Yealm Mouth the explorer is put to the tiring
scramble towards Wembury. Descending the hillside fields of corn, the
lonely church is seen, and over it, out to sea, the famous Mewstone
appears, rising, a huge, abrupt and angular mass of dark limestone rock,
a mile off-shore. Dangerous, and nearly inaccessible though it be at most
times, it and its surrounding sea look so innocent and harmless under
the sun of a still day in July that the evil reputation of that rock and
these waters seems based on insubstantial grounds. Yet the Mewstone has
amply occasioned the poetic tribute:
“The sullen crash, the shriek of wild despair,
One moment swell the gust that whistles by;
The next—no sound of living voice is there,
None, save the waken’d sea-mew’s dreary cry.”
The verse points to the origin of the name of this and the several
other Mewstones along this coast of Devon; the sea-mew is of course the
sea-gull, and these isolated reefs so many “sea-gull rocks.” References
are often found in literature to the “laughter of the gulls,” but the
name of “sea-mew” more nearly indicates the sound of the peevish cry of
those birds, which closely resembles the mew of a cat.
About 1836 the Mewstone was inhabited by one Samuel Wakeham and his wife,
who lived in a little rustic house and looked after Squire Calmady’s
rabbits, which swarmed the seemingly lifeless rock. The Mewstone was made
the subject of an article in a local South Devon magazine, and (according
to the editor of it) drew the annexed reply from the “Lord of the Isles,”
as the editor calls him. The thing is amusing, but smells suspiciously
like an editorial invention:
“On bored the moostone septembur The fust Sur, i ham verry
mutch obliGed to u for puttin a drawen of the moostone an mi
howse into youre booke an I Rite this to tel u that no won
cant wark from the moostone to the shoar At lo warter for a
six ore gig as i nose cud be toed over the roks without runnen
fowl of it or a smawl bote mite sale over in good Wether
squire kill maid he nose the same i ave a been livin hear a
long time an i Never seed the hole beech all across dry at No
time whatsumdever the see warshes over sum part of them for I
Nose all the roks an goes down their to pik sof crabs for bate
gainst i goes a chad fishen an me wife youre hum Bell servant
“to cum hand samel warkeam
“Po. scrip
“if any genteelman what likes a wark he can wark to the shoar
At wembury an if they holds up there white pockethanchecuffs
for a signal an ile cum off in me bote an fetch them to the
island for two pence a pease an you furgot to say that there’s
a bewtifull landin place dead easterd on the iland an sum
stairs that i made to cum up for the ladeys an ile be verry
mutch obliGe to put this in your booke you maid a mistake I be
not fortey ears old i be only 39 an 6 munths.
“Samel warkeam”
“P.s. Youve a forgot to say that ive a got a bewtifull Kayl
plat for the gentlemen an ladeys for To play to KeEls an shut
rabets at nine pens A pease eccept the panches for me piggs an
kip the jackits ov em
An my missus hasent got no hobjectsiuns to boyll the kittle an
make the tay pon the Kayll Plat an hand the tay Pot out of the
winder an put a tabell outside the winder on every thing hum
Bell an comfortabell.”
There is no village at Wembury; only, down beneath the swelling contours
of those hillside cornfields, a church, a farmstead, and a water-mill
on the very verge of the beach: the whole so situated and of such a
singularly unnatural loneliness and air of detachment that you feel sure
whatever history may have to say of the place, or whatever it may leave
unsaid—you feel sure, I say, that the sea has at some time come up and
munched off a great piece of land and the village with it, and has long
ago digested the whole. And indeed what is left of Wembury is situated
in a little semi-circular bay, where the downs descend to low clifflets
of friable earthy rock, which is now slaty, now gravelly, and again of
the red Devonian sandstone, all by turns. It is as though that hungry
sea had come suddenly and taken a mouthful, as you might bite a piece of
bread and butter.
Descending to this strange spot, you look down upon the leads of the
church tower and thence come by rough and steep tracks to the shore,
where a little stream runs by the water-wheel of the old mill on to the
shingle of the beach. So near is the wheel to the sea that in times of
storm the salt water of the waves mingles with the fresh, and so close
to the tide are the walls of the mill-house that when the winds lash the
waters into foaming breakers the rooms smell of the salt spray, and are
filled with the clamour of the elements.
Here the singular picturesqueness of the place is most fully revealed,
and the church to which just now you descended is seen to stand high and
boldly above the beach, on a commanding knoll, girt about with a circular
brick retaining-wall heavily buttressed, lest it, as well as the church,
and the churchyard it shores up from a sudden descent, should come
toppling down in common ruin.
The age, the rugged beauty, and the interest of the church are almost
completely hidden beneath a coating of plaster, and the grass grows
rankly in the churchyard, where the odd epitaph may be noted:
Henry Kembil
died Nov. 25 1725
’Tis over with your friend
Mind That.
An arresting inscription, surely, and not a little puzzling until it is
discovered that Henry Kembil was a ferryman of the Yealm and a portion of
his epitaph is a play upon the word “over,” by which, shouting across the
river, the would-be passenger who is versed in Devon ways still brings
the ferryman to him.
[Illustration: WEMBURY.]
Save, indeed, for the hullabaloo created by the battleships out to sea
and the forts off Plymouth, practising their heavy guns, Wembury would
scarce be associated with bloody war; yet if this place is really the
“Wicganbeorch” of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—as by antiquaries it is
supposed to be—it saw particularly hard fighting in A.D. 851, when “Ceorl
the Ealdorman, with the men of Devon fought against the heathen men (that
is, the Danes), and there made great slaughter and got the victory.”
Those “heathen” men or Danes were the vikings, of whom early history has
so much to tell; but here we see the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, in writing
“Wicganbeorch,” which means Wiking-bury—adopting the advice given so many
centuries later by Tony Weller to his dutiful Sam, and “spelling it with
a ‘we.’”
The big gun practice of the battleships out in the Channel, whose roaring
is like that of several thunderstorms growling in concert across the
water, is very impressive, and majestic, and altogether different from
the sound of firing from the forts, producing a less resonant noise, like
that of rude and impudent persons, very much out of temper, violently and
continually slamming doors.
Oh! it is good to stand on the beach of a primitive place like Wembury
when the sea breeze blows in strong, and the great curling waves come
creaming up to the very walls of the mill-house, with the stinging salt
particles on your face and an unutterable sense of vitality and freedom
clothing you, and the giant waves spouting out yonder on the Mewstone,
and the hoarse jamboree of the great guns bellowing yonder. But when
the sea and the air are still and the August sun glares down upon the
hilly coast, why then there is nothing for it but to either rest till
sundown or plod on exhaustedly in a reeking moist heat, welcoming every
little puff of wind on the rises, and almost sinking to the ground in the
stew-pan of the hollows.