church-tower raised above the street, and half its houses hidden by
the trees. In this church with the fine roof and the granite pillars
is buried, under a black marble slab elaborately inlaid with brasses,
a Sir John Arundel of the sixteenth century; the father, I believe, of
John-for-the-King. And in the north aisle, with no stone to tell the tale
of his brave and faithful service, lies Anthony Payne, the tender-hearted
giant who taught little boys to fish, and fought with the strength of ten
by Bevill Grenville’s side, and wrote a letter for which alone, if for
nothing else, he deserves an epitaph. When Sir Bevill died at Lansdowne
Hill it was Anthony Payne who broke the news to Lady Grenville. “You
know, as we all believe,” he wrote, “that his soul was in heaven before
his bones were cold. He fell, as he did often tell us he wished to die,
in the great Stewart cause, for his country and his King. He delivered
to me his last commands, and with such tender words for you and for his
children as are not to be set down with my poor pen, but must come to
your ears upon my heart’s best breath. Master John, when I mounted him
upon his father’s horse, rode him into the war like a young prince as he
is.… I am coming down with the mournfullest load that ever a poor servant
did bear, to bring the great heart that is cold to Kilkhampton vault. O!
my lady, how shall I ever brook your weeping face?”[12]
Down in the street we may find the house where this servant with the
heart and tongue of gold was born and died. It was once a manor-house of
the Grenvilles, but is now the “Tree” Inn, and shows little sign of age.
Until lately there was a hole still in the ceiling through which Anthony
Payne’s huge body was lowered after his death, since it was impossible
to bring it down the narrow stairs; but now this room has been rebuilt.
Fixed in the outer wall of the inn, however, is a relic of the battle
on Stamford Hill, where “ye army of ye rebells … receiued A signall
ouerthrow by ye Valor of Sir Bevill Granville and ye Cornish army,” and
where Anthony Payne was valiant as his master. Once this stone was on
the battle-field, but the owner of the land was so greatly harassed by
sightseers that in his rage he dug out the memorial and built a house
upon the spot!
Here, as we drive out of Stratton on a fine curving road, is the green
slope on our left where the desperate battle of Stamford Hill, and the
landlord’s desperate act of self-defence, took place. It was on that
hilltop that Sir Bevill’s valour won him a personal letter from the King,
the letter that was found in his pocket when he was dead. “Keep this
safe,” he had written on it; for the Grenvilles were “King’s men,” not
perfunctorily but passionately. It is but a few miles, on rather a rough
road, to Kilkhampton, where Sir Bevill and most of his house are buried.
Indeed, Kilkhampton Church is as it were the shrine of the gallant
Grenvilles, and deserves that high honour. A shady avenue leads from
the modern lych-gate to the porch that was built by a Grenville and
the Norman door through which so many Grenvilles have passed to their
prayers, and so many have been carried to their graves: Roger, who
for his lavish table was called the Great Housekeeper, and John the
privateer, and Richard the Marshal and poet,[13] and Sir Bernard, son of
the greatest of the Grenvilles and father of Sir Bevill. Sir Richard of
the _Revenge_, as we all know, died “with a joyful and quiet mynde” on a
distant sea, leaving behind him “an everlastynge fame of a valyante and
true soldier that has done hys dutie as he was bounde to do.”[14] But Sir
Bevill, thanks to Anthony Payne, lies in the vault of Kilkhampton, and
with him is the wife who could not live long without him, and the boy who
rode into the war like a young prince and became as ardent a royalist as
his father.
Everywhere we see the Grenville arms: the three strange objects that
some call “horsemen’s rests,” and some call rudders, and some clarions.
They are outside the south-east door, and in the chancel, and on one of
the elaborately carved bench-ends, and on the old granite font, and in
much magnificence of paint and gilding on the south wall. And here on
the same wall is the ugly eighteenth-century monument to Sir Bevill,
with its long epitaph. “A brighter courage and a gentler disposition
were never marryed together,” said Lord Clarendon. A better memorial of
his bright courage than this thing of gilt and marble is the well-worn
helmet that hangs beside it; and of his gentle disposition we have proof
enough in his own and his wife’s letters, with their engaging mixture of
romance and domesticity. “Would God but grant you were home,” writes Lady
Grenville, “till when my heart will never be quiett.” “The Plaisters you
sent, I trust in God, hath done me much good.” “I pray you make haste and
come home.… I am and still will be yours ever and only.… PS.--I pray you
let your Coate be well ayr’d and lye abroad awhile before you weare it.
To my dearest and best Frend Mr. Bevill Grenvile, these.” “Beseeching God
to encline yr heart to love her who will in spite of the divill ever be
yrs immoveably.” “If you please to bestowe a plaine black Gownd of any
cheape Stufe on me I will thanke you.”[15]
[Illustration: MORWENSTOW.]
Not far from Kilkhampton is another church that some of us may care to
see, though the long lane that leads to Morwenstow is by no means one
that has no turning. Indeed, it would need some ingenuity to find room
for any more corners in these narrow ways; but if progress is slow the
country is attractive and the sea is before us, with flat-topped Lundy
Island in the distance. We come rather suddenly on the church in its
steep and narrow valley, with the tower darkly outlined against the blue
sea, and a bold sweep of heather for background: the remote romantic glen
where Morwenna the hermit had her cell near the sea, and died with her
eyes fixed upon her native Wales: the glen of which Hawker wrote: “Here
within the ark we hear only the voices of animals and birds, and the
sound of many waters.”
He must have heard the voices of a good many animals; for even when he
went to church he was followed by nine or ten cats, they say, which
wandered, while he was preaching, about this beautiful building with the
Norman arches, and the chancel with the marble floor. Here at the foot
of the pulpit is the grave of his wife, the devoted wife who was older
than his mother. Morwenstow, in its utter loneliness, its wild beauty,
its deep, full colouring, needs nothing to give it charm; but its name,
probably, would be known to few if it had not had, for many years, a
vicar whose eccentric, poetical, heroic nature made his name and his
dwelling-place memorable. We can forgive his errant cats to a man who
wrote verses so sonorous--and above all to a man who fought the wreckers
as Hawker fought them here.[16] His dust is not in the church he loved
and cared for; but his epitaph is on the lips of those who knew him.
“His door was always open to the poor,” they say.
The twisted lanes take us back to the main road, and on a splendid
surface we cross the border into Devon.
NORTH DEVON
SUMMARY OF RUN THROUGH NORTH DEVON
DISTANCES.
Morwenstow
Clovelly 12 miles
Bideford 12 ”
Barnstaple, viâ Torridge and Taw Valleys 52½ ”
Ilfracombe 11¾ ”
Lynmouth, viâ Simonsbath 28½ ”
Porlock 12 ”
----------
Total 128¾ miles
ROADS.
Surface variable; steep gradients invariable.
VI
NORTH DEVON
After a few miles of brisk running over the breezy heights of Welsford
Moor we return to the steep, winding, narrow lanes that have grown so
familiar, and pass slowly down the long hill to the woods of Clovelly. To
the left is Clovelly Court, where the Careys lived, and the church where
they were buried, and to the right is the turn towards the entrance of
the Hobby Drive, and the garage where the car must be left.
[Illustration: CLOVELLY.]
There are two ways into the village. The shortest way is by the path that
drops almost from our feet, as we stand by the gate of the beautiful
Drive that motorists may not enter. Very soon this path that winds down
the face of the cliff merges into the village street, the famous street
that we know so well, even if we have never seen it. For that very
reason, because it is so well known, I would advise those who are here
for the first time to follow the road to the left, and after a short
walk that is almost painful--so steep is the way and so loose are the
stones--to enter Clovelly at the bottom of the hill, near the quay. Here
there is an unfamiliar and beautiful picture for one’s first impression
of the loveliest village in England. Overhead are the trees that clothe
all this hillside in sweeping draperies of green; the picture is framed
in stems and ivy-grown rocks; clustered under the cliff are the irregular
roofs of a group of cottages; a large boat is drawn up by the wayside;
and towering in the distance is the soft mass of trees through which the
Hobby Drive winds unseen. Almost at once we reach the little pier, and
Clovelly, hanging between sky and sea, is facing us.
[Illustration: STREET IN CLOVELLY.]
For some of its beauty one is prepared. The little white houses
clambering up the precipitous hillside, the long, winding street of
cobbled stairs, the curving pier with its nets and poles and nights of
steps, the jerseyed fishermen and pretty Devon faces, the boats that
fill the harbour and the donkeys that climb the street, are all things
that one has been taught to expect. But neither pen nor brush can give,
in a single picture as we have it here, the extraordinary variety
and brilliancy of their setting: the clematis that trails about the
verandahs, the fuchsias and hydrangeas, pink and blue, that guard the
doors, the crimson valerian that runs riot on the walls, the brown cliffs
and ruddy rocks, the woods that roll from the skyline to the shore, and
at their feet the little shining pools and many-coloured seaweed, and
beyond them the long curve of Bideford Bay and the sea, unutterably blue.
“Now that you have seen Clovelly,” said Kingsley to his wife, “you know
what was the inspiration of my life before I met you.” Here on the
little quay he heard his father, the rector, many a time read prayers
for the fishermen before they put to sea; and it was the sad teaching
of Clovelly, where he saw so many men work and so many women weep,
that gave its pathos to the song of the Three Fishers. When his health
was failing, it was the air of Clovelly that he pined for. He came to
lodgings at the top of this winding street that we climb so laboriously,
“the narrow, paved cranny of a street,” as he called it, and stayed there
happily for weeks.
It would be easy to be happy here for weeks; but in the summer there
is some difficulty in finding shelter even for one night. Fortunately
Bideford is not far off, and when we have made our way slowly back to the
high road there are only ten miles of a good surface between us and a
comfortable hotel.
[Illustration: CLOVELLY HARBOUR.]
To reach it we must cross the famous bridge. This “very stately piece,”
as an old writer calls it, has played a very prominent part in the
history of the town. “A poore preste” began it, we are told, being
“animatid so to do by a vision. Then al the cuntery about sette their
handes onto the performing of it.” Sir Theobald Grenville, Lord of
Bideford and Kilkhampton, a young ruffler who had lately been in trouble
with the Church, made common cause with the bishop who had ordered
his excommunication, and after being duly absolved became “an especial
furtherer” of the work. Grandison’s contribution took the form of
indulgences; the rich gave their lands and the poor gave their time; and
so the pride of Bideford arose on its foundation of woolsacks, and to
this day gives distinction to a town that is otherwise rather in need
of it. For wherever it was possible old things have been made new here.
The old part of the Royal Hotel, once the house of a merchant prince,
has been so carefully hidden that no one would guess it was there: the
splendid panelling of the room where Kingsley wrote much of “Westward
Ho!” has been painted: the church was rebuilt in the nineteenth century:
even the tombstones have been tidied up and marshalled in rows round the
churchyard wall. Within the church a few relics have survived: the Norman
font, the remains of two screens, and the canopied altar-tomb of Sir
Thomas Grenville, called the Venerable, who fought against Richard III.
and was esquire of the body to Henry VII. The tombstone of the Indian who
was brought home by the great Sir Richard seems to have been lost or
obscured by the redistribution of graves in the churchyard; but there is
a modern brass on the south wall to Sir Richard himself, who lived here
when he was not upon the high seas.
This is the only memorial, in his birthplace, to the greatest of the “men
of Bideford in Devon;” but Charles Kingsley has a full-length statue at
the end of the promenade. Kingsley, I imagine, would have preferred a
different arrangement.
Two miles away to the west is Westward Ho! We shall see it under the hill
if we drive out to Appledore, where the sands are very yellow and the sea
is very blue. We shall also see a spot called Bloody Corner, which is
said to be the burial-place of the scourge of Saxon England, Hubba the
Dane, the devastator of Yorkshire, the marauder of our coasts, the rifler
of monasteries. A slab of slate has been fixed in the wall on the right
side of the road, and an inscription engraved on it by someone who was a
lover of history, but no poet.
The shortest, but not the most direct way to Barnstaple from Bideford is
by the coast road, whence we see, across the brown and yellow sands, the
river-mouth from which seven ships of Bideford sailed out to fight the
Armada. This road is level, but extremely dusty in dry weather except
near Barnstaple, where it has a “prepared” surface. The direct road over
the hills is so steep in places that its directness is merely nominal;
but here the scenery is lovely.
There is a third alternative: to drive up the Torridge valley, cross
over by Winkleigh to the valley of the Taw, and follow that river to
Barnstaple. This is a course greatly to be commended.
Especially on a hot afternoon this is one of the most desirable runs in
Devon. From Bideford to Torrington the road is shaded nearly continuously
by high banks of trees rising from the wayside: on the left the cool
stream winds beside us. Torrington, on its abrupt hill above the river,
must have been a place of dignity when its castle dominated the valley.
Through these streets where we are driving Fairfax chased the royalists
one night in the dark, after a long resistance “with push of Pike and
butt end of Musket”--chased them clean through the town and out of it to
the bridges. This engagement, wrote the general, was “a hotter service
than any storme this Army hath before been upon.” The royalists meantime
had bribed “a desperate villain” to fire their store of powder in the
church, lest the army of the Parliament should benefit by it; with the
unexpected result that when “the Lead, Stones, Timber, and Ironwork of
the Church were blowne up into the Ayre” two hundred royalist prisoners
were blown up too. Hardly any of the Parliament-men were injured, though
Fairfax himself had a narrow escape, and was obliged to return to “Master
Rolls his house” for the night, “in regard the Quarter at Torrington was
inconvenient, the Windowes broken in pieces, and the houses so shattered
with the great blast that they could not performe a convenient shelter
from the raine.” This church on our right among the trees replaced the
one that was blown into the air so completely that hardly a fragment of
the old building remains; and this street by which we pass through the
town is the one by which Fairfax rode back that night to Master Rolls
his house. He went straight on to Stephenstone, but we turn away to
the right on the road that skirts the castle hill and passes near the
Waterloo obelisk.
We see little more of the Torridge; but this splendid Exeter road takes
us through very lovely scenery; by woods, and beds of fern, and level
heaths, and fields of meadowsweet, and rows of shady beeches, while for
the last time our view is bounded by the beloved hills of Dartmoor. It
is a curiously lonely road: hardly a village, and indeed for some miles
hardly a cottage, breaks the solitude. Between the two valleys, as we
pass through Winkleigh and bear round to the left to cross the Taw, the
country is less beautiful and the surface rougher; but after the sharp
turn at Morchard Road Station we have a splendid run to Barnstaple.
This is the most level road in Devon. This fact alone commends it to
us, but there are many other facts to make it memorable: woods of oak,
and larch, and mountain-ash, and chestnut-trees, not only shadowing us
but filling all the landscape: tall red fir-stems, and ferns beside the
road, and wildflowers everywhere. All the way we follow the railroad,
swinging past station after station, Eggesford and South Molton and
Portsmouth Arms and Umberleigh, while the valley widens and narrows and
opens out again; and all the time the Taw is close at hand, growing from
a tiny stream between low banks of red earth and grass to a strong river
rippling over the shingle, with trees dipping into its sunny waters.
Somewhere in Bishop’s Tawton lies the dust of the first Bishop of Devon.
It was here that the see was originally fixed; but when the second bishop
was murdered it was thought wise to move to a more central position
at Crediton. Beyond the pretty village the estuary widens, and we see
Barnstaple before us through the trees.
[Illustration: ON THE TAW.]
Barnstaple, says Mr. Warner of the eighteenth century, “is by far the
most genteel town in North Devon.” This is a very happy word; though why
a town whose history includes the days of Athelstane, a town that has had
a castle and a priory and a life by no moans dull, should be “genteel”
when all is said, is hard to understand. The nice public gardens and open
spaces, the air of clean prosperity, and the colonnade with the fluted
pillars give it an eighteenth-century air, at latest. Yet, if we look
behind the church with the crooked spire we shall find the brown stone
grammar-school where Bishop Jewell and the poet Gay learnt their lessons;
and in the narrow street near the Imperial Hotel are some almshouses
whose granite pillars and beautiful moulded gutters date from 1627; and
spanning the river is the “right great and sumptuus bridge of stone” that
was “made long sins by a merchaunt of London caullid Stamford.” Nothing
is left of the priory where Sir Theobald de Grenville was excommunicated
with bell, book, and candle; nor of the castle that belonged at various
times to Judhael of Totnes, and the Tracy who murdered Becket, and
Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. Even at the beginning of the
Civil War it was “a place of small strength,” and during the struggle
it led a hard life. The Colonel Basset who defended it while it was in
royalist hands figures among John Prince’s Worthies. “This gentleman as
to his stature was somewhat short, but of an high crest and noble mind.
As to his religion he did not boast great matters, but lived them … he
being as plain in his soul as he was in his garb, which he resolved
should be proud of him rather than he of it.”
The road that crosses the hill between Barnstaple and Ilfracombe leaves
the town by the suburb of Pilton, whose white houses and gaily painted
shutters and high walls have rather a foreign air. There is a long but
well-graded hill before us, and a surface that is not very good. Each
flowery village is followed by another as gay, and each green valley
leads into another as green, and still we climb higher and higher till we
come to the heather. For a little time the scenery is dull; then the road
winds down a deep valley, and we see Ilfracombe in a gorge below.
Ilfracombe, like everyone’s grandmother, was lovely when it was young.
That, however, was some time ago, and at present its charms are a matter
of taste. That thousands love its piers and pierrots is evident at a
glance, but some of us can only look sadly at its bluffs and sparkling
sea, and long for the days that are no more. The change must have come
very quickly, for only fifty years ago George Eliot thought Ilfracombe
the loveliest sea place she ever saw, and found Tenby tame and vulgar
after it. “But it would not do,” she adds, “for those who can’t climb
rocks and mount perpetual hills; for the peculiarity of this country is
that it is all hill and no valley.”
There are hills, and valleys, too, in astonishing numbers along this
coast. The contour of the road between Ilfracombe and Porlock makes a
sinister picture. But those thirty miles include some of the finest
scenery in England; and by making them more than thirty, one may avoid
some of the worst gradients without missing any of the beauty.
For the first few miles the road clings to the brow of the cliff,
twisting round curve after curve, and mounting and falling and mounting
again. All the colours of the rainbow are in the landscape. There are
headlands of every shade of purple and red, foliage of every tint of
green, shadows that are intensely blue, sands that are really golden,
and a sea of a colour that has no name. We swing round a curve and see
the white houses of Combe Martin wedged between the brown cliffs, and a
few minutes later we turn away from the sea and mount the long village
street. Combe Martin may be defined as length without breadth; for though
it is a mile and a half long it is in no place wider than two little
houses. It has contributed in its day to the honour of its country, for
Edward III. and Henry V., it is said, made use of the silver-mines of
Combe Martin during their wars with France. Elizabeth gave cups of the
same silver to her friends; but Charles I., though ingenious in the art
of extracting the precious metals, sought here in vain.
The road, as it climbs up to Exmoor, grows rather rough. From Blackmoor
Gate the direct way to Lynton is of course through Parracombe, where
there are two hills of some renown, a descent and a climb. The
inconvenience here is in the fact that the change from the downward
to the upward gradient is in the middle of the village, and a run is
out of the question. None the less this hill, though steep, is quite
practicable; but the still more famous hill between Lynton and Lynmouth
thoroughly deserves its reputation, and, after personal experience,
I strongly advise motorists to avoid it unless they have absolute
confidence in the staunchness of their car, the power of their brakes,
and the scope of their steering-locks. Its difficulty lies, not only in
the gradient--though at one point that is steeper than one in four--but
in the extremely acute angle that occurs at the steepest spot and makes
it impossible, if there should chance to be so much as a wheelbarrow by
the wayside, for a car of any size to turn without pausing. An added
difficulty is the looseness of the surface, for the constant use of drags
has ploughed the road into a mass of stones and sand. It is possible now
to take cars on the “lift,” or funicular railway that runs up and down
the cliff; but it seems to me that the simplest plan is to drive round
by Simonsbath to Lynmouth. There is shelter there for both man and car;
but those who prefer to stay at Lynton--and they are many--may leave
their cars at the bottom of the hill, and mount it themselves, with their
luggage, in the cliff railway.
At Blackmoor Gate, then, instead of taking the road to Parracombe, we
must go straight on till we turn to the left at Challacombe. The country
is not inspiring. Technically, I suppose, this is part of Exmoor; but
there is nothing in these undulating fields and hedgerows to suggest
the hunting of the red deer by Saxon kings, or the jealous guarding of
forest-rights by the Conqueror. For William, though he gave away these
lands, was very strict about the hunting. “He loved the tall deer as
though he had been their father,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. His
love was like that of the little boy who was so fond of animals that he
always went to see the pigs killed.
[Illustration: LYNMOUTH.]