LYNTON (_continued_), COUNTISBURY, AND NORTHWARD
The word "Lynton," Mr. Chanter tells us in his interesting monograph on
the village, means the town on the lyn, and "lyn" is the Celtic word, not
for river, but for pool, and occurs in this meaning all over England, in
Northumberland, Yorkshire, Kent, Herefordshire. It is strange, perhaps,
that this rushing mountain stream should have been named from its very
rarely occurring pools, but the authority is indubitable.
The Celtic folk who named it, the "early Britons," as our childish
history books used to call them, were not, of course, the first
inhabitants of this wild and wooded spot; there are neolithic
remains--hut circles and burial-places--fairly thickly scattered along
this coast, and a certain number of flint implements have been found.
The hut circles in the Valley of Rocks, of which traces still remain,
though many of them have been destroyed quite recently, within the last
two hundred years or so, belong to this period, and it is probable that
the earth-camps of Lynton and Countisbury, of Parracombe, Martinhoe, and
Ilfracombe, were built by the immense labour of this vanished people.
Remains of the early Bronze period show that there was a moderate
population in this district before the Roman Conquest. Of Roman remains
there are none, save a few coins of doubtful authenticity found at
Countisbury, which are supposed to have been scattered and buried by a
resident clergyman at the close of the last century, with the avowed
intention of "fogging" later antiquarians--surely the strangest
"fourberie" ever indulged in by a reverend gentleman. All other evidence
points to the fact that the Romans never occupied North Devon, though
they may have held in temporary garrison one or other of the existing
camps of the district.
These camps open up most interesting avenues of speculation; many of them
were undoubtedly built as defences, some few--such as the small earthwork
on the din's edge at Martinhoe--as beacons or signalling stations, and
some are conjectured to have been built for burial purposes, not the mere
barrows for single internment, but in connection with sepulchral
ceremonies and rites of the worship of the dead. Such, perhaps, is the
small camp at Parracombe, which is built with a strong double fosse, but
the inner fosse deeper than the outer, which does not seem to have been
the case with camps built only for defence. There are two other camps at
Parracombe, one on the common and one on a high hill; near Lynton there
are two simple earth enclosures, called popularly Roborough Castle and
Stock Castle, and seven miles south of Lynton there is a square enclosure
called High Bray Castle, which commands a view of the fortified camps of
the district from Barnstaple to Braunton and Martinhoe. Tradition has it
that Alfred held this camp against the Danes, not that he built it, for
even in his day its foundation had become legendary and was ascribed to
"men of old time."
The Saxons do not seem to have built earth-camps, but stone
fortifications on hills, like Athelstan's castle at Barnstaple, or
Kenwith Castle, though they used the barrow-camps at their need. The
Romans, we know, were mighty engineers, and their roads and buildings
bear witness to the endurance of their handiwork, but many of these camps
are indisputably not Roman, and their names bear witness to their Celtic
origin. Such is the camp at Countisbury, which name is almost certainly
the same as Canterbury--"Kant-ys-bury," the "camp on the headland," and
which is one of the most perfect in Devonshire. It stands on a hill a
thousand feet above the sea, commanding a view of the coast from Porlock
to Heddon's Mouth, with the line of the Welsh coast opposite; it consists
of a triple rampart and fosse, rising boldly one within the other, with a
gate cut in the northern face of the rampart, and with a small mound
exactly in the centre of the inner camp. How did these peoples of the
Celtic speech build a work of such engineering magnitude, without the
tools and appliances of the Roman civilization, with implements of flint,
or at best of bronze, a work of such strategical foresight, of such
nicety of proportion, and of such enduring strength, that now after the
lapse of probably twenty-five centuries its bold proportions can be
traced by the most casual glance of the passer-by of the road that runs
past, now that the sheep clamber and feed in its deep fosses, and daisies
sprinkle the grass of its ramparts?
The Saxons seem to have come more or less peaceably to the Britons of
North Devon, who had taken little impress, probably, of the alien Roman
civilization, except Christianity, for many of the churches round still
carry the name of a Celtic saint, showing that the Saxons did not come
devastating villages and destroying the little churches (in which case,
of course, the churches would carry the name of a Saxon saint of their
later Christianity), but settled with the inhabitants, intermarried, and
probably adopted their worship. There is the church of St. Culbone, St.
Brendon--that tiny village of Brendon, near Lynton, which must have been
a village, with a rude little church of its own, before Hengist and Horsa
landed--of St. Dubricius at Porlock, of St. Brannock at Braunton, near
Barnstaple.
St. Brannock ought to have been an Irish saint; the legends of him have a
levity, and a fantastic and humorous twist, that we do not find in the
stories of the Teutonic saints. He was the son of the King of Calabria,
and came to North Devon somewhere about A.D. 300. He searched the hearts
of the inhabitants by various miracles, among them by having a cow
killed, cut in pieces, and boiled in a cauldron, and then, calling the
cow by name, out it walked, alive and whole, and never a penn'orth the
worse. The story of this is carved on one of the bench-ends of the pews
in the present fourteenth-century church of St. Brannock, and there is a
large carved boss of the roof representing a sow and her litter, because
St. Brannock is said to have been commanded in a dream to build a church
on the spot where he should first meet a sow. He pressed the deer into
the service of God, and yoked them, making them draw timber from the
woods to build the church. This is how the rhyme goes--a fairly modern
version of a much older doggerel:
"He had nor horse, nor ox, nor ass, but the deer so little
and limber;
They ran in the forest to please themselves, why shouldn't
they draw his timber?"
There is also another rhyme which seems to show that a bond of affection
sprang up between him and the cow which had had to serve his miracle:
"St. Brannock fed on venison when he sat down to table;
Behind him stood his favourite cow, and his
valet-de-chambre Abel!"
I do not know why his servant should have been called Abel.
The Norman Conquest also came peaceably to this beautiful and remote
place; the census of the population of Lynton and Countisbury given in
Domesday, which was compiled in 1086, twenty years after the Conquest,
gives the numbers for the two villages as 425. In 1801 the population
numbered no more than 601, these numbers being as many as the district
could support until the modern distribution of supplies; and the
comparatively small increase in seven hundred years shows that in William
the Conqueror's reign sobriety of government and security of the life of
the individual gave these localities freedom to develop to the limit of
their capacity. Countisbury had been held by Ailmar "on the day on which
King Edward was alive and dead," and it "rendered geld for half a hide."
A "hide" was the unit of assessment on which the Danegeld was paid in
Saxon times--
1 virgate = 1/4 of a hide.
1 ferling = 1/4 of a virgate (also identified with sixteen acres).
1 ploughland = as much land as 8 oxen could cultivate.
(In Devonshire 1 ploughland was equivalent to 4 ferlings.)
The "manor" consisted of the "demesne," which was the lord's home-farm,
attached to his dwelling, and the villagers' land, which was held by the
villeins for their own use, on the condition of the cultivation of their
lord's ground. Hence it will be seen that the condition of the peasantry
in the eleventh century, while actually serfdom, with enforced labour,
and no right of moving from the dominion of the lord under which they
were born, was virtually better than the conditions of the agricultural
population at the beginning of the nineteenth century (and some would
say, even, at the present day) in that they practically owned
smallholdings and were in a position where industry and enterprise could
be better rewarded than many a labourer of our own time could expect,
whose prospects--so long as he remained an agricultural labourer, and in
England--were inalterably bounded by eighteen shillings a week.
The manor of Countisbury rendered geld for half a hide, of which the lord
held one virgate and four ploughs, and the villeins held one virgate and
six ploughs. Here is a list of the possessions of the overlord in 1086:
"There William has 12 villeins, and 6 bordars, and 15 serfs, and 1
swineherd (who renders 10 swine by the year), and 1 packhorse, and 32
head of cattle, and 24 swine, and 300 sheep less 13, and 35 goats, and 50
acres of wood, and 2 acres of meadow, 1 leuga in length and 1 furlong in
breadth; and it is worth by the year 4 pounds, and it was worth 20
shillings when William received it."
The Danish raids also, though they were frequent up and down this coast,
seem to have passed by Lynton; the narrowness of the landing beach, the
steep rise of the cliffs immediately from the shore, the rocky bed of the
river and the thick woods which fence the valley, all made it difficult
of attack, while Porlock and Ilfracombe lay within a few miles, offering
smoother harbours and easier access. There are several notices in the
Saxon Chronicle of Danish raids on the coasts of the Severn Sea, in A.D.
845 and in A.D. 917, when the Lidwiccas, under Ohtor and Rhoald, landed
and devastated a great portion of this north-west country, but they
probably came to Watchet, near Minehead, and even then all that Lynton
saw of the fierce raid was the smoke of the beacon fires from Dunkery
Beacon to Martinhoe Beacon, near Heddon's Mouth.
In the twelfth century the manors of Lynton and Countisbury were in the
possession of Henry de Tracy, Becket's murderer, and by him were given to
the Abbey of Ford, in whose right they remained until the dissolution of
the monasteries by Henry VIII. Ford Abbey was a foundation of Cistercian
monks, an order which was always engaged in matters of practical value,
and under their rule something was done to improve the breed of mountain
sheep round this district and produce wool of greater market value; they
also attempted some development of agriculture and the fishery of
Lynmouth. They had, indeed, extensive rights of fishery by land and
sea--a very valuable asset, it must be remembered, in the Middle Ages,
when the mass of the population lived almost exclusively on salt fish,
and meat was scarce, except on the tables of the noble. Their rights
extended over Lynmouth, Martinhoe, Countisbury, and the coast of Wales,
and the monopoly of deep-sea fishing along the Severn Sea. This went
beyond the old manorial claim, which was "from the shore so far seaward
as a horsed knight could, at low water-springs, reach with his spear."
Beyond was the King's, and was free and open to all his subjects, though
a claim for deep-sea rights was allowed if it could be proved to be of
very ancient usage, as in the case of Ford Abbey. Lynmouth was a noted
resort for herrings all through the Middle Ages, and curing-houses stood
on the beach for many years until 1607, when nearly all were swept away
by a great storm, and never after properly reconstructed. The herrings
also at some time in the seventeenth century left these coasts
completely--tradition says because of the avarice of a parson of Lynton,
a hard man and greedy, who cared rather to fleece his flock than feed
them, and who imposed such heavy tithes on his poor parishioners, that,
in spite of the prosperity of their fishing, they were unable to pay
them. So the herrings left the district, and the parson could whistle
for them, until he mended his ways and reduced his tithes, when they
magically returned.
At the dissolution of the monasteries very little difference in the daily
routine of their lives can have been felt by the country people round
Lynton and Countisbury. John Chidley, who had been bailiff for Ford
Abbey, applied to the King for continuation in his office, which was
granted to him, and he administered the property for Henry VIII, Edward
VI, and, Elizabeth, as he had administered it for the Abbey of Ford.
Nor did the Civil Wars touch it nearly. Barnstaple and Dunster were
taken and retaken by the Parliamentarian troops, and armies marched from
Dunster west to Bideford across Exmoor and the great commons, but no
armed troops came down into Lynton; perhaps hardly even a straggler found
his way there. In the tragic rebellion of 1685 a bloody little drama was
enacted here indeed, but that is connected with the history of the de
Wichehalses, the family of chief interest and importance who have lived
at Lynton. They did not come to Lynton before the early seventeenth
century; their home was a small hamlet called Wych, near Chudleigh in
Devonshire, though Blackmore invents for them a romantic Dutch pedigree,
and asserts that they fled to England to escape from Spanish persecution
in the Netherlands; this story, however, has been proved entirely without
foundation by the careful researches of Mr. Chanter. In the time of
Elizabeth, he says, these de Wichehalses had overflowed all over the
country; we find them at Exeter, Chudleigh, Ashcombe, and Powderham. In
1530 one, Nicholas de Wichehalse, settled at Barnstaple and started in
the woollen trade; he married into the Salisbury family, who were in the
same business; and when he died he decreed by will that his nephew John
should marry his stepdaughter, Katherine Salisbury. The next Nicholas de
Wichehalse married Lettice Deamond, the daughter of the Mayor of
Barnstaple, and it is an inventory of his shop, taken in 1607, that I
have quoted in a previous chapter.
His son Hugh married in due course, and continued to live at his family
mansion in Crock Street, until, in 1627, the fear of the plague which
ravaged Barnstaple and Bideford (it was supposed to have been brought
into the towns by an infected mattress which had been thrown overboard by
a plague-stricken ship, and was fished out of the river just below
Barnstaple by four children who were fishing) drove the de Wichehalses
out of the city.
Hugh de Wichehalse decided to send his family to the purer air of the old
Grange Farm of Lee, near Lynton. One can picture the removal: his wife,
his children, his servants, and a whole string of packhorses (carriages
were still rare as a means of transport), coming down Boutport Street,
and across Pilton Causeway, up the beautiful and fertile valley of the
Yeo, to Westland Pound on the edge of Blackmoor, and its inn, where in
all probability they slept. The next day they would be on the high
barren moors, where the air was too sweet and keen for infection, and so
would come across Parracombe Common, Martinhoe Common, Lynton Common, and
down the Valley of Rocks to Lee (what is now called Lee Abbey).
The farm stood about a mile and a half or two miles from Lynton, and
after the busy life of the town their solitude must have seemed to them
excessive, for their near neighbours would live half a dozen miles away,
and were inaccessible in winter. There were the Berrys from Crosscombe,
a branch of the Berrynarbor family into which Hugh's sister had married;
the Knights at West Lyn; the Pophams, who came from Porlock.
The family lived there for the next eighty years. Hugh was buried in the
parish church at Lynton, and his monument can be seen there; it is he to
whom Blackmore refers in "Lorna Doone" as Baron Hugh, who was somewhat
too much hand-in-glove with the Doones; but the "young Squire Marwood,"
who rode too frequently past the Ridds' farm and kissed Annie Ridd, is a
character of fiction, for Hugh de Wichehalse's son was called John, and
not Marwood, there was never one of that name.
John was a strong Parliamentarian, and married into the Venner family;
but very soon they were in opposite camps, and there was great distrust
and anger between them. Colonel Venner commanded a regiment in
Monmouth's haphazard and ill-fated army in 1685. Wade, a renegade lawyer
from Holland, with a captain's commission, served in his regiment, and
after the defeat of Monmouth at Sedgemoor, Wade and Ferguson (a notorious
factious Scotchman, and the father of all plots) escaped to Bridgewater
and from thence got passage down to Ilfracombe. There they hired a small
ship and worked their way up the coast, hoping to rescue other refugees;
they were sighted and chased by one of the King's frigates, and were
forced to run ashore, when Lynton became the scene of one of those grim
and terrible rebel hunts which made the West Country tragic and bloody
during that summer of 1685. Wade was discovered at Brendon by John de
Wichehalse; he made a run for it, and was shot by de Wichehalse's
servant, John Babb. The Babbs were said never to have prospered
afterwards; their crops failed, the fisheries failed, and they became
extinct in the second generation. The last of them, Ursula Babb, the
grand-daughter of John, was to be seen wandering up and down the little
beach of Lynmouth, a half-crazed old crone, cursed with the evil-eye, and
babbling disjointed and incoherent stories of the ruin of the de
Wichehalses.
Partly because of discord between him and the Venner family, partly
because of the strong feeling which was aroused locally by the action of
de Wichehalse, who had the body of a rebel who was shot in Bonham Wood
quartered and hung on the paled gate opposite Lee, he left Lynton and
went to live in London. The simple Devonshire estates could not support
the expenses of living in London; bit after bit his property was
mortgaged and frittered away, and when he died he possessed East Leymouth
(now Lynmouth) only, which he left to his daughter Mary. She it was who
became the heroine of all the stories of the "last of the de
Wichehalses," which, indeed, she was. She met a sudden and unexplained
death off Duty Point, and the White Lady of Castle Rock--a phenomenon
caused by a small aperture, bearing a slight resemblance to a woman's
figure, among the dark masses of the rock--is popularly supposed to be
connected with her fate. Of her brothers, Charles, the younger, was
killed at the Battle of Almanza in 1707, when the English, under Lord
Galway, lost 18,000 men and all their transport, and the elder brother,
John, died at Port Mahon, in Minorca, in 1721, while on garrison duty,
and this branch of the family became extinct.
[Illustration: Duty Point]
And this is positively all the history of Lynton, until, in the time of
the French Revolution, when the turbulent state of the Continent made it
inadvisable to spend a holiday abroad, its beauty was discovered by those
eager to find in England that enjoyment of the picturesque which before
they had looked for in Italy and Southern France. We use "picturesque"
now in a slightly derogatory sense, or we use it patronizingly, because
it is old-fashioned and belongs to the nineteenth century, and Ruskin and
Wordsworth, and even Horace Walpole and his "Gothic" ruin on Strawberry
Hill; and we are of the twentieth century, and have discovered the beauty
of docks and harbours and tall factory chimneys and railway stations,
under the guidance of Whistler and Brangwyn and such folk, and we do not
fret at laying a railway through Perthshire or the Lake District, because
railways are fast becoming almost as romantic and old-fashioned to us as
stage-coaches (in these days of aeroplanes and automobiles); but at least
let us remember that it is to the nineteenth century that we owe that
acute appreciation, not only of the visible beauty of the world, but of
the spirit that lies behind it, that personal and intimate character of
places which is one of our dear possessions. Mountains and woods, cliff
and cove, have become to us a truism of beauty, but let us at least be
grateful to the generation which first dared to see more in the boundless
Scotch hills and moors than "savage and disgusting country," or to
compare the pinnacles of the Alps to human handiwork--greatly to their
disadvantage. And the small absurdities, the "ruins" that they loved,
the "abbeys" they erected, were only part of that general half-conscious
striving to apprehend and express the spirit of romance with which we are
still moved in our own day, which Kipling expresses in his own fashion
and Conrad in his, down to the small-change of literature which struggles
for expression in our magazines and periodicals.
So when Shelley and Coleridge and Wordsworth came to Lynton, and found it
beautiful, and nearly decided to live there and be the poets of Devon
instead of the poets of the Lake District, it was because they found in
it that quality of beauty which they needed; and when, a little later,
Lynton was "discovered" by one or more people of wealth--notably by Mr.
Coutts, the banker, who built houses there and hotels, and began to noise
its beauty up and down the London world--it was just the outermost ripple
of the vast disturbance of the French Revolution which touched the little
spot, part of the free new eager spirit which sent men questing for a
loveliness they could neither make nor control, and of which they must be
humble and passive spectators, and part also of vast causes and changes,
which drove Englishmen to seek their holidays within their own shores.
Before closing this second chapter on Lynton, I cannot forbear to speak
yet further of the beautiful scenery in which it lies. There is
Summerhouse Hill, or Lyn Cleave, as it is more charmingly and
appropriately called, the great rocky height, a thousand feet above
Lynmouth, which looks down on the two villages and which divides the
valleys of the East and West Lyn. Lying on the short dry springy turf,
in the mellow sunlight of late afternoon, you can look along the velvety
wooded valley of the East Lyn, where the stream is hidden by the tufted
banks of the trees, and by shifting ever so slightly on your elbows as
you lie at ease you can look into the bare brown rocky valley of the West
Lyn, and see the gleam of the river foaming over its rocks a thousand
feet below. All round is the cawing of rooks, as they sail majestically
back to their nests, grave and cheerful with their abundance of food and
their security of tenure. England belongs to the rooks, says a friend of
mine. We English may live here, we may build houses and farms, we may
plough and sow and reap, we may make revolutions or wars, sending our
armies marching through the countryside in creeping dusty columns, but we
are only illusions on the page of history, shadows flitting across the
face of the land; the rooks are perpetual, ineradicable, and possessive.
They feed behind our plough; they flock in our green trees; they build in
our valleys and in the shelter of our houses; summer and winter they are
seen flying under our English skies; they mate and nest and bicker round
our cathedrals and our cottages; they are noisy and turbulent and
unrestrained before us, as if we were no more than the hedges we plant
and prune; they are irrepressible as street-arabs, and arrogant as
monarchs. If all human life were by some unimagined catastrophe swept
from the length and breadth of England, the cawing of the rooks would
sound as certainly, and they would fly forth to their morning meal and
back across the evening sky to their tall green elm-trees as if they had
never sailed over the heads of men who looked up and saw in them the
symbol of peace, security, and comfort, which they loved to call England.
For a good walker the road that lies between Lynmouth and Porlock is an
adventure worth taking, though it gives a taste of the steep and
shadeless roads which lead up and down these moors, pitilessly
sun-scorched in summer, and pitilessly bleak and windswept in winter,
when the rain and sleet comes stinging and driving in your face, and yet
somehow, at all times of the year, worth adventuring for the splendid,
open, untamed beauty they show you.
If you take carriage (in which case you will walk the greater part of the
way!), you will start from Lynmouth, and ascend the steep hill that leads
right up the cliff to Countisbury Foreland--I should have said the
steepest two miles of carriage road in England, had I not also climbed
Porlock Hill, twelve miles northward. The surface of the road is loose,
and scoured by winter rains, and on a windy day the dust comes swirling
down it like a miniature sandstorm. I have, indeed, seen even a car
obliged to draw up to let the blinding red swirl go by; and from Lynton,
on the opposite side of the valley, the whole headland has been blurred
and obliterated by the dust, as if it were a fog.
If you are not driving, you may go up the East Lyn Valley, past the
Watersmeet, till you strike the path for Brendon, a more sheltered way on
a hot morning, but steep also, for the hills are not to be avoided, and
you have somehow to climb 1,300 feet from the sea to Countisbury.
Countisbury itself is a tiny, bare, white-washed hamlet, with a small
bare white inn with the sign of the Blue Ball; it stands on the borders
of Devon and Somerset, and hence some have supposed the name to mean the
"county's boundary"--but this, I think, is a case of false analogy, and
the Celtic origin of the "camp on the headland" is far more likely.
[Illustration: The Moors near Brendon Two Gates]
The Foreland is a great bold promontory looking towards the Welsh coast,
which hangs on the horizon like a low silver cloud above the faint haze
of the summer sea. Below lie Sillery Sands, and the caves of the beach;
beyond, the opening heights of Exmoor, in long flat curves, featureless,
spacious, and beautiful, purple and sombre under the wrack of
rain-clouds, grey and arid in the fierce blaze of the midsummer sun, most
lovely of all on crisp September mornings, when the heather is abloom in
miles on miles of changing purples and the air has a keen, clean edge, as
if it were blown off the top of the world. The air of Exmoor has always
this sharp sweetness, however much the sun may blaze, as John Ridd knew;
and looking over the wide-stretching countryside, one sees many a farm
that might have been his, a sturdy, whitewashed affair, flanked
generously with out-buildings, and standing high, but sheltered, in a
hollow of the ground, cut off from its neighbours by the rising hills,
and even more isolated in winter by the deep ruts of the roads, muddy and
impassable, that wind from valley to valley.
A mile beyond County Gate is the village of Oare, where John Kidd and
Lorna were married; and as we follow the Porlock road across the moors we
see on our right the dip of the Doone Valley, where Lorna's bower was,
and a few scattered remains of stone huts show the habitations of the
outlaws. It is a scene of wildness and grandeur; on the left lies the
blue sea, on the right the dun-coloured moors. There are no trees, save
for a few writhen and stunted alders, covered with lichen till they are
the colour of stone, and look like petrified remains of an earlier age;
they are grown all to one side under the stress of the prevailing wind.
The only signs of life are the scattered sheep, their grey backs scarcely
visible among the heather and close furze, a great buzzard hawk poised
far up in the blue, and, when his shadow has passed, sailing slowly over
the shadeless ground, the sweet, monotonous song of mounting larks.