PORLOCK AND EXMOOR
The road now lies in Somerset; we pass Glenthorne, lying five hundred
feet below, among its beautiful green woods and stretches of vivid
green turf, and separated by some five miles of barren brown moors from
the village of Porlock. The road that leads from Exmoor down to
Porlock is incredibly steep, the steepest coach-road in England. It
twists dangerously in sharp right-angle turns, the surface is loose and
stony, worn by the dragging of brakes and the scouring of winter rains,
and on a summer afternoon it is so hot, so dusty and glaring, and so
steep, that it seems impossible for man or beast to climb. As soon as
you are at the top, however, the fresh air of Exmoor fills your lungs
and freshens your face, so let nobody be dissuaded from it.
Porlock itself was a port in Saxon times and in the reign of William
the Conqueror (I have told elsewhere how not only the Danes, but Saxon
Earl Harold, drove his ships into the harbour on a fierce raiding
expedition), but it is now an inland village, and between it and the
sea lie two miles of flat land of the most wonderful luxuriance. _De
gustibus_ indeed, and to me Porlock is one of the most beautiful spots
in all England. It lies in a green bay--what was a bay eight centuries
ago--between two towering headlands. On three sides of it rise the
heights of Exmoor, barren, beautiful, and windswept; before it stretch
the lands over which the Danes sailed, running out to a thin strip of
marshland, and then a silvery flat beach, and then the tremulous silver
curve of the sea, not like the line of wave that breaks at the foot of
cliffs, but a true marshland sea, seeming to come from nowhere,
infinitely smooth and faint and distant from the level shore to the dim
horizon.
There are many kinds of beauty in the world: beauty of hot suns and
delicate mists, of sea and shore, mountain and lake and city; there is
the beauty of barren moors and of green orchards, and of flat fertile
marshlands where streams run amid a luxuriance of tangled growth,
kingcups and meadowsweet and loose-strife and forget-me-nots, and
feathery willows and rushes where the reed-warblers sing. And at
Porlock there is such a gathering up of these different beauties that
it is difficult to describe the pleasure that one has in it. I have
told you how it is fenced by Exmoor, and lies within sight of Dunkery
Beacon, the highest point of the moors; but it is impossible to convey
adequately the peculiar beauty of those great smooth dipping curves,
the satisfying breadth and harmony of their line, the way the sunlight
lies upon them, and the rich deep shadows that slide into their folds.
And below, round Porlock, lie the orchards. I came there once in the
spring, and as we turned the last angle of the stony road I saw before
me such a sweep of blossom, such a foam of cherry and pear, white above
the luxuriant grass, and of that delicate flushed rose of the
apple-blossom, so exquisite a range of green, the hazy green of willows
and the bright clear green of hawthorn, that it seemed impossible it
should lie just under those miles on miles of moor where nothing
bloomed but furze and heather.
The green fields that stretched away to the sea were just such fields
as in the "Romaunt of the Rose" or the poems of the troubadours, fields
verdantly green, and starred with daisies and golden with
buttercups--the "enamelled meads" of Chaucer and the little illumined
pictures of the fourteenth-century manuscripts; and the hedges were
just such hedges, incredibly green, with here and there a break for the
misty silver of the blackthorn. Wherever flowers could bloom they
bloomed, in the gardens, in the hedges, by the roadside, in the
crannies of the walls.
Porlock village itself is a quiet, charming spot which, in spite of the
temptation of visitors who come here in considerable numbers in the
autumn, when stag-hunting on Exmoor is in season, keeps most of its
old-world simplicity, and has not much "modernized" itself. It is
rambling, calm, and whitewashed; the bank itself is a long, low, cream
building with a thatched roof, and a lovely note of colour from a
climbing japonica. The Ship Inn also is a pleasant old building, with
a dark, cool coffee-room and heavy, timbered roof. "Southey's corner,"
where he is said to have written his poem, "Porlock, thy verdant
vale . . .," on being detained at the Ship by the heavy moorland rain,
is by an old open fireplace, and has been cut off from a larger room by
thin partitioning walls. It is a pleasant homely place, with its sound
of horses from the stable-yard, and the clink of its old pewter pots
from the bar, with its low raftered ceiling and brick floor, and the
sunlight seen from its open doors.
Porlock Church has a square tower, with a heavy, octagonal, truncated
spire, which gives the little church an over-weighted appearance, but
very distinctive in this country, of tall Perpendicular towers. It is
dedicated to St. Dubricius, who is a Celtic saint of the sixth century,
who crowned and anointed Arthur of the Round Table; in the twelfth
century he became a very famous saint once more, after having been
nearly forgotten for several hundred years. Many miracles were worked
at his tomb, and churches were dedicated to him. The present church at
Porlock was built about the thirteenth century by Sir Simon Fitz-Roges,
who was a crusader, but I am inclined to think that the dedication to
St. Dubric belonged to the early simple church (probably a thatched and
whitewashed barn) which was there at the time of the Conquest, and
which, like the neighbouring churches of St. Culbone and St. Brendon,
harks back to Celtic Christianity of pre-Saxon times. The church was
altered in the fifteenth century, and the Harington Chantry, which now
contains the tomb of Baron Harington and his wife, was added, and the
present spire, in place of the old one, which was blown down in a gale.
It is a little, quiet, grey English church, set peacefully in its green
churchyard, shaded by a huge ancient yew, perhaps as old as itself. In
the winter rain and wind beat round its solid grey walls, in spring the
daffodils bloom in the churchyard, and on summer days the bees are busy
among the clover and daisies over the graves. There are thousands of
such small, sober, beautiful churches in England; they are the monument
on which a fragment of the history of the race is inscribed; they are
the nucleus of the village life; the beginning and the end of its
activities have their sanction within its walls; they are rich with the
continued service of men's lives, generation from generation taking up
the duty and its privilege; they rise above the clustering roofs of the
village, tower or spire, as the visible landmark of faith--not of a
creed that can change and ebb and flow, but of a faith in the spiritual
core that lies at the heart of material life, like the village church
among the homes of its village.
We who pass casually, and pause, and step in and look, with a curious
and antiquarian eye, for a bit of old brasswork or carved screen, miss
the intimate beauty of these churches as much, perhaps, as if we read
them in a catalogue: "St. Dubric; 12th cent.; fine marble monument of
15th cent. . . ., and so on." The plainest and simplest holds within
its whitewashed walls the beauty of continuous tradition; you must see
it in all its aspects of daylight and evening light, summer and winter,
the rainy, tumultuous November afternoons and the long, golden, mellow
evenings of June, to realize what it offers, of peace and order,
tenderness and calm.
Inside Porlock Church, which is light and white and simple, there is a
beautiful canopied tomb of the fifteenth century, with the recumbent
figures of Baron Harington and his wife Elizabeth Courteny, carved in
alabaster. Whoever made these marble figures was an artist; not only
is the detail of the dress intricately and beautifully carved, the
foliated wreath of his helmet, the elaborate decoration of her girdle,
and the curved "horns" of her head-dress rolled either side of her
face, but the whole pose and outline of the figures is firm and
gracious.
I find that this tomb is quite famous among virtuosi, though I was
unaware of it when I came upon the monument in the quiet of a workaday
afternoon; but its beauty at once claimed my eye, presenting something
so different from the average mediaeval tomb, of interest chiefly for
its age. These figures are slightly defaced, the sharp edges worn
smooth by time, and scores of initials have been scratched roughly on
the surface of his armour or her mantle; but there is a certainty of
line, a sharpness, and at the same time a suavity of angle, a way of
disposing the head and hands and body, all within the stiff convention
of rigid tomb carving, that to any lover of sculpture reveals the sure
hand of a master, whether he were a nameless stonemason, working in a
secluded village, or a renowned man, invited from far.
Standing by this beautiful tomb I can see the sunlight through the open
door, with a black splash across the gold, of the great yews beyond; I
hear the crowing of cocks and the voice of children, the creak of a
passing cart and the song of birds, all the simple, jolly sounds of
that everyday life which is the plain fabric on which all history, of
nations and empires and monarchs, is (if you like) the embroidery.
From Porlock to the little port of Porlock Weir is a walk of two miles
along a narrow lane between high green hedges. The road leads nowhere
else but there and back; it is a kind of enchanted road which goes to
an enchanted village, a village at the world's end, beyond the circle
of mere reality. Every cottage in Porlock Weir is just such a little
cottage as J. M. Barrie's fairies might build, low-browed under a steep
thatch, with great tall chimneys, in which are cut just such little
windows as would frame a fairy's head, looking out and laughing and
nodding at you; whitewashed, half-timbered cottages, grouped together
in a jumble of delicious curves and angles, with dusky, deep oak
doorways, and stone steps hollowed by the feet that have gone in and
out, and long leaded windows, softly yellow with lamplight in the
mellow twilight of summer evenings, and gardens--oh, gardens that are
small, and walled with stone, and running over with colour and bloom as
no other gardens in the world could ever be! Hydrangeas, geranium,
larkspur and evening primrose, columbine, forget-me-not, roses--and,
indeed, the roses have gone wild with freedom, and threaten to overflow
and drown the village, trailing over the wall, running up the tall
chimneys, thrusting in at the open windows--nor are there names for all
the flowers that bloom here, for all the mellow gold and crimson and
blue and yellow and purple that glow in the sunlight, and fade gently
into shadows of themselves as night falls. Beyond is the sea, all
round the flowering meadows of the marsh, behind the moors; to anyone
who has had the fortune to see Porlock Weir on such a day in May as
this I recall, when this England of ours seems, to our fancy, to gather
up all beauties of colour and sound and scent and sunlight of which the
long winter and the chill, reluctant spring have starved us, and offer
them all at once in immeasurable bounty, this village will seem to them
to have the loveliness of magic.
The beauty of Exmoor is a stranger beauty and more remote than that of
these lovely villages. It is the beauty of space, I suppose, and the
great open arch of the sky; it is the clouds and cloud shadows, the
changing light from dawn to evening through the blazing colourless
hours of midsummer noon to the tender light of the falling day, when
the land lies in long, suave, misty curves; it is the swirl of mist
down its hillsides, and the solemn banking of great heavy rain-clouds,
purple and black, above it, that gives it so rich and varied a beauty:
for it is like a great open canvas, on which an artist's hand makes
wonderful pictures of a myriad changes of sun and shadow. Anyone who
has seen Exmoor, as Mr. Widgery has seen and loved and painted it, on a
still September night, under the mellow splendour of the harvest moon,
high above the infinite shadowy blue of the horizon and the misty moor,
has seen a rare loveliness he must travel far to match.
[Illustration: Harvest Moon, Exmoor]
The "forest" of Exmoor is about thirty-five miles in extent from east
to west, and twenty from north to south, running from the valley of
Crowcombe, near the Quantocks, to Hangman Point, near Combe Martin. It
is a stretch of country which makes its appeal to the sportsman, the
antiquarian, the artist, and the mere idle, happy walker; it is a
little country within a country, having many peculiarities of scenery
and structure, plant life and animal life, history and custom, peculiar
to itself.
And, firstly, though from Saxon times until 1818 it ranked as a "royal
forest," it is not a forest at all. Trees will hardly live on Exmoor,
not even the black fir, the hardiest tree of all; only here and there a
few twisted and stunted alders planted along the shelter of a wall, and
degenerated into "scrub." As soon as you descend from the heights,
indeed, the country becomes luxuriantly wooded, as at Glenthorne and
Lynton and Horner Woods; but the great expanse of Exmoor is bare brown
land, covered with short tussocky grass and grey furze. Why, then, was
it called a "forest" in Saxon times? Did "forest" mean also moorland,
wild and unarable land? This opinion has been held by many
authorities, but there is the contrary one put forward, that Exmoor was
at some time a forest, and that all the land from Crowcombe to Combe
Martin was clothed with oak and beech. We know, indeed, that in early
times, certainly, England was much more densely wooded than now; the
rocky foundation on which Exmoor lies is covered with a peaty deposit
which is formed of decayed vegetable substance--the myriad leaves,
perhaps, of many hundred autumns--and near the Chains, which are a
series of dangerous bogs near Dunkery Beacon, stumps and roots of
bog-oak have been pulled out of the ground. This last fact does not
seem to me in any way conclusive, for Exmoor may have had wooded
thickets, without being a forest covering half a county, like the New
Forest.
And, if it were, what causes led to its deforestation? The climate of
Britain was not, we know, more sheltered and temperate in old days than
now, so it seems necessary to suppose human agency to account for so
great a change. There is one theory, ingenious but fantastic, which
asserts that the whole forest was felled to provide timber props for
the mine-workings of Devon and Cornwall. Whether this took place in
Celtic times, when the trade with Phoenicia was at its height, or
subsequently--in which case it is strange there is no historical record
of so remarkable a fact--or whether those prehistoric peoples who built
huge camps and erected mighty monoliths were yet capable of so
stupendous a feat as felling the timber of sixty thousand acres, and
carting it over roadless country, is at least open to question. There
is another theory, that the Romans in their struggle to subdue the
Britons, who took refuge in these wooded fastnesses, fired the forest,
and burned them out, as they are supposed to have done with Hatfield
Moor in Yorkshire, which, now a peaty moor, was 12,000 acres of forest
land until Ostorius, having slain many Britons, drove the remnant into
the forest and destroyed it. An ingenious gentleman, in support of
this theory, instances Cow Castle (or Cae Castle), near Simonsbath,
which is a large British camp in the centre of Exmoor, and juxtaposes
with it Showlsborough Castle, a few miles away, just beyond the limits
of Exmoor, which is held to be a Roman camp, and where certainly two
Roman swords have been found within recent years, advancing this as
proof that a serious campaign between Romans and Britons was fought
across Exmoor.
All these are interesting speculations; one hesitates to dismiss a
theory because of its apparent unlikeliness, until it has been proved
wrong, for in this unrecorded past of ours so many things are possible;
nevertheless, it seems to me difficult to believe that the Romans would
have or could have burnt forty to sixty thousand acres of
woodland--above all, in a climate so humid and a country so well
watered as ours.
Exmoor is not generally heather-covered, but its tors and hillsides are
clothed with a wiry colourless grass and the hardy, prickly furze.
Heather grows abundantly on its boundaries, and above all on the common
lands, such as Brendon Common, Lynton, and Parracombe Common, which
surround it, and which are distinguished from the moorland proper.
Native agriculturists say, I believe, that the heather grows to its
finest on land which has been turned up by man's labour--like nettles,
which grow so wildly in deserted gardens and ruined villages--and that
this common land on the edge of the moor bears evidence of having once
been cultivated. With the break-up of the feudal system, certainly, at
the beginning of the sixteenth century, much land in England went out
of cultivation with the abolition of forced labour, and became
pasturage or mere rough common. The people around here say that, if
you turn up a strip of land on Exmoor, where nothing grows but grass
and furze, and leave it, in a year or so the heather will come. But
that heather, unlike nettles, does not grow only where the land has
been turned by the plough is proved enough by the heather which grows
on steep hillsides, such as the Scotch mountains or Dunkery Beacon,
which can never have been brought under cultivation.
To all who live in the West Country, who says Exmoor says "the red
deer." This is the last corner in England where the red deer, an
ancient and native inhabitant of these islands, lives in his natural
state, and where he can be hunted with the freedom, and yet with the
traditional pomps and usages, with which our Saxon and Norman nobles
hunted him. The hunting passion of the Norman Kings is familiar to us
in our history; how William the Conqueror "loved the tall red deer as
his father," and how he laid waste hamlets and villages in Hampshire,
and the little crops of the toiling villagers, to plant the New Forest
for his pleasure in the deer; and how his son William Rufus met his
death there, while hunting, by an untraced arrow piercing his eye, and
retribution for William's act was made plain to all men. The Saxon
Kings, doubtless, hunted with less pomp, but with an equal passion.
There was a Saxon palace at Porlock, and also at Dulverton, from which
they might hunt on Exmoor, and it may very well be that Alfred the
Great came to Porlock for rest and refreshment among the labours of his
life, his lawgiving and his translating of Latin books into the
Anglo-Saxon tongue for his people's good, and his bitter and incessant
struggle with the Danes.
The laws by which the Kings protected their sport were among the most
cruel and oppressive ever made in England. They were not, so far as I
can find, imposed by the Saxon Kings upon their countrymen, but by the
conquering Norman and Plantagenets. Canute, the Danish King, is said
first to have made death or mutilation the penalties for poaching; but
throughout the Middle Ages the game laws were intricate, rigid, and of
incredible cruelty. To cut off a man's thumbs so that he could not
hold his tools, to lame him, to hang him, for snaring a hare or
shooting a deer in a land abounding with game, while he tilled another
man's ground and went hungry on his salt fish and coarse bread, while
all around him bred and ran the flesh food his stomach craved, and the
King who owned it lived far away, and neither hunted it nor ate it from
spring to winter--this seems one of the stupid and anomalous cruelties
of which the human race is so amazingly capable. It was a concession,
granted by Henry II, for men to be allowed to keep dogs at all, even
for the guarding of their homes and their small flocks; but even so the
animals had to be brought before some magistrate every three years, and
maimed, by cutting off the three claws of the fore-feet, to prevent
them from pursuing or seizing game.
There is a description of stag-hunting in Chaucer's "Book of the
Duchess," which dates somewhere from the end of the fourteenth century,
which is substantially the same, I suppose, as a modern hunt on Exmoor;
a few of the terms are different. The stag is "embossed," meaning
"hidden in a thicket," and Chaucer says he is "rechased" when he means
he is headed back, while the note which the huntsman sounds to recall
the hounds when the stag is lost is a "forloyn." But stag-hunting
elsewhere than on Exmoor is virtually an archaic imitation of a sport.
The beast is carted to the meet, loosed, chased, and when brought to
bay is recaptured and carted back to captivity. Here it is a natural
affair, and rendered necessary by the depredations which the deer
commit on the farmers' crops; it also contains an element of danger to
the hunters, and calls for coolness, decision, and endurance: for the
pace is killing, the going rough, the hills tremendously steep, there
are rocky combes down which the rider has to plunge, streams to ford,
bogs which make the going unsafe, if not actually dangerous--and a
rider, unfamiliar with Exmoor, who finds himself caught in an October
mist had better jog quietly home before worse befall him--and, at the
last, the chance of losing the stag, or having him, as happens
occasionally, plunge desperately off the rocks into the sea.
The red deer is the most beautiful of all wild creatures in England;
seen in his native setting on these high, windy moors, the brown grass
and patches of purple heather all round him, the clear brown and white
streams of the combes where he waters, the blue shadows of hill behind
hill, and the grey billows of mist and cloud the wind sends rolling
down the hillsides, he is a noble beast indeed.
Wild-horses also run on Exmoor. Mr. Page, in his "Exploration of
Exmoor," advances the theory that they are not native ponies, like
those of the New Forest or parts of Scotland, but the descendants of
horses which the Phoenicians brought in their galleys when they traded
with Cornwall and Devon; for their bones are smaller and lighter than
those of our native ponies, and beautifully white and polished like
ivory, as are the bones of the Arab horses of the north coast of
Africa. This is an entertaining theory, with its romantic conjectures:
the picture of the Phoenician oared galleys pulling into Combe Martin
or Porlock Bay; the scenes on the beach, with the swarthy, beak-nosed
sailors, the Celts, eager for trade and curious to look at any
foreigners come from beyond the sea; the heaps of tin and silver, the
ivory and gold and Eastern gauds with which the Phoenicians bartered;
the plunging, high-spirited little horses, wild with release from the
galleys. But though the Phoenicians certainly came, it is very likely
the horses did not; for Mr. Snell, another authority on Exmoor, thinks
that the ponies are indigenous, like the red deer, and are at least as
old as the first human inhabitants of this north-west corner.
They are small creatures, as active as cats, and at Bampton Fair, where
many hundreds are driven in for the last Thursday in October, and the
narrow streets are packed with them from end to end, there are scenes
of great liveliness and disorder. Dulverton, which is the centre of
Exmoor, used also to have a fair, which consisted mainly of Exmoor
ponies and sheep; but it has passed out of existence by reason of
railways and shops, and the greater facility for commercial exchange of
our era, and the charming cobbled, whitewashed town--which was quite an
important town, remember, when John Ridd's cousin Rachael lived
there--now dozes undisturbed among the brown hills.
The sheep of Exmoor are of a horned variety; we all know what excellent
mutton they make from its praises in "Lorna Doone," and John Fry's
lyrical outburst over the saddle of mutton "six year old, and without a
tooth in mun head," and sure to eat as soft as cream. John Fry was
referring to the custom among the farmers of not killing their sheep
until the teeth begin to go. Their coats are exceedingly thick, and
their wool a very valuable asset to the whole county; it was more
particularly so in the Middle Ages, when cloth-making was the staple
industry of England. There is a woolpack in the coat-of-arms of
Minehead, and the most striking feature of the little mediaeval town of
Dunster is the yarn-market in the centre of the main street.
Wolves were plentiful on Exmoor at that time, and doubtless did much
damage among the sheep; in hard winters, even, they would have come
down into the little villages of Simonsbath and Parracombe, but the
last of them was killed in the reign of Elizabeth. In her reign, also,
wild-pigs could be hunted here, while the existence of such names as
Crane Tor, Lynx Tor, Bear Down, is evidence of an even greater variety
of game in Saxon times than now. Yet there is abundance still, hares
and foxes, badger and otter; the otter, indeed, makes grievous
depredations among the salmon that come up the river to spawn, for,
like a dingo among sheep, he slays promiscuously what he does not eat.
It is, I suppose, a lingering tradition of our old stern game laws that
imposes a severe penalty for poaching when a man picks up a salmon
which an otter has killed and left.
Birds abound on Exmoor; snipe and woodcock, partridge and black-game,
plover and wild-duck. Nothing could more exactly express the
loneliness and wildness of this great open country than, when you are
walking solitary, to hear the harsh, melancholy cry of the bittern from
the reedy, desolate bogs, or in the falling daylight of a cloudy
February afternoon to see the plover rise from the tussocks of brown
grass at your feet, and go flying and wailing above you, in that
broken-winged, broken-hearted way of theirs, or to watch the duck
flying home across the sunset, with their strange honk-honk!
For all that I have said about the barrenness of these great moors,
Exmoor is the land of sweet waters. The Exe, the Barle, the Quarine,
rising near Dunkery Beacon, the Haddes from the Brendon Hills, the Lyn,
the Wear Water, the Badgeworthy (up which little John Ridd fished for
loach), the Parley Water, the Horner, which runs into Porlock Bay, the
East Water, all these beautiful clear, clean streams abound with fish,
and have the freshness and the sparkle of this sparkling upland air.
Wherever there is a fold in the ground there is running water--though
geographically one should put it in the opposite way, that wherever the
water runs there is a fold in the ground--and wherever it runs flowers
and ferns and trees grow in beautiful abundance. I have already
described the luxuriant green of the wooded gorges of the Lyn, the
variety of trees and the luxuriance of ferns and mosses; the Horner
Woods, near Porlock, have the same green loveliness, though a sharper
air blows through them, as they stand nearer the Exmoor heights and
less sheltered by steep rocks than those that overshadowed the Lyn, and
on a summer afternoon there is a sharp smell of resin from the
sun-warmed pines, and the keen air stirs even in the depths of the wood.
And besides these rivers there are numberless little unnamed streams,
everywhere the tinkle and chatter of water, breaking over stones,
slipping through the peaty earth, falling in a thin spray down the face
of the cliffs, spreading out across the white rocks of an encircled
cove, incessant movement and change of colour and light, a ceaseless
ripple and gleam of reflected water across the lichened trunk of some
old tree, sweet and incessant sound.