IN SOMERSET
"In Somerset," says Miss Celia Fiennes with considerable severity,
"they are likewise as careless when they make cider; they press all
sorts of Apples together, else they might have as good sider as in any
other parts, even as good as the Herriforshire."
This young lady, with her keen criticisms, her spirit of intrepidity,
and her variable spelling, betook herself on a tour on horseback
through England in the reign of William and Mary, and kept a diary of
her travel, noting with equal solemnity the state of agriculture or the
quality of pastry which she encounters in her journey. She was the
daughter of Colonel Fiennes, a Parliamentary soldier, and being a
delicate girl, was recommended fresh air and exercise by her doctor.
"My journeys, as they were begun to regain my health by variety and
change of air and exercise, so whatever promoted, that was
pursued . . .," she says, rather elliptically, in her preface, and
admonishes Ladies and Gentlemen to follow her example, and profit by
the spectacle of their own country--advice which we of this generation
have taken _au sérieux_, and of which the present book and those akin
to it are sufficient witness!
Her remarks on Somerset are not all strictures, for it is here, she
tells us, that she had the best tarts and "clouted cream" that she ever
had in her life; and this although Devon has given its name to this
excellent dainty, while Cornwall fiercely asserts that it is a Celtic
recipe, and stolen from them by the Saxons of Devon, after they were
driven over the Tamar.
With Somerset, however, we are not dealing in the limits of this book,
neither with its characteristics of scenery or of speech--which, to the
observant eye and ear, make every county in England rich in
individuality and infinitely various, so that Hampshire can never be
confounded with Sussex, nor Somerset with Dorset--but only with that
small strip of it between Porlock and Dunster which lies on the borders
of Exmoor, and belongs to it geographically. After leaving Porlock,
however, the six miles of road that runs across the moor to Minehead is
on a lower level, and (as the aesthetic writers would say), in a lower
key than the magnificent barren stretch of uplands from Lynton to
Porlock. The way still lies across Exmoor, but the "forest" lands are
beginning to lose their wildness; they run down to about five hundred
feet above the sea, while the summit of Dunkery Beacon is fifteen
hundred, though rising but little above the moors that surround it; for
the road between Countisbury and Porlock is over twelve hundred feet
above the beach it overhangs. From Porlock the wooded valleys are more
frequent and more thickly wooded, and the villages lie nestled more
sleekly; the winds are less keen and strong, the sun itself seems more
tempered than when it blazes upon Heddon's Mouth; a more suave and
temperate beauty begins gradually to take the place of the wild open
spaces and grey cliffs.
The villages indeed are beautiful: Selworthy, Luccombe, and Wootton
Courtney, each with its lovely grey church, embowered in trees, its
street of whitewashed houses, its angles of light and shadow, and
gardens filled with colour. Luccombe, which is said to contain the
same Anglo-Saxon word _locan_, to enclose, as Porlock, lies under one
of the spurs of Dunkery on a little stream which falls into the Horner
Water, and is, indeed, enclosed in a steep wooded combe. The church
stands behind a tall row of cypresses, which, though planted only
seventy years ago, have grown as tall as the church-tower, and bear
witness to the fertility of the soil and the mildness of the climate;
they give the churchyard a foreign and outlandish look, I think, and
harmonize less perfectly with the characteristically English
architecture of the church than their neighbour, the old yew. The
tower is battlemented, and has some individual gargoyle heads around
its gutter, and the barrel roof of the interior has richly carved
wooden bosses, with the remains of painting upon them.
The church at Selworthy has also a carved and painted wooden roof,
though of finer workmanship than Luccombe; the church itself was
originally built of red stone, but the tower is the only part
remaining, and this has been covered with stucco. The window and
tracery of the south aisle is of the lightest and most delicate
Perpendicular, but the interior has been a good deal restored. The
church is beautifully situated. It lies high above Selworthy, and
before it stretch the long flat curves of Exmoor; below, Luccombe
Church tower can just be seen above its surrounding trees; to the
south-east, beyond the green luxuriance of Horner Woods, rises the
outline of Dunkery. From it a path leads down to Selworthy Green,
which is rather a famous beauty-spot, lying on the slope of a hill,
neatly surrounded by trees--and the woods here are very beautiful by
virtue of the great variety of the trees, beech, oak, chestnut and very
fine walnut, and of the fair growth and dignity of the individual
tree--amid a little circle of seven cottages which form Sir Thomas
Acland's almshouses. The cottages are old and whitewashed, and the
thatched roofs sink into beautiful curves and hollows where the shadows
lie smoothly; in the summer, when visitors from Minehead mostly see
them, the windows stand open to the warm air, and in the shade of the
porches, sweet-scented with climbing roses, they can be given tea by
the old pensioners.
It is beautiful indeed, and yet to me it has lost something of the
appeal of those lovely and desolate little villages--of Brendon, or
Parracombe, or Oare--more bleak and windswept, more sun-scorched and
barren, thrusting each into some cleft or hollow of the high brown
lands, with the wide sky over each, and each its small square church to
witness to the fear of God. Some quality of freedom and individuality
which is their charm is not in Selworthy.
This is a mere question of taste; we are all apt to look at a place
with the eye of extraneous opinion. The beauty of Selworthy is not,
indeed, except fancifully, affected by its being a landowner's village,
a swept-and-garnished village where the roofs are repaired by Sir
Thomas Acland's thatcher, for fear they should fall into the evil ways
of slate, and spoil the lovely contours of the village. A landlord has
as much right to preserve the beauty of his property as he has to the
upkeep of his fences, and we are indeed fortunate to live in an age
when the mellowed beauty of ancient buildings has become almost a
religion. But to me there is a smugness about such a village, which
has become the hobby, the by no means selfish or unenlightened hobby,
of a single man, which does much to temper my enjoyment. Selworthy,
with its thatch and cob, its neat old pensioners, its suavity, its
absence of what is unsightly, is an anomaly; it can only be preserved
against the growing pressure of the twentieth century by the artificial
barriers erected by wealth. Parracombe, smaller, lonelier, with its
white farms and outbuildings and cottages, is the natural outcome of a
small and scattered population, who are not rich enough to build newer
houses, and who live as their forefathers did because their isolation
on Exmoor, and the barren land on which they live, has not induced men
from other districts to come and "expand."
The little village of Culbone, near Porlock--if one may call half a
dozen cottages a village--is not an anomaly; indeed, it is a kind of
geographical whim. The cleft in which it lies faces towards the north,
and it is so deep and so deeply wooded that for four of the winter
months there is no direct ray of sunlight in the gorge, only the sky or
the light high up on the summits to remind the score of folk who live
there that they are not shut in a green prison. Even at midsummer
their sunrise is several hours later than for the rest of the world.
Among the darkest part of the green thickets stands the church, which
is probably the smallest parish church in England, or shares that
distinction with the church of Lullington in Sussex or St. Lawrence's
in the Isle of Wight. One or two of the tiny churches in Cornwall are
smaller. There is St. Piran's, but that is now a ruin on a beach, with
only the low walls of the very early building remaining; and there is
the church of St. Enodoc, near Wadebridge, which the saint must have
forgotten and the world overlooked, for it got lost among the low
sandhills and the sand drifted over, and it is only fifty years since
it has been found again, a delight to the few who ever see it, with its
squat grey tower barely seen over a tall hedge of tamarisk, and before
it the short grass rich with thyme, giving place to the sand-hills
which run out to the long level stretch of the beach, and behind it the
sand-hills yielding to the clean dry grass of the downs.
But these charming small buildings are mostly of very simple and
primitive construction, and St. Culbone has the construction of a
perfect parish church within the limits of its thirty-four feet from
east window to west door, with a nave, and a tiny chancel thirteen feet
long, and a small truncated spire, similar to that of Porlock Church.
Its patron saint is the Celtic St. Columban--Culbone is a simple
corruption of his name--who lived about the same time that St.
Dubricius crowned Arthur at Caerleon, about A.D. 517; of how this tiny
church came to be built (for the present fifteenth-century building
stands on the site of a pre-Saxon foundation, which was dedicated to
the Celtic saint), or what refuge or sanctuary it was, there is no
historical record; doubtless a remnant of the British, harassed by
Saxon raids on Porlock, hid themselves in this dark gorge, and there
built and dedicated a church to their own saint of the dove's name, in
the hope that he would save them from the claws of the invaders.
Of Minehead as it is now, no greater contrast can be imagined with
Porlock and St. Culbone, except that of Ilfracombe, with the grand
desolation of Heddon's Mouth and the solitariness of Trentishoe or
Morthoe. For both Ilfracombe and Minehead have become so popular for
summer visiting that most of their original character is lost under a
flood of new houses, trim streets and shops, which have grown to meet
the requirements of a large but fluctuating population. Unduly to
deplore this is, I suppose, a form of intellectual snobbery. Both
Minehead and Ilfracombe are still undoubtedly beautiful in their
setting of sea and moorland, the one upon lofty cliffs, the other among
gently rounded and wooded hills; and it is fitting that more people
than the favoured and aristocratically-minded few, who elect to stay in
cottages and shun their fellow-men, should be given opportunity to
enjoy them.
Minehead is a place with a history; its position on the Bristol Channel
made it a port of considerable value, and throughout the Middle Ages it
did a large trade with Ireland, and a foreign trade with France and
Spain, only second to that of Bristol from the West of England. In the
seventeenth century, like Bristol also, it had an extensive trade with
Virginia and the West Indies, and it exported annually forty thousand
barrels of herrings to the Mediterranean. But the herrings left these
coasts, as I have already had occasion to state in speaking of Lynton,
and an Act passed in the reign of Charles II, forbidding the import of
Irish cattle, though passed with the intention of protecting the
English farmers against Irish competition, had the usual result of such
short-sighted policy, and, while it crippled the Irish trade and ruined
the prosperity of such ports as Minehead, it ultimately benefited
nobody. Any ship smuggling cattle, that was captured, was sold, and a
part of the proceeds went to charity and a part to the Crown. The "Cow
Charity" is a fund which is still administered in Minehead.
Minehead was a "manor" in Domesday Book, and was given along with
Dunster by the Conqueror to William de Mohun, who was one of the first
of his nobles to support his English expedition, and who brought to the
standard of Duke William fifty-seven knights in his retinue, with their
esquires and their men-at-arms. The name Minehead is a corruption of
the Norman lord's name with the Anglo-Saxon word _heved_, a head; it
used to be written "Manheved."
The Mohuns held it until the time of Henry IV, when, there being only
daughters, it passed out of the direct line, and was sold by Lady Mohun
to the Luttrells, who have held it until the present time. It was
incorporated by Queen Elizabeth, and governed by a "port-reeve," and
later by two constables. The place was then of a size to consist of a
Lower, Middle and Upper Town; the Lower Town, now called Quay Town, is
the oldest remaining part. It lies under the high hill of Culver
Cliff, around the harbour, and has more of the look of a Devon or
Cornwall fishing village--the steep, narrow streets, the whitewashed
cottages with their large chimney-stacks and leaded windows--than the
aspect of modern Minehead would lead one to expect. It was here,
indeed, that the sea broke in the great gale of 1860, when the shipping
in the harbour tore from its moorings, and was driven literally upon
the houses of Quay Town, as the sea-wall gave way under the pounding of
the waves, and the _Royal Charter_, getting clear from Culver Cliff,
was driven on to the rocks off Anglesea, and lost with all hands.
Thirty years later, in 1891, the Minehead shipping was again wrecked by
one of the fiercest storms that has ever been recorded over England.
It began on March 9, and raged for four days, chiefly over Somerset,
Devon, and Cornwall. Shipping was driven on to the rocks from Land's
End to Bristol; at Plymouth the solid iron seats on the Hoe were torn
up and hurled about by the force of the wind; the heavy snowdrifts
stopped all communication, even by train; some unfortunate people were
practically buried in their houses; and along with the tragedies and
devastation the strangest and most fantastic adventures happened, such
as an old woman, struggling back from market, having her basket of
provisions blown bodily out of her hand, and picking it up four days
later, with every article in it unharmed, not even a burst packet of
tea! Where the roads were not blocked with snowdrifts, they were
mostly impassable from fallen trees, for the force of the wind was
greater than anything which has been experienced in England, partaking
more of the character of a cyclone, with the wind varying from N.E. to
S.E. and with very rapid changes, but of greater duration than an
average cyclone, for it raged from the 9th to the 13th.
Many fine and historic old trees were lost, and at Edgcumbe Park alone,
near Plymouth, it was estimated that at least two thousand were blown
down, and the damage was so extensive that it took two years to clear
the park; while at Cotehele, near the little town of Calstock, the
damage was beyond description. One hundred thousand feet of timber, it
was calculated, suffered in this one small district; and Cotehele
House, which before had lain behind a screen of trees, was afterwards
open to view from the town by this violent deforestation. Here is one
of the most interesting descriptions of the storm, written by Mr.
Coulter, the steward at Cotehele:
"The wind, having blown a gale the whole day, continued to increase in
violence as evening approached, and from seven till nine p.m.
accomplished, if not all, the greater part of the devastation to house
and woods. The noise of the storm resembled the frantic yells and
fiendish laughter of millions of maniacs, broken, at frequent
intervals, by what sounded like deafening and rapid volleys of heavy
artillery, and, as these died away, louder and louder again rose the
appalling screams of the storm, with slight intervals of lull and
perfect calm, only to return with tenfold violence, which made the
whole house tremble and vibrate. . . . Several of the windows facing
east were swept in as easily as a spider's web; lead and glass
scattered all over the rooms, leaving only the shattered frames,
through which rushed the resistless wind and blinding snow. . . .
Through the joints of doors and windows, the cracks and crevices,
before unknown to the eye, the drifting snow penetrated and piled up in
ridges, so that rooms and passages had to be cleared like the pavement
in the streets. . . . On an examination of Cotehele Woods, the scene
presented gives one the idea of an earthquake rather than that of a
storm. The majority of the trees are from two to three hundred years
old, torn up by the roots, and tearing up like so much turf yards of
macadamized road and huge blocks of strong stone walls."
The violent storm in the South of England in February, 1916, gives one
only a faint idea of this famous blizzard of 1891; for, great though
the damage was, it was more local, and the storm was of shorter
duration and did not interrupt the train and telegraph services over
many scores of miles, as the earlier storm did, travellers in the West
being out of touch with their friends for as much as four days or a
week, snow-bound in some small village until the railway line was
cleared and the postal service re-established.
[Illustration: The Doone Valley in Winter]
The fury of such a storm across these always windy Exmoor heights can
hardly be imagined; only Conrad could convey in words some adequate
idea of the fury and the force, as he has done in "Typhoon." Anyone
who was in Exmoor during these three days would have been fortunate to
have reached shelter alive, and not to have been lost, as were so many
unfortunate sheep and ponies, in the deep snowdrifts. There is a scene
in "Lorna Doone," where John Ridd and his servant Fry go out on a bleak
stormy morning to rescue their sheep from the snow, which gives a vivid
picture of what must have been many times enacted in the Exmoor valleys
during those wild March days. Of the loveliness of the scene when the
snow had fallen, and after the fury of the wind had abated, when the
March sun shone on the smooth upland curves and beautiful rounded
hollows of the moors, stainlessly white and wonderful under the
clearing sky, Mr. Widgery's picture of Lorna's Bower under snow gives a
beautiful impression.
Apart from its cattle industry and its herrings, Minehead was noted in
the seventeenth century for its alabaster mines, "harder than ye
Darbishire alabaster," says Thomas Gerard in his "Particular
Description of Somerset," written in 1633; "but for variety of mixture
and colours it surpasseth any, I dare say, of this kingdom." The mines
are said to have been discovered by a Dutchman, but I cannot find that
they were much worked, or were very abundant; for there is no record of
them a century and a half later. They were not like the Combe Martin
silver-mines, which were worked for centuries--some say in the time of
the Phoenicians, when the mines of Cornwall furnished tin for half the
bronze in Europe--which helped Henry V to pay for his wars in France,
and were reopened by Adrien Gilbert in Queen Elizabeth's time, and a
great cup and cover, fashioned from the silver, was presented by him to
the City of London, and may still be seen among the city plate. The
water got into the workings, and they were running poor after so many
centuries, and were finally abandoned in the seventeenth century; for
which Combe Martin is the more picturesque, according to our modern
standards, if less prosperous.
There is another industry of Minehead, or, more properly, a curiosity;
for there are no traces of the most enterprising approaching the matter
from a commercial standpoint. "There is on the rocks at low-water a
species of limpet which contains a liquor very curious for marking fine
linen," says our seventeenth-century authority, and he gives directions
for breaking the mollusc "with one sharp blow," and taking out "by a
bodkin" the little white vein that lies transversely by the head--a
somewhat delicate operation. "The letters and figures made with this
liquor on linen," he continues, "will appear of a light green colour,
and, if placed in the sun, will change into the following colours: if
in winter about noon, if in summer an hour or two after sun-rising and
so much before setting, for in the heat of the day in summer it will
come on so fast that the succession of each colour will scarcely be
distinguished.
"Next to the first light green it will appear of a deep green, and in a
few minutes change to a full sea-green; after which it will alter to a
blue, then to a purplish-red; after which, lying an hour or two (if the
sun shines) it will be of a deep purple-red, beyond which the sun does
no more. But this last beautiful colour, after washing in scalding
soap and water, will, on being laid out to dry, be a fair bright
crimson which will abide all future washing."
Is this indeed the "murex," as Browning calls it, of the Tyrian purple,
which can be found on the Minehead rocks at low-tide by the
holiday-makers of our day?--that "purple dye" for which, the weary
Roman usurper said,
"We'll stain the robe again from clasp to hem
With blood of friends and kinsmen . . .,"
and yet which is only
"Crushed from a shellfish, that the fisherman
Brings up in hundreds, yet rejects as food."
In coming to Dunster we come to the last of the many beautiful places
that lie within the compass of this fifty miles of England, places with
so varied a loveliness that nowhere else, I think, can you match with
them.
There is Barnstaple, suave and clean and sunny, with its well-kept
streets and smooth, broad river, and its air of all prosperity and
peace, the very type and pattern of a decent English country-town; and
almost within stone's throw of it the moors begin, lying widely under
the expanse of the sky, with the perpetual running of waters, and the
lonely farms, from which the smoke curls up, blue against the brown
hillside. There are the sombre and unpretending small villages,
Parracombe, Brendon, Bratton-Fleming, each with its history and its
little church, and the homesteads from which the young men have gone,
in their humble twos and threes, to take their part in this war of
millions. There is the grand solitude of Heddon's Mouth and the
raven-haunted cliffs to Lynton; there is Lynton itself, drowned in the
green woods that surge up the steep hillside; there is the West Lyn
Gorge, shadeless and sultry even on a spring day, and the East Lyn
Valley, where ferns and lilies of the valley grow, and every green
thing that loves moisture and shade; and the Watersmeet, where there is
a perpetual rushing of waters which drowns the song of the birds; there
is Porlock, between the moors and the marshes, and the drowned forest
of Porlock Bay; there is the green magnificence of Horner Woods or
Bossington, and the cloud-wreaths that gather and lift on the summit of
Dunkery; and here, easternmost of our journey, is Dunster, the castle
on its wooded hill rising above the long street of the village, and the
edge of Exmoor beyond, dipping now from its bleak heights in gentle
wooded undulations to the shores of the Bristol Channel. The Tower on
the Hill, that is the meaning of the word "Dunster," and the name
fittingly describes it; for it dominates many miles of beautiful and
fertile country, and stands feudally above the village, perceptible
from every angle of the street, at once a guardian and a menace. It
has stood so for a thousand years, for it was a stronghold of the Saxon
Kings before William the Conqueror gave it to William de Mohun, and he
built his gloomy Norman fortress, with its massive, windowless walls,
and squat strong towers, of which nothing now remains save a
bowling-green which marks the site of the old keep.
The main part of the present building dates from "the spacious days of
great Elizabeth," when her nobles needed rather magnificent
country-houses than fortresses for defence; but the gatehouse, with its
four flanking towers, was built in the time of Henry V, and the oldest
part of the castle is the gateway by the side of the main entrance,
which was built by Reginald de Mohun in the time of Henry III, while
Henry Luttrell added the south front in the "antique taste" of a
hundred years ago. Yet, like so many cathedrals, and not a few of the
castles and great houses of England, like Hampton Court or Ely
Cathedral, the varying styles of architecture do not give an appearance
of patchiness or incongruity, but rather a feeling as of the vitality
of the old building, and the continuity of life within it, that century
after century adapts and adds to the uses of the present the habitation
of their ancestors. The sun and rain mellow all, and the ivy makes all
green; stone urn and Roman column grow old and gracious beside steep
Elizabethan gables and fantastic chimneys, and the grey pointed arches
of the fifteenth-century gateway are as good to ride under to the meet
on crisp September mornings as a Renaissance doorway or an
eighteenth-century portico. Much of the charm of these old buildings
cannot be reproduced by brush or camera; it lies in their intimate
association with the scene around them, sunshine and cloud, summer and
winter, their hills and their streams; it is the sense of age which
they convey, of long-continued tradition and a certain mellow security.
It was in 1376 that the Luttrells bought the castle from the Mohuns;
and they hold it still; the old receipt for the purchase-money is still
preserved in the castle hall, with various ancient and yellowing
title-deeds, and a list of the "muniments" of the castle, made by
William Prynne, who was sent there as a prisoner by Cromwell in 1650,
after having suffered branding and the loss of his ears at Royalist
hands for his "seditious teachings," and who, firebrand and fanatic as
he was, beguiled his imprisonment with this curiously peaceable
occupation.
The village is as beautiful as the castle; in the long, irregular
street every house is three to four hundred years old. The projecting
upper stories are supported on great timber balks, often with the ends
grotesquely carved. Under the projecting eaves the swallows build, and
twitter about the diamond-paned windows which reflect so richly the
sunset light. In the steep roofs there are dormer-windows, and the old
tiles have mellowed to a deep rose-red, stained yellow with lichen, and
sink into irregular planes and angles of beautiful, varied colour.
There are tall brick chimneys and steep gables, and all manner of odd
delicious scraps and jags of architecture, where one building has
crowded upon its neighbour in its growth, like trees in a forest.
There are old gardens also, long sunny walls with old fruit-trees that
look like hoary serpents writhing up them, until the spring comes and
the delicate, exquisite forms of plum or peach blossom break out of the
gnarled boughs; there are wallflowers and lavender and rosemary, for
the sweet scent and the "remembrance" of them, and tall hollyhocks to
nod over high brick walls; creepers, green or flowering, to grow over
the whitewashed spaces, and great trees for shade on summer afternoons.
In the centre of the long main street is the yarn-market, a beautiful
wooden building of the seventeenth century, built by Sir George
Luttrell when Dunster was still a centre of the wool industry. It is
built with wide overhanging caves, pierced by eight little
dormer-windows, with a lantern at the apex of the roof, and is a unique
little building whose characteristic features have been sketched and
photographed many scores of times, and is comparable, perhaps, only
with the butter-market at Bingley in Yorkshire. Opposite is the
Luttrell Arms, a quiet, comfortable, harmonious stone building of the
eighteenth century, but with part of the older building still preserved
inside--a wall that overlooks a paved court, with windows set in frames
of beautiful carved oak, and a gabled roof, a moulded plaster
over-mantle also, and yet with that general air of disregard for these
treasures, amid a hurrying to and fro with plates and bottles, which,
to me, is one of the special charms of these long-established country
inns.
To anyone who loves England, and that beauty which is so
characteristically English, where the life of the present day is
visibly linked with the life of the past through long centuries of
security, where age has ripened all, the great old trees, the colours
of old oak and weather-beaten tiles and warm brick, has gently
undulated straight lines, and softened all sharp angles, where the very
sunlight has the mellowness of old wine, to a mind perceptive of this
peculiar and intimate charm of England, Dunster makes a special call,
set amid the suave curves of its rich country, crowned by its ancient
castle, dignified by its old, beautiful church (grown, like the castle,
through Norman and Early English and Perpendicular styles of
architecture), yet intimate and familiar, and beautiful most of all
because of the use and wont of daily life within its walls.