Charles G. Harper

“ TEIGNMOUTH HARBOUR.
Round here by the sand spit, past the battery pour rire, is the little lighthouse, and behind it the lifeboat-house, with its window illuminated at night, where the barometer and weather-chart are anxiously scanned in the summer months by eager visitors. For the proverbial inconstancy of the weather is very marked here. One may stand looking up the Teign in fine weather, to where the Dartmoor hills loom grey in the distance, and presently see the rain-clouds gather and sweep swiftly down the valley, blotting out the landscape with driving mist ”

“ EASTGATE, TOTNES.
His castle (what remains of it) stands on a steep and lofty mound of earth at the northern end of the town, overlooking the streets and clustering roofs, and commanding a glorious panorama of the river Dart, winding deep amid the trees toward Dartmouth and the sea. These castle remains are very meagre: a low circular keep-tower, open to the sky, perched on an eminence studded thickly with tall trees—that is all. Below is a garden, with closely shaven lawn, where young men and maidens play tennis in summer months. ”

“ PENZANCE HARBOUR: NIGHT.
But we leave these, and embark upon that little voyage of three miles to “the Mount,” as you come to abbreviate Saint Michael’s crags, across the shallow waters of the tumbling bay.
In less than half an hour our little launch runs alongside the massive stone walls of the tiny haven, at the foot of the historic Mount, and we presently disport ourselves upon its delightful slopes, whose history, with that of the grey castle above, goes back to very dim antiquity: a history of sieges, surprises, and fierce fights among the rocks, and on the sands below. ”

“ Everywhere in summer-time are boats and16 launches and canoes, punts and houseboats, and varieties innumerable of floating things; for when the sun shines, and the incomparable river scenery of the Thames is at its best, the heart of man desireth nothing more ardently than to lie in a boat upon the quiet mirrored depths of a shady backwater, or better still, to sit within the roaring of the weir, where the swell of the tumbling water acts like a tonic upon the spirits, and the sunlight fashions rainbows in the smoke-like suspended moisture of its foam. ”

“ To return, when the moon is shining, to Torquay from Paignton, is to experience a thrill of decorative pleasure that few other places can confer. A great bar of silver moonlight, all alive with ripples, mingles with terrestrial illuminations of villas and climbing hillside roads,143 garish yellow by comparison. Below, in the harbour, red and green and yellow lights of smacks and vessels of many builds dance in streaky minuets upon lazy tides, while on the horizon the mast-head lanterns of Brixham boats rise and fall giddily from crest to trough of Channel waves. ”

“ It is much larger than either Truro, Redruth, or Penzance, numbering 15,000 inhabitants, most of whom live upon mines, either directly or indirectly. Indeed, many of them live in the mines, and merely come home to sleep. Thus it is that all day long Camborne seems almost a city of the dead. It is a town whose houses, if not squalid, are the most abjectly characterless of any I have ever seen, stony granite affairs, which wear the look of having once upon a time been inhabited—but a very long while ago, and meanwhile having been preserved from decay by some mystic preservative power. ”

“ It was the quietest of days; even the screaming sea-gulls’ cries were less persistent than on week-days; and the male population of the place lay idly on the rocks, or lounged, gossiping, at sunny corners of the lanes, while the mid-day meal cooked213 within doors. But above all the grateful kitchen odours rose the scent of the fish offal that, with the ebbing of the tide, lay stranded in the ooze of the harbour, and bubbled and fermented in the heat of the sun, vindicating the country folk, who call the place Polstink. ”

“ The first impression one gets of the building is of its great length: it is, indeed, the longest cathedral in England. The exterior, seen from the north-west corner of the close, is, perhaps, disappointing, with its long, unbroken, roof-line and low central tower, showing an almost entire absence of that picturesque grouping which is the charm of many others. But Winchester Cathedral has an interior equalling, if not surpassing, all others in beauty and interest. ”

“ Swanage, like all seaside places, has grown, and is growing yet, but not with the frenzied growth of more accessible places. It has sands, is seated in a charming bay, and is frequented chiefly by recurrent visitors, who, happening here on some day-excursion from Bournemouth, have been stricken with a love of its still unconventional air, after a surfeit of that starchy town that sprawls unwieldy upon the Hampshire coast. These be decent folk, uxorious perhaps, and with large families, but unostentatious and loving quiet, and they come to Swanage time and again. ”

“ In the valley beneath lay the city, its more prominent buildings showing as in an isometric drawing—among them the broad Cathedral tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of Saint Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the College, and, more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. ”

“ O most sensible Vicar of Bray: wholly admirable and right reverend exponent of expediency!
When once the bend of the river just above Bray is reached there is an end, for the time, of beauty, for the reach runs straight, and on either bank the encroachments of villadom are forming a continuous frontage of houses on to Taplow and Maidenhead, and three parts of the way to Cookham. Taplow Railway Bridge, brick-built, with bricks of a jaundiced hue, straddles over the water in two strides, an unlovely bridge, but remarkable for the great span of its arches, and for their extreme depression. ”

“ If any place there be within these sea-girt isles that can make your pulses thrill, ’tis Plymouth. The majesty of England is no mere phrase to them that181 have seen the clanging dockyards, the arsenals, the floating strongholds, the encircling chain of forts that render the three towns of Plymouth, Devonport, and Stonehouse a microcosm of the empire’s strength. Military—the red coats, the tunics black and green of rifle regiments, the sound of the bugle, instant and commanding, are everywhere. Naval—no more slacks-hitching, timber-shivering towns exist than these. ”

“ And charming is still the epithet for Torquay, seated majestically on its many hills. So charming is it, that the witchery of the place gets into the head of the average young man o’ nights, like so much champagne, and sitting by one of the many hillside winding walks overlooking the bay, you may hear him declare to his inamorata that he loves her with a love transcending all other affections, past, present, or to come. ”

“ And from here it is well within three miles to the little village of Ham, encircling, with its scattered cottages and mansions of stolid red brick of legitimate “Queen Anne” design, that common whose name has within the last two years been so familiar in the mouths of men. You may journey into the county’s depths and not find so quiet a spot as this out-of-the-world corner, nor one so altogether behind these bustling times. It has all the makings of the familiar type of an old English village, even to its princely manor-house. Ham House is magnificent indeed, and thereby hangs a tale. ”

“ For the life of the place, add some rumbling carts and waggons, filled with china-clay, rattling their way down to the jetty with their drivers; some three or four whitewashed-looking men, lounging and drinking at the “Welcome Home” Inn; the whistle and noise of an occasional train; a housewife hanging clothes out to dry in a garden, and there you have the full tide of existence at this Cornish seaport toward mid-day. ”

“ Meanwhile, let us away to Torquay. Here a steep and rugged path, leading up the face of the cliff, brings us to Labrador. Every visitor to Teignmouth goes also to Labrador, a name not usually coupled with sunshine and sparkling sea, al fresco teas, and roses at a penny a piece. He was a romantic mercantile Jack, who, retiring from the Newfoundland and North American seas, laid out his precarious little estate and built this little house on it, and named his domain after an inhospitable coast. ”

“ It was the site of that stronghold, Rougemont Castle, whose poor remains are now enclosed in private grounds. The gardens stand on a considerable height, and overlook, through the trees, the Queen Street Station of the South-Western Railway. All day long, and all the night, the snorting of engines and their shrill whistles, the metallic crash of carriage buffers, and the thunderous impacts of railway trucks are heard. Behind the station the eye rests upon the county gaol and the military barracks. Exeter has all the appliances of civilisation, I promise you. ”

“ Fowey is a seaside town, singular in having no sands and no recognised public promenade; there was nothing to do then but to spend the evening at our hotel over our maps and notes. We had by this time collected an intolerable quantity of the tourists’ usual lumber. Fossils, lumps of tin and copper ore, and fragments of granite would drop from our knapsacks upon the least provocation, or upon no provocation whatever. We amalgamated our hoards, threw away a goodly percentage, and sent the remainder of the relics up to London. ”

“ The king looks down the street with a fishy glance, and his gaze to-day rests upon that other jubilee memorial, the Clock-tower, erected in 1887—useful, but scarcely a thing of beauty—a merely meretricious iron and gilt affair, without even the quaint ugliness of the Georgian effigy to recommend it.
Beside these claims to notice, Weymouth has nothing to advance. Its harbour is merely commonplace, and its streets featureless. ”

“ He has voyaged long since into the Unknown, and his romance has gone with him, for the place is now but a superior sort of tea-garden, where you drink your tea and eat your cream and strawberries in the open-air arbours and the society of innumerable centipedes and spiders.
You cannot fare farther along the coast-line, just here, without becoming bedevilled amid fallen rocks and rising tides; and to climb the cliffs at a venture might haply result in being hung up on some impracticable ledge, whence advance or retreat would be alike impossible. ”

“ It shocks the normally-constituted eye to see ranges of hills, distant churches, and big houses wagging frantically, while yet no symptoms of earthquake have been manifested; yet these signs and portents are common enough at Corfe, when the dog days rage unmitigated. A quiet village though, and pleasing enough when once the traveller has quenched his thirst. The streets converge toward a small market-place, and directly in front, high above the church and the houses, tower the sturdy ruins of Corfe Castle. ”

“ We were up early this morning, in order to catch the Kingsbridge Packet, which called here on its way to Plymouth, and was timed for eight o’clock. But we need not have hurried over our breakfast to reach the quay, for when we walked aboard on the stroke of eight, the amphibious-looking crew were still busily loading up with the fragments of machinery and steam-pipes salved from a neighbouring wreck, and it was not until nearly an hour later that we were steaming out of the harbour toward the open sea. ”

“ But not only invalids hie them to the neighbourhood of these frowzy firs, these yellow sands. Bournemouth, one is tempted to say, is the watering-place par excellence of the curate. There is a certain respectable air of five-o’clock tea and a savour of muffins about the place, that traditionally accompany the unbeneficed. Bournemouth abominates the tripper whose pockets ring with plebeian silver, whose trips are calculated in hours, and so with the recurrence of statutory holidays, Bournemouth shivers at the sounds of vulgar revelry heard by the sounding sea. ”

“ We came to Lanteglos before (according to the map) we had any right so to do, going to it through steep hillside fields. I don’t think there is any village to speak of, but there is a fine church, picturesquely out of plumb, with a four-staged tower, strong and plain, without buttresses, standing, with its churchyard, beside a “farm-place,” as the Cornish folk sometimes call their farm-yards, filled with great stacks of corn, stilted on long rows of stone staddles. ”

“ Half the visitors are at Land’s End or the Logan Rock; some at Saint Ives; many at the Mount, or Newlyn, or Mousehole; a few have gone to Truro or the Lizard.
Penzance is a harmony in grey and blue, looking seaward; in grey and green to the inward glance. Its chief street, Market-jew Street, climbing up to the centre of the town, has at its summit the somewhat gloomy granite building of the Market House—severely classic—fronted with a statue in white marble of Sir Humphry Davy, a native of Ludgvan village near by. ”

“ I think a waft of more spacious times has come down to us, and lingers yet about the steep streets and strange stairways, the broad eaves and bowed and bent frontages of Dartmouth—an air in essence salty, and ringing with the strange oaths and stranger tales of the doughty hearts who adventured hence to unknown or unfrequented seas, or went forth to do battle with the Spaniard. Hence sailed crusaders, and Dartmouth came a splendid third to Fowey and Yarmouth in 1342, when the port sent as many as thirty-one sail for the investment of Calais. ”