Charles G. Harper

“ And now, over the steep hill dividing Welcombe Mouth from Marsland Mouth, we come to the conclusion of the coast of North Devon. Marsland Mouth is a fit ending: the very culmination of loneliness. If the scenery of its seaward end is not so rugged as that of many of these “mouths,” the extraordinary exuberance of the close-grown thorn, oak, and hazel thickets that have entirely overgrown the valley is unparalleled anywhere else in all these miles. Only a rugged footpath, closely beset with bushes, leads down to the shore. ”

“ A good riverside road from Braunton village by degrees becomes an indifferent road; then, ceasing to be a road of any kind, becomes a more and more sandy lane, which, in its turn, insensibly degenerates to a track, and—there you are! You must not, however, imagine this sandy waste to be without its own peculiar beauties, or barren of vegetation. The winds have blown the immense accumulation of shifting sand into fantastic hummocks and weird hollows, where the dry surface is ribbed by their eddies, just as the retreating tide ribs the wet sand of the shore ”

“ Sometimes they rise up for all the world like pedestals rudely shaped to receive statues; but they would need to be statues of heroic size and pose to fit these surroundings. The eye ranges along the coast, past Castle Rock and Duty Point, to the softly rounded masses of woods covering the hillsides enclosing Wooda Bay; and only the restless, resistless spirit of exploration forbids long lingering here and there, on those occasional seats provided by the thoughtful Urban District Council that rules the twin places, Lynmouth and Lynton, and perseveringly tries to reconcile their jealousies. ”

“ When rounding successive points, new and ever more beautiful views are disclosed, and sublime thoughts rise, but they do not find full expression in that form, because of the loose stones and fragments of rock that everywhere prodigally strew the cliff-paths. Midway between Wooda Bay and Heddon’s Mouth, a lovely waterfall comes spouting down the face of the cliff, in a little bight, the sides of it fringed with moss and ferns, and at the foot a tangle of trees and bushes that have found a precarious foothold. ”

“ The scene where this rivulet, arriving abruptly at the cliff’s edge, falls sheer over it, in a long spout of about a hundred feet, is the most dramatic thing on the coast of North Devon. Imagine the lonely valley, not in itself very remarkable, suddenly shorn off in a clean cut, disclosing a smooth face of rock as black as coal, ending in a little beach—and there you have Speke’s Mouth, as it is called. ”

“ It is a two and a half miles’ cliff drive, branching off from the main road at a lodge-gate, where one pays fourpence for the privilege of traversing that glorious winding-way turning and twisting back upon itself at hairpin corners, in negotiating the contours of the cliffs. It was a “hobby” of its constructor, hence the name. From this fern-bordered tree-shaded drive are obtained the finest peeps of Clovelly, down there hundreds of feet below: a toy port, an artist’s dream, a—in fact anything rather than the reality it seems, so dainty and exquisite is the view. ”

“ The irradiated sky, throwing into silhouette the great masses of rock, has the effect of magnifying and glorifying them. On such summer evenings, the more youthful among the holiday-makers set out from Lynton, and there, on the rugged hillside of the Castle Rock or Ragged Jack, you may see the white frocks of the girls, looking more than a little like the white-robed figures of those Druids, who, according to old Polwhele, used this place of desolation as a temple, and carved the roughly shaped rock-pillars and granite hollows into “rock idols” and “sacrificial basins.” ”

“ We who stay, communing with nature, elegantly housed in the more refined hotels of Lynmouth, or the even yet primitive Clovelly, shudder at the August crowds at Ilfracombe, and recount across the dinner-tables, what time the tender evening closes in upon the quiet harbour, how we adventured there for half a day and watched the trippers at their strenuous tripping. ”

“ The little stream presently falls over a ledge of rock and becomes a little waterfall, whose purring voice fills the narrow space; and everything is delightful. And there are not any of those horse-stingers, which generally infest the most desirable spots and, instead of confining themselves strictly to horse-stinging, interfere with inoffensive explorers.
The tiny bay that opens out from this twilight lane is a quiet spot, where boulders are scattered about amid the sand and shingle, with that look of studied abandon customary in stage-carpenters’ versions of the seaside ”

“ Hartland Quay, half a mile down the road, is an example of the overweening confidence of man in his ability to battle successfully with the forces of nature. You see, as you come down the road over the down, a tumultuous ocean, no longer the Bristol Channel, sometimes dun-coloured with the outpourings of the Severn, and not, except under extreme provocation, to be stirred to great waves, but the Atlantic Ocean itself, dark blue with great crested waves rolling inshore, whether it be calm weather or boisterous. ”

“ A strikingly handsome hotel—the “Manor Hotel,” standing amid lawns and gardens, for it was once the manor-house—occupies the middle of the tiny bay, and is the resort of those who like to be within easy reach of Ilfracombe, and yet out of its exuberant life; and that is all there is of Lee. The coastguard path clambers round to Bull Point lighthouse, and there is a steep and rocky, but hopeful-looking, lane on the left which promises a short cut for the stray cyclist to Morthoe. ”

“ Where the down curves to the sea and the road dips steeply, in a hairpin corner, a rugged point, all bristling with black, jagged rocks, runs out, and in between them is a little flat space—the Quay. On one side is an isolated conical hill, capped with a flagstaff, and on the other a formidable reef, black as ink, with the rock-strata tipped perpendicularly in some convulsion that attended238 the world’s birth. ”

“ But then, strangely enough, this majestic succession of headlands, of bays, and “mouths” is flattened and fore-shortened and depreciated in a degree incredible to those who have not tried both methods. Heddon’s Mouth, for example, looks by no means remarkable from the sea. But viewed from either above or below, on land, its grandeur is exceptional. From this cliff-path on High Veer, whence you first see the deep and narrow valley, or gully, or, as a Central American might say, “cañon,” you look far up the valley in one direction, and in the other out to sea. ”

“ There is a world of desolation in Braunton Burrows, and he who would thus come, overland, to the queer lighthouse that is perched at the seaward end of the estuary of the river Taw, must needs quest doubtfully and with some physical discomfort, before reaching that point where the waste of shifting sand slopes down to the waves.150 Just as no one becomes irreclaimably wicked in one plunge, but descends irretrievably by a series of slight moral lapses, so does the unwary traveller come by degrees into the baffling sand-wreaths of the Burrows. ”

“ But even in North Devon, where time goes something slowly, life is not long enough to always pronounce the word as spelt of old, and certainly the arm of no signpost is long enough to contain the whole of it; and so the district has cast away, like so much useless lumber, half its length.
Down on the right hand goes the road, staggeringly steep, to Buck’s Mill, a little cranny in the towering wooded cliffs, where a huge limekiln and a few white cottages hang crazily over the water. ”

“ Morthoe (locally “Morte”) village is a wan, desolate-looking collection of a few houses on the cliff-top, overlooking the wide expanse of blue sea and yellow sands of Woolacombe Bay. It can never have worn anything but a stern, stark, weather-beaten appearance, but that is giving way in these times to something even less attractive; commonplace plaster-fronted houses, that would not pass muster in even one of the less desirable London suburbs, having sprung up around the ancient weatherworn church, while a grocer’s shop, styling itself “stores,” looks on to the churchyard. ”

“ Of course, the ideal way to arrive at Lynmouth is by motor-car, and there, as you come down the salmon-coloured road from Minehead and Porlock, the garage of the Tors Hotel faces you, the very first outpost of the place, expectantly with open doors. But, good roads, or indeed any kind of roads, only rarely approaching the coast of North Devon, it is merely at the coast-towns and villages, and not in a continual panorama, that the motorist will here come in touch with the sea. ”

“ I heard such a critic describe Lynmouth as an ’ole (or was it “a nole”?) . Geographically, of course, she was correct, for Lynmouth, by the seashore, is several hundred feet below the summit of Holiday Hill; but of course we all know that a ’ole (or even a100 hole) is more, in this conjunction, than a mere geographical expression. It was a term of contempt, in this instance, for a place without open-air concerts and minstrels, a place where you are reduced to amusing yourself; a horrible fate when you find yourself so empty of entertainment to yourself. ”

“ In short, the romantic natural setting of Ilfracombe is utterly unsuited to this sort of thing. One may deplore, yet not resent, it at Yarmouth or at Blackpool, where Nature is at her tamest, but found amid the bold rocks and frowning cliffs of North Devon, one does both. ”

“ But the horned breed of sheep that browse here keep a wonderful foothold, in places where no human being would dare trust himself on the slopes, covered with slippery grass. The cliff-path is usually solitary, and the occasional, nearly human cough of these only living creatures is therefore at first somewhat startling, in its apparently half-apologetic note, like that of some Paul Pry, who “hopes he don’t intrude.” Their clattering walk along the loose flakes of stone, so plentifully strewn about, is oddly like unseen people roughly handling piles of dinner-plates. ”

“ Between these extremes lies the opening for the entrance of small craft, and a sorry haven it must be for any distressed mariner in severe weather. The place is lonely, save for the “Hartland Quay Hotel” and a few coastguard cottages; and the stone pier built out to sea, by which it was proposed to make Hartland Quay in some small way a harbour, has been battered utterly out of existence by the waves. Watching the enormous walls of water, curving and advancing with an imperious unhasting grandeur, you do not wonder that anything less solid than the living rock should go down before them. ”

“ LYNMOUTH Lynmouth would have pleased Dr. Johnson, who held the opinion that the most beautiful landscape was capable of improvement by the addition of a good inn in the foreground. We have grown in these days beyond mere inns, which are places the more luxurious persons admire from the outside, for their picturesque qualities—and pass on. Dr. Johnson’s ideal has been transcended here, and hotels, in the foreground, in the middle distance, above, below, and on the sky-line, should serve to render it, from this standpoint, the most picturesque place in this country. ”

“ A reef-strewn indentation, known as Rockham Bay, separates this spot from Morte Point.
Morte Point does not impress me, and although I have every wish to “write it up” to its grim name—as every journalist who properly understood what is expected of him would most assuredly do—I cannot see the grimness of it; only a projecting tongue of land that runs down to the sea and ends in low, insignificant cliffs, with a chaotic scatter of formless rocks projecting from the waves, and the “Morte Stone,” rather larger than the others, seaward. ”

“ Descending this fairest of introductions to the North Devon coast, past the confluence at Watersmeet, where slender trees incline their trunks together by the waterfall, like horses amiably nuzzling, one comes by degrees within the “region of influence”—as they phrase it in the world of international politics—of the holiday-maker at Lynmouth, who is commonly so lapped in luxury there, and rendered so indolent by the soft airs of Devon, that Watersmeet forms the utmost bounds to which he will penetrate in this direction, when on foot. ”

“ Down upon it, on either hand, look the great rocky hills of Hillsborough and the razor-backed, spiny ledges of the Runnacleaves, and the Tors; while amidst the winding roads of the town itself run smaller hills and vales, and down by the sea, where other seaside resorts usually have a conventional flat parade running by the shore, there are the Lantern Hill, overlooking the harbour, and the Capstone Hill, placed just where the usual sea-front would be, if the site of Ilfracombe were other than it is. ”

“ There is always, in the summer, a cheerful stir in Lynton, and the railway has by no means abolished the four-horsed coach that plies between Ilfracombe and this point, and even on to Minehead. But when the close of the season has come and the holiday world has gone home, what then? The hotel-keepers and all the ministrants to the crowds of visitors must surely, to protect themselves from sheer ennui, institute a kind of desperate “general post,” and go and stay with each other, on excessive terms, to keep their hands in, so to say. ”

“ So few, evidently, and far between are those who come this way, that the track kept open by the occasional explorer who brushes aside the brambles and the branches that bar his path, is almost overgrown by the time the next stalwart forces a passage. Here and there a steep little gorge requires careful manœuvring; in some places, where the track emerges upon the open, bracken-grown hillside, descending alarmingly, and without a break, to the sea far below, it traverses broken, rock-strewn slanting ground, where a slip would send the incautious hopelessly rolling into the water ”

“ Beyond this, the hollow of Black Mouth, well named from its inky rock ledges, opens, with an enchanting view inland, up a wooded valley, where a noble mansion may be seen in the distance.
That is “Hartland Abbey,” the country residence so-called. Here, in the beautiful valley that, with its broad, level bottom, is more than a “combe,” Gytha, wife of Earl Godwin and mother of the unfortunate King Harold, who lost life and kingdom at the Battle of Hastings, founded a college of secular canons, as a thank-offering to God and St. Nectan for the preservation of her husband from shipwreck. ”