Charles G. Harper

“ There surely is no more beautiful wilderness of the particular type in England, than this: a very great deal of its beauty being due to the happy circumstance that neither Lyme Regis nor Seaton are as yet large enough to admit of it being overrun. Hardy pioneers have beaten out the devious pathway, and the few who have followed in their footsteps have kept it from being again overgrown. Spring—the month of May—is the ideal time for this part of the coast; when the birds have again wakened to song, and the young foliage is tender and the landsprings have not been dried up. ”

“ There is no village at Wembury; only, down beneath the swelling contours of those hillside cornfields, a church, a farmstead, and a water-mill on the very verge of the beach: the whole so situated and of such a singularly unnatural loneliness and air of detachment that you feel sure whatever history may have to say of the place, or whatever it may leave unsaid—you feel sure, I say, that the sea has at some time come up and munched off a great piece of land and the village with it, and has long ago digested the whole. ”

“ It enjoys that inestimable advantage in a seaside resort, a tidal estuary; and round by the sandspit, over against the bold red cliff of the Ness, you come from the somewhat artificial front and its pier and its seats for visitors, to the harbour, where the Teign flows out at the ebb and the sea comes swirling in at the flood, across the shifting sand-bar that from time immemorial has afforded a living for Teignmouth pilots and tug-boats, bringing the craft of strange skippers, ignorant of the state of the channel, safely into the haven. ”

“ As you round the hilly coast from Wembury and come within the Sound, you enter upon a panoramic scene, where the great Breakwater, itself nearly a mile and a half long, with a sea-passage on the hither side of a mile’s breadth, rests upon the blue waters like some pigmy undertaking, and the ironclads seem quite trivial. The ordinary vision is altogether at fault at Plymouth, and requires careful adjustment to an unfamiliar scale of things; and in the meanwhile the stranger, walking round the coast, discovers that in tramping these last miles the way is quite twice as long as it seems. ”

“ If I were to say that Exmouth was the Margate of Devonshire, I should please neither Exmouth nor Margate; for all Devon does not contain a purely seaside resort of the size of that favourite place in Kent. But it is, like Margate, popular with trippers; it has sands; and is, in short a place where the crowd spends a happy day: the crowd in this instance hailing, as a rule, from no further than Exeter. ”

“ The actual coast, for the six miles between Lyme Regis and Seaton is a roadless, and in parts an almost trackless, stretch of strenuous clambering among rocks and tangled thickets; among landslips old and new, and undercliffs overgrown with such a wilderness of trees and shrubs and bracken, and blackberry brakes as only Devon can produce. But for all these difficulties, perhaps because of them, the way is preferable to the hard high road that goes, a little way inland. Here, at least, “exploration” is no straining after effect, no misuse of the word. ”

“ This is really the mouth of the Erme, the estuary where it slides out to sea, but it is infinitely mysterious in this smother of fog and woolly silence. The stranger, of course, assumes a village from the direction of that curt, staccato signpost up the road, but devil a house can he find here; only a something looming out from under low cliffs, which at first he takes to be an inn, and then a blockhouse fort, resolving itself finally into the inhospitable likeness of a ruined limekiln. ”

“ The beauties of Exmouth are external, extrinsic, a minus quantity; but it is placed in the loveliest situation at the seaward end of the long and beautiful estuary of the Exe. The beauty of the views across sea and river are unspeakable. To me it is an Avalon, a Gilead, where the balm is; a country in the likeness of the Land of the Blest, you see over there, where the red cliffs dip down in fantastic shapes to the sea, and where the heights of Great [66] Haldon and Mamhead, clothed with clumps of trees of a richness only Devon can show, rise to the glowing sky. ”

“ Long, too, may the fishwives of Teignmouth continue their rounds, with their endearing “Any nice fresh whiting to-day, my dear?” to old and young, gentle or simple.
There are wild and beautiful valleys away behind Dawlish; in especial that vale down whose leafy gullies flows the clear stream of Dawlish Water, which, rising out of the green bosom of Great Haldon, up Harcombe way, comes down by Ashcombe and, reaching Dawlish, is made to perform quite a number of parlour tricks before it is allowed to straggle out over the sands and pebbles of the beach, and find a well-earned rest in the sea. ”

“ With a dark and oily smoothness that betokens depth and strength of current, the estuary of the Teign empties itself at the ebb, and fills again with feathered spray on yonder rocks. Above Shaldon, opposite, rise the great hills, up whose sides climbs the road to Torquay: hills fertile to their very summits, and remarkable for their subdivision by hedgerows all the way up those staggering gradients. From nowhere better than from Teignmouth can this beautiful and characteristic feature of a Devonshire landscape be seen. ”

“ It is because I love Teignmouth so well that I criticise it so closely. For the sake of the place that nature has endowed so richly, one must needs protest against the things that have been done, the blunders and the vulgarities that have been perpetrated. Was ever there a place where advertisements could look more offensive? Yet the entrance to the pier is smothered with them. They stand boldly out against the scenery, and your view across to Torbay or to Exmouth is obliterated by the pushful poster and the enamelled iron sign. ”

“ POWDERHAM AND THE COURTENAYS—STARCROSS
But the coast really does not reach to Exeter. Let us take boat across from the picturesque waterside of Topsham, and then follow the western bank of Exe down to the sea. It is by far the prettier and more rural side, but, perversely enough, all the eastern shore, including Lympstone and Exmouth, looks in the distance exceptionally beautiful; and no one who only knows the west is content until he has crossed and explored the east. But it is the better part to remain so far untravelled, and to keep the illusion. ”

“ Babbacombe—the real Babbacombe of the beach, not the strange new thing on the cliff-top—is the tiniest of places, with the “Cary Arms” inn, a little stone fishing-pier, a few boats, a fortuitous concourse of lobster-pots, a windlass or two, and a general air of being a natural growth, as indeed it is. It seems remote from the evil passions of the world, but for all that seeming, it was the scene of a dreadful tragedy in 1884, when Miss Keyse, an elderly lady who lived in a picturesquely thatched cottage on the very margin of the beach, was murdered by John Lee, her manservant. ”

“ It is so, not so much by reason of the steepness and ruggedness of the way, for the road out of Brixham, up-along to the railway-station and so on to Churston Ferrers, is equally heart-breaking, but there are all manner of occasions for going in that direction; while few have any business, or pleasure either, over Berry Head, or along that lonely and rugged coast, save some poor fool of an exploring tourist who, encountering rain on these shelterless coastguard walks, is fain to think, like the Melancholy Jaques in Arden, that when he was at home, he was in a better place. ”

“ Conceive a brook running in a deep bed down one side of a village street, and bridged at close upon half a hundred intervals with brick and plank footbridges, leading across into cottages and cottage-gardens; and conceive those cottages, partly the humble homes of fishermen, and partly the simple villas of an Early Victorian, or even a Regency, seaside, and midway down the street imagine that stream crossing under the road, taking the little beach diagonally, and there percolating through the giant “popples.” ”

“ Here the explorer requires not a little of the suppleness and agility of the chamois, and growing at last weary of bounding hazardously from crag to crag, climbs with extraordinary labour, past monstrous grey, ivy-grown spires and pinnacles of limestone, up a winding footpath in the face of the cliff, to where the Whitlands Coastguard station looks down upon the tumbled scene. From this point the coastguard-path lies along the cliffs’ edge, to where the cliffs die down to the waterside in the deep coombe in whose woods the sea comes lapping at Charton Bay. ”

“ Down below lies Hope village, in its tiny cove, where an island can be seen in the making; a great mass of rock dividing the cove in two being joined to the mainland only by strips of sand and heaps of tumbled boulders. It was here that one of the many ships of the Spanish Armada was wrecked: so many ships and so many wrecks that the pen revolts from writing about them, even as the London apprentices revolted, in the centuries gone by, against salmon every day. ”

“ There is no river mouth at all at Sidmouth, and the Sid, which so plentifully christens places on its banks, has not water enough to force its way to sea, as a river should. Instead, it abjectly crawls through the pebbles of the beach, as though wishful of escaping observation; but when storms heap up sand and shingle and the Sid is denied even this humble outlet, then it becomes an urgent matter to hire labour for the speedy digging out a passage, lest the low-lying town should be flooded.
WOOLACOMBE GLEN.
The sea-front of Sidmouth is, indeed, yet an unsolved problem. ”

“ So soon as the hauling up of the nets begins, [162] myriads of sea-gulls, springing apparently from nowhere in particular, appear, with the instantaneous promptitude of a crowd in a quiet street of London when an accident has happened. Screaming and circling about, dipping instantaneously into the water, and rising up quickly, they often make daring snatches at the fish aboard. Surely there is nothing so sharp-eyed on earth, in air, or water, as a sea-gull, and nothing so greedy and insatiable. The sea-gull is the scavenger of the fisher towns and villages, and is not nice in his tastes. ”

“ From Haldon you look one way to the Exe and the other to the Teign, and, standing in one and the selfsame spot, can see both, for it is an exceeding high place. The solitude of it is perhaps intensified to some by the fact of Teignmouth’s cemetery being here; but it is a large and a populous place, and to those of us who knew in life many who lie here, this is no solitude. God rest them. The summer sun that shines on Haldon shines no more for them, nor winter storms blow. ”

“ In one way and another, the South Devon Coast, tracing the creeks and the coastguard-paths, is not less than one hundred and eighty-nine miles in length.
It is a historic coast, and plentifully marked with towns and villages; with this result, that it is by no means to be treated of shortly. Devon has produced fully her share of great men, and many of them have been born within sight and sound of the sea; while the mere mention of Torquay, Brixham, Dartmouth, and Plymouth, recalls, not merely local annals, but prominent events in the history of England. ”

“ For the rest, all is silence, save for an odd continuous buzzing or sizzling undertone, like bacon-frying, piano. It is marvellously like, and only the smell is wanting to complete the illusion, which is produced by the billions of [250] sand-fleas living their little crowded hour in the sands and among the drying seaweed. Every time you kick over a tuft of weed you disturb a little world, and rouse that frying-bacon sound, as though a rasher had been turned in the frying-pan.
Meanwhile, the way is obviously across that river, but how to win to that other side? ”

“ Great islanded rocks stand off-shore, glooming over the blue sea like ogreish strongholds: the black monstrous forms of the Ore Stone and the Thatcher Rock, with the smaller Shag Rock close in, and a scatter of reefs just off the sands.
Near by, but hidden from view by its enclosing grounds, is that semicircular group of villa residences, Hesketh Crescent, built, some forty years ago, on the model of the classic terraces of Bath and Buxton. ”

“ From the turf there soared aloft the ruddiest of all the ruddy cliffs of South Devon, seamed and seared with the weathering of ages, and as thickly pocketed with holes as a Post Office poste-restante rack. The cliff is there, as ever, and the holes, [116] and the pigeons and jackdaws that inhabit them, but the undergrowth has grown up in dense and tangled masses everywhere, the hedges of the rustic lane have given place to stone walls, and all the pleasant approaches are enclosed in the grounds of somebody’s private domain. ”

“ The improving hand of modern times has indeed improved away much of the outward and visible romance of the Hoe, which, from the rugged cliff-top common of Elizabeth’s time, whence the great captains, roused from their historic game of bowls, first glimpsed the dreaded Armada, has been flattened out into trim lawns, and provided with broad gravelled promenade paths, like the veriest urban park or recreation ground. ”