South Devon

“ Every mile of Devonshire has its charm, not to be mapped out in advance, but freshly discovered by each new lover of the moorland and the sea, of soft air and the play of shadows, of folklore and tradition, of the memory of heroes. Those who cannot know fair Devon in actual presence may find her at her best in the romances of Kingsley and Blackmore and Phillpotts. The shire abounds in sea-magic. The south coast, with its wealth of sheltered bays and tempting inlets, has so mild and equable a climate that its dreamy windings have become dotted with winter resorts as well as watering-places. ”

“ Besides the trip up the Tamar, there are other rivers in South Devon whose charms are of a totally different, but perhaps even more exquisitely beautiful character. Thus the Dart, the Lynher, the Plym, the Yealm, the Erme, and the Tavy, all present attractions to the tourist.
It cannot fail to augment the enjoyment of those who visit this beautiful county—the fairest, the brightest, and the “greenest” of all our English shires—to recall the many “worthies” to whom Devonshire and Cornwall have [77] given birth ”

“ Why, with leisure—and genius—one might compose another Rabaiyat when the tea-takers were gone.
“I reckon,” says one of the soil, whom we meet here and exchange remarks with, “Twize up and down es a gude day’s work,” and it really is a leg-aching job to climb to the top of the cliff, which must be done to gain the Torquay road. South Devon is sleepy, and, experiencing this steepest of paths and hottest of hot corners, the stranger is not surprised. At any time it is possible to sit down and drop into a “bit of a zog”—which is Devonian for a nap. ”

“ No more perfect parklands, albeit on a modest scale, existed in South Devon, and the views of the surrounding heights and great vale opening from the estate caused pleasure alike to those contented with obvious beauty and the small number of spectators who understood the significance of what constitutes really distinguished landscape. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The soft, silvery grey slate that is used in South Devon is pleasing, and when a house is slated down its face against the driving rains, and the slates are worked into patterns and are small, they are vastly pretty. But architects are paid a percentage on the outlay, and it is to their profit to use material from a distance; they insist on Welsh or Delabole slate, and nothing can be uglier than the pink of the former and the chill grey of the other—like the tint of an overcast sky in a March wind.
SHEEPSTOR
I once invited an architect to design a residence on a somewhat large scale. ”

“ What Devon hath kept
Devon shall keep on tide or main;
Call to the storm and drive them flying,
Devon, O Devon, in wind and rain!"
Valour of England gaunt and whitening,
Far in a South land brought to bay,
Locked in a death-grip all day tightening,
Waited the end in twilight gray.
Battle and storm and the sea-dog's way!
Drake from his long rest turned again,
Victory lit thy steel with lightning,
Devon, o Devon, in wind and rain!
The Volunteer
"He leapt to arms unbidden,
Unneeded, over-bold;
His face by earth is hidden,
His heart in earth is cold. ”

“ Devonshire, like Cornwall and Kent, is remarkable in having both a northern and a southern seaboard; a peculiarity shared by no other English county. Its two shores present striking points of difference. The south coast-line is broken by many estuaries. On the other shore there is only one important river mouth. There are, it is true, many little coves and inlets on the Bristol Channel, some of them of great beauty; but they make little show upon the map of England, and the stern outline of the North Devon coast affords no harbour of refuge. ”

“ The neighbourhood of these exploited seaside towns are, however, not the places, as a general rule, in which to look for such fine survivals [122] of old Devon talk. The villages and the hamlets are the last homes of it, and, generally speaking, the only times when an indweller hears the Doric is when a servant, fresh-caught from “Dartymoor” or other remote district, comes into residence. Then, indeed, one hears strange phrases. Then you learn, if you did not know it before, that in Devon all girls are “maads” and all boys “byes,” large or small ”

“ Hence, for example, the name of the Start, that prominent headland in South Devon, one of the most salient promontories along our coasts.
The aspect of the country, as you proceed from Penzance into the Land's End district, is quite in keeping with the name. Everything appears to resign itself to an ending. The town of Penzance looks like a last great urban effort, [248] and the railway itself seems to come, tired out, to the shores of Mount's Bay, and to expire, rather than come to a terminus. It cannot make an effort even to get up into the town, but stops on the doorstep, so to say. ”

“ You do not, generally, on the North Devon coast, as so often in South Devon, find the scenery outraged by a terrible lack of taste, displayed in a plenitude of plaster.
When Mr. Louis Jennings passed this way, about 1890, the Cliff Railway, or lift, was newly opened, but the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway was not yet in being. Lynton, nevertheless, was in the throes of expansion, and he found “the hand of man doing its usual fatal work on one of the loveliest spots our country has to boast of. ”

“ In the eighteenth century, as we have already seen, it passed to the Rolles, whose paws have comprehended so much of the land between Seaton and Exmouth.
The old farm-house, smartened up with a facing of that stucco which is so beloved by Devon folk that it is almost a wonder they don’t make it an article of diet, stands now as ever in a hollow of the hills, remote; for although Budleigh Salterton has expanded into a townlet, I do not suppose the village of East Budleigh has grown appreciably in all these centuries. ”

“ The Devonian strata on the south do not form such lofty elevations as those on the north, and are in consequence, like the plain of Hereford, very fertile and peculiarly adapted for fruit-growing and cider-making. The remarkable features of the scenery of South Devon and Cornwall are due to a narrow band of Archaean rock which appears in the south of the peninsulas terminating in Lizard Head and Start Point, and to huge masses of granite and other eruptive rocks which form a series of great bosses and dykes. ”

“ To the south of Salcombe rise the great cliffs of Bolt Head, and a few miles farther to the west is Bolt Tail. Mr Norway points out that 'no other town in South Devon possesses, nor, indeed, more than one or two on any coast, a headland so high and dark and jagged as the entrance to the harbour. It is wild and rugged like a Cornish headland, and the walk across it to Bolt Tail is the finest between Portland and the Lizard.' A few miles to the west is Thurlestone, and all about here the coast is most dangerous. ”

“ Invitations were sent round, and the whole of South Devon was thrilled with expectation. There was to be a succession of dinner-parties and a splendid ball, which would be attended by the officers from Plymouth and Exeter, and by all the young ladies of position in the neighbourhood. ”

“ There are folk of primitive ways of thought and rugged speech up the valley of Dawlish Water, [82] and their characteristics are those of old Devon, of whose peasantry it has been truly said: “They work hard, live hard, hold hard, and die hard.” ”

“ Every particular is absolutely true, excepting the names that are fictitious.
“On the 1st August, 1904, we heard that we had succeeded by the death of an aunt of my husband to a considerable property in South Devon, and as bad luck would have it, the mansion on the estate had been let just two months before on a short lease. It was our duty to make Devonshire our home at once and for the future, and the wearying undertaking was before us of looking out for a suitable house. ”

“ It is not true that the people of South Devon, who singularly combine agricultural skill with good seamanship, so that they handle equally well the plough and the oar, are open to any implication of special dulness. ”

“ The town of Totnes, in fact, occupies one point alone in a ness or promontory that was formerly, when the tide rose, flushed with water on the three sides. It has, however, been supposed that the term Totnes applies to the whole of that portion of South Devon to the coast; some even assert to the whole peninsula of Devon and Cornwall. The creeks have silted up with the rich red mud, and with the washings from the tin mines on Dartmoor, to such an extent that [315] the true ness character of the little district of Totnes and the villages of Ashprington and Harberton has not been recognised. ”

“ The South Western Railway has exploited the eastern shore of Exe, and the Great Western runs its main line along the west, and each is characteristic: the South Western peculiarly suburban, bustling and commonplace, the Great Western sweeping on in noble curves, with a wayside station, at which trains rarely halt, planted here and there. It skirts the water on one hand, and Powderham Park, seat of the Earls of Devon, on the other. ”

“ Hope is just bidding “good day t’ye” to the old immemorial times, when it was just a hamlet of crabbers and lobster-catchers and the like, for villas and bungalows are putting the old cottages of cob and rock to shame, and they are becoming, although still a small community, as up-to-date as you please, or you don’t please. No longer, I think, is the once-famous “White Ale” of South Devon made or sold at Hope, or even at Kingsbridge ”

“ There can be little question but that, of all the west country which lies aloof from the moor, this south-east corner of Devon, watered mainly by the Otter and familiar to many strangers who visit the watering-places of Seaton, Sidmouth, or Budleigh, is the most beautiful in general landscape. The contour of the hills is more varied and effective, nor have they been denuded of timber about their more conspicuous portions as in most other parts of the county. ”

“ JACK RATTENBURY
The coasts of Devon and Cornwall, north and south, are bold, with cliffs starting out of the sea, white near the Dorset frontier, then red, and then of limestone marble, or, on the north coast, of slate and schist. The rocks are riddled with caves, the highland is cleft by narrow valleys sawn through their mass by descending streams. The whole coast, north and south, lends itself to smuggling; and smuggling had been carried on as a profitable speculation till it ceased to pay, when heavy duties were removed, and when the coastguard became efficient. ”

“ There is no other family so constantly met with in Devon. Villages—like Sampford Courtenay—bear their name: their monuments are in Exeter Cathedral, and in many a town and village church, and in the majority of ancient Devon churches you will at least see their easily distinguished arms sculptured somewhere—the three golden torteaux, roundels, or bezants, supposed by some to have originated in the family association with the Byzantine crown, or flippantly thought by others to typify their last three sovereigns. ”

“ The country, between the central highlands of Devon and the north-west coast of Devon and north-east of Cornwall, is not only secluded into an angular area bounded by the sea; but lies quite out of the course of the torrent of West Saxon advance westward: which indeed had been evidently checked by the Dartmoor heights. It might have been expected, therefore, except for the explanation now offered, that this district would have retained a strong tincture of its original Celtic condition, in that lasting index of race-occupancy its place-names. ”

“ When he returned home with the purchaser the woman repudiated the transaction, and, taking her two children with her, went off at once to Exeter, and only came back to attend her husband’s funeral, at which, unless I am mistaken, I officiated.
“Mr. Roberts, the present old clerk at Wolborough, tells me that he has heard his father say that he knew [Pg 66] of several instances of the kind now under consideration, but that he does not think that in South Devon the arrangement was often considered legal. In the north of the county people were less enlightened.” ”

“ No more of Devon could then have been held by the West Saxons than the fruitful southern lowlands, easily accessible from Somerset and Dorset, and from the south-coast. Most or all of Cornwall, and the highlands of Dartmoor and Exmoor, extending into north-west Somerset, still remained British or Welsh; as for the most part in blood, though not in speech, they do to this day. ”