Coast road

“ On the one hand magnificent and widely extended views of the ocean, which on this coast rolls its swelling waves towards the shore with a peculiar and dangerous rapidity; and on the other, rocky mountains of considerable height, whose hanging cliffs, as the road extends partly up their sides, seem to threaten the traveller with destruction; and which in some places are thickly clothed with woods, through the openings between which the eye is sometimes surprised with the sight of a village as the road winds round the spacious bays and jutting promontories. ”

“ A land of stupendous mountains, roaring cataracts, silvery cascades, fantastic volcanic formations, magnificent landscapes, noble forests, and picturesque lakes,” meeting the tourist at every turn, in a thirty hours’ journey. This West Coast road must be seen to be appreciated and enjoyed. The stupendous grandeur of the scenery in many places is beyond description, and is such as can only be realised by actual vision and experience. ”

“ A man could not be strong then, or the devil was in it.
The road was good, and the way plain. As the shores are for some miles intersected by creeks intrenched behind sandy downs, the route follows a level shelf along the high land. There are pleasant strips of beach, where the sea breaks noiselessly when the wind is off shore, but where it comes thundering in when driven before a north-east gale. Now and then a vessel is embayed here in thick weather, or, failing to make due allowance for the strong drift to the westward, is set bodily on these sands, as the fishermen say, "all standing." ”

“ Should you walk along the highway from Quincy to Hingham on a Sunday morning you would be passed by many automobiles, for the Old Coast Road is now one of the great pleasure highways of New England. Many of the cars are moderately priced affairs, the tonneau well filled with children of miscellaneous ages, and enlivened by a family dog or two—for this is the way that the average American household spends its modern Sabbath holiday. ”

“ So the hillside runs steeply down to where at its rocky base the blue waves murmur. All down the coast the road turns and twists and climbs and dips, above little lovely bays and through little gay towns, caught between mountains and blue water. ”

“ HE open-door to an understanding of the sea coast life, its enthusiasms, its joys, its sorrows and its toil, is by way of the little sea-coast homes edging the ‘long-shore road in out-of-the-way coves and harbours, remote from towns, cities and the big sea-ports. These little houses are as a voice in the land; as soon as one heaves in sight by a turn of the road or a dip of the land we instantly feel their personality. ”

“ In the olden time the beach was the high-road over which the settlers traveled when, as was long the case, it was their only way of safety. It was often beset with danger; so much so that tradition says the mail from Portsmouth to Wells was for seven years brought by a dog, the pouch being attached to his collar. This faithful messenger was at last killed by the savages. For miles around this bay the long-abandoned King's Highway may be traced where it hugged the verge of the shore, climbing the roughest ledges, or crossing from one beach to another by a strip of shingle. ”

“ Nothing could be more delightful than the crooked ten miles from Old Lyme to Niantic. If you look at the map, and see all the little bays that make the coast so rugged, you can imagine how we twisted about to follow what is called the shore road. We say “called,” for most of the shore and river roads we have ever driven over from [85] Connecticut to Canada are out of sight of water. A few glorious exceptions come to mind, like the four miles on the border of Willoughby Lake in Vermont, the Broad Brook drive near Brattleboro and seven miles by Newfound Lake in New Hampshire. ”

“ There is no gain in the scenic way by following the coast from Par to Charlestown. Nothing of any outstanding character appears along those coastwise paths, which are long and obscure. This is not to say that the road inland is in any way delightful. It is, in fact, a plaguey ill-favoured road, for when you have left the various railway bridges and junctions of Par behind, you come to a very Gehenna of a place; a sterile plain through whose midst the highway proceeds bumpily. ”

“ We drove out along the coast road. There was the green of the headlands, the white, red-roofed villas, patches of forest, and the ocean very blue with the tide out and the water curling far out along the beach. We drove through Saint Jean de Luz and passed through villages farther down the coast. Back of the rolling country we were going through we saw the mountains we had come over from Pamplona. The road went on ahead. Bill looked at his watch. It was time for us to go back. He knocked on the glass and told the driver to turn around. The driver backed the car out into the grass to turn it. ”

“ The modern road to Deal lies open and unfenced for the most part, first across samples of these marshes, and then across chalk downs. It is a pleasant highway, where you get just as216 much of the dykes and waterlogged scenery as you want, without a depressing surfeit of it. By the time the turning for Worth is reached the shore is nearly three miles distant. ”

“ The study of a map will show the tourist what to expect, and he may note the parts where, if he thinks of easy travelling alone, he will have to desert the sea. But by a judicious use of high-road and by-road he need never be far from the shore, and in some places the road that is actually best for him gives fine views of the coast. There are many excellent maps issued, but it is best to go to the fountainhead, to the publications of the Ordnance Survey. For the pedestrian those of one inch to a mile are admirable ”

“ It is always a struggle to choose.
The road to the beach descends a sharp, gravelly hill, and crosses a bridge. Then you come out on a waste of salt-marsh, threaded by the creek, broken by wild, fantastic sand-hills, grown over by beach-grass which will cut your fingers like a knife. You drive close along the white, precipitous beach; you pass the long, shaky pier, with half-decayed fish-houses at the other end, and picturesque heaps of fish-cars, seines, and barrels. Then the road, following the shore a little longer, climbs the hill and enters the woods. ”

“ Shea, for Petty Harbor, a small fishing port, nine or ten miles to the south. The road—one of the finest I ever saw, an old-fashioned English gravel road, smooth and hard almost as iron, a very luxury for the wheels of a springless wagon—keeps up the bank of a small river, a good-sized trout stream, flowing from the inland valley into the harbor of St. Johns. Contrasted with the bold regions that front the ocean, these valleys are soft and fertile. We passed smooth meadows, and sloping plough-lands, and green pastures, and houses peeping out of pretty groves. ”

“ Once on land, we realised, looking up the long, black hill ahead of us, and feeling the heat from a blazing sun directly overhead, that the walk would be a hard one, and that we must go slowly, in order to make it with any degree of comfort; but walk we must, or stay on the beach.
The pitch was in evidence immediately. Reefs of hard asphalt ran through the sandy beach into the sea. The hill was covered with asphalt, and down near the shore it lay in great wrinkles, where, when the road was being made, it had overflowed and taken to the hedgeway. ”

“ The fine level road traversing the plain passes through numerous towns and villages, and for the latter half of the distance skirts the shore. Old dismantled stone forts, tea-houses, eating-stalls, fishermen's huts, house-boats, and swarms of jinrikishas and pedestrians make their sea-shore road lively and interesting. The single artery through which the life of all the southern tributary country ebbs and flows to trade at the busiest treaty port in Japan, this road is constantly swarming with people. ”

“ The roadway round the island is celebrated all over the Pacific, and with justice, for nothing more lovely than this twenty-mile ribbon of tropic splendour is to be found beneath the Southern Cross. One drives in a buggy of colonial pattern, light, easy-running, and fast, and the rough little island horse makes short work of the miles of dazzling white sandy road that circle the shores of the bright lagoon. ”

“ The eastern coast, in particular, is provided with little more than a few imperfectly protected roadsteads. The southern portion of the west coast is distinguished by a series of back-waters, or lagoons, parallel with the coast, and affording a safe and convenient waterway for small vessels when the season of high winds makes the ocean unnavigable. ”

“ Uncouth and quaint vehicles are perpetually plying between the old and the new towns; they jolt along fast over the narrow wooden roads, and the foot-passengers, who have no other place to walk, are perpetually scrambling from under the horses' heels. It is a unique highway: 132 pebbly beaches, marshes, and salt ponds, alder-grown cliffs, hemlock and spruce copses on its inland side; on the water-side, bustling wharves, canneries, fishermen's boarding-houses, great spaces filled in with bare piles waiting to be floored ”

“ On the blue background of the high coast they seem to float on silvery patches of calm water, arid and grey, or dark green and rounded like clumps of evergreen bushes, with the larger ones, a mile or two long, showing the outlines of ridges, ribs of grey rock under the dank mantle of matted leafage. Unknown to trade, to travel, almost to geography, the manner of life they harbour is an unsolved secret. There must be villages—settlements of fishermen at least—on the largest of them, and some communication with the world is probably kept up by native craft. ”

“ Transit Beach, where we effected our first landing after leaving Dusky Sound, is a short stretch of shingle beach, a mile or two to the southward of Milford Sound, and quite exposed to the ocean swell. Along this part of the coast, between the Sounds, there are several small bays, or inward curves of the shore-line, which, when seen from a short distance out at sea, are somewhat deceptive. ”

“ Sometimes the vague, hazy coast line could be seen dimly on the port side, more like a low-lying cloud bank than solid land. More often, however, the wide expanse of restless water was as unbroken as the glittering arch of deep, fathomless blue above their heads. ”

“ The whole of the coasting trade passes within this barrier, and the houses and villages, of which there are many, lie hidden on the sheltered shores of the numerous channels; so that, however well peopled the coast may be—and in some places population is by no means scanty—neither house, nor boat, nor ship, except the foreign trade as it approaches or leaves the coast, is ever seen by the outside coaster. ”

“ The people, dwelling with pardonable pride upon the peculiarities of their coast line, say that any one who walked from the north to the south side of the bay, keeping resolutely along the high-tide mark, would travel altogether 200 miles. ”

“ Perhaps the most striking evidence of the effect of increased facilities for locomotion and traffic upon the habits of the population is presented by the western coast of the country, or the region usually spoken of as the West Highlands and Islands. Few parts of Britain are now more familiar to the summer tourist than the steamboat tracks through that region. Every year thousands of holiday-makers are carried rapidly and comfortably in swift and capacious vessels through that archipelago of mountainous land and blue sea. ”

“ It is made up of irregular bits of land, all jumbled about in a shallow sea—or of bits of sea running into the flat land in all directions—so that to get to a place one mile in direct distance you may have to walk five or six or even ten miles, if you can’t get a boat. It is a land of desolation and dreariness. Bare rocky hills form the eastern coast, and from the foot of these the low undulating rocky and peaty land stretches for some ten or twelve miles to the Atlantic. ”

“ From Saint Just's Church-town, the road conducts us over a wild part of the peninsula, although highly salubrious, and invigorating from the fine sea breezes which blow from every side; after a ride over such bleak and barren hills, the eye experiences a singular repose on our approach to the cultivated shores of the Mount's Bay. ”

“ Under examination, even our familiar term coastline proves to be only an abstraction with no corresponding reality in nature. Everywhere, whether on margin of lake or gulf, the actual phenomenon is a coast zone, alternately covered and abandoned by the waters, varying in width from a few inches to a few miles, according to the slope of the land, the range of the tide and the direction of the wind. ”

“ The coast, to the northward, is formed of detached 81hills, rising perpendicularly from the sea, with ragged and broken summits; the sides covered with wood, and the valleys between them of a fertile and well cultivated appearance. To the southward, we saw an extensive bay, bounded by a low point of land to the south-east which was covered with cocoa-nut trees; and off it stood a high insulated rock, about a mile from the shore. The haziness of the weather prevented our seeing distinctly the land to the southward of the point ”

“ A subsidence of the land adjacent to the sea permits an extension of the waters landward; the sea will enter the valleys so as to form estuaries, bays, straits, etc., while the high land between the partially water-filled depressions will rise above the water-level and appear as peninsulas, capes, and islands. A bold, deeply sculptured coast when depressed will give origin to an intricate, and what may be termed a ragged shore-line; while a lower region crossed by large river-valleys would be changed to a system of broad estuaries. ”