And so at last to leave Lynmouth.
It is by no means necessary to take Lynton on the way to the Valley of Rocks and the coast-walk to Wooda Bay and Heddon’s Mouth. The cliff-path known as the North Walk avoids Lynton, and, climbing up midway along the hillside, forms a secluded route of the greatest beauty. It was cut in 1817 by a public-spirited Mr. Sanford. Until that time, there was no path, and only the most hardy climbers, at the risk of falling headlong into the sea, ever attempted to make their way by this route. It is merely a footpath, and so not in any way injurious to the wild, romantic nature of the scenery. Were some injudicious person, or local authority, to conceive the idea of forming it into a broad road, not Nature herself could, short of a convulsion, remedy the scar that would be made for all the neighbourhood to see. Trees cannot grow on this stony hillside, to hide such things; the great gash made for the Lift, or Cliff Railway, which here runs at right-angles up hill, being only by good fortune screened45 through ascending by a route affording foothold for shrubs and undergrowth. It is now, indeed, hidden in a degree those who saw the raw wound in 1890 dared not hope for. Kindly Nature, dear, forgiving, long-suffering, immortal mother, to whom we all come, weary, for rest at last, to your ample bosom, how great soever be our enormities, you bear with them all and, smiling, resume your way.
This rocky walk, winding past one grey crag after another, is rich in towered and spired masses and jutting pinnacles. 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. But one must needs rest awhile at that point where the North Walk, bending to the left, enters the Valley of Rocks. Here a convenient seat is placed, commanding a view backwards to Lynmouth and the Foreland, and looking down from a sheer height on to great emptinesses of blue, sunlit sea. Seagulls wheel and cry, or poise suddenly, on idle extended pinions, whimsically like a cyclist46 “free-wheeling”; excursion steamers, to and from Ilfracombe and other resorts, go by, and in the still August sea leave more than mile-long creamy wakes of foam traced in the blue, until they become indistinct in distance.
An elderly gentleman, who had hobbled up the path on gouty feet, sat down beside me. Like two true Britons, we sat there a minute or two together, each ignoring the presence of the other. He glanced a greatly impressed eye upon the short, steep and slippery slope of grass that alone intervened between his side of the seat and a sheer drop of some two hundred feet into the sea. “It would not be difficult to commit suicide here,” he at length remarked.
Was he wearied to extinction with his gout, and so determined here and now, to make an end? Not at all: it was a purely speculative thought.
“The easiest thing in the world,” I replied; “and one person might readily push another over, and no one——”
“Yes, yes,” he rejoined with alacrity, and relapsed into thoughtful silence a moment. Then, suddenly consulting his watch: “Time I was moving off for lunch.”
Now I don’t by any means, you know, regard myself as a very desperate-looking person, yet obviously that unlucky remark moved that nervous old gentleman to go off in quest of his lunch at a very early hour. I suppose he imagined himself to have experienced a very narrow escape. “One49 does read such dreadful things in the papers,” I hear him, in imagination, saying at lunch; “you never know what lunatic you may meet in some lonely spot.” True.
THE VALLEY OF ROCKS.
And so, into the Valley of Rocks. There was a time when every writer who happened upon the Valley of Rocks felt himself obliged to adopt an attitude of awe, and to ransack the dictionary for adjectives to fitly represent the complicated state of mind into which he generally lashed himself. That time has naturally been succeeded by a revulsion of feeling; and there is not a guidebook at the present day which does not apologise for those old transports of feeling, and declare the Valley of Rocks to be really nothing remarkable. But that later attitude is just as absurd as the earlier. The valley is very fine indeed, and its wildness is only impaired by the broad white ribbon of road that runs through it, and will not let you forget that here, too, however craggy and precipitous the piled-up masses of granite on either side, and however remote the feeling, actually the most up-to-date civilisation is very near indeed.
This is what was written of the Valley of Rocks in 1803: “The heights on each side are of a mountainous magnitude, but composed, to all appearances, of loose, unequal masses, which form here and there rude natural columns, and are fantastically arranged along the summits, so as to resemble extensive ruins impending over the pass.”
50 So far, this is literally true, and the name of Castle Rock, given to one of these stony heights, grimly coroneted with masses of rock, is excellently descriptive. The rocks so closely resemble towers and battlements that the stranger is often deceived into thinking them to be real masonry. A companion rocky hill, isolated midway in the valley, and called “Ragged Jack,” from its notched outline, is almost equally castellated.
It is only when the account already quoted proceeds to dilate upon the “awful vestiges of convulsion and desolation presenting themselves, and inspiring the most sublime ideas,” that we do not quite follow, and we suspect this was the outcome of much competitive writing; each succeeding writer striving to pile phrase upon phrase, very much after the manner in which the rocks of the Valley of Rocks are heaped upon one another.
The “Devil’s Cheese-wring” is the name of one of these curious stony piles, now partly overgrown with ivy. The Valley and the cheese-wring are mentioned in “Lorna Doone,” a romance no one can escape in North Devon, strive though he may; although, really, the Doone Valley and almost every incident of that story, are in, and concerned with, Somerset.
A wind-swept little wood is almost the only sign of vegetation, except the coarse grass, in this wild valley of grey stones; but it is the appalling heat, rather than the wind, which troubles the tourist in his passage, and he is often fain to51 shelter awhile in the welcome shade of some huge crag; thinking, as he does so, of that eloquent passage in Isaiah, “The shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” And really, the Valley of Rocks is very like the parched, stony land of Palestine, which suggested the phrase.
It is at the close of some sultry summer day that the Valley of Rocks looks its very best. 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.” On the summit of Castle Rock a “white lady” of a different kind may be seen; a curious figure, resembling a woman, formed by a huge slab of rock fallen between two upright masses. The resemblance is sufficiently close to startle strangers coming this way at night.
The road goes under the rugged hills, past the little inlet of Wringcliff Bay, overhung with ferny precipices, to a gate leading into the domain of Lee Abbey. All kinds of wheeled traffic may go through by lodge and gate, except motor vehicles—they are forbidden.
52 Lee Abbey, occupying the site of the old manor-house of the Wichehalse family, is an abbey only in name and venerable only in appearance, having been built in 1850. But although “Abbey” be merely a fanciful name, and although there yet remain people who have seen the building of the entire range of mansion and outworks, the ivied entrance-tower and enclosing walls have so truly medi?val an appearance, that many people are entirely deceived, and, not seeking to inform themselves, dream wonderfully romantic dreams of “the old monks” and their religious life in this secluded spot, and live ever afterwards in happy ignorance of the deception. Lee “Abbey” is, in fact, nothing more than a very charming country residence, designed to fit an exceptionally beautiful site.
High above it is the woody hill with look-out tower overhanging that spot on Duty Point called “Jennifrid’s Leap,” of which we have already heard, and down below is the loveliest little bay—Lee Bay—with Wooda Bay opening out beyond it, and the little tumbled headland of Crock Point and the swelling, scrub-covered hillside of Bonhill Top in between. To style the little promontory Crock Point is entirely correct, for it was the scene of a landslip somewhere about 1796, when, one Sunday morning, the hillside fields, with their standing crops of wheat, suddenly slid down to the sea in utter ruin. This was due partly to the percolation of landsprings acting upon the clay, and the clay-digging that had for some while been55 in progress, for shipment to Holland. The names, “Crock Point” and “Crock Meads,” probably allude to this old digging for pottery uses.
LEE “ABBEY.”
Lee Bay looks like the choicest site in some delectable Land of Heart’s Desire. Down goes the road, through another gate and past the most entirely picturesque and well-constructed lodge I have ever seen, and so out of this private domain. Here a shady valley welcomes the heated traveller; a valley where everything but the generous trees, and the cool shade they spread, is in miniature. A little stream comes running swiftly down from the hilltops, as though it, too, were eager to enter from sunburnt heights into this place, where mossy tree-trunks radiate a welcome coolness, and hart’s-tongue ferns grow in lichened walls and look refreshing. 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; and surely we can give no higher praise than that! It is a spot where one might fitly converse with some not too forward young mermaid (keep your eye off her tail, and56 such, by all accounts, should be presentable enough); to be auditor of strange, uncanny legends; a thousand fearful wrecks “full fathom five,” and dead-men’s bones and drowned treasure.
But for tales of drowned treasure, or “money sunk” and lost, which, after all, is much the same to the owner of it—one need not go far, nor seek the dangerous society of mermaids. Wooda Bay, yonder, across the intervening neck of land, has a modern story of some interest. It was somewhere about 1895 that Benjamin Greene Lake, of the London firm of solicitors, Lake and Lake, conceived the idea of “developing” this secluded and extremely lovely spot, and of making it, as it were, a newer Lynmouth. He purchased much land, caused many roads to be made to the bay, and built an elaborate timber landing-stage for steamers. A few houses were indeed built here and there: among them the “Glen” Hotel, but Wooda Bay has not developed to any extent, in the building-estate sense. How many thousands of pounds were lost here, seems uncertain; according to some accounts, ￡25,000, or by others, much more. Unfortunately, this was one of Benjamin Greene Lake’s many speculations financed with other people’s money—without their knowledge or consent. He was sentenced in January 1901 to twelve years’ imprisonment, for converting trust funds to his own use. He had in various projects made away with no less than ￡170,000 of his clients’ money.
So there was an end of this great development57 idea. Only a few scattered houses and the roads gashed in the hill-tops remain to tell of it, for the sea speedily washed away every fragment of the timber pier.
The name of Wooda Bay, therefore, falls ill on the ears of not a few defrauded persons. It is a pity, for it is one of the loveliest bays on an exceptionally lovely coast. The Post Office authorities have adopted the new-fangled spelling, “Woody,” instead of “Wooda,” as appears by the tree-shaded post-office here; and the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway, which has a station for it, set down in a far-off wilderness, appears to spell the name, with a fine air of impartiality, in both styles. But the old rustic Devonian way was “Wooda”; a form characteristic of innumerable place-names throughout the country, and exemplified near by, in “Parracombe,” “Challacombe,” “Fullaford,” “Buzzacott,” and innumerable others.
Delightful lanes lead round the shores of the bay, amid woods, with here and there a waterfall; notably at a point where a bridge carrying a lane over a little stream is inscribed Inkerman Bridge, 1857.
Near the shore is the unpretending manor house of Martinhoe: the church of that parish being situated high above, away among the wild commons of a little-visited hinterland. It was here and at Trentishoe, many years since, that the future Bishop Hannington, who met a martyr’s fate in 1885 in the wilds of his African diocese, was58 curate. He dressed the part unconventionally, in a manner fitting a neighbourhood where there were no Dorcas Societies, mothers’ meetings, or any of the quaint machinery of a modern parish. Only rough farmers and their men, and wild and unfrequented footpaths formed everyday experiences. The typical curate would have soon found his conventional dress very much out of place. Hannington wore Bedford cord knee-breeches of a yellow hue, yellow Sussex gaiters with brass buttons, and great nailed boots that would have suited a ploughboy. A short jerkin of black cloth and a clerical waistcoat that buttoned up the side gave just a professional hint. In this costume, covered with the surplice, of course, he would take the services as well; not from any eccentricity, but simply because the conditions of these rustic parishes demanded it. They demanded much walking, too. “I see you’ve got fine legs,” Dr. Temple, the rather grim Bishop of Exeter, said: “mind you run about your parish.”
Over the wooded hill called Wringapeak, the way now lies on to Heddon’s Mouth.
WOODA BAY.
There is no hint of monotony in this grand stretch of coast scenery. Here nature is full of resources and surprises, and each cliff-profile, valley, wooded hillside, or little bay is strikingly different from the last. Leaving Wooda Bay behind, having already, as you think, tasted every variety of scenic splendour, yet another aspect of these boundless resources is revealed, in an61 exquisite wood of dwarf oaks. Through this delightful boscage, delightful in itself and in the shade it gives on fervent days, the way lies, as a grassy path. Great grey boulders, covered with lichen, show on either side, in the half light, and the foliage of the oaks grows in wonderfully large lustrous leaves, by favour of this wonderful climate. It is all so quiet. Few people are ever met here; but, here and there, at infrequent intervals one finds a retired villa, three-parts hidden behind the shrubs of its ample grounds. One such you pass, and see amid the woodland trees a little tombstone to a pet dog; “‘Bruiser,’ a good dog”: concise, yet all-comprising.
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. Here fragments of rock, like some prehistoric rubbish-heap, threaten unstable ankles.
These cliffs are simply huge masses of loosely compacted rubbish—laminated stone embedded in ochreous, friable earth—held together largely by surface vegetation: gorse, grass, and rock-plants, and in places the hillsides resemble engineers’62 spoil-banks. 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.
HEDDON’S MOUTH.
Presently Heddon’s Mouth bursts upon the view, with all the force of a revelation. To observe the coast-line from the deck of a vessel—for example, from one of the big steamers that pass63 quite close in, on the way to Ilfracombe—may seem (and is) a luxurious way of seeing these cliffs and their openings. No foot-soreness, no scrambling amid incredible rocks: only a patronising passing in review from an easeful attitude of observation. 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, “ca?on,” you look far up the valley in one direction, and in the other out to sea. The hills on either side are not rocky. They impress rather by their enormous size and simplicity of outline. Shelving down steeply to where the Heddon flows at the bottom, only an occasional outcrop of rock stands up. For the rest, they are clothed in patches and streaks with bracken and with a short, wiry innutritious grass, and very largely strewn from top to bottom with countless thousands of tons of rocky rubbish, blue-grey in general effect of colour, and in appearance like the refuse on the tip banks of mines. Oddly enough, such a generous distribution of waste material does not help to spoil the scenery. The hillsides end, seaward, in grey, red and yellow-brown cliffs, where an old limekiln, like a stone blockhouse fort,64 lends a specious air of historic assault and battery to the scene. Here the Heddon stream comes trickling down among the boulders of the beach; sometimes indeed, when thunderstorms have vexed the uplands, swirling down in a coffee-coloured tumult and staining a calm sea for a long distance out.
“HUNTER’S INN.”
Winding footpaths lead up the lonely valley and through a wood, and then conduct to a well-known hostelry in these parts, the Hunter’s Inn. For many long years this was a picturesque thatched house, but it was burnt down at last, in 1895, and the new “Hunter’s Inn,” although it is built very charmingly and in good taste, and really is as picturesque as the one it replaces, has not yet existed long enough to compel the affections of the sentimental. There is a nameless something in these things, an elusive flavour, an65 unexpected feeling, it may be, that the old inn was picturesque by accident, as it were, and was the natural product of its era and surroundings, while the new was created to be self-consciously pretty. It is a favourite resort of anglers, who, except in summer, when pedestrians and carriage-parties come this way, have the inn and the whole valley very much to themselves, for there is no neighbourly village and Trentishoe is a mile distant, half-way up one of the steepest of hills.
Trentishoe has a church of the Early English extremely rural type, with a little insignificant tower; but, although it possesses this church of its own, no one would accuse it of being a village. Two cottages by the church, a little group half-way up hill, and another little group below, by the Heddon, constitute Trentishoe.
The moorland to which the traveller comes is the wild windy waste of Trentishoe Down and Holdstone Down, considerably over a thousand feet above the sea, scorching and drouthy in summer and ferociously cold in winter; but these disadvantages, each in its season, have not prevented hopeful, would-be sellers of building-sites from erecting the usual notices of “this desirable” land to be on offer. It has come to this at last, that all land is in land-agents’ jargon, “desirable,” just as, conventionally, a naval or military officer is “gallant,” members of Parliament are “honourable,” and barristers “learned”: to name but a few of those tags and labels that nowadays mean so little.
66
TRENTISHOE CHURCH.
Few are those who explore to the right hand on this upland, where Trentishoe Barrow seems to witness that, however un-desirable the site may really be for residences, Prehistoric Man found it eminently suitable as a burying-place. The “Great Hangman,” the crowning height of these cliffs (1187 ft.), obtains its ill-flavoured name from an ignorant perversion of Pen an maen: the old Cornu-British for “the Hill of the Stone,” namely, a rude, post-like monolith, standing something over five feet high. The “Pen” was lost in course of time and “an-maen” became by degrees “Hangman,” when the legend that now attaches to the stone was duly invented to account67 for the name. According to this thoroughly unveracious story, which old Fuller, who does not appear to have disbelieved it, no doubt heard from the peasantry, a sheep-stealer was crossing the hill with a sheep slung over his back, and sat down here to rest awhile, and, doing so, the sheep in its struggles slipped, and the rope tightening round the man’s neck, he was strangled. Two difficulties, however, meet us here (supposing, for the moment, we take this tale seriously)—(1) How the sheep-stealer could have sat down to rest on a post over five feet high, and (2) How this strangling accident could possibly in any way have happened. Probably we may be met with the reply that the standing-stone is merely a monument of the affair, but the final quietus should be given the legend by the fact that there are numerous tales identical in every respect, all over England: and it is unthinkable that sheep-stealers were always being accidentally hanged in such numbers—and in a manner demonstrably impossible.
This region between Heddon’s Mouth and Great Hangman Point is without doubt the most inaccessible nook along the coast. Roads avoid the neighbourhood of the gigantic cliffs that for the most part go sheer down into the sea, without sands or beaches at their base, six or seven hundred feet. And the combes, mouths, and valleys, that here and there let down some streams to the sea, are, if on a smaller scale than the gorge of Heddon’s Mouth, even more rugged and difficult of exploration.68 Sherracombe—or “Sherry-come-out,” as the fishermen name it—is particularly notable for its stream that, rushing down this cleave in the hills, pours out in a fall of seventy feet over the rock-face. Somewhat east of it, over the hillside and down a perilous climb, is “Wild Pear Beach,” a lonely spot overhung with brambles and hawthorn bushes: the haws upon the thorns in autumn being the “wild pears” in question.
The Great Hangman ends in Blackstone Point and beach; a savage spot, now absolutely solitary, but once the scene, together with the neighbouring cliffs, of busy mining operations. Combemartin, round the next bend of coast, was for centuries famed for its silver mines, and in a less degree for its lead, iron, and copper; and here also rich lodes were evidently discovered at some remote period, for the cliffs are honeycombed with tunnels and caves excavated in the pursuit of wealth. No road exists to these old excavations, and the rock and ore extracted must either have been shipped off by long-vanished stagings, or hoisted hundreds of feet above by ropes. One of these tunnels extends nearly 350 feet into the rock, and with a plentiful supply of matches it is possible to stumble along it to a great distance. But scrambling in these wilds, in a climate such as this of Devonshire, is an undertaking of the most exhausting kind, and not to be embarked upon by any except the agile or the robust. This explorer, at any rate, is not likely to forget the69 scramblings up and scramblings down involved, in company with showers of the loose stones that encumber the hillsides; nor the astonishment exhibited at West Challacombe Farm on beholding a stranger, stumbling upon the place by accident, on the way to Combemartin.
There are remains in this old farmstead of a vanished importance, both in the thick walls carefully disposed and loopholed for defence, and in the old porch surmounted by a defaced coat of arms and the word “Pruz.” It is said to have been the manor-house of a family of that name, long ago extinct, or its identity lost in the debased form, “Prowse.”
And so at last, steeply—always steeply up or down in these parts—down a typical Devonshire lane to Combemartin, meeting on the way a truly Devonian farm-labourer, who remarked of the sultry heat that it was, “Law bless ’ee proper St. Lawrence weather.”
“St. Lawrence weather?”
“Ees, fay; braave an’ hot, sure.”
“But why St. Lawrence?”
“Aw, then; daunt ’ee knaw? St. Lawrence wer’ king o’ th’ idlers, he wer’.”
But why St. Lawrence should have that unenviable distinction is more than I can tell. There is, at any rate, an obvious connection between hot weather and the gridiron martyrdom of St. Lawrence.
“Lazy as David Lawrence’s dog,” is said to be a Scottish phrase: the “Lawrence” in this70 instance being originally an imaginary “Larrence” who presided over the indolent. In Essex, on the other hand, your typical lazybones is “Hall’s dog”: e.g. “you’re like Hall’s dog, who was too lazy to bark.”