The traveller setting out by road from Bideford to Appledore has a haunting feeling that he is making for some unconsidered part of the world: a loose end ravelling out to ineffectiveness. The map will help him in this impression, for it show’s a tongue of land that is to all intents a dead end, leading nowhere. Nor will the railway journey to Westward Ho!, now made possible by the Bideford and Westward Ho! Railway—an undertaking which belongs to the “light railway” order—help him to revise this opinion. You may see the terminus of it on Bideford quay. There the rails run on to the roadway, and end without the formalities of a station, platforms, signals, or anything of the kind. And the weird-looking engine when it goes off, dragging the one or two carriages after it, glides away with the air of to-morrow being plenty of time to do the work of to-day. The road keeps well out of sight of the river Torridge, and is both hilly and uninteresting, coming at last to Northam. This is the very heart198 of what has been styled the “Kingsley Country,” rich in the scenes of his “Westward Ho!”, and it is therefore of peculiar appropriateness that a white marble statue of him should have been erected in 1906 on Bideford quay, whence this expedition starts. It is an aggressive-looking Kingsley—and therefore true to the appearance of the original—that stands there in clerical robes, with quill pen poised in hand, ready, as in life, with more honesty than discretion, to do battle for any cause he had at heart. “The most generous-minded man I ever knew,” said Maurice of him: with the fervour of a schoolboy and qualities of heart better than those of head, as the unfortunate controversy with Newman, in which that crafty dialectician had the better of him in argument, sufficiently proved. But although worsted in sheer tactical marshalling of his forces, Kingsley was instinctively right, and the sympathy of honest men went with him, and continues.
Northam is a dusty, gritty village, standing on a ridge that looks one way towards the Torridge, and the other across to the great waste of Northam Burrows, that repeat, on this side of the twin Taw and Torridge estuaries, the features of Braunton Burrows. On the north side of the churchyard is a knoll, known as “Bone Hill,” where a flagstaff has been planted on a cairn of sixty boulders, brought by willing hands from the famed Pebble Ridge. The whole thing forms a homemade loyal and patriotic memorial of the second Jubilee of Queen Victoria, with additions suggested199 by later events, together with an aspiration that “these shores may never be without brave and pious mariners, who will count their lives as worthless in the cause of their country, their Bible, and their Queen.” But other people beside the mariners must do their part also.
“BLOODY CORNER.”
There is little deserving notice in the neighbouring church, except the quaint inscription on200 the interior wall of the north aisle: “This yele was made anno 1593.” Let us, then, press on to Appledore, passing Bloody Corner, so-called by reason of the defeat of the Danes here in A.D. 882 by King Alfred the Great, when the Danish chieftain, Hubba, was numbered among the slain. Hubba’s Stone, where the landing of the invaders was effected, lies near the shore of the estuary. A recently erected memorial by the wayside marks the Corner, and a row of even more recently erected cheap cottages, opposite, serves effectually to dilute any feelings of romance.
Appledore (whose name has really nothing to do with apples, but derives from two words meaning “water-pool”) stands at the very entrance to the Torridge estuary. On the opposite side is Instow.
Appledore is a decayed port; a fishing village long past its prime. Time was when its ship-owners waxed rich in what the natives still call the “Noofunlan’ Trade,” but that was long ago, and it is scarce possible even the hoariest inhabitant recollects those times. But the buildings, the quays are reminiscent; the whole place mumbles, quite plainly in the imaginative ear, “Has Been.”
This is, however, by no means to hint that Appledore is poor, or moribund. Vessels are repaired in its docks, a quarry is in full blast on the hillside, and the fishermen fare out to sea in pursuit of the salmon and cod. The less adventurous gather the edible seaweed known to201 epicures as “laver,” or at low water ravish the tenacious cockle and mussel from their lairs.
But, in general, Appledore has resignedly stood still since the “Noofunlan’” trade ceased, and remains very much what it was at the time of its ceasing: only something the worse for wear. Bideford may exchange cobbles for macadam, and even, in choice spots, wood-pavement, but Appledore’s lanes, which are of the dirtiest, the steepest and most rugged description, still retain their ancient knobbly character. In short Appledore is a curiosity, and one not in any immediate likelihood of being reformed out of that status, for it is at the very end of things. So its whitewashed cottages will long, no doubt, continue to give a specious and illusory character for cleanliness to it, as seen across the river from Instow; and “Factory Ope,” “Drang,” and other queerly named lanes will survive for generations yet to come.
Returning to Northam on the way to Westward Ho! I meet with a sad disillusion: nothing less than a group of angelic-looking little girls belying their looks by shouting ribald things, of which no one, and least of all Charles Kingsley, could find it possible to approve. And this in the “Kingsley Country,” too!
Westward Ho! is all too soon disclosed to the disillusioned eye. You see it, as you come along the ridge road, occupying the flat lands and the sandy wastes beside the sea, with the famed Pebble Ridge extending towards the Burrows.202 The scene is a beautiful display of colour: the dark-blue sea, light-blue sky, yellow sands, blue-grey line of pebbles and green salt-marshes, with the Braunton lighthouse a dab of white on a distant shore.
But Westward Ho! is chiefly a sad collection of forlorn houses, dressed in penitential grey plaster. Kingsley wrote a romantic novel compact of patriotic fervour, love of Devon, of England, and of Elizabethan seafaring derring-do. He placed one of the most dramatic of his scenes—the interrupted duel—here, on “Bideford Sands.” You recollect the incident: Grenville intervening between the combatants, and his “Hold! Mr. Cary,” a fine moment; but it is Failure, not Romance that here meets the eye to-day.
The fame of the novel, “Westward Ho!” brought thousands of pilgrims into these parts, and aroused great enthusiasm. At that time these sands were lonely in the extreme. Not a single house stood upon them. But the astonishing success of that book led to the spot being “discovered” and duly exploited. Enterprising persons, finding that Bideford town was, after all, not a seaside resort, conceived the idea of founding a place which, with its sea-bathing advantages, should become in time as popular as, say, Weston-super-Mare. But they forget the fact—an enormous factor in the fortunes of such places—that, being on the way to nowhither, there was no railway here, and that there, consequently, never could be, by any chance, an easy and convenient approach from any large203 town whence holiday-makers come. Thus forgetful “Westward Ho!” was founded. A hotel designed on a scale large enough for the considerable town expected to develop was the first care, but the place has never prospered, and failure is everywhere insistent. Three-fourths of the houses are empty and the others are chiefly occupied by people who wonder why they ever came—and wish they hadn’t. These are those who by some cruel fate of necessity—choice or pleasure are surely out of the question—are anchored here.
But no thought of this fate crossed the minds of those projectors. They saw a brilliant future awaiting Westward Ho! and impressed others with their confidence. A “Kingsley Memorial College” was built, and a “United Services College” followed. Both are now closed and add their own note of melancholy to the otherwise sufficiently dismal place.
The United Services College was founded in 1874 by the exertions of General Sir H. C. B. Daubeney and a number of officers of the services. The idea was to provide a public-school education for the children of officers in Army, Navy, and Civil Services, at a lower cost than usual. “Fear God and honour the King” was its motto, and mural and naval crowns, surmounting crossed swords and anchor, were its badges. Mr. Rudyard Kipling was educated here, and the College therefore figures in that story of peculiarly nasty schoolboys, “Stalky & Co.”
204 The “Pebble Ridge” is a good deal better to look at than to walk on. Conceive a raised beach, flung up out of the sea in the course of countless seasons, and forming, as it were, a natural embankment, fashioned by the waves against their own encroachment upon the salt-marshes. But do not imagine a ridge of pebbles like those that rattle up and down to the scour of the tides at Brighton. Those are like the stones found in gravel; but what is in North Devon conceived to be a pebble is a monstrous thing, rather larger than a dinner-plate, and weighing anything from five to seven pounds. In the times before the wretched settlement of Westward Ho! arose, and when the rustics still talked broad Devon, these were “popples.”