DEVONSHIRE is notoriously prolific in bold streams, a fact due to the presence of those two great areas of spongy moorland, Dartmoor and Exmoor, which lie in whole or part within her borders. Next to her splendid sea-coast, both north and south, the streams of Devon and the deep valleys they have cut are her chief glory. The actual moorland—Dartmoor, for instance, Exmoor being largely in Somerset—owes its celebrity in a great measure to the unexpected nature of its situation: a patch of South Wales or Yorkshire dropped, as it were, into the heart of a warm southern county. The uplands of the moor, save for a scantier supply of heather, are practically identical in appearance with hundreds of square miles in South and Mid Wales, or the northern counties of England, that have no notoriety at all outside their own districts. The same indeed may be said for the beautiful Devonshire streams. They are merely the streams of the North and of Wales disporting themselves in an unexpected quarter. Or, to put it more lucidly, the contrast between the soft low-pitched, bridled landscape, with its gentle streams of the neighbouring southern counties and the moors of Devonshire, with the impetuous rivers that they send spouting through the humpy low country, upsets the equilibrium of people not widely acquainted with their native land, and gives rise to a good deal of ill-instructed gush. Again and again in fiction, on the stage, or in fugitive articles, you find the Devonshire village glibly quoted as the ideal of English rustic architecture and bowery cosiness. As a matter of fact, with the exception of Cornwall, Devonshire stands easily last in this respect of all the southern and west midland counties, including the rural counties of South Wales. The wanderer by Devon streams other than those on the Dorsetshire side of the county must not expect, save in a few favoured districts, to find the picturesque villages that will confront him everywhere on the chalk streams, or by the slow rivers of Warwickshire, Gloucester, or Worcester, or the livelier brooks of Shropshire, Hereford, and

THE HAMOAZE, DEVONPORT, FROM MOUNT EDGCUMBE

Monmouth, or even by the mountain streams of Radnor, Brecon, Carmarthen, and rural Glamorgan. There are such villages to be sure, but nothing like so many as in all these other districts, for the rustic builder in Devon has revelled this long time in slate and stucco and bare stone fabrics of painful angularity. In architecture of the class above the cottage again, of the farm and manor house type, that is to say, the county is comparatively sterile, as every archÆologist knows. As a matter of fact, a majority of Devonshire villages do not nestle by the river bank in a sunny combe embowered in orchards as depicted by the writers of stories and essays in London, but are much more often perched, together with their fine churches, on the bare summit of extremely steep and windy hill-tops, and have the appearance of being contrived with a view mainly of defying the driving moisture.

Devonshire is, in truth, a county of extraordinary contrasts. Large portions of it are extremely beautiful. Almost as large regions again are as devoid of every essential of the picturesque in a general survey as any English landscape could possibly be; mile upon mile of bare humpy hill-top, ruthlessly shorn of every stick of timber and laid out in small and largely arable fields with painful chess-board regularity. No one would guess, for instance, when standing upon any elevation between the Dart and Plymouth, that through this almost forbidding prospect the Avon and the Erme cut deep channels which are perfect dreams of beauty, hidden away amid this patchwork of cultivated upland unsurpassed in any part of England for uncompromising, unrelieved monotony. This region to the west of the Dart covers the little matter of some 300 square miles, and has given a rude shock in the prospect to many a stranger possessed of the very generally preconceived notions of the county. Considerable parts of North Devon again present almost the same singular spectacle, redeemed, as here, at intervals by the deep-cut valleys of moorland bred streams, that, wherever they may be, diffuse an atmosphere of charm and beauty about their banks.

Devonshire, as I have said, thanks to its moorlands, abounds in such streams. Cornwall has relatively as many, but its physical shape so curtails their scope, whether flowing to the north or to the south, that as a county of streams it is almost insignificant compared to its greater neighbour, so fortunate and so opulent in this invaluable asset. The large slices of Cornwall too that have been made desolate in appearance by the mining enterprise of centuries, combined with the overwhelming reputation of its sea-coast, have tended to obscure its many picturesque and unspoiled valleys, particularly in the north-east of the county, that are practically counterparts of their equivalents across the Tamar.

The subject of Devonshire rivers is a matter of embarras de richesses indeed. To the writer, who has trodden the banks of most of them at one time or another from earliest youth, and spent long periods on intimate terms with many, some preferences due to such associations are well-nigh unsurmountable. But no impartial soul who knows the county well will, I think, dispute the claim of the Dart to be absolutely the Queen of Devonshire rivers. In the wild Dartmoor wanderings of its two branches to their junction at Dartmeet it has all the qualities and atmosphere which we look for, and many of us greatly love, of a typical moorland peaty stream. When it escapes through the high gateway of the moor, through that fringing country between the absolutely wild and the wholly domestic in which transitional condition Devon is always at its best, the Dart has perhaps no equal in the county. From some distance above the deservedly famous Chase of Holne till it approaches the little town of Buckfastleigh the exceptional altitude and abruptness of the hills through which it breaks its impetuous way, the lavish display of verdure—mostly, as in other Devonshire valleys, of oak—which clothes the steeps, the rugged character of the rocky ledges where the streams are now lashed to white-capped fury, or now pent into narrow rushing flumes of deep black water, are nowhere excelled. Released from this beautiful tangle of woods and the rugged bed over which it has fought its way out from the solitudes of the moor, the Dart sobers down into a typical salmon river of the less riotous order. For when it shoots under the bridge at Buckfastleigh it has attained quite imposing dimensions in a wonderfully short space of time, and for the seven or eight miles that remain to it before meeting the tide at Totnes makes a fine display, in alternate moods of speed and quiet, of deep and shallow, in the green vale between the now much lowlier hills.

Buckfastleigh is not a dream of wood and stone, but it does no great violence to the charm of its site, and has an old Benedictine Abbey, which has been recently restored and occupied by French

THE DART, DITTISHAM, DEVON

ecclesiastics of that order. High above the streams of the Dart, too, in Holne Vicarage, Charles Kingsley was born nearly a century ago. After passing through the village of Staverton the Dart spends the last mile or two of its fresh-water career before tumbling over the Totnes weir in the slower tree-shaded waters that bound the grounds of Dartington Hall. This is the ancient and present seat of the Champernownes, whose ancestor was a quite distinguished member of that group of enterprising Devonian squires who shed such unforgettable lustre on the county in the Elizabethan age. Though the present house at Dartington is more or less of that period, what more particularly constitutes it one of the memorable houses of Devonshire is the still ample ivy-clad shell of the noble fourteenth-century banqueting hall, the great clock tower, and many subsidiary buildings of an extremely early date. Not very far across the river, too, are the splendid ruins of Berry Pomeroy Castle, one of the best existing mediÆval monuments of the kind in the county.

The little town of Totnes, where those celebrated tidal reaches, to which the Dart owes perhaps a somewhat disproportionate measure of its fame, begin, is about the most picturesque inland town in a county by no means architecturally rich in this particular. With its castle, its quaint and steep narrow High Street climbing from the river level through an embattled gateway, its penthouses and fine church, Totnes has something to show on its own account to the great numbers of people who come here for the sole purpose of making the beautiful trip by steamer to Dartmouth. There are still, moreover, in Totnes, some fine old houses where its merchants dwelt when Devon did such a roaring trade with the Newfoundland fisheries and the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century, to say nothing of a little profitable buccaneering, when the Spaniards were so well worth robbing, and the beard of their king requiring to be so frequently singed.

In due accordance with the nonsensical habit of labelling the natural beauties of England after stock scenes on the Continent, this tidal stretch of the Dart has been advertised ever since most of us can remember as the “English Rhine.” Anything more utterly different from the banks and waters of the Rhine than the banks and waters of the Dart it would be difficult to conceive. One is reminded of the gushing lady who, while walking upon one occasion with the venerable Bishop Philpotts of Exeter above the cliffs near Torquay, asked the Bishop if he did not think the prospect was very Swiss like.

“Very, ma’am,” snapped the bored prelate, “only here there are no mountains and in Switzerland there is no sea.”

Britons of average powers of observation, with an intelligent knowledge of their own country and a sufficient one of others, know very well that Great Britain, whether in its wilder or its tamer aspects, resembles no other country in the least little bit, but is absolutely unique in almost every detail, natural and artificial, that goes to make a landscape. The very atmosphere that many of us abuse for its moisture and lack of clarity is no small factor in wrapping this favoured isle in that mantle of velvet, which the graces of English rural life have perfected into a land without equal in mellow finished beauty. Only Britons who have never experienced banishment seem to be unconscious of what kind of a land they live in. Let them ask an intelligent foreigner or an American how it strikes them on first seeing it! The Dart is no more like the Rhine than Torquay is like Switzerland or Cornwall like the Riviera, or North Wales like the Alleghanies or the Grampians like the mountains of the moon.

It is absolutely English. The woodlands that mantle so richly about Sharpham could not possibly be anything else, still less the brilliant pastures that cling like velvet to the slopes of the folding hills, nor yet the cottages that lie amid the orchards of Dittisham, nor the homesteads sprinkling the high slopes, nor the tracery of the fields that enclose their groups of red Devon cattle or the long-wooled sheep of the South Hams. Nobody with sense could imagine this looked like anything but England. As one nears Dartmouth the spirit of British seamanship, ancient and modern, dominates everything and seizes the imagination. The old Britannia, lying where she has lain ever since we can remember, and the new naval college standing out upon the hillside above, speak loudly enough of the present, while the home of Hawkins, whose brave parting words as his ship foundered off the coast of Newfoundland are historic, greets us from the opposing heights. Of Raleigh, too, and his first pipe of tobacco smoked on a rocky islet in the river, Dartmouth has much to say. But if Devonshire rivers lead us to discuss Devonshire harbours and all that they mean, we shall become involved in the heroic west country age of the Great Eliza, and of the protracted epoch of the Newfoundland fisheries, which so profoundly affected Devonshire life to its inmost recesses for two centuries afterwards. And this will not do. It will be enough to say that the mouth of the Dart is worthy of the river’s deserved reputation; a fine deep, winding harbour, channelled between lofty hills and embellished at its narrow mouth with the keep of an ancient castle. Dartmouth town is, in its different way, as picturesque as Totnes, and if it were not, its great memories would hallow the homeliest walls. But in treating of Devonshire villages and country houses one has hardly in mind the abodes of sea-goers and fishermen. They belong to another type altogether, and one regards them with different eyes. When you get to the mouth of a river, for instance, you no longer look for thatched cottages or half-timbered houses or Tudor homesteads. You expect hard-featured, storm-smitten tenements of stone, and seek the picturesque with probable success in narrow tortuous streets, in steep stairway wynds, in low-browed taverns soaked in mariners’ tales. We have nothing to do with these things here. It may be said that rivers whose storm-sheltered mouths are so intimately concerned with sea-going have much to do with them. But it is not with that side of a river’s influence at any rate which in the main this book aspires to deal.

Between the Dart and Plymouth, or, to be more precise, between the Dart and that beautiful little stream, the Erme, a glimpse of which adorns these pages: between Dartmoor again on the north and the sea to the south, lies that block of Devon known as the South Hams. As I have said, it is not precisely a part of the county which a patriotic Devonian, not obsessed by his patriotism, would select for taking, let us say, a Herefordshire friend up on to a high place and asking his opinion of Devonshire. But furrowing its way southward from Dartmoor to the sea, hidden from the eye till you are right down beside it, runs one of the most entrancing little rivers in Devonshire. Larger and longer than the Erme, which at Ivybridge has some outside notoriety, the Avon is quite as beautiful, with the advantage of comparative obscurity. This is an inversion, too, of what one might look for, since from South Brent Junction on the Great Western main line, where the Avon breaks from the fringes of the moor, a little railway follows down its woody mazes, hugging it closely for most of its journey to the sea, and culminating at Kingsbridge, whence travellers go by road or water to

THE ERME, IVY BRIDGE, DEVON

Salcombe, another harbour on the Dartmouth pattern, but even more beautiful.

The Avon, like all its sisters, starts life as a peaty burn prattling for many miles through the silence of the moors. Then comes the beautiful fringe country, where it plunges in many a cascade through woods and ravines, and thence emerging sparkles down through the meadows beneath the village of Brent into what might be called the low country, if the phrase in Devonshire were not absurd. A country “all ’ills and ’oles,” as a venerable Suffolk cook within my knowledge curtly and pithily summed up Devonshire to East Anglian friends, after visiting her old mistress, who had migrated westward. If the hills of the South Hams are mostly a bare patchwork of cultivation, the “holes” through which the Avon flows are a long delight. Leaving villages, such as Huish, Dipford, Woodleigh, and Loddiswell, to face the south-west storms on windy brows, away upon either hand the Avon urges its bright impetuous streams for a dozen or so miles beneath an almost unbroken canopy of foliage; churning here over mossy rocks, rolling there over gravelly beds, or lingering in some deep and broad pool shadowed by fern-tufted, mossy crags or by some giant trees of the woods, waxed mightier than common, as if conscious that long arms were needed to join hands across the expanded stream. Green strips of meadow spread now and again along one bank or the other. But even then the foliage bristles upon the river’s immediate edge and screens its waters from every attempt at undue familiarity on the part of the casual wanderer. Betimes, too, some old stone bridge festooned with trailing ivy gives a more perfect finish to the vista of water that dances through flickering bands of sun and shade beneath the swaying boughs. But after all, it is only the angler down in the water who penetrates these inner sanctuaries of Devon streams, and others like them, and gathers of their best.

Occasionally some little farm with an orchard abuts upon the bank, or a water-mill where in a big kitchen the miller’s wife will serve the angler, wearied with battling knee deep in the rocky rapid stream—for no other strangers come this way—with a grateful confection in which clotted cream and honey play a treasured part. But for much of the way wild woods towering to the skyline several hundred feet above, often, too, pathless, trackless woods, hold hill and stream alike in their sylvan grip. And what a spangled carpet it is that Nature stretches here upon the cool mossy ground, above all, perhaps, in the season when April wanes and the shy leaves of May have as yet shut out but half the sunshine. What a continual blaze is here of primroses and violets and wild geranium, of star of Bethlehem, of celandine, which in these moist cool shades all linger on till the kingcup and the bluebell have burst upon the mossy floor with something more than the promise of their coming splendour. The oak is the staple tree of these Devon valleys, and, as the latest to put forth its leaves, the bloom of spring flowers in which these vales are equalled by few and surpassed by none, shows upon the woodland banks in all the more bewitching brilliancy. Though the oak is the groundwork of woodland colouring in Devon valleys, the ash and the alder, the willow, the birch, the rowan, and the larch all play their part in the riotous foliage of the stream. One misses the opulent sycamore, that precocious harbinger of summer by the streams of Wales and the north country, for they are much scarcer in Devon. One misses, too, with thankfulness the stiff and sombre pine wood beloved by economists and afforestation enthusiasts, from which the streams and hills of this county are, as a rule, singularly and happily free. An inspiring sight, beyond doubt, is a well-grown ruddy-barked Scottish fir, standing out alone or one of a small group, but a poor thing as a forest; acceptable enough in a common-place country, but intolerably superfluous in those of shapely outline and strong characteristics. Most of us will agree with Wordsworth, who bitterly resented the growing practice of obscuring the heather and crag and diversified mountain colouring of the Lake District with the dull, stiff monotone of the pine wood. Devonshire, at any rate, may be thankful that her valley slopes are the natural home of the oak.

But I should not have ventured to spend so much time on the banks of a comparatively obscure west country river if it had not always seemed to me about the most complete example of an ideal Devon stream within my knowledge. On a less exalted scale than the Dart in the south or the Lynn in the north of the county, and little known outside its own district, it is the better qualified to be the river of one’s fancy, and the typical stream of the west country. As a trouting stream, so far as regards the dozen miles or so here lingered upon, it is perhaps the best in Devonshire; the size of its fish, for some inscrutable reason, considerably excelling as an average the over modest weight that distinguishes most of the rivers of the county. A moderate payment to the Association who preserve the water from below Brent to the sea will make the stranger free of it. But to hope for any substantial success he must be thoroughly familiar with the art of upstream wet-fly fishing in clear water, and that too among almost continuously overarching foliage. Furthermore, he must be physically strong, for wading all day upon a rocky bottom against strong currents is a labour compared to which an ordinary day’s partridge-shooting under modern conditions is an easy lounge. Both salmon and peal (the west country term for sea-trout) run up the Avon to spawn, but they take the fly so sparingly as scarcely to be worth mentioning among the attractions of the river.

The Tamar, which for nearly all its course divides Devon and Cornwall, is a river that, in the matter of size, ranks with the Dart and Exe. But as regards its estuary, being the principal affluent of Plymouth harbour, acquires by this a distinction far above these other streams of purely local fame. It rises within five miles of the Bristol Channel, but turning its face at once away from this northern coast, runs southward by a course that, reckoned as the crow flies, is over fifty miles, and by the bends of the river must be at least half as much again. For the whole of this distance, with the exception of a short-cut through an intrusive arm that Devon flings into Cornwall, it forms the boundary between the two counties. Its fountain springs are close to those of the Torridge, which would seem to start with some intention of running a race against the other in its long journey towards southern seas, and then changing its mind, comes northward again, almost upon its own tracks, to rival the Elizabethan glories, at any rate of Plymouth, in forming the once famous harbour of Bideford. By the time it arrives at the nearest point to Launceston, a mile or so, the Tamar has achieved that measure of importance which marks the somewhat subtle and capricious border-line between the mere stream and the full-grown river, as we count such things in England.

Launceston, locally pronounced “Larnston,” is so near its banks as to count for a Tamar town, and is well worth a visit. It is beautifully situated in a fair country, with the softness of detail common to the better parts of Devonshire, and looking out towards that block of Cornish moorland

THE TAMAR, COTEHELE, CORNWALL

which appears like an outline of Dartmoor, and in the person of Brown Willy rises to something like its height. This north-east corner is the choicest part of inland Cornwall, and is practically undisfigured by the havoc of abandoned mines. It suggests nothing less than a continuation of Devonshire, with another Dartmoor on a smaller scale for a background, and a like profusion of mountain streams, which spout down pleasant valleys to the Tamar or the sea. Launceston too, in spite of a lack of those more pronounced architectural notes of antiquity which mark the ancient towns east of Devonshire, has the look of one nevertheless, if viewed through west country spectacles. Indeed, it has a mediÆval gateway still actually in situ, the ruins of a castle, and a most beautiful church, the outside walls of which are entirely faced with carved stone in a manner calculated to make the wandering ecclesiologist rub his eyes at a spectacle so singular, if not quite unique, in England.

At Greystone bridge, where the high-road from Tavistock to Launceston crosses it, the Tamar will have run more than half its course, and already achieved the size of the largest Devonshire rivers in their fresh-water stages, such as the Dart, the Exe, the Torridge, and the Taw. Like these, though not in this particular case rising in the moors, the water of the Tamar is clear in texture, and tumbles along over a gravelly or rocky bed from rapid shallow—or stickle, as the west country term has it—to swirling pools, and so far it remains unpolluted with the mine refuse that is the scourge of some of its lower tributaries. The scenery of the upper half of the Tamar is that of a normal Devonshire stream away from the moors. From Greystone bridge downwards the great height of the country on both banks gives a distinction of environment to the Tamar above most of its fellows. On looking over the landscape through which it flows, from any high point, it gives the impression of a mighty gorge wriggling tortuously through an upheaved country. Not that you can actually see the Tamar till you get to quite close quarters with it. It is a most difficult river for the casual stranger to acquire an intimacy with, from the fact that it flows in so deep a trench. Few roads or lanes follow its banks, and all the ordinary arteries of travel lie back on the ridges above. Here and there, as at Newbridge and again at Calstock, steep ways descend in perpendicular fashion for a mile or so to the valley, but no assistance from wheels of any kind either up or down it could much benefit the less robust adventurer. The tide runs a long way up the Tamar from Plymouth harbour, even to the weir below Morwell crags in the Tavistock neighbourhood. The scenery is, beyond question, imposing; the Cornish bank rising in these middle reaches to over a thousand feet of altitude and terminating in wild moorish summits, each, however, unfortunately surmounted by the unmistakable signs of the mining industry which, alive or dead, to a sensible extent smirches the beauty of this otherwise striking outlook. The villages too, both those on the river-bank, like Calstock, or on the hill-top, like Bere Alston, are mainly the abode of miners, or those who would like to be such if work were active, and have all the forbidding qualities of their kind, or most of them. There is a fine old Tudor manor-house of the Edgcumbe family, with picturesque grounds, at Cotehele near Calstock, and a few miles higher up, in the fresh-water reaches of the river, is Endsleigh, a box of the Duke of Bedford’s, with delightful surroundings. In ancient times, before mining and other obstructions discouraged the salmon, the river seems to have had a great reputation, as one can well believe. Of late years efforts have been made, by means of ladders on the weirs, to attract that noble fish once more. But the Upper Tamar is something better than a second or third rate salmon river, since it is a really first-class trout stream, equal to the Avon in the average weight of its fish, with a much greater length as well as breadth of water. It is rigidly preserved, however, the Duke of Bedford being the largest riparian owner. The mention of this powerful house turns one’s thoughts to Tavistock, whose broad Abbey lands fell to the Russells at the Dissolution.

Now Tavistock is the centre of a perfect network of small rivers, and is in itself the most ornate, cheerful, and in some respect picturesquely situated country-town in Devonshire. The influence of the House of Bedford has, no doubt, much to do with the quite distinguished appearance of the little borough as regards its most conspicuous quarters, while Nature has done much by means of the impetuous waters of the Tavy, which wash its lawns and pleasure-grounds. What with its Townhall, Guildhall, Library, and its great hotel, once a ducal residence, with other pleasant buildings set in an ample umbrageous square around the stately Perpendicular church, the native town of Drake is calculated to give quite a shock of pleasant surprise to the stranger expecting

THE TAMAR, NEAR CALSTOCK, CORNWALL

the somewhat undistinguished atmosphere of an average west country town. There are just sufficient remnants of the once famous Abbey visible here and there, amid other buildings, to remind the visitor both of the origin of the town and of the Bedford influence. As for the rest of Tavistock, it is quite pleasing in the older streets, and still more in the many attractive residences in and about it, though scarcely any ancient houses now remain. The site of that of Tavistock’s great son, Francis Drake, is just outside the town, though covered by a later house, while a bronze statue to the hero, a replica of the one on Plymouth Hoe, greets the visitor approaching by the Plymouth road. Another honoured native of Tavistock should be mentioned, namely, William Browne, the poet and friend of Drayton, if only for the fact that in his Britannia’s Pastorals he celebrates the streams and rivers around his native place with obviously intense affection—as well he may.

For when we come to these same streams the difficulty of the Devonshire river, as the subject of a single chapter, bursts on us with fresh force. A perfect network of bright waters dance in the numerous valleys that they have furrowed so deep in the neighbourhood of Tavistock. Most of them, to be sure, are tributaries of the Tavy, though some, like the Lydd and the Lew, break westward to the Tamar. These last come down from the sequestered groves near the edge of the moor, where that venerable oracle of Devonian lore, that “Vates Sacer” of the West, Mr. Baring-Gould, is so felicitously seated in the home of his fathers. The Plym, least in size of the three fair rivers which meet at the great seaport, but compensated by the greater glory of its name, runs an independent course. Indeed, the very traveller on the railroad to Tavistock from Plymouth makes such acquaintance with the quite remarkable beauties of this little river, as is not often vouchsafed even to those who do not read picture magazines or tit-bits, like the average Briton when going through the choicest portions of his own country for the first time. For many miles up the enchanting vale to Bickleigh, the fortunate wight who has the right-hand window seat can look down upon the little river churning its way far below through a deep trough between a continuous maze of oak forests, till at length he may see its course break away towards the moor, where it has its birth, and into the wilds of the eternal granite-crested hills. The Meavy, the Plym’s weaker half, will still be left beside the railroad in the meadows playing hide-and-seek amid the alders and the orchards, with all the normal humours of a Devon stream, till we leave it and cross the Walkham on its way to join the Tavy. But it is the Tavy, of course, with which Tavistock, and we too, perhaps, should be chiefly concerned. For the Tavy is a very assertive stream, and its friends hold it as second to none in the county for natural beauty, to say nothing of its repute as a peal river.

The first claim I am quite prepared to endorse, for the simple reason that I do not know any stream of importance in Devonshire that I would deliberately place in the second rank. The Dart stands out as prima inter pares at least, because it adds tidal distinctions to its other charms. Nor do I honestly think there is any coup d’oeil in Devonshire quite equal to that presented by the uniting valleys of the East and West Lynn above Lynmouth. But these are mere details. The Tavy, at any rate, has not a dull mile. Its early career in the moor is a long one, and that portion of it known as Tavy Cleeve is one of the wildest ravines on Dartmoor. It enters civilisation about four miles above Tavistock, near the village of Mary Tavy, a name of ill-omen, from the fact that mining has been more or less always carried on here for a very long time, and the truth must be told that the waters of the Tavy assume henceforward for a very long way down the colour of milk. This matter has been the source of continual disputes between those interested in the fishing, or merely in the purity of the Tavy, and those concerned in delving for copper and arsenic. Many years ago a sudden inflow of mine refuse destroyed every fish in the river, a void which time and re-stocking, however, have long rectified. But though the more poisonous matters are no longer let into the stream, there are occasional difficulties with weirs erected for mining purposes, which, unless fitted with ladders, obstruct the run of salmon and peal in the breeding season. The law settles these matters nowadays, though not always so satisfactorily as to clear the air between the conflicting interests, and allays the perennial friction between the angling community and the less concerned but still sympathetic public on the one hand, and the mine-owners with some local labour following on the other. A mine-owner on the river expressed his point of view to me recently, as one stranger to another with characteristic frankness.

THE TAVY, TAVISTOCK, DEVON

“They’d sooner I lost all the money I have put in here, and threw a hundred men on the rates, than that three or four salmon a year should be stopped coming up by my dam.”

His random selection of a confidant was not in this case a happy one; but that was nothing, for it is instructive at least to hear both sides of a question. The Tavy is not a good salmon river, but not quite so indifferent a one as the hyperbolic statistics of my rather sore-headed mineralogist would suggest. But it is about the best peal river in Devonshire, the larger ones running up in April or May and the smaller coming up in greater numbers in July and later. The Tavy and Tamar unite in their estuary just above Plymouth, and it is a singular natural phenomenon that the ascending salmon in a vast majority select the Tamar, while practically the whole bulk of the peal turn up the Tavy. Another curious fact is, that neither the trout nor the salmon species take apparent hurt from even the permanent discoloration of a river, provided certain poisonous ingredients are kept out. The Tavy, to be sure, clears itself below Tavistock, and is not an extreme case. But in many known to the writer, that fastidious lover of clear water, the trout, has accommodated himself without apparent inconvenience to the most untoward transformation of his once pellucid haunts. The beautiful Mawddach, familiar to every one who knows Dolgelly, coming down through its glorious mountain glens the colour of milk is a case in point. Another equally familiar is the Glenridding beck, which pours into the crystal depths of Ullswater a ceaseless volume of lead “hush”; and though it soon sinks in the deep lake, collects the trout from all parts to feed at the inpouring of its milky waves. The fish again of the Upper Wear, in County Durham, seem to thrive amid the stained waters, while the sea-trout still run up the once beautiful rapids of the Ogmare in Glamorganshire, which are, I think, the foulest of them all. But in any case it is a piteous sight to see a mountain stream, perhaps the most beautiful of all Nature’s works, flowing befouled through the fair scenes of which it should be the centre and the chief adornment. The Tavy, however, as already stated, runs virtually clear again, when, with the added waters of a strong brook just below Tavistock, and those of the still larger Walkham, pursues its devious way through deep-wooded vales, only severed from the Tamar by a single lofty ridge. The junction of the Walkham and the Tavy, known as “Double Waters,” is a spot that abides in the memory, so does the romantic scenery just below and around the Virtuous Lady Mine, which has in its day produced much copper and other treasure, and derives its name from the Great Elizabeth, who, as we know, imported German miners freely, and always took good care to get her full share and often a good deal more out of every enterprise she encouraged. No one, indeed, knew that better than Tavy’s great son, Francis Drake, though his enterprises were of a more adventurous kind. One remembers the occasion on which he lay in Plymouth harbour with a ship full of Spanish gold, waiting to hear from the illustrious lady, who was actually his business partner in the venture, whether she intended to disown him and cut his head off as a pirate or amicably divide the spoils. We know at any rate which she did. Nowhere in Devonshire would the stranger be able to command so much that is beautiful and interesting in this county, and make a wider acquaintance with Devonshire streams than at Tavistock, since this town is not merely on the South Western main line from Exeter to Plymouth, but is also served by its rival the Great Western. Not only the moor itself, whose swelling tors, each capped with their mysterious cluster of upstanding crags, but the district, is richer than any part of Devon in prehistoric remains, in “round huts,” Cytiau Gwaeddeold, as the Welsh call them, in crosses and inscribed stones. The churches, though ancient and interesting, are not often ornate, owing, it is supposed, to the difficulty of carving the hard granite of which they are composed. But high above all, on the sharp summit of Brent Tor, between the Tavy and the Lydd, is the most wonderfully situated church in Devonshire, nay in England. A couple of ruined castles in Wales, that of Dinas Bran above the Dee at Llangollen, and Cerrig Cennen near the Towy at Llandilo, alone within my knowledge have such pride of pose. But no church in which service is still held in the whole kingdom approaches this “cloud compelling” shrine of North Brent.

The main line to Exeter passes beneath it, and space limits me here to a mere passing mention of the gorgeous view which may be had even from the train window of the Okement, as fresh from the wild foot of Yes Tor, the highest peak of Dartmoor, it glitters down the rich luxuriant vale to Okehampton, with the towers of a ruined castle, in real Welsh fashion, perched high above its streams.

The Okement, and its greater neighbour and cradle companion the Taw, are the only Dartmoor rivers that flow north into the “Severn Sea,” that euphonious term which Kingsley substituted whenever possible for the infelicitous and unpoetic designation of “Bristol Channel.” This is natural, for North Devon offers the shorter course; much more natural, indeed, than the forsaking of Exmoor itself upon the north coast for southern seas, as do the Exe and Barle. Many a time, in days now unhappily remote, both in winter and summer have I looked down from the high bogs, where the Barle rises over the whole sweep of the Channel and the shadowy mountains of South Wales beyond it, and fancied these united rivers as rejecting the brief inglorious career which seemed their destiny, and facing southwards into strange lands to win a foremost place in volume and importance among the rivers of the West. Fancy too might credit the Tamar, born within sound of the Severn Sea, with the same vaulting ambition.

The Tamar, by the way, is almost certainly Taw-Mawr (the great Taw), and the Tavy most likely is Taw-vach or bach (the Welsh diminutives for Vechyn, little). Then, again, there are in North Devon the rivers Taw and Torridge (Taw-ridge), while South Wales has two notable rivers of the same etymological origin, Towy and Tawe, both pronounced as the former is spelt. It is natural enough that Celtic names should prevail in a corner abutting on Cornwall, the old West Wales, that obviously shared in those dim Irish invasions which so complicate the story of the Cymry.

Our thoughts can then follow no better course than that of the railway from Okehampton to Yeoford Junction, and there abandoning the Exeter train take the one coming up for Barnstaple and North Devon. For then in a very short time you will be upon the banks of the Taw, the chief river of North Devon, where it is yet a modest stream, and keep it quite intimate company till it spreads, a shining estuary, laden with historic memories, into Barnstaple bay. Still sticking to your seat by the window you will see Instow and Appledore rising, significantly if you know your west country lore, out of the broad glistening tide. You will round the corner into Bideford and behold the Taw’s twin sister, the Torridge, sweeping under the many-arched and ancient bridge. On yet, with delightful glimpses of that fine river, shrunk from

THE OKEMENT, OAKHAMPTON, DEVON

an estuary into a bold salmon water sweeping along the meadowy vale, till beneath the high-perched little town of Torrington the railway comes to a peaceful end, and dumps you out on the eastern fringe of that unknown rugged block of Devonshire which Devonian farmers, hunting men, and true provincials often speak of as “the West country.” But this is anticipating a little. Nor do I make any sort of apology for taking the train for this brief interlude. No one shall say that there is no poetry in the corner-seat of a railway carriage! Such a man would be a dull, unimaginative soul indeed. Rhapsodies are being daily written on motoring, as a revelation of the glories of England by persons who have apparently lacked the enterprise or inclination to discover them before, accessible as they have been for all time to the cyclist, the horse keeper, or the pedestrian. The cyclist with an eye to the landscape can go easily along as slowly as he chooses with scarcely a glance at the road; the keen motorist, who nearly always drives himself, can scarcely take his eyes off it. Indeed, whether as his neighbour beside him or a stranger upon the road before him, Heaven forbid that he should take to admiring the scenery! It seems practically impossible to travel at dog-cart pace—the organism of the machine seems to resent it. At any rate, no motorist ever does. So whatever measure of enjoyment in the landscape may belong to the process is the privilege only of the passengers. But what I should like to know is why the poetry of rapid motion through rural England has never been associated with the corner-seat of a railway carriage. You are free from wind, from noise, and the spasmodic motions incidental to meeting traffic. The rhythmical beat of a train is notoriously stimulating to the brain and the imagination. There is nothing corresponding to it in the motion of an automobile, whatever the comparison may be worth in the mere question of luxury. It is surprising, too, what long stretches of some of our most beautiful rivers and streams can be seen to real advantage as passing acquaintances from a train window. I have lived long enough to have cursed in my heart, like many others, the making of a line up many a well-known and familiar stream, cherished for its sequestered beauties. I have lived to discover how little, how extraordinary little, difference to the charms of the river-side the terrible thing has actually made. For one thing, it is only at long intervals that your local line gives any sign of life at all, and then but for a few brief seconds. For the rest, foliage wraps it in kind embrace, and flower-spangled turf soon clothes its once ragged edges. The very birds of the air and the beasts of the field show a confidence in the single track, with its prolonged periods of certain repose, its immunity from restless, prying individuals, that they never give to a highway. And now when this last has become in varying degrees a place of noise and rush and betimes of danger, its echoes strike far more frequent discords in your ear down by the stream than the rumble of the rarely passing train. But to that corner-seat again. How finely it commands the stream in the valley, lifted, as it often is, much higher than the road, and striding the river, for the most part of necessity, far oftener than the other which is apt to creep behind fences along the hill-foot. What glorious vistas of foaming water gleaming between avenues of bordering foliage disclose themselves at this bend or at that, and if the vision is fleeting it is at least frequent. And if the stream is an old friend; if its pools and eddies, its bridges, its bordering homesteads, its water-mills, its moments of frenzy, and its periods of calm have remained among many others engraven on the page of memory, how delightful to thus snatch a fortuitous half-hour with them again in a long succession of fleeting, but no less significant and suggestive, glimpses in that they are momentary. It would be preposterous to deny that there is both poetry and sentiment in the corner-seat of a railway carriage—every one with a spark of sensibility must have felt it.

The Taw is a thought more leisurely than most Devon rivers after passing Eggesford, where the late Lord Portsmouth a generation or two ago maintained so great a name among the gentry of the West. It swishes fast round gravelly bends into large eddying pools where in their season the salmon and peal lie. It runs in smoother fashion along broad reaches between red crumbly banks comparatively free from timber, and fringed by verdant meadows where the red cattle of North Devon supply the inevitable complement to every Devon landscape. At Portsmouth Arms comes pouring in with strong and lusty current the first contribution from Exmoor, to wit, the Mole, or Bray, whichever you like at this point, but the Bray where it rises far away in a deep Exmoor gorge behind the village of Challacombe. And still the Bray as it burrows for miles along the skirts of the moor through hanging woods of oak, and under ivy-covered bridges hugging the base of rounded hills on whose summits pony-riding farmers dwell in slate-roofed, windy homesteads, with one eye on the Exmoor slopes where their sheep graze, and the other on the narrow ribbon-like meadows where they cut their hay: men knowing in the ways of stag or fox or hare, and ready to mount their little shaggy cobs at the first note of the horn which sounded so often, and still, no doubt, sounds upon the banks of the Bray. Such at least was this beautiful valley in the days of my youth, that golden period in which Heaven knows one needs no poet to tell one a glory shone upon wood and stream of a kind that shines no more. Scores of my readers will have abiding with them some such river:

So of the Bray, and there is nothing more to be said unless to record that it flows through Castle Hill, where the noble House of Fortescue represents probably the widest possessions and the most abiding influence in North Devon, and that it spends its last hours among the pleasant woods and meadows of Kings Nympton.

Of Barnstaple and Bideford, lying at the mouth of the Torr and Torridge respectively, it is impossible to say anything worth having in a paragraph. They belong to the sea-rovers and their story, which the reader of Westward Ho! at any rate—and who has not read it?—knows something of.

Æsthetically, however, you must look at these famous towns in detail with the eye of faith—not of an artist nor an archÆologist. But they will pass, being neither unsightly nor in serious conflict with their traditions, which are great.

Now the Torridge, like the Tamar, rises in no moorland. In fact their infant springs are close together hard by the north coast. For this reason, though both are clear and rapid rivers, they have scarcely anywhere the turmoil of the Dart, the Tavy, or the Avon. The Torridge, as mentioned earlier, after running a heady, youthful course far southward, would seem to change its mind as if loth on second thoughts to leave the country of its birth; for, doubling back again, it hurries northward, and with a course parallel to its upper reaches rolls in fine broad sweeps of alternate deep and rapid beneath Torrington perched on its high hills, to Bideford and the sea. Now the region between the lower or northward-flowing half of the Torridge, extending west to the Tamar and

ON THE WEST LYNN, LYNMOUTH, DEVON

Cornwall, is a land unto itself, and, as already noted, commonly alluded to by Devonshire farmers, cattle buyers, hunting men and such like as “the West country.” It is watered by the Upper Torridge flowing southwards through it, and covers some two or three hundred square miles. In appearance it is normal Devonian; a succession of high red ridges of tillage and pasture, heavily fenced to their round summits, and traversed by narrow precipitous roads hemmed in between lofty, flower-spangled banks. Cold grey church towers stand out here and there above some small, clustering, slate-roofed village on a windy hill-top, and at intervals some deep, wooded glen bearing a noisy runlet to the Torridge throws a redeeming ray of beauty through a country otherwise open to criticism for a certain monotony of outline and detail, like many other parts of Devonshire.

But this “West country” or land of the Upper Torridge has the merit, one may almost say the charm, of unconventionality. For within its whole wide bounds there is scarcely a gentleman’s residence but the indispensable vicarage, and even scattered cottages are rare, there being few labourers. The entire country, in fact, hereabouts is occupied by yeomen farmers, many of whom have lately bought their farms, and who mostly do their own work. It is the most sequestered and unknown part of habitable Devonshire. Scarcely any one but its occupants know anything about it, except such few as may penetrate it behind a hunted fox or as purchasers of stock. There is nothing, indeed, to bring any one in here, while the labours of locomotion except on horseback are prodigious. No social functions occur within it; no railroads disturb its calm; while the motor, nay, even the cycle, give it a wide berth. The farmers ride ponies, and, fifty years hence, will probably be riding ponies still. If it were a wild pastoral country, this land of the Upper Torridge, there would, of course, be nothing worthy of remark in all this. But, on the contrary, it is a quite normal district. The land is not very good, nor its occupants very progressive, so the formality of the country is delightfully broken by stretches of golden gorse, by moorish, ill-drained fields where snipe are numerous, by whole hillsides that Nature has clothed after her own fashion with birch and alder, blackthorn, or ash, straggling about waist deep in open brakes of fern or broom, and these are the haunt in winter of great numbers of woodcock—a country, indeed, full of birds, those of

THE EXE, COUNTESS WEIR, DEVON

prey or otherwise, for there is no one to molest them. The keeper and the form of sporting he now represents is as non-extant as the garden-party. Throughout this west country of the West country the sportsman still follows a brace of setters in arduous but pleasant quest of the indigenous partridge after the fashion of bygone days. And if, while standing in the bosky shallows of the Torridge, one hears the call of a cock-pheasant, it will be the voice of no coop-raised, grain-fed sybarite, but a bird and the descendant of birds well able to take care of themselves and quite experienced travellers. And the Torridge itself, which wanders in and out of woodland and thicket, running upon a gravelly bed and scooping out the red crumbly banks of narrow meadows, where lively red yearlings caper with justifiable amazement at the apparition of the rare stranger, calls for no further comment here. It is in its northward-flowing lower reaches that it acquires distinction, swelled, moreover, with the considerable streams of the Okement.

It is a far cry from the Taw and Torridge estuary to Lynmouth and Lynton—that gem of Devonian, nay of English, coast scenery. But though many small streams cleave their way through that iron coast into the Severn Sea, at Watermouth, at Combe Martin, and, most beautiful of all, at Headons Mouth, there are none approaching the dignity of a river till you come to the outpouring of the recently united waters of the East and West Lynn on the very borders of Somerset. Here, indeed, looking out through a great open gateway as it were in the most imposing stretch of cliff scenery in England, Cornwall not excepted, is a vision of a tumbling stream and hanging woodland that as a mere picture, and having regard to its composition, is not surpassed, I think, even upon the Upper Dart. Then, again, the near presence of the sea in the prospect seems to place Lynton on a pinnacle to itself. From Bristol to Berwick there is surely nothing quite like it upon our coast—this really noble curtain of woodland hung from so great a height and folding away inland, out of whose green recesses the white waters come spouting on to the very shore. Both the East and the West Lynn come down from Exmoor, leaving the comparative plateau of the moor at a distance of some four miles from the sea, and in that brief space falling about a thousand feet through continuously wooded gorges. The East Lynn, however, is the more noteworthy, dividing again at that famous sylvan spot known

THE EXE, TOPSHAM, DEVON

as “Waters meet.” Up the western of the two forks cut high up the steep hillside, commanding beautiful views of the winding gorge beneath, runs the road to Brendon, climbing the steepest hill in Devonshire, if such a thing is conceivable, on any known highway. At Brendon, emerging from the woods, the moor opens wide before you, the land of the red deer and the Exmoor pony, and, what with many persons is even more to the point, the land of Blackmore’s celebrated novel Lorna Doone. The eastern fork of the little river, known on the moor as the Badgworthy (Badgery) water, soon reached from Brendon, is more immediately concerned with this, leading immediately up as it does to the famous Doone valley. Hundreds of pilgrims, both in frivolous and pious fashion, journey up here nowadays, literal persons sometimes, looking for cataracts where are only the normal gambols of an ordinary moorland stream, and inveighing against poor Mr. Blackmore who, sublimely unconscious that he was creating classic ground, took quite legitimate liberties with the little waters of the infant Lynn. Lynton and Lynmouth had acquired even before this some outside fame for their extraordinary beauty, and had their modest share of summer visitors. But of literary or historical associations no valley in Devonshire could have been more absolutely bereft than that of the Badgworthy water. No book that ever was published, not any one even of Scott’s novels, gave a hitherto obscure spot such permanent fame as did Lorna Doone in the matter of the head-waters of the Lynn. I can state with the confidence of personal knowledge and recollection that before that delightful book was written these upper waters, and what is now known as the Doone valley, had no more significance for local people than any other obscure glen on Exmoor, and by strangers were never seen, for stag-hunting then attracted comparatively few outsiders.

Now from the Upper Lynn to the sources of the Barle and Exe there is a carriage road pursuing a wild course over the moor to Simonsbath, some dozen or so miles distant. Long before arriving there, however, it crosses the infant Exe, a peaty brook piping in feeble strains amid the silence of the hills. Not far to the southward rises its sister and later partner, the Barle, in a high bog to merge immediately in the deep and desolate tarn of Pinkerry—in truth a reservoir made nearly a century ago by a visionary landowner for impracticable purposes of no consequence here.

THE AXE, AXMOUTH, DEVON

Dripping out of this black eerie pool, which in my youth had stimulated the then lively imaginations of the turf-cutters from Challacombe, who almost alone ever set eyes on it, to some racy superstitions, the Barle in a few miles becomes a stream of consequence, and during its passage through the moor has all the wild charm of a moorland river still struggling in its cradling hills. Within the writer’s memory, which goes back to the time before Exmoor was discovered by the tourist and the up-country stag hunter, great changes have come over this country of the Upper Barle and Exe. The heather, which once held the black game in considerable numbers, has sensibly diminished before draining and increased sheep-grazing. Bank enclosures have eaten deep into the once wild fringes of the moor; but the solitude and the silence still remain. The curlew still calls in the breeding season upon the long ridges above the Barle; the ponies and the little horned sheep of the moor, and the black-faced Highlander still have the waste to themselves.

Simonsbath, the little metropolis of Exmoor forest, with its church, vicarage, manor-house, and shepherd’s cottages, at one time occupied mainly by Scotsmen, sits upon the Barle. All this country and that about the Upper Exe is now familiar, in fact, to the great numbers of persons who in one way or another follow the chase of the stag, and, in name, to far more who read the voluminous literature on the subject. It is curious to recall Exmoor before it became the fashion, when its very name conveyed no meaning in ordinary company, when a strange face on the banks of the Upper Barle was a cause of astonishment, when the villages on the moor edge were rich in original characters, content with a tri-weekly post, and quite independent of newspapers. Most of the moor, including the Exe and Barle, is just within the county of Somerset. Just below Dulverton, on the Barnstaple and Taunton line, noted now as a stag-hunting quarter, the Barle and Exe join, passing at the same moment into the county of Devon. Thence through a pleasant pastoral and agricultural country with less hurry and commotion than the majority of Devonshire rivers under the name of the Exe, the river flows by Tiverton to Exeter. Beneath that ancient cathedral city it winds with broad and slow current, and, meeting the tide, becomes a navigable river; while its wide estuary, as it flows into the sea between Exmouth and Dawlish, is familiar to every traveller on the Great Western main line which skirts its shores.

South-east Devon, that block of country between the Exe and Dorsetshire, is watered through its very heart by the Otter and on its extremity by the Axe. 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. The bank-fences too are more umbrageous, and the bright red soil has here an uncommon fertility, which gives an even added verdure to the grass and a brighter glow to the fallows. This gracious region has all the hill qualities of Devonshire, with a general look of luxuriance and abundance which is absent from the chess-board bareness that is the characteristic of such large tracts of the county.

The Otter, though bright and clear, is not a moor-bred river. But as it sweeps and swirls free of timber upon a pebbly bed, amid open meadows of extraordinary verdure and between banks of a most brilliant ruddy hue, it always seems, in company with its immediate neighbour the Axe, to claim a place of its own among Devon streams. Here too the Devonshire village of the alien idealist, the novelist, and the play-wright is more in evidence, for the simple fact that East Devon approximates in some respects—cottage architecture among them—with the neighbouring counties where the old-fashioned picturesque thatched village is still much more of an every-day reality.

THE THAMES, ETON

THE THAMES, RICHMOND

THE ARUN, ARUNDEL CASTLE, SUSSEX