In relation to the Maid of Sker, the most important places in the immediate vicinity of Barnstaple are undoubtedly Heanton Court, Braunton, and Saunton. Heanton Court, as we have seen, is only a memory. In the early part of the seventeenth century it was described as a “sweet, pleasant seat”; and the account proceeded, “the house is a handsome pile, well-furnished with every variety of entertainment which the earth, the sea, and the air can afford. A place, whether you respect pleasure or profit, daintily situated on an arm of the sea.” A later notice speaks of it as standing at the bottom of a park, very near the river Taw, and acquaints us that it had a new front of two storeys, each of which contained eleven windows, and was ornamented with battlements, while at either end was a tower. Other particulars have been given in a previous chapter (see p. 211), and need not be recapitulated here. The reader, however, may be assured of the identity of Blackmore’s Narnton Court with this historic mansion.

Braunton is a village not easily forgotten. The scenery is magnificent, and the great hills

furnish admirable opportunity for climbing. On alighting at the railway station, the stranger will encounter an array of coachmen anxious to whisk him off without delay to Saunton Sands, but he will do well to resist their importunities until, at least, he has inspected the interior of Braunton Church. If he converses with the natives, somebody will be sure to tell him that three successive attempts were made to erect it on Chapel Hill, and that each time the building collapsed, the assumed reason being that the spot chosen by man was not the site approved and predestined by Heaven. He will learn also that in the panel work of the roof of the church, carved on one of the bosses, is the representation of a sow with a litter of pigs. This singular emblem is associated with St Brannock, the Irish missionary; indeed, the very name of the place is said to have been originally Brannock’s town, and it is averred that he founded a church on the site of the present one. As for the sow and her offspring, the legend is that St Brannock was commanded in a dream to rear a Christian temple on the spot where he should light on this vision of fecundity; and it is added that he fetched the timber on a plough, to which he yoked the red deer of the adjacent forests, “who mildly obeyed him,” while he milked the complaisant hinds. The old writer concludes summarily: “But to proceed no farther and to forbear to speak of his cow (which, being killed, chopped in pieces, and boiling in his kettle, came out whole and sound at his call), his staff, his oak, and his man Abel, which would seem wonders—yet all these you may see lively represented unto you in a fair glass window as this present, if you desire it.”

Mr Z. E. A. Wade characterises this venerable tradition rather fiercely as a “senseless story,” and proposes a symbolic interpretation which is certainly ingenious, and in the main not unlikely to be correct.

“Popular story says he tried in vain to build on a certain spot, but was bidden in a dream to rear his proposed church where he should encounter a litter of pigs. He was to rebuild the work of earlier saints, the pige or pigen, female teachers, who had before his day fulfilled the promise of the Psalmist, ‘The women that publish the tidings are a great host.’ Pige is the Danish word for a maid; piga is the Anglo-Saxon form, hence the diminutive of Margaret. So Peg-cross is not unknown....

“The cow or ox of sacrifice—also on an ancient church of Youghal—which finds place in his story, is suggested by the name of the place whence he came, Cowbridge, and by the covering of the boat in which he and his fellow-travellers came. His staff and oak explain themselves.... The ‘man Abel’ in the story carries sticks; ‘Isaac carrying wood represents Christ bearing the Cross,’ said Bede in A.D. 677, a few years after Brannock’s time. ‘Under wood, under rood.’ This saint’s man was ‘the man Christ Jesus.’ The hart was one of the earliest types of the Christian, to be met with over and over again in the Catacombs, and on baptisteries, and the image of the 42nd Psalm is still used in sacred song. It is said of monks in St David’s school ‘that they were required to yoke themselves to the plough and turn up the soil without the aid of oxen.’ The harts at Braunton, like those on the sketch from St Andrew’s, were converts.”

At Braunton dwelt the fair Polly, after her days of service, and before she wedded old David (Maid of Sker, chapter lxiii.).

Now as to Saunton Sands, which are perhaps three miles in length, and viewed from the high ground at Braunton, form, with their grotesque hummocks, a weird background to the smiling landscape. Although efforts have been made to bind it by means of vegetation, sand continues to be blown inland, and Westcote states that in his time the wind drove it to large heaps near the house or court, by which he apparently intends Saunton Court, now a farmhouse. Between Saunton and Braunton the ruins of an ancient settlement have been seen amidst trees that have been “thrown down and overwhelmed.” Westcote goes on to declare that a great quantity of the sand was removed every day to serve as manure for the fields, yet there was no diminution in the sum total, the wind constantly supplying the deficiency. On these grounds the old historian makes the name of the place “Sandton, quasi Sand-town.”

To this Mr Wade demurs, his own derivation being “Sancton,” a holy place. It seems that on Saunton Sands were chapels of St Sylvester, St Michael, and St Helen, as well as numerous palmer’s crosses; and he suggests that since the Celtic missionaries set foot in the country in the sixth and seventh centuries, hundreds of acres have been submerged by the sands. This idea is more than probable, and will remind the reader of the early chapters of the Maid of Sker, which contain realistic descriptions of similar visitations on the coast of Wales. In the same work Blackmore frequently alludes to the Saunton Sands, the scene of the fictitious burial of the Bampfylde infants.

More famous than Saunton Sands are Woolacombe Sands, chiefly owing to their associations with the Tracys, some of which are purely mythical. There is a sensational story of two brothers fighting a duel on Woolacombe Sands for the hand of a waif who had been rescued from the sea by their father; and a notion exists that they were possibly Henry de Tracy, who died in 1272, and his brother and co-heir Oliver, who followed him within a year or two after. Dark hints are thrown out that one of the duellists was rector of Ilfracombe from 1263 to 1272.

The most celebrated member of the family came earlier, and he owes his celebrity to the fact that he was one of the four assassins of Thomas À Becket. According to Risdon, who is decidedly wrong, William de Tracy, after the commission of the deed, lived in retirement at Woolacombe; and on the south side of Morthoe Church is an altar tomb, which Risdon and Westcote agree in assigning to the murderer (or patriot). The Devonshire tradition is in flat contradiction to the official version of the Church of Rome, which imputes that William de Tracy died at Cosenza, in Calabria, within four years of the sacrilege; but other accounts testify that four years after Becket’s death Tracy was Justiciar of Normandy, and that he survived his victim fifty-three years. These various stories are clearly irreconcilable, but one thing appears certain, that the altar tomb with the figure engraved on the grey marble and bearing the half-erased inscription, Sqre [Guillau] me de Tracy [gist ici Dieu de son al] me eyt merci, has absolutely nothing to do with any secular person. The figure is that of a priest in his robes, holding a chalice with both hands over his breast, and that priest was William de Tracy, rector of Morthoe, who died in 1322.

Blackmore does not say much of the Tracys, although he brackets them with the Bassets and “St Albyns” as an old West-country family. (See Maid of Sker, chapter lxvi.).

It is singular to find a remote spot like Woolacombe identified with political adventure, although it might have been, at one time, an apt place “to talk treason in.” Odd to say, the Tracys of Woolacombe-Tracy have not been the only men to bring the great world, as it were, to these yellow sands. Already I have quoted the gossiping Cutcliffe; now I will quote him once more. In a letter of October 8, 1728, he writes:

“Last Sunday se’nnight, the Duke of Ripperda (who lately escaped out of the Castle of Segovia) was putt on Woolacombe Sands, out of an Irish barque; he had no one with him but the lady who procured his deliverance, the corporal of the guard, and one servant. He was handsomely treated at Mr Harris’s, and last Tuesday went on to Exon.”

The Mr Harris by whom the stranger was entertained was John Harris, of Pickwell, in the parish of Georgeham, who was twice M.P. for Barnstaple, and died in 1768, aged sixty-four. Who was the Duke of Ripperda?

Protestant, Catholic, Mussulman, soldier, courtier, diplomatist, Dutchman, Spaniard, Moor—all these parts were supported (not, of course, at one and the same time) by the extraordinary character, who appeared momentarily, in his meteoric career, on the north-west coast of Devon. The whole of his chequered life cannot be recorded here. Suffice it to say that he was born towards the end of the seventeenth century, and came of a distinguished family in Holland. Having won his spurs as a soldier, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Madrid, where he became the trusted minister of Philip V., and was created a duke. Incurring the hostility of the Spanish grandees, he was accused of treason and thrown in 1726 into the Castle of Segovia, whence, at the date of the above letter, he had just escaped. He next turned Mahomedan, and took service with the Emperor of Morocco, who appointed him commander in his army. His attacks on the Spaniards proving unsuccessful, he was imprisoned, and solaced his captivity by elaborating a sort of via media between the Jewish religion and Islamism. In 1734 he was ordered to quit the country, and found an asylum in Tetuan. He died in 1737.

The northern horn of Morte Bay is formed by Morte Point, with Morte Stone in close proximity. As the spot is unquestionably dangerous, there is no risk, I imagine, in accepting the ordinary and obvious etymology—Mort, Morte Point and Morte Stone are as tragedy and comedy. Concerning the latter there is an ancient saw, “Would you remove Morte Stone?” and for centuries it has been held that no one can accomplish the feat save the man who can rule his spouse. Another tradition asserts that the stone can be moved by a bevy of good wives exercising sovereignty over their husbands. In this connection it may be noted that the old fable of Chichevache and Bycorn (the former a sorry cow, whose food is good women; and the latter fat and well-liking, owing to abundance of good and enduring husbands) is represented on the corbels of Ilfracombe Church amidst a menagerie of apes, mermaids, griffins, gnomes, centaurs, cockatrices, and other extinct hybrids too numerous to mention.

Morthoe has a bad record for wrecking operations, which brought much discredit on this coast, and of which it was one of the principal centres. Prayers are said to have been offered that “a ship might come ashore before morning.” To facilitate this blessed consummation, a lantern was tied to some animal, and by this wandering light poor mariners were lured through the treacherous mist to their doom. Even women were to be found cruel enough to participate in this murderous trade, and the tale is told that one of Eve’s daughters held a drowning sailor under water with a pitchfork. Another, a farmer’s wife living at a certain barton, secured as a prize some chinaware, which was arranged on her dresser. One day a sailor’s widow happened to enter, and recognising the ware as belonging to her late husband’s craft, seized a stick and smashed it to atoms. The farmer’s wife thereupon became a prey to remorse, and not long afterwards gave herself up to justice. A painful story regards the wreck of an Italian ship, when the only person on board to reach the shore was a young and beautiful lady, who bore with her a casket of precious family jewels, saved at the risk of her life. Utterly unmoved by her tears and entreaties, the savage wreckers carried her off to one of their vile haunts, and nothing was heard of her again. Many years after the event, the jewels, it was said, were still in the neighbourhood.

The last recorded instance of this shameful practice on the north-west coast of Devon occurred in 1846, at Welcomb, near Hartland, where a vessel and her ill-fated crew were ruthlessly sacrificed to the cupidity of heartless local wreckers. By the way, Blackmore’s account of a wreck in the Maid of Sker is perhaps founded on the circumstance that at the commencement of the great war two transports from the French West India islands, laden with black prisoners, were driven ashore at Rapparee Cove, many lives being lost, whilst, afterwards, gold and pearls were washed about among the shingle.

Rapparee Cove is at Ilfracombe, which Blackmore describes as “a little place lying in a hole, and with great rocks all around it, fair enough to look at it, but more easy to fall down than to get up them” (Maid of Sker, chapter lxv.).

Historically, Ilfracombe has not much of interest save the escapades of the saint-like Cavalier, Sir Francis Doddington, who in

September 1644 set the place on fire, but was beaten out by the townsmen and sailors, with the loss of many of his followers. Ten days later he returned, and, falling on the town with his horse, succeeded in capturing it. “Twenty pieces of ordnance, as many barrels of powder, and near 200 arms,” were amongst his spoils. Ilfracombe was retaken for the Parliament in April 1646.

Sir Francis was no lukewarm partisan, for meeting one Master James, described as “an honest minister,” near Taunton, he demanded whom he was for? “For God and His Gospel,” was the other’s reply, whereupon the enraged knight immediately shot him.

It was to Ilfracombe that Colonel Wade, Captains Hewling and Carey, and others fled after the battle of Sedgemoor, and here they left Ferguson, their chaplain, and Thompson, captain of the Blue Regiment, whilst they themselves, having seized and victualled a vessel, put out to sea. Being pursued by two frigates, they had to land at Lynmouth, as already narrated (see p. 154).

The great charm of the neighbourhood is its bold scenery and romantic walks, one of which will conduct the wayfarer to Hele, with its old earthwork, and thence to Chambercombe, concerning which Mr Tugwell has preserved a most delightful legend, worthy to be reproduced at length:—

Chambercombe is now a retired farmhouse in a beautifully wooded valley, through which saunters the little streamlet which shortly afterwards empties itself into the sea at Hele Strand. The inhabitants still show the Haunted Room to the curious in such matters—a long, low chamber in the roof of the house, from which the flooring has been removed, and which is now used only for the purpose of storing away useless lumber. There are many versions of the legend which belongs to this house; the one which I shall give seems to have the merit of a quaint originality, and is sufficiently mysterious in its unexplained connection with former days.

Many years ago, the burly, ruddy-cheeked, well-to-do yeoman who owned this farm was sitting under the shade of a tree in his garden, enjoying in the cool of the summer’s evening his much-loved pipe of meditation and contentment. After a time he exhausted his usual subjects of reverie, the state of his crops, the rise or fall of wages, the prospects of the next Barnstaple Fair. What should he do? He could not “whistle for want of thought,” because of his pipe—he couldn’t even indulge in the excitement of a matrimonial “difference of opinion,” because his wife was gone into ‘Combe to sell her last batch of chickens. Whatever should he do?

The evening was very still and warm, not even a breath of wind stirring in the copse on the hillside, where the last kiss of the sunset lingered lovingly. He was just dropping off into a doze, and had nodded once or twice with much energy, to the imminent danger of his “yard o’ clay,” when it suddenly occurred to him that he had forgotten to see about some necessary repairs in the roof of his house, and that his spouse had a better memory for such things than himself, and would not fail to remind him of the same on her return.

So he roused himself, and facing his chair in the direction of the house, began to arrange in his mind the when and where of his intended operations. The hole in the roof was over his wife’s store-room, which accounted for her anxiety in the matter, and as he did not expect to be allowed to interfere with that sanctum, he settled that he would get at the roof from the next window, which opened into a passage, and had a low parapet in front of it. Then he rubbed his eyes. Certainly the passage was next to the store-room, and the passage window was the only window with a parapet to it, and therefore the next window to the parapet must be the store-room window, and consequently must have the hole in the roof over it—ably argued and very conclusive. But, to his great perplexity, the fact stared him in the face that the aforesaid hole was over the window which was next but one to the parapet. Then he counted the rooms of the house—“Our Sal’s bedroom—passage—wife’s store-room—own bedroom—one—two—three—four.” Next he counted the windows—“one—two—three—four—five.”

There was one too many. He repeated the process with the same result.

Between the passage and the store-room, which were next to each other, there was decidedly a window—the window too many.

If a window, then a room—unanswerable logic!

Now thoroughly aroused, he dashed his pipe to the ground with a vast exclamation, and rushed into the house at the top of his speed. It was the work of a moment to call together half a dozen able-bodied serving-men, to arm them and himself with divers spades and mattocks, and to scale the creaking stairs which led to the parapet window. There was no trace of a door, nothing but a flat, white-washed wall. He sounded it with a hasty blow, and a dull, hollow sound rang through the house.

“Odswinderakins!” roared the farmer. “Down wi’ un, boys! Virst o’ ye thro’ un shall ha’ Dame’s apern vull of zilver gerts.[23] Gi’ it un, lads!”

Clash went the mattocks into the cob-wall; cling, clang rang the spades on the oak floor. A cloud of dust rolled through the staircase as the farmer’s pick-axe went up to the head in the first breach, and the farmer’s wife rushed up the stairs. Half-choked, and wholly stunned by the din, she could get little information beyond a general statement that the Goodger[24] was in the house, which seemed self-evident. Another five minutes’ work, and the farmer dashed through the gap, which barely admitted his burly person, followed by his wife, whose curiosity mastered her rage and fright.

And what did they see?

A long, low room, hung with moth-eaten, mouldering tapestry, whose every thread exhaled a moist rank odour of forgotten years; black festoons of ancient cobwebs in the rattling casement and round the carved work of the open cornice; carved oak chairs, and wardrobe, and round table; black, too, and rickety, and dust-covered, and worm-eaten; the white ashes of a wood fire on a cracked hearth-stone; and a bed. The embroidered hangings were drawn closely round the oaken posts, and rustled shiveringly in the gust of fresh air which wandered round the room.

“Draw un, Jan, if thee beest a mon,” whispered the dame under her breath, looking round anxiously in the direction of the gap at which she had entered.

John screwed up all his courage, and with a desperate hand tore down the hangings on the side which was nearest the window.

In that dim half-light, for the night was closing in rapidly and the shadows falling heavily, they saw a white and grinning skull gazing grimly at them from the hollowed pillow, and one white and polished arm-bone lying idly on the crimson quilt, and clutching the silken fringe with its crooked fingers.

The dame swooned with a great cry, and her husband, stunned and sickened, dashed to the casement, and, swinging it back on its creaking hinges, leant out, for the sake of a breath of pure air.

Horror of horrors! The garden was alive with ghastly forms; ill-shapen, unearthly, demon-like heads rose and fell with threatening gestures, and mopped and mowed at him from among the flowers of that quiet plesaunce.

Hastily raising his wife in his strong arms, he made his way as best he could through the welcome breach, nor did he rest that night till he had walled up and secured, for a future generation, the terrors of the Haunted Room.

“I should love thee, Jewel, wert thou not a Zwinglian. In thy faith thou art a heretic, but in thy life thou art an angel”—in such terms did Dr John Harding address his former school-fellow at Barnstaple, but at that time his great antagonist—Bishop Jewel, whom Westcote describes, with punning enthusiasm, as “a perfect rich gem and true jewel indeed.” This ornament of the English Church was born at Bowden, in the parish of Berry Narbor, which has the reputation of being about the healthiest in the country—a place where only old people die. The seventeenth-century writer, evidently a lover of puns, quotes the following epitaph on one, Nicholas Harper, who lies buried in the church:—

In Swymbridge Church, where Parson “Jack” Russell ministered so long, is a “shoppy” inscription on a monument erected to the memory of “John Rosier, Gent., one of the Attorneys of the Court of Common Pleas and an Auncient of the Hon^ble Society of Lyons Inne, who died the 25th day of December, 1685, Ætatis suae, 57.” It is as follows:—

Our next and last point is Combmartin, Westcote’s village—a long, straggling place, which Miss Marie Corelli annexed for her Mighty Atom, and another lady, whom I met at Challacombe some years ago, designated with pious horror as “dark”—no doubt in allusion to the bits of folklore, which—happily, as I think—yet linger in these rural districts. It would be easy to cite many illustrations of West-country “superstition,” such as the fruitful influences of the moon, which will send a man to dig in his garden when it is covered with snow; but, having devoted a considerable section of my Book of Exmoor to this fascinating topic, I will here confine myself to the principal interest of Combmartin—namely, its silver mines. In the reign of Elizabeth, however, it was a great place for hemp, and a project was formed for establishing a port at Hartland entirely on account of this trade. As it was, the shoemakers’ thread manufactured in the neighbourhood was sufficient to supply the whole of the western counties.

As to the mines, Westcote states:—

“This town hath been rich and famous for her silver mines, of the first finding of which there are no certain records remaining. In the time of Edward I. they were wrought, but in the tumultuous reign of his son they might chance to be forgotten until his nephew (?) Edward III., who in his French conquest made good use of them, and so did Henry V., of which there are divers monuments, their names to this time remaining; as the King’s mine, storehouse, blowing-house, and refining-house.”

The industry was resumed in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, but seems to have been checked by the influx of water. However, a great quantity of silver is said to have been raised and refined, mainly through the enterprise of Adrian Gilbert and Sir Beavois Bulmer, who bargained for half the profit. Each partner realised £10,000. The owner of the land, Richard Roberts, who happens to have been Westcote’s father-in-law, presented William Bourchier, Earl of Bath, with a “rich and rare” cup, bearing the quaint inscription:—

Another cup was given to Sir Richard Martin, Lord Mayor of London, who was also master and manager of the Mint, the design being that it

should remain in the permanent possession of the Corporation. It weighed 137 oz., and like its fellow, was engraved with naÏve, and, I fear, doggerel verses.

The Latin appendices to the “poems” show the date of the presentations to have been the year 1593; and Blackmore seems to refer to them when he speaks of the “inaccurate tales concerning” the silver cup at Combmartin, sent to Queen Elizabeth (Lorna Doone, chapter lviii.). Ultimately the flooding, with which there was no means of effectually coping, put a stop to the operations; but it is possible that they were not entirely suspended, as a few years ago I saw a report in a local journal that a Combmartin half-crown of 1645 was sold in an auction room in London for the sum of £5. 12s. 6d.

In 1659 the working of the mines was brought before Parliament by a distinguished mineralogist named Bushell, but nothing was done, and, when, forty years later, an attempt was made to exploit them, it resulted in failure. Between 1796 and 1802 the experiment was renewed, and 9293 tons of ore were shipped to Wales. The mines were then closed, and so remained till 1813, when 208 tons were sent to Bristol. The cost, however, exceeded the profit, and in 1817 the mining was again abandoned.

Yet another effort was made in 1833, this time by a joint-stock company with a capital of £30,000, nearly half of which was expended in plant, the sinking of shafts, etc. However, a rich vein having been discovered, work was carried on feverishly night and day, and a large profit realised, three dividends being made to the shareholders. As the result, shares were run up to a high premium by speculators, who, in mining phraseology, “worked the eye out.” In 1845 a smelting company was formed, but neither this nor the mining company, whose expenses averaged £500 a month, was destined to last. In 1848 the engines were taken down, and apart from a spasmodic and, ’tis said, unprincipled attempt at company promoting in 1850, nothing has since been done.

The levels were driven under the village; and beneath the King’s Arms (or Pack of Cards, as the old manor-house of the Leys is usually designated) runs a subterranean passage, constructed for drainage purposes. The ore is exceedingly rich in silver and lead, and the opinion has been expressed that the mines, worked fairly, would have yielded a tolerable return.

There is an old saying, “Out of the world, and into Combmartin.” On this odd text Miss Annie Irwin has based the following pretty verses:—

Both Combmartin and Martinhoe—Martin’s vale and Martin’s hill—received their name from one of William the Conqueror’s ablest lieutenants, Martin of Tours.

The horrible murder which gave rise to the traditional couplet,

is located by Blackmore in the parish of Martinhoe, and he subjoins the following note: “The story is strictly true; and true it is that the country-people rose, to a man, at this dastard cruelty, and did what the Government failed to do.” The term “strictly” seems to imply that Blackmore had been informed by some authority that Martinhoe was the place of the tragedy, and that murder was aggravated by abduction. On both these points the account in Lorna Doone is at variance with Mr Cooper’s version (quoted on p. 144), which mentions Exford as the scene of the butchery, and altogether omits the other incident. Of course, there may have been different versions floating about.

Past Lee Bay and Wooda Bay, both sweetly sylvan, the pilgrim fares to the Valley of Rocks and Lynton.