SUMMARY OF RUN THROUGH NORTH DEVON
Distances.
| Morwenstow | | |
| Clovelly | 12 | miles |
| Bideford | 12 | ” |
| Barnstaple, vi Torridge and Taw Valleys | 52½ | ” |
| Ilfracombe | 11¾ | ” |
| Lynmouth, vi Simonsbath | 28½ | ” |
| Porlock | 12 | ” |
| Total | 128¾ | miles |
Roads.
Surface variable; steep gradients invariable.
VI
NORTH DEVON
After a few miles of brisk running over the breezy heights of Welsford Moor we return to the steep, winding, narrow lanes that have grown so familiar, and pass slowly down the long hill to the woods of Clovelly. To the left is Clovelly Court, where the Careys lived, and the church where they were buried, and to the right is the turn towards the entrance of the Hobby Drive, and the garage where the car must be left.
There are two ways into the village. The shortest way is by the path that drops almost from our feet, as we stand by the gate of the beautiful Drive that motorists may not enter. Very soon this path that winds down the face of the cliff merges into the village street, the famous street that we know so well, even if we have never seen it. For that very reason, because it is so well known, I would advise those who are here for the first time to follow the road to the left, and after a short walk that is almost painful—so steep is the way and so loose are the stones—to enter Clovelly at the bottom of the hill, near the quay. Here there is an unfamiliar and beautiful picture for one’s first impression of the loveliest village in England. Overhead are the trees that clothe all this hillside in sweeping draperies of green; the picture is framed in stems and ivy-grown rocks; clustered under the cliff are the irregular roofs of a group of cottages; a large boat is drawn up by the wayside; and towering in the distance is the soft mass of trees through which the Hobby Drive winds unseen. Almost at once we reach the little pier, and Clovelly, hanging between sky and sea, is facing us.
For some of its beauty one is prepared. The little white houses clambering up the precipitous hillside, the long, winding street of cobbled stairs, the curving pier with its nets and poles and nights of steps, the jerseyed fishermen and pretty Devon faces, the boats that fill the harbour and the donkeys that climb the street, are all things that one has been taught to expect. But neither pen nor brush can give, in a single picture as we have it here, the extraordinary variety and brilliancy of their setting: the clematis that trails about the verandahs, the fuchsias and hydrangeas, pink and blue, that guard the doors, the crimson valerian that runs riot on the walls, the brown cliffs and ruddy rocks, the woods that roll from the skyline to the shore, and at their feet the little shining pools and many-coloured seaweed, and beyond them the long curve of Bideford Bay and the sea, unutterably blue.
“Now that you have seen Clovelly,” said Kingsley to his wife, “you know what was the inspiration of my life before I met you.” Here on the little quay he heard his father, the rector, many a time read prayers for the fishermen before they put to sea; and it was the sad teaching of Clovelly, where he saw so many men work and so many women weep, that gave its pathos to the song of the Three Fishers. When his health was failing, it was the air of Clovelly that he pined for. He came to lodgings at the top of this winding street that we climb so laboriously, “the narrow, paved cranny of a street,” as he called it, and stayed there happily for weeks.
It would be easy to be happy here for weeks; but in the summer there is some difficulty in finding shelter even for one night. Fortunately Bideford is not far off, and when we have made our way slowly back to the high road there are only ten miles of a good surface between us and a comfortable hotel.
To reach it we must cross the famous bridge. This “very stately piece,” as an old writer calls it, has played a very prominent part in the history of the town. “A poore preste” began it, we are told, being “animatid so to do by a vision. Then al the cuntery about sette their handes onto the performing of it.” Sir Theobald Grenville, Lord of Bideford and Kilkhampton, a young ruffler who had lately been in trouble with the Church, made common cause with the bishop who had ordered his excommunication, and after being duly absolved became “an especial furtherer” of the work. Grandison’s contribution took the form of indulgences; the rich gave their lands and the poor gave their time; and so the pride of Bideford arose on its foundation of woolsacks, and to this day gives distinction to a town that is otherwise rather in need of it. For wherever it was possible old things have been made new here. The old part of the Royal Hotel, once the house of a merchant prince, has been so carefully hidden that no one would guess it was there: the splendid panelling of the room where Kingsley wrote much of “Westward Ho!” has been painted: the church was rebuilt in the nineteenth century: even the tombstones have been tidied up and marshalled in rows round the churchyard wall. Within the church a few relics have survived: the Norman font, the remains of two screens, and the canopied altar-tomb of Sir Thomas Grenville, called the Venerable, who fought against Richard III. and was esquire of the body to Henry VII. The tombstone of the Indian who was brought home by the great Sir Richard seems to have been lost or obscured by the redistribution of graves in the churchyard; but there is a modern brass on the south wall to Sir Richard himself, who lived here when he was not upon the high seas.
This is the only memorial, in his birthplace, to the greatest of the “men of Bideford in Devon;” but Charles Kingsley has a full-length statue at the end of the promenade. Kingsley, I imagine, would have preferred a different arrangement.
Two miles away to the west is Westward Ho! We shall see it under the hill if we drive out to Appledore, where the sands are very yellow and the sea is very blue. We shall also see a spot called Bloody Corner, which is said to be the burial-place of the scourge of Saxon England, Hubba the Dane, the devastator of Yorkshire, the marauder of our coasts, the rifler of monasteries. A slab of slate has been fixed in the wall on the right side of the road, and an inscription engraved on it by someone who was a lover of history, but no poet.
The shortest, but not the most direct way to Barnstaple from Bideford is by the coast road, whence we see, across the brown and yellow sands, the river-mouth from which seven ships of Bideford sailed out to fight the Armada. This road is level, but extremely dusty in dry weather except near Barnstaple, where it has a “prepared” surface. The direct road over the hills is so steep in places that its directness is merely nominal; but here the scenery is lovely.
There is a third alternative: to drive up the Torridge valley, cross over by Winkleigh to the valley of the Taw, and follow that river to Barnstaple. This is a course greatly to be commended.
Especially on a hot afternoon this is one of the most desirable runs in Devon. From Bideford to Torrington the road is shaded nearly continuously by high banks of trees rising from the wayside: on the left the cool stream winds beside us. Torrington, on its abrupt hill above the river, must have been a place of dignity when its castle dominated the valley. Through these streets where we are driving Fairfax chased the royalists one night in the dark, after a long resistance “with push of Pike and butt end of Musket”—chased them clean through the town and out of it to the bridges. This engagement, wrote the general, was “a hotter service than any storme this Army hath before been upon.” The royalists meantime had bribed “a desperate villain” to fire their store of powder in the church, lest the army of the Parliament should benefit by it; with the unexpected result that when “the Lead, Stones, Timber, and Ironwork of the Church were blowne up into the Ayre” two hundred royalist prisoners were blown up too. Hardly any of the Parliament-men were injured, though Fairfax himself had a narrow escape, and was obliged to return to “Master Rolls his house” for the night, “in regard the Quarter at Torrington was inconvenient, the Windowes broken in pieces, and the houses so shattered with the great blast that they could not performe a convenient shelter from the raine.” This church on our right among the trees replaced the one that was blown into the air so completely that hardly a fragment of the old building remains; and this street by which we pass through the town is the one by which Fairfax rode back that night to Master Rolls his house. He went straight on to Stephenstone, but we turn away to the right on the road that skirts the castle hill and passes near the Waterloo obelisk.
We see little more of the Torridge; but this splendid Exeter road takes us through very lovely scenery; by woods, and beds of fern, and level heaths, and fields of meadowsweet, and rows of shady beeches, while for the last time our view is bounded by the beloved hills of Dartmoor. It is a curiously lonely road: hardly a village, and indeed for some miles hardly a cottage, breaks the solitude. Between the two valleys, as we pass through Winkleigh and bear round to the left to cross the Taw, the country is less beautiful and the surface rougher; but after the sharp turn at Morchard Road Station we have a splendid run to Barnstaple.
This is the most level road in Devon. This fact alone commends it to us, but there are many other facts to make it memorable: woods of oak, and larch, and mountain-ash, and chestnut-trees, not only shadowing us but filling all the landscape: tall red fir-stems, and ferns beside the road, and wildflowers everywhere. All the way we follow the railroad, swinging past station after station, Eggesford and South Molton and Portsmouth Arms and Umberleigh, while the valley widens and narrows and opens out again; and all the time the Taw is close at hand, growing from a tiny stream between low banks of red earth and grass to a strong river rippling over the shingle, with trees dipping into its sunny waters.
Somewhere in Bishop’s Tawton lies the dust of the first Bishop of Devon. It was here that the see was originally fixed; but when the second bishop was murdered it was thought wise to move to a more central position at Crediton. Beyond the pretty village the estuary widens, and we see Barnstaple before us through the trees.
Barnstaple, says Mr. Warner of the eighteenth century, “is by far the most genteel town in North Devon.” This is a very happy word; though why a town whose history includes the days of Athelstane, a town that has had a castle and a priory and a life by no moans dull, should be “genteel” when all is said, is hard to understand. The nice public gardens and open spaces, the air of clean prosperity, and the colonnade with the fluted pillars give it an eighteenth-century air, at latest. Yet, if we look behind the church with the crooked spire we shall find the brown stone grammar-school where Bishop Jewell and the poet Gay learnt their lessons; and in the narrow street near the Imperial Hotel are some almshouses whose granite pillars and beautiful moulded gutters date from 1627; and spanning the river is the “right great and sumptuus bridge of stone” that was “made long sins by a merchaunt of London caullid Stamford.” Nothing is left of the priory where Sir Theobald de Grenville was excommunicated with bell, book, and candle; nor of the castle that belonged at various times to Judhael of Totnes, and the Tracy who murdered Becket, and Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. Even at the beginning of the Civil War it was “a place of small strength,” and during the struggle it led a hard life. The Colonel Basset who defended it while it was in royalist hands figures among John Prince’s Worthies. “This gentleman as to his stature was somewhat short, but of an high crest and noble mind. As to his religion he did not boast great matters, but lived them … he being as plain in his soul as he was in his garb, which he resolved should be proud of him rather than he of it.”
The road that crosses the hill between Barnstaple and Ilfracombe leaves the town by the suburb of Pilton, whose white houses and gaily painted shutters and high walls have rather a foreign air. There is a long but well-graded hill before us, and a surface that is not very good. Each flowery village is followed by another as gay, and each green valley leads into another as green, and still we climb higher and higher till we come to the heather. For a little time the scenery is dull; then the road winds down a deep valley, and we see Ilfracombe in a gorge below.
Ilfracombe, like everyone’s grandmother, was lovely when it was young. That, however, was some time ago, and at present its charms are a matter of taste. That thousands love its piers and pierrots is evident at a glance, but some of us can only look sadly at its bluffs and sparkling sea, and long for the days that are no more. The change must have come very quickly, for only fifty years ago George Eliot thought Ilfracombe the loveliest sea place she ever saw, and found Tenby tame and vulgar after it. “But it would not do,” she adds, “for those who can’t climb rocks and mount perpetual hills; for the peculiarity of this country is that it is all hill and no valley.”
There are hills, and valleys, too, in astonishing numbers along this coast. The contour of the road between Ilfracombe and Porlock makes a sinister picture. But those thirty miles include some of the finest scenery in England; and by making them more than thirty, one may avoid some of the worst gradients without missing any of the beauty.
For the first few miles the road clings to the brow of the cliff, twisting round curve after curve, and mounting and falling and mounting again. All the colours of the rainbow are in the landscape. There are headlands of every shade of purple and red, foliage of every tint of green, shadows that are intensely blue, sands that are really golden, and a sea of a colour that has no name. We swing round a curve and see the white houses of Combe Martin wedged between the brown cliffs, and a few minutes later we turn away from the sea and mount the long village street. Combe Martin may be defined as length without breadth; for though it is a mile and a half long it is in no place wider than two little houses. It has contributed in its day to the honour of its country, for Edward III. and Henry V., it is said, made use of the silver-mines of Combe Martin during their wars with France. Elizabeth gave cups of the same silver to her friends; but Charles I., though ingenious in the art of extracting the precious metals, sought here in vain.
The road, as it climbs up to Exmoor, grows rather rough. From Blackmoor Gate the direct way to Lynton is of course through Parracombe, where there are two hills of some renown, a descent and a climb. The inconvenience here is in the fact that the change from the downward to the upward gradient is in the middle of the village, and a run is out of the question. None the less this hill, though steep, is quite practicable; but the still more famous hill between Lynton and Lynmouth thoroughly deserves its reputation, and, after personal experience, I strongly advise motorists to avoid it unless they have absolute confidence in the staunchness of their car, the power of their brakes, and the scope of their steering-locks. Its difficulty lies, not only in the gradient—though at one point that is steeper than one in four—but in the extremely acute angle that occurs at the steepest spot and makes it impossible, if there should chance to be so much as a wheelbarrow by the wayside, for a car of any size to turn without pausing. An added difficulty is the looseness of the surface, for the constant use of drags has ploughed the road into a mass of stones and sand. It is possible now to take cars on the “lift,” or funicular railway that runs up and down the cliff; but it seems to me that the simplest plan is to drive round by Simonsbath to Lynmouth. There is shelter there for both man and car; but those who prefer to stay at Lynton—and they are many—may leave their cars at the bottom of the hill, and mount it themselves, with their luggage, in the cliff railway.
At Blackmoor Gate, then, instead of taking the road to Parracombe, we must go straight on till we turn to the left at Challacombe. The country is not inspiring. Technically, I suppose, this is part of Exmoor; but there is nothing in these undulating fields and hedgerows to suggest the hunting of the red deer by Saxon kings, or the jealous guarding of forest-rights by the Conqueror. For William, though he gave away these lands, was very strict about the hunting. “He loved the tall deer as though he had been their father,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. His love was like that of the little boy who was so fond of animals that he always went to see the pigs killed.
At Simonsbath there is a sudden outburst of beauty. The tiny village lies in a hollow among the fir-clad hills, and makes an idyllic picture with its stream and bridge; and here the road turns and winds up to a fine expanse of true moorland. It is sterner than Dartmoor. There is no luxuriance of bracken here, nor acres of purple, but mile beyond grassy mile of stately, rolling hills, very austere at noonday, but in the light of a summer sunset transfigured into splendour. The new road to Lynmouth turns abruptly back upon the hillside, and on it we plunge into the green depths.[17]
If Nature is austere upon these hills, in the valley she is riotous. We seem to be dropping down and down into her generous heart, and, like the poet, we bless ourselves with silence. Far above us, as we wind beside the river, the tall sides of the valley are clear-cut against the sky; but just below the line of rock and heather the rich woods rise up and take triumphant possession of the hills, and fill every curve and hollow, and clothe the steep heights, and hang over the stream, and rustle by the wayside. We have dropped so suddenly and deeply into these green waves that we almost expect them to close over our heads. And as the road winds on we think at every corner that all this beauty must come to a sudden end. Surely we have passed the climax: surely the next curve will take us out of this enchanted valley into the world we know. But the beauty does not end. It grows; and only finds its climax in the red and green headlands, and in the lovely village that lies between the hills where the valley ends in the sea.
Lynmouth below and Lynton above, when one recalls them, seem, like Clovelly, too good to be true. All the charms of Devon are here. Charms that elsewhere seem incongruous are here in accord; grandeur and homeliness agree together; the lion lies down with the lamb. Boats and heather are in the same picture; the cliffs are clothed with woods almost to the water’s edge. The two places cannot be compared; they are so different that neither is complete without the other. Some love best the boats and shallow pools and shaded river of Lynmouth; and to some the wide view from Lynton hill seems the fairest thing in England.
Wherever we stay ourselves, there is little to be gained by taking the car up the cliff. The only roads that lead away from Lynton are the Parracombe road and the road to Hunter’s Inn, which is not open to motors—that wonderful road that runs through the wild Valley of Rocks, and past the Castle Rock with its fine views of the coast, and past Lee Abbey on its grassy plateau, and then for miles along the face of the cliff, with dense woods closing round it on every side, and, through the trees, hints of a blue sea very far below. This narrow way that is hung so high in air, and has so many sharp corners and steep pitches, is truly not a motoring road. It turns inland where a gap comes in the cliffs, and ends at Hunter’s Inn, in a narrow gorge that is sheltered from every wind.
From Lynton we look over the roofs of Lynmouth to Countisbury Hill and the red road that climbs it—apparently quite perpendicularly. Into the mind there steals a hope that this is not our road. But it is.
We may avoid it, of course, by going back to Simonsbath and taking the road through Exford and Whiddon Cross to Dunster—a road that is fairly good, if dull. But most of us will think the loss of all the beauty of the moors and woods is too heavy a price to pay for ease of travelling. The lower part of Countisbury Hill, it is true, is quite as rough and nearly as precipitous as the hill to Lynton, but as we rise the surface becomes quite good, and the gradient is nowhere so steep as at the bottom. And from the top of the cliff we look away across the heather to the high uplands of Exmoor, and see below us on the right the green cleft in the hills that is the Doone Valley.
