The Channel Islands

Another dark picture, and unhappily more authentic, is the burning, with attendant circumstances of extraordinary brutality, of three poor heretic women, by order of Dean Amy and Bailiff Helier Gosselin, on July 18, 1556. The mother, Katherine Cauches, was tied to a stake in the middle, with a married daughter on either hand—Guillemine Gilbert and Perotine Massey. An attempt was made to strangle them before the faggots were lighted—a merciful privilege that was also extended to women in executions for "petty treason"—but one of them, at least, fell alive into the fire. This poor wretch, Perotine Massey, the wife of a Protestant pastor, was delivered of a baby in the middle of the flames. The child was rescued from the burning by a man called House, but cast back again by order of the Bailiff. This repulsive incident is preserved by Foxe, and is interwoven by Tennyson in Queen Mary:

St. Peter Port is an admirable centre from which to visit every quarter of the compact little island; but, indeed, as already adumbrated, there is but little in Guernsey (except for the antiquarian) that is really worth seeing outside its capital, except the south coast. St. Sampson's may be visited for its picturesque church, which is one of the oldest and most interesting on the island. The road by which we gain it is so ugly—one continued line of houses—that no one need hesitate to use the electric tram, which was one of the earliest of its kind in the British dominions. It is hardly worth while to get out on the way to visit the poor remains of Ivy Castle: the situation of the ruins is unusually unpicturesque, and the ruins themselves are uninteresting. Opposite St. Sampson's itself, across the busy little harbour, is the rather better ruin of Vale Castle. This would be exceedingly pleasant to look on, were it not for the mammoth granite-quarries that pave the streets of Westminster, but effectually disfigure what were once the charms of Guernsey. The Castle itself, like Ivy Castle, is little more than a shell; in fact, the latter has the additional credit of what is possibly a chapel, with a rudely vaulted stone roof. Ivy Castle, moreover, boasts at least authentic pedigree, having first been built—if the date be really right—by Robert, Duke of Normandy, before the Norman Conquest; whereas of the origin of Vale Castle practically nothing is known. Its ancient title, Le Château de St. Michel l'Archange, is perhaps responsible for the tradition that it was built by monks from Mont St. Michel as a place of protection for the neighbouring priory in case of a sudden invasion. From Vale Castle, if we like, we may cross the island—here less than a couple of miles broad—to Vale Church, built on the edge of what was once a sea-creek, but has long since silted up, or been reclaimed. It is pleasanter, however, to follow round the coast, past Bordeaux Harbour, and across breezy L'Ancresse Common, especially as this takes us past the L'Autel de Déhus, and the L'Autel des Vardes, the two finest remaining dolmens in the Channel Islands. The finest of all is supposed to have been that which was discovered behind St. Helier in 1785, and which was "unanimously voted" to the then Governor, Marshal Conway, "in a moment of enthusiasm." The Marshal, unfortunately, in another moment of enthusiasm, carried it off and re-erected it at his country seat in Berkshire. These Channel Island dolmens are of wholly different type from the familiar cromlechs of the mushroom pattern of Kits Coty House, near Aylesford, or of Pentre Evan, in Pembrokeshire. They are, in fact, considerable, stone-built, subterranean burial-chambers, with traces in some instances of a long succession of interments. The islanders call them "pouquelayes"; which is derived by Miss Carey from either the Celtic pwca, a fairy, and lies, a place, or from pouq, an excavation, and lekh, a stone. In this connection it is interesting that they are supposed to be haunted by fairies—one is called the Creux des Fées, and another the Roche à la Fée—who are supposed to "bring ill-luck on those who interfere with them, a fact which has saved many of them from the spoiler." "The restorer, however," adds Mr. Bicknell dryly, "has unfortunately not been idle, and the Little People do not appear to have found a punishment to 'fit the crime' in this case." Unhappily the same must be admitted in the case of the navvies employed on the harbour works in Alderney, who "amused themselves by smashing up all the megaliths that they could lay their hands on." Many of the relics from these cist-vaens—bones and pottery—have found their way into the Lukis Museum at St. Peter Port.

Vale church itself, not far from the Grand Havre, and in a flat, unlovely neighbourhood, is possibly the most interesting, architecturally, in the island. The chancel arch should be noticed, with its chevron ornament; the chancel, vaulted in two compartments (in contrast with the rude, pointed vaults of most of the other churches); the piscina in the aisle; and the wall arcade. Another striking feature is the brackets for images on the columns of the arcade, between the nave and its aisle. A series like this is uncommon; though there is a group of churches in West Yorkshire—sometimes supposed to have been built by the Tempest family—Kirkby Malham is the finest—which has traces of canopied niches in the same position. The finest single niche that the writer knows of this kind is on the south side of the nave in the fine, fifteenth-century church of Lechlade, in Gloucestershire. Towards the west end of the churchyard is another tumble-down dolmen. Thus Christians of the twentieth century are buried in the same soil that received the bones of their neolithic ancestors no one knows how many thousands of years ago.

Though Vale is not uninteresting, it is with a feeling of relief that one turns one's back on this north corner of the island that once perhaps was so beautiful, but is now so hopelessly spoilt. The glory of Guernsey, as already stated, is now wholly confined to its south coast. Moulin Huet is a gracious bay, too well known from photographs to need further description; whilst the little Saints Bay to the west of it—a shrine within a shrine—is almost equally charming. Westward from Icart Point, itself a splendid promontory, the coast sweeps round in another great curve to La Moye Point; beyond which, again, to Pleinmont, at the south-west corner of the island, the cliffs, though everywhere deeply indented, continue, on the whole, a more uniform direction. The great hollow between Icart and La Moye Points is apparently nameless, unless it be Icart Bay. There is no authoritative Ordnance map of the Channel Islands, to which one might adhere whether right or wrong; and the best map of Guernsey with which I am acquainted, in the late Mr. C. B. Black's guide-book, gives the name Icart to the eastern recess of the great main bay, and Petit Bot and Portelet to the two small recesses to the west of it. Anyhow, Petit Bot is the most secret and intimate of the three, and entirely picturesque with its disused mill and martello tower. This is one of the points on the coast to which the chars-à-bancs descend from St. Peter Port; and the drive down the glen by which we approach it is delightful. The next calling point is Le Gouffre, just beyond La Moye Point, which here runs out into the sea in long ribs of warm red granite. Here the cars generally halt for a couple of hours, whilst the tripper feasts on lobster in the pleasant little inn. The Gouffre may be taken as roughly the centre of the grand seven miles of cliff line of this splendid south coast. The section hence to the west is less frequently explored, though the picturesque cave of the Creux Mahie, again roughly halfway, is often paid a visit, and is well worth visiting. Pleinmont and Torteval come into the "Toilers of the Deep"; and this corner of the island, the farthest of all from St. Peter Port, is luckily less injured than the rest. The north-west coast of Guernsey, from Pleinmont Point to Vale, past the huge sweeping hollows—some of them singularly symmetrical—of Rocquaine, Perelle, Vazon, and Cobo Bays, is chiefly a matter of rocky beach and of slight elevations shelving down in gentle declivity to the sea. The glass-houses, moreover, which have languished much at Torteval, flourish again in amazing vigour as we draw near Cobo Bay. There are two points of interest, however, in this corner of the island that justify even the dull, direct journey by which we approach them from St. Peter Port. The first of these is the little Chapel of St. Apolline, which is stated in all the guide-books, on documentary evidence, to have been founded by Nicolas Henry in 1394, or thereabouts. Even documentary evidence, in architectural matters, is not always to be trusted. Only the day before writing these lines the writer was re-visiting the Lady Chapel at St. Albans Cathedral, which is said to have been built—again on documentary evidence—circa 1310; though the Inventory lately published by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments adds cautiously: "The tracery of these windows ... is very advanced in character for the date." The tracery, indeed, is so advanced, if the date be really right, as hopelessly to confuse all previously held notions as to the systematic evolution of English architecture. That the building was at any rate finished by this date is altogether incredible. I notice that the late Lord Grimthorpe, in his pugnacious little handbook, after setting out the evidence from the Abbey Records, adds significantly, "but the style of the windows suggests a much later date." And the case is much the same with this Chapel of St. Apolline. On October 13, 1392, Nicolas Henry received permission from the monastery of Mont St. Michel, in Normandy, to alienate certain fields to provide an endowment for the Chapel of Notre Dame de la Perelle, which he had recently erected; and in an Act of the Royal Court, dated June 6, 1452, we come across the phrase, "La Chapelle de Notre Dame de la Perelle appellée la Chapelle Sainte Apolline." Certainly the identification seems complete. On the other hand, the writer believes that no one visiting this chapel who has previously read Professor Baldwin Brown's beautiful volume on Saxon Architecture—and it so happened that the writer paid his first visit to the Channel Islands almost immediately after its perusal—can fail to detect in this building quite a number of criteria that are there set out as indicating, at any rate in England, a pre-Conquest era of building. Unfortunately I have kept no note of these features, but the impression then made on my mind is vivid. I may, of course, be wrong; but it seems to me at least possible that we have here the solitary survivor—far older than the Fishermen's Chapel at St. Brelade's in Jersey—of those many chapels that are known to have been built in the Channel Islands in the eighth and ninth centuries by the successors of St. Magloire.

The other point of interest in the neighbourhood of L'Erée is the rocky islet of Lihou, approached by a causeway across the sands, or more properly the rocks, but only at low tide. Here are the scanty fragments of the Priory and Chapel of Notre Dame de la Roche, apparently a cell to the monastery of Mont St. Michel, which seems to have had so much to do with the spiritual matters of the Channel Islands. The tide at St. Michael's Mount is said to rush up across the level sands more quickly than the fleetest horse can gallop, and visitors to Lihou will be well advised to remember that here again its onset is unexpected and swift. At L'Erée village is another dolmen, the Creux des Fées, to which passing allusion has already been made. St. Peter's Church in this neighbourhood—in full, St. Pierre du Bois—is perhaps the handsomest, though not necessarily the most interesting, of all the twelve churches in the island, and exhibits some Flamboyant work of a very pleasing character.

CHAPTER III
ALDERNEY, SARK, AND THE LESSER ISLANDS

Hitherto, in dealing with the two larger of the Channel Islands, we have found their claims to natural beauty in their coasts. The interior of Jersey is no doubt pleasant, with its lush-green valleys running north and south, with its quiet little villages, and with its never-ending potato-fields. The interior of Guernsey, on the other hand, is frankly hideous, save here and there a cottage, or a picturesque old farm, hidden in the folding of some safely secluded dell. But in both cases alike the real distinction of the island is limited to cliffs that for warmth of colour and strangeness of contortion can surely be paralleled in Cornwall alone. Sark, on the contrary, is almost wholly coast; the interior in comparison is a negligible quantity! And almost as much may be said of Alderney. Both these islands are exceedingly small—Sark being only a trifle more than three miles in length, and about one and three-quarters of a mile in breadth (measuring, not precisely from east to west, but at right angles to the axis); and Alderney being about three and a half miles in length, from north-east to south-west, and one and a quarter miles in breadth. Alderney is undoubtedly the less beautiful of the two, and is probably by far the least frequently visited of all the different members of the Norman archipelago. The voyage from St. Peter Port, in a very small boat, and made only two or three times in a week, is dreaded, and not without reason, by those for whom rough seas have no welcome. Alderney, again, is the least foreign of the Channel Islands in local colour, though nearest France in situation; and here the old Norman patois has been entirely replaced by English. It possesses in its capital, St. Anne, a small, old-fashioned country town that is wholly without parallel anywhere else in the islands. The harbour is at Braye, a short mile north from the centre of the town; and the visitor, in strong contrast with what happens at Sark, is landed in the least romantic corner of the island. Of the old church nothing now remains but a picturesque tower, and even this does not seem to be mediæval. The new church was erected from designs by Sir Gilbert Scott, and is, perhaps, the most striking modern building in the Channel Islands. The interior of Alderney, or Aurigny, to use the French form—

is strongly individualized, and rather wild and remote. One feels at once that this little island has a flavour of its own—a state of things no longer felt among the villadom and glass-houses of Guernsey. The strength of Alderney, however, lies chiefly in its west and south coasts; no one would visit the island except to visit these, or unless one happened to be an enthusiast for the world's neglected and inaccessible spots. I do not know how far the barbarous quarrying that was projected some six or seven years ago on the south side of the island has since been carried out, or how far it has injured the amenities of the coast. Anyhow, the Two Sisters, towards the south-west corner of the island, are hardly to be rivalled in their splintered grandeur, even in Jersey or Sark.

To Sark we come at last in our long exploration of the Channel Islands, and for Sark we may well be content to have waited patiently, and to have wandered far. For this, by universal acclamation, is certainly the gem of the whole group. Already we have often seen it in the distance—a long, level line of cliff (save where broken by the Coupée)—from the north coast of Jersey, or from the piers at St. Peter Port. Now, as we approach it more closely, threading the narrow strait between Herm and Jethou, and doubling the cliffs of Little Sark, at the south corner of the island, this hitherto unbroken, monotonous wall begins to resolve itself into an infinity of broken cliffs and promontories, isolating and half concealing a thousand fairy-like bays. Surely nowhere else is another coast like this—everywhere so irregular in its general trend and outline—everywhere so deeply bitten into by the mordant unrest of the sea. Sark, we have said already, is little else than coast; and certainly it is the coast which first arrests and charms us, and the coast which lingers last and most clearly in our memory, when other impressions begin to be obliterated, or vanish altogether in the steady lapse of years. Not a yard of this gracious girdle of cliff is monotonous, or repeats itself, or is even grim (as parts of the coast of Alderney are grim), or is relatively less interesting, or less beautiful, or dull; everywhere and always it is singularly lovely, and everywhere and always at the same high pitch. There is really very little to be said about Sark, except that the whole island is beautiful throughout: there is nothing to be gained by giving a long catalogue of successive promontories, caves, and bays. It was thus that Olivia made a schedule of her beauty—"item, two lips indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth"—and at the end of the inventory we have no better picture of the real Olivia than before she was thus appraised in detail.

The history of Sark, for so small an island, is unusually interesting, and in some respects instructive. It is set out by Miss Carey in an interesting chapter, and some of its episodes may be summarized here. Sark, like its sister islands, must have been occupied by neolithic man, for the remains of two poor dolmens still exist in the island, and formerly, no doubt, there were very many more. St. Magloire, in the sixth century, built a chapel and founded a small monastery in the island, but apparently he found it unpopulated when first he arrived. In the middle of the fourteenth century the island was inhabited by a crew of lawless wreckers, who were a menace to the navigation of the whole Manche. The merchants of Rye and Winchelsea then put their heads together, and agreed to do by subtlety what they could not effect by force. Landing on Sark with an armed force must well-nigh have been impossible, till Helier de Carteret cut his tunnel through the rocks, when he colonized the island in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The merchants, accordingly, constructed a piece of strategy that may well have been borrowed from the Trojan horse, but in that case was certainly invested with much ingenious detail of its own. The story is told by Sir Walter Raleigh in his History of the World, though, as Miss Carey points out, he postdates the incident by some 200 years, and describes it as having occurred to the crew of a Flemish ship. "Yet by the industry of a gentleman of the Netherlands [the island] was in this sort regained. He anchored in the Road with one Ship, and, pretending the death of his Merchant, he besought the French that they might bury their Merchant in hallowed Ground, and in the Chapel of that Isle.... Whereto (with Condition that they should not come ashore with any Weapon, not so much as with a Knife), the French yielded. Then did the Flemings put a coffin into their Boat, not filled with a Dead Carcass, but with Swords, Targets, and Harquebuzes. The French received them at their Landing, and, searching everyone of them so narrowly as they could not hide a Penknife, gave them leave to draw their Coffin up the Rocks with great difficulty.... The Flemings on the Land, when they had carried their Coffin into the Chapel, shut the Door to them, and, taking their Weapons out of the Coffin, set upon the French."

The final settlement of Sark—which the French call Serq—dates only from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when Helier de Carteret established himself on the then deserted island, and planted there forty families, whom he brought from his native Jersey. He also built a church, and instituted a Presbyterian Vicar, Cosmé Brevint—being himself a Presbyterian—who continued to hold office till his death in 1576, being one who spared, or flattered, no one, "great or small, in his reprehensions." It is rightly said that the constitution of Sark is still largely feudal in character. The land is parcelled out into the original forty holdings, and some of these are said still to be held by descendants of the original holders. The lord of the island is still the Seigneur, though the lordship has passed from the hands of the de Carterets—it is said that they were compelled to part with it by reason of their lavish expenditure on the thankless Stuart cause. In the so-called "Battery" at the back of the Manor-House is one of the old guns that were given by Elizabeth to Helier de Carteret. It is inscribed, "Don de Sa Majesté la Royne Elizabeth, au Seigneur de Serq, A.D. 1572."

Of the smaller islands of the Norman archipelago only a word or two need be added here. Roughly halfway between Sark and Guernsey, and separated from each other by a narrow passage that is difficult to navigate by reason of its hidden rocks and surging tides, are the small twin islands of Jethou and Herm. The latter is now occupied by a German Prince, the great-grandson of the famous Prussian leader, the exact place of whose meeting with Wellington after the field of Waterloo—whether at Belle Alliance, or farther along the road towards Genappe—has often been made the topic of historical discussion, and is anyhow the subject of a well-known picture. Jethou is considerably the smaller of the two, and is principally devoted to the purpose of a rabbit-warren. In Herm are some remains of the old Chapel of St. Tugual, incorporated with the outbuildings of the present manor-house. Previous to 1770 Herm was inhabited by deer; and Mr. Bicknell tells us that they "used to take advantage of the tide to swim over to the Vale in Guernsey to feed, returning on the next tide." Certainly it is lucky that there are now no deer in Herm, since they would not find much pasture now at Vale.

Jethou and Herm belong to Guernsey, and once, no doubt, were physically parts of it. As seen from St. Peter Port, with Sark dimly descried on the distant horizon, they still contribute largely to Guernsey's most charming seascape. Alderney and Sark, again, have each their attendant isle. Jersey alone, though the biggest of them all, is a planet without a satellite. The islet peculiar to Sark is Brecqhou, or the Ile des Marchants, which lies off its west coast, and is separated from it by the narrow Gouliot Strait, only a few hundred yards wide. Though measuring more than seventy acres, and possessed of a small landing-place, it is at present as innocent of human habitation as was Sark itself immediately before the coming of Helier de Carteret. Burhou is situated at a considerably greater distance to the north-west of Alderney, from which it is separated by the never-resting Swinge. This is, perhaps, the least visited among all the lesser islands, as is Alderney itself among the major four.

INDEX

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.