The South Devon Coast

The Raleighs seem to have been gentlefolk of long descent, of many relationships among the storied names of Devon—the Carews, the Grenvilles, Gilberts, and others—but of only modest worldly possessions. The Raleigh genealogy is fragmentary, and the early history of the family vague, but that they had once been locally rich and powerful, before the famous Sir Walter’s day, seems evident enough in the names of the two neighbouring parishes of Withycombe Raleigh and Colaton Raleigh, which show that in more prosperous times his forbears had been lords of those manors. In common with many of their contemporaries, the Raleighs seem to have spelt their name according to individual taste and fancy; nor even did the same individual always select, and adhere to, one method. Thus we find the father of the greatest of all Raleighs signing himself “Ralegh,” his eldest son, Carew, affecting “Rawlegh,” and the future Sir Walter, in his first known signature, writing “Rauleygh,” and afterwards adopting “Ralegh,” and the form “Raleigh,” which posterity has finally decided to accept. Queen Elizabeth herself spelled the name “Rawley.”

Sentimentalists have united to draw a wholly imaginary picture of the boy, Walter Raleigh, ranging from the inland valley in which his birthplace stands, climbing the intermediate woody hill, and straying down to the margin of the sea at Budleigh Saltern, as Budleigh Salterton was then styled. They have drawn fanciful pictures of him among the amazing pebbles of that beach, listening wide-eyed, to the yarns of sailor-folk telling of strange histories from the Spanish Main; and they have pictured him exploring away down to Exmouth, which was in those times a port of considerable commerce. I have no doubt he did all these things, and for my part can readily envisage them; can see, too, the little, crisp-haired, ruddy-cheeked Walter, in russet doublet and stockings of the same, being taken to church on Sundays at East Budleigh, half a mile away, where you may still see the family pew with the heraldic “fusils” of Raleigh impaling the “rests” of Grenville, boldly sculptured in heart of oak on a massive bench-end.

But while we can picture all these things, with sufficient readiness, it yet remains certain that we know nothing of the hero’s earlier years, and but vaguely gather that from Oxford, whither he was sent, he went to the wars on the Continent, between the Protestants and the Catholics, and then, by some occult family influence, became attached to the brilliant Court of our own astounding virginal Gloriana. They were a coruscating Renaissance group, who circled round Elizabeth, and were gifted in a singular variety of ways. They were noblemen and gentlemen who could, and did, turn their hands to anything, from captaining some desperate enterprise, negotiating treaties, steering frail flotillas through unknown seas into unheard-of lands, buccaneering, and filibustering, down to duelling, intriguing and backbiting among each other; practising literature and the liberal art of sonneteering, and dallying in the dangerous pastime of flirting with that too towardly Queen herself. One thing only they could not do; they could not be commonplace. None may say how much of truth, or how much legend there may be in the famous story of how Raleigh first attracted the Queen’s notice by flinging down his velvet cloak over a muddy place, so that she might pass, clean-footed; but the story was current, in the time of those contemporary with both, and being possible at all, shows us the spirit of the time and of the Queen’s surroundings.

Raleigh’s excellent early services in Ireland, where he broke down the rebellion in the south, recommended him to the Queen, his youthfulness interested her middle-aged sentimentalism, and his dark, florid manhood enslaved her. For this was a very hero in look, as in deed; standing six feet high, with black hair, full-bearded, ruddy-cheeked, like the apples of his native shire; and Elizabeth loaded him with gifts and grants. Meanwhile he had begun the colonising schemes and the exploratory enterprises by which his name is largely known. He equipped, and was at the cost of, the expedition which in 1584 discovered that shore of North America he christened, in honour of the “Eternal Maiden Queen,” “Virginia.” At the close of that year a knighthood rewarded his flattery.

Already he was become a man of vast wealth, the holder of highly remunerative grants and monopolies, and was keenly desirous of refounding the house of Raleigh in visible form in Devon. To this end he wrote in July, 1584, to Mr. Duke of Otterton, into whose possession this farm of Hayes Barton had by some unexplained means come, desiring to repurchase it. The letter is still in existence, and runs:

It is surely no unamiable trait in a man, that he should wish to purchase the house in which he was born; but Mr. Duke, “from that jealous disposition which can bear no brother near the throne,” did not choose to sell or to have so great a man for so near a neighbour, and so the Raleighs never again entered into possession of Hayes Barton.

CHAPTER VIII
BUDLEIGH SALTERTON—LITTLEHAM—EXMOUTH—TOPSHAM—ESTUARY OF THE AXE

Budleigh Salterton lies at the foot of a steep descent. Only within quite recent years has it been connected by railway with the outer world, and so has not yet quite woke up and found itself, and become self-conscious; although there are plenteous evidences that attempts will be made to convert it into a small modern watering-place, pitifully emulative of its betters. It is not fulsome to say that up to the present it has had no betters, for it has been an individual place, without its fellow anywhere. Conceive a brook running in a deep bed down one side of a village street, and bridged at close upon half a hundred intervals with brick and plank footbridges, leading across into cottages and cottage-gardens; and conceive those cottages, partly the humble homes of fishermen, and partly the simple villas of an Early Victorian, or even a Regency, seaside, and midway down the street imagine that stream crossing under the road, taking the little beach diagonally, and there percolating through the giant “popples.” That is Budleigh Salterton.

The Otter flows out to sea farther to the east, along that beach, obscurely, but still one speculates idly—no help for it but to do anything “idly” in South Devon—by what strange and exceptional chance Budleigh Salterton is not “Ottermouth” in this county of Axmouth, Sidmouth, Exmouth, Teignmouth, and other places which own rivers as their godfathers and godmothers. Yet one is not too idle to discover that East Budleigh and this Budleigh “Saltern,” as it was originally named, do, after all, in a way, follow the general rule, for they are named after the contributory streamlet, the Buddle, on which they stand and the “leas,” or meadows, that border it.

It is the same old story, with regard to the haven at the mouth of the Otter, that has already been told of other places. Leland, writing close upon four hundred years ago, tells us that: “Less than an hunderith yeres sins shippes usid this haven, but it is now clean barred,” and so it remains. Salterton and its neighbourhood are therefore without the convenience of a port.

The front of the townlet is, as an Irishman might say, at the back, for in times before the invention of the seaside as a place of holiday, the inhabitants seem to have had a surfeit of the sea by which they got their living, and built their houses on the low crumbly cliff, not only with the faces turned away from it, but in many cases with high dead walls, enclosing back-gardens, entirely excluding any sight of the water. And so the “front” remains; nor is it clear how, without a wholesale rebuilding, it will ever be otherwise. It is a curious spot for a seaside resort, and in places more resembles an allotment-garden, or the side of one of those railway embankments, where frugal porters and platelayers cultivate vegetables; for between the pathway and the sea, on the fringe of that beach where the gigantic popples lie, ranging in size from a soup-plate down to a saucer, and forming the raw material of the local paving, there are rows of potatoes, cabbages, peas, and scarlet runners! The effect is a good deal more funny than the humour of a professional humourist, for it has that essential ingredient of real humour, unexpectedness; and he who does not laugh at first sight of the peas among those amazing popples, and the boats amid the beans, must be a dull dog.

The explorer who does not wish to martyr himself on the way from Salterton to Exmouth may be recommended to take steamer, for it is six miles of anti-climax by shore and cliff, and four by uninteresting hard high road, passing the wickednesses of suburban expansion at Littleham, in whose churchyard is the neglected grave of Frances, Viscountess Nelson, who died in 1831, the deeply wronged wife of the naval hero.

A marble monument to her in the church does, however, make some amends for the neglect outside. There, in that interior, are memorials to Peels, relatives of the statesman, and others to those ubiquitous Drakes who, like the Courtenays and recurring decimals, repeat themselves indefinitely.

Leaving Littleham behind, there presently begins the long-drawn approach to Exmouth itself, looking as though all Ladbroke Grove and Putney Hill had moved down, en bloc, for a sea-change. And, oh, how blue and refreshing and lovely looks that peep of the sea over towards Dawlish that you get at the end of this long, hot and dry perspective!

And as you think thus, you remember the pungent saying of Dr. Temple, who once, while still Bishop of Exeter, stood upon the steps of the vicarage of Exmouth and remarked that “Exmouth was a good place to look—from.”

He was absolutely correct, for Exmouth, facing directly into the west, is especially famed for its sunsets. To peruse the local guide-books one might even think Exmouth had entered into arrangements with the solar system for a supply of the best displays.

But there was, as you have already suspected, a sting behind the bishop’s remark. What a waspishness beyond the ordinary these high-placed clerics do develop! The beauties of Exmouth are external, extrinsic, a minus quantity; but it is placed in the loveliest situation at the seaward end of the long and beautiful estuary of the Exe. The beauty of the views across sea and river are unspeakable. To me it is an Avalon, a Gilead, where the balm is; a country in the likeness of the Land of the Blest, you see over there, where the red cliffs dip down in fantastic shapes to the sea, and where the heights of Great Haldon and Mamhead, clothed with clumps of trees of a richness only Devon can show, rise to the glowing sky. I yearn ever to be over yonder in that Land of Heart’s Desire, as the good Christian should yearn for Paradise; and the little hamlets dwarfed by the two miles of water, and even the little trains that seem to go so slowly, trailing their long trails of steam, are things of poetry and romance.

If I were to say that Exmouth was the Margate of Devonshire, I should please neither Exmouth nor Margate; for all Devon does not contain a purely seaside resort of the size of that favourite place in Kent. But it is, like Margate, popular with trippers; it has sands; and is, in short a place where the crowd spends a happy day: the crowd in this instance hailing, as a rule, from no further than Exeter.

Exeter is an interesting city, and its citizens, in their own streets and in their everyday garb are sufficiently amiable, but when Exmouth on Sundays and other holiday-times is overrun with Exeter’s young men, tradesmen’s assistants, clad in the impossible clothes pictured on provincial advertisement boardings, laughing horse-laughs, singing London’s last season’s comic songs, wearing flashy jewellery, and smoking bad cigars, Exeter’s reputation, and Exmouth’s suffer alike. If you can imagine such a curious hybrid as a provincial cockney—the type really exists, although it has not yet been noticed by men of science—you may picture something of Exmouth’s week-end patrons. The provincial cockney, poor thing, imagines himself in the forefront of style, but he is merely a caricature of the London cockney plus his own accent, which, wedded to cockney slang, is peculiarly offensive.

But Exmouth, when its week-end patrons are behind their counters, in their aprons, is a vastly-different place. It is cheap, and has always been, and always will be, but it is at last sloughing off that air of impending bankruptcy that once sat so dolefully upon the scene; and the shops that were once mere apologies are now for the most part real shops, and stocked with articles less than ten years old. Moreover, the tennis lawns and gardens have grown by lapse of time into things of beauty: the lawns becoming something else than bald patches of red earth, and the gardens luxuriant indeed. But cheap railway trips from Exeter, only ten miles distant, by South Western Railway, have determined the character of Exmouth for ever, and grey stucco, only on the outskirts occasionally varied with red brick, or rough-cast, has clothed it in a sad shabbiness until its ninety-nine years building-leases shall have lapsed.

Modern times, however, are making themselves felt in other directions. In early days, when the town of Exmouth was merely a longshore settlement called “Pratteshythe,” situated where the docks now are, the mouth of the river was largely obstructed by an immense sandbank stretching from this shore. At some unnamed period this geographical feature of the place changed sides, and has for centuries past been that delightfully wild, nearly two-miles long wilderness, “the Warren,” which extends a sandy arm from Langston Cliff; leaving something less than half-a-mile of fairway at the mouth of Exe. Until quite recently the Warren has remained the haunt of the wild-fowler and the naturalist, but now the red roofs of bungalows are beginning to plentifully dot the wastes; and to play at Robinson Crusoe, with twentieth-century embellishments and more or less luxurious fringes, has become a favourite summer pastime on this once solitary haunt of the heron, the wild duck, and the sea-mew.

The salt estuary of the Exe runs up boldly from Exmouth, a mile broad, past Lympstone; and then, suddenly contracting, reaches Topsham, which was in other days a place of considerable importance, where ships were built and a great deal done in the Newfoundland trade; and in the smuggling trade too. Now the old shipyards are forgotten, and Topsham, which, among other things, was formerly the port of Exeter, is merely a relic, in course of being submerged by Exeter’s suburbs. Yet still odd nooks may be found, with that curious alien air belonging to all such out-of-date seaports, and in shy old houses Topsham is peculiarly rich in old blue-and-white Dutch tiles.

Topsham ceased from being a port when the present Exe Canal was made, in 1827, from Turf up to the very streets of the city: the first ship canal that ever was. It is five miles in length, and thirty feet wide, and it cost £125,000. Anciently, however, the tide flowed the whole way to Exeter, until, in the old high-handed mediæval days, the imperious Isabella de Redvers wrought her vengeance against the city by causing the stream to be dammed with felled trees, thus obstructing the navigation. Doubtless, in their turn, the citizens damned the countess, so far as they safely could, but there the obstruction remained, and thus the still-existing “Countess Weir” came into being.

The enterprising citizens of Exeter cut a small canal, so early as 1554. This was afterwards enlarged, and the present undertaking is the still more enlarged successor of those early waterways. It is a pleasant and clear canal, with none of those evil associations the word “canal” generally implies, and the walk along the broad towing-paths into Exeter yields one of the most striking views of that picturesque city.

CHAPTER IX
POWDERHAM AND THE COURTENAYS—STARCROSS

But the coast really does not reach to Exeter. Let us take boat across from the picturesque waterside of Topsham, and then follow the western bank of Exe down to the sea. It is by far the prettier and more rural side, but, perversely enough, all the eastern shore, including Lympstone and Exmouth, looks in the distance exceptionally beautiful; and no one who only knows the west is content until he has crossed and explored the east. But it is the better part to remain so far untravelled, and to keep the illusion.

The South Western Railway has exploited the eastern shore of Exe, and the Great Western runs its main line along the west, and each is characteristic: the South Western peculiarly suburban, bustling and commonplace, the Great Western sweeping on in noble curves, with a wayside station, at which trains rarely halt, planted here and there. It skirts the water on one hand, and Powderham Park, seat of the Earls of Devon, on the other.

Romance, as well as beauty, belongs to Powderham, for it has been for over five hundred years the seat of the Courtenays, a younger branch of the family which was settled at Courtenay, fifty-six miles south of Paris, in the ninth century. They married into the royal family of France, and three in succession were Emperors of Constantinople in the last days of Christian rule there. It seems a proud thing to have numbered emperors among one’s ancestors, but those imperial Courtenays of old Byzantium were, it must be owned, put to many indignities and miserable shifts, and the imperial purple was more than a thought moth-eaten. They were reduced to selling and mortgaging their property, to scouring half Europe for alms, and in the end the Turks captured their sorry empire. Then the elder Courtenays returned to the rank of French nobles, and although they had an admixture of royal blood, sank gradually throughout the centuries until at length they became simple peasants. The last of them died towards the middle of the eighteenth century.

The English Courtenays appear to derive from Reginald de Courtenay, who relinquished his French nationality and properties, and in the reign of Henry the Second came to England. He acquired honours and manors, and was the ancestor of Hugh de Courtenay, Baron of Okehampton, created Earl of Devon as heir in right of his mother, to the lands and titles of the De Redvers family, who had previously held the earldom. Powderham came to the Courtenays with the second earl, to whom it was brought by his wife, Margaret, daughter of the Earl of Hereford. He gave it to his sixth son, Philip, who was the builder of the castle. Here his descendants, members of the younger of the branches into which the English Courtenays spread, have ever since resided, and might have been merely squires or knights yet, but for the misfortunes that befell the members of the elder branch, who in the wars of rival York and Lancaster took the losing side, with the result that three brothers in succession, the sixth, seventh and eighth earls, sealed with their blood, on scaffold or in stricken field, their devotion to the Red Rose. With those gallant, but ill-fated partisans of a just cause the elder line became extinct, and when the family honours were revived under the Lancastrian Henry the Seventh, they went to the next branch in order of seniority, represented by Sir Edward Courtenay of Haccombe, the first earl of a new creation. To him succeeded his grandson, son of Sir William Courtenay and the Lady Katherine Plantagenet daughter of Edward the Fourth; second earl, and later advanced to be Marquis of Exeter. The fortunes of the Courtenays now seemed to be again improving, but those were the times of Henry the Eighth, when quick changes and dramatic reverses of fortune were the rule. The same king who had created the earl a marquis later capriciously sent him to the block, confiscated his property, and annulled the family honours. A strange romance sheds a mysterious glamour over the story of his son Edward, who is said to have been loved by Queen Mary and slighted by him for her sister, Elizabeth. The queen made him earl of yet another new creation, but later threw him into prison on an absurd charge of aiding the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt, which he had really been largely instrumental in quelling. It was ill consorting with the Tudors, or even living in their times, for they were tigerish alike in their affections and their hatreds. This ill-used young earl—“this beautiful youth,” Gibbon calls him—was released, but died mysteriously, it is supposed of poison—at Padua, in 1556. With him that branch of the Courtenays, and it was long supposed the title also, became extinct.

Meanwhile the junior branch, the Courtenays of Powderham, continued unmolested. “He that is low need fear no foe,” says the old proverb; and those plain knights and, later, baronets excited the jealousy of no one. So they continued until the era of beheadings and forfeitures ended, when Sir William Courtenay was created Viscount Courtenay in 1762. And viscounts they might be yet, only in 1851 an accomplished genealogist, looking over the patent of nobility granted by Queen Mary, discovered the all-important fact that the usual words “de corpore,” limiting the title to direct descendants, were not included. The succession was thus extended to collaterals, and the curious fact was revealed that for two hundred and seventy-five years the Courtenays of Powderham had been earls unknown to themselves, and had gratefully accepted inferior honours while legally possessed of greater.

The claim being proved before the House of Lords, the third viscount in this manner, became the tenth earl. It was he who, regaining the title, plunged the Courtenays again into embarrassments and alienated much of the family property, and it was Viscount Courtenay, son of the venerable eleventh earl, who still further wrecked their fortunes by his losses upon the Turf, which were partly liquidated during his short tenure of the title. The thirteenth earl, who died in 1904, ninety-three years of age, was uncle of the twelfth, and rector of Powderham. He resided at the rectory; for, of the 50,000 acres and the yearly rent-roll of £40,000, mentioned in the New Domesday Book, only an inconsiderable residue is left. Gibbon says of the French Courtenays and their old home: “The Castle of Courtenay was profaned by a plebeian owner,” and here we see the strange spectacle of the seat of the English Courtenays being let to a stranger, and the titled owner of it, a clergyman, living obscurely on the fringe of his own encumbered domain. The reverses of fortune experienced by this ancient race may well seem to render their old motto, adopted in the sixteenth century, still applicable: Ubi lapsus? Quid feci? = “Where have I fallen? What have I done?” It is, at any rate, better than their sentiment of later years: Quod verum tutum = “What is true is safe.” That is indeed a hard saying.

There is no other family so constantly met with in Devon. Villages—like Sampford Courtenay—bear their name: their monuments are in Exeter Cathedral, and in many a town and village church, and in the majority of ancient Devon churches you will at least see their easily distinguished arms sculptured somewhere—the three golden torteaux, roundels, or bezants, supposed by some to have originated in the family association with the Byzantine crown, or flippantly thought by others to typify their last three sovereigns.

The old church of Powderham, built of the rich, red sandstone, stands quite close to the railway, amid the trees of the noble deer-haunted park. The railway then, following the shore along a low sea-wall, comes to the wooden station of Starcross, through which most of the trains rush without stopping. From its crazy timber platforms, standing with their feet in the water, you look across nearly two miles of salt water to Exmouth, transfigured by distance; its dreadful make-believe Gothic church, built in the architectural dark ages of the opening years of the nineteenth century, bulking like a cathedral. A steam launch plies between Starcross and Exmouth in these days, instead of the row-boat that once gave such tremendous rowing to get across; so the sundered shores of Exe are become less foreign and speculative to one another than they were of old. But, as the reader will have already perceived, these increased facilities have destroyed illusions. Exmouth we have already revealed for what it is, rather than what it seems, across the shining water, and Lympstone, yonder, looks better from Starcross than close at hand:

To those given to grotesque phonetic affinities, Lympstone suggests cripples; for myself, looking here across the pale blue and opalesque estuary, where the seagulls ride the still waters, waiting for the tide to ebb and the small sprats and the cockles to become revealed as meals, Lympstone suggests a limpid stream and refreshing breezes. There it nestles; a little strand with little houses and a little church, set down in the opening between two little cliffs of red, red sandstone; but when you arrive there Lympstone is modern, the church has been rebuilt, with the exception of the tower, and an ornate clock-tower, Jubilee or other, flaunts it insolently.

Starcross itself has been described as “a melancholy attempt at a watering-place,”—probably by some person who regards Exmouth as a cheerful and successful effort in that direction; but “There’s no accounting for tastes,” as the old woman said when she kissed her cow. As sheer matter of fact, Starcross never attempted anything in that way, but just—like Topsy—“grew,” and so became what it is; a large village of one long, single-sided street, looking once uninterruptedly upon the shore and the water, but since the railway came, commanding first-class views of expresses, locals, and goods-trains; and more or less identified by strangers with a singular Italianate tall red tower, sole relic of the atmospheric system with which the then South Devon Railway was opened in 1846. This survival of one of the old engine-houses completes a conspicuously beautiful view along the Exe, raised thereby to the likeness of an Italian lake. The one other remarkable feature of Starcross is the curious little steamship, modelled like a swan, that for some fifty or more years past has been moored off Starcross jetty; to the huge amazement of travellers coming this way for the first time.

For the rest, Starcross is merely a more or less modern development of a very ancient little fisher hamlet of the inland parish of Kenton, close upon two miles inland, and is said to have been originally “Stair-cross”; a crossing, or passage, to Exmouth. Maps, showing how the road from Exeter only approaches the coast at this point and then immediately turns away again, support this view.

The high road, leaving Starcross, winds around Cockwood Creek, and passing for a while over level ground ascends, steep and narrow and between high banks, past the old-time smugglers’ haunt, “Mount Pleasant Inn,” and so over the cliff top to Dawlish. Hut the coastwise path by the Warren, and so over the railway to Langston Cliff and the sea-wall, is the only way for beauty. Over the cliffs, by the high road, you come dispirited into Dawlish, with the latest greedy proceedings of speculative builders very much in evidence before the town itself is seen. Such a manner of approach is highly injurious. It is as though a guest bidden to a country house were admitted through the back door. One had rather enter Dawlish by train, for the railway runs along a sea-wall under the cliffs, and the station is built on the edge of the sands.

CHAPTER X
DAWLISH—ASHCOMBE—THE PARSON AND CLERK

Dawlish looks its very best from the railway station; not the least doubt of it, and looks best of all to passengers bound elsewhere. From the train you have on one side the blue sea, the red rocks, the yellow-brown sands; and on the other the lovely lawns and gardens in midst of the town, with the little stream called “Dawlish Water,” tamed and trimmed, and made to tumble over half a hundred little cascades, in between. In short, like any tradesman, Dawlish displays its best goods—nay, more, its entire stock-in-trade—in the shop window.

The name of Dawlish is rather by way of being a calamity. Antiquaries declare it derives from the Celtic dol isc; that is to say, “the meadow by the water”—and as we have seen, the stream and the gardens are the chief feature of the place—but the modern form of the name is fatally attractive for cheap wits. Even great minds have declined to the remark that “Dawlish is dawlicious”; and as the excursion trains in summer draw up to the platform and strangers step out from the carriages, to stretch their legs for a moment before going on, the idiot jape trips off a hundred tongues.

At Dawlish, however, the traveller first realises himself fully in the West. The view, the colour, the speech, all proclaim it.

Ah! the old familiar cries of the West, they warm the heart with the fires of remembrance. As the traveller comes down the line, so insensibly he comes into the districts where the soft slurring burr of the West of England prevails. You first notice it, if you are travelling by a stopping train, at Swindon, on whose platforms the newspapers—in the speech of the bookstall imps—become “Londun pay-purr”; and when the train draws up to the seaside platforms of Dawlish, the shibboleth has become “Lundee pay.” Long, too, may the fishwives of Teignmouth continue their rounds, with their endearing “Any nice fresh whiting to-day, my dear?” to old and young, gentle or simple.

There are wild and beautiful valleys away behind Dawlish; in especial that vale down whose leafy gullies flows the clear stream of Dawlish Water, which, rising out of the green bosom of Great Haldon, up Harcombe way, comes down by Ashcombe and, reaching Dawlish, is made to perform quite a number of parlour tricks before it is allowed to straggle out over the sands and pebbles of the beach, and find a well-earned rest in the sea.

There are folk of primitive ways of thought and rugged speech up the valley of Dawlish Water, and their characteristics are those of old Devon, of whose peasantry it has been truly said: “They work hard, live hard, hold hard, and die hard.”

“My tongue has two sides to et, like a bull’s; a rough an’ a smuthe,” said a sharp-spoken woman up at Harcombe—or I should say, “up tu Harcume”—and up tu Ashcombe they talk in a way that no mortal man coming fresh to Devon can understand. There is a picturesque rustic church high up on a knoll in the dwindling village of Ashcombe, and there is a quaint old smithy with an equally quaint old couple of bachelor brothers, the smiths of it, who have the simplicity of children, the richest brogue in all Devon, and the unaffected courtesy we associate with great nobles. “We’m plazed tu zee ’ee, ye knaw, ye bain’t a stranger tu Ashcume, they tell me”; while their housekeeper says, “Zittee down, do ’ee,” and with her apron vigorously dusts a chair which, like all else in this spotless interior, is absolutely innocent of dust. It is the rustic way of showing politeness.

As for their speech, all Devonians have that characteristic rich twist of the tongue which one cannot well convey in all its richness in paper and print, and for “stranger” say “strangurr.” Similarly, when, during a conversation with them, an insect of sorts bites you painfully, they inform you it is a “hoss-stingurr.”

There is a prized possession at the smithy, in the shape of an old bureau, which has been in the family for goodness knows how many generations, and the visitor will probably be invited to see the “sacred” drawer they discovered. Here, in the cold medium of print it is obvious enough that a “secret” drawer is meant, but I assure you it is by no means so immediately obvious on the spot, and you quite expect an introduction to some holy of holies.

Dawlish is shut in on the west by the great cliff of Lea Mount, which forms, both in colour and shape, an unforgettable feature.

Lea Mount owes its formal, straight-cut outline to the anxieties that followed the falling of a portion of the cliff on August 29th, 1885, when over fifty tons of rock buried a party of seven women and children, killing three of them. To prevent further accidents, all overhanging portions were cut away.

Through this vivid red mass plunges the main line of the Great Western Railway, in a series of five longer or shorter tunnels, emerging through Parson Tunnel upon the long sea wall that brings it into Teignmouth. From Dawlish sands the long and bold range of cliffs ending in Hole Head and the Parson and Clerk rocks is distinctly seen, but there has ever been some considerable doubt as to which of these rocks of Hole Head is the Clerk. Commonly the solitary wave-washed pillar standing out to sea has been given the name, but there are certainly the likenesses of two faces on the cliff itself, one immediately under the other; and there have always been those who have pointed them out as the unworthy pair.

From one of the little coves that notch the cliffs between Dawlish and Teignmouth, those giant profiles are seen with advantage. They are impressive at a distance and even in calm weather, but near at hand, and when the clouds lower and the screaming winds tear off the crests of the waves and dash them in clouds of flying spume over the hurrying trains, they are not a little awesome. The Parson, with round, bullet-like head, looks sternly out, with calm, inscrutable face, and all the dignity of a colossal Rameses, upon the whirl of wind and water. The Clerk, beneath him, a senile, doddering countenance, with wide-open mouth and thick, pendulous lips, seems to laugh and gibber maniacally at the racket of the elements, and is a little dreadful to behold.

There is no way round Hole Head to Teignmouth. Sheer walls of rock and a stark descent into the sea forbid; but some day, when local authorities take the hints that nature and latter-day circumstances have thrown out, a road will be made under those cliffs, and the sundered towns made neighbours.

Meanwhile, there are two prime ways of getting to Teignmouth: the one a threepenny journey by train from Dawlish station, the loveliest threepenny railway ride in the kingdom; the other a shockingly hilly climb up by the high road that goes over Lea Mount, and so, in a series of sharp rises and falls brings you, at one mile from Teignmouth, to a breakneck descent into the town, usually ending, for cyclists some few years ago, in a pantomime-trick disappearance through the window of the “Dawlish Inn” and a removal, as the case might be, to the hospital or the cemetery. But more scientific brakes have happily neutralised these dangers.

There is, however, a delightful variant of this road journey that cannot too greatly be praised. This is found when coming to the cross-lanes in the hollow at Holcombe, one mile from Lea Mount, by turning to the left down a tree-shaded way known as “Smugglers’ Lane.” A short distance brings the explorer to a sight of the sea again, glimpsed between the stone arches of a railway-bridge spanning a tiny cove or inlet. A walk through the arches on to the sands, if the tide be out, or the ascent of a dozen steps up to the sea-wall, if it be in, brings the stranger into the best and easiest, and certainly, into the most beautiful, approach to Teignmouth, by the sea the whole way and under the shadow of the tremendous red cliffs, at whose foot the railway, by the daring of Brunel, is made to run along the most massive of sea-walls. The engineer here wrought more picturesquely than he knew, and performed an inestimable service to the public by providing a ten-foot wide masonry pathway nearly two miles and a half long, where the contemplative visitor has the trains on one side and the sea on the other; and where he may, when it blows great guns off the sea, witness such a spouting and a buffeting of furious waves against the wall as scarce to be equalled around the coast.

The railway has here, at any rate, left the shore more picturesque than it found it, and the trains themselves give a last touch of romance. You see them, in summer, coming down from London, a wondering and expectant face thrust from every window: the faces of holiday-makers enraptured with the scene. You see the holiday-makers again, a little later, with a deep tan colour, but with expressions wistful and melancholy; returning home, and taking a long lingering glance before the Parson Tunnel finally occults the view.

There is an added majesty to the sea-wall and the railway when night is come. The red cliffs become black and minatory, the trees and shrubs against the skyline assuming weird shapes; and stillness reigns; for mankind is gregarious and congregates in the town, leaving the sea-wall to shy lovers; and the contemplative crickets chirp in the ballast and on the sleepers, and the wash of the waves sounds in a restful undertone until a red eye in the darkness along the line changes to green and, with a rush and a scream, the express thunders by.

CHAPTER XI
TEIGNMOUTH

Teignmouth is the “second largest watering-place in South Devon” and the most entirely delightful. It was more delightful when it was smaller; but that is a fact known only to people old enough to have acquired memories of the Has Been and to drag the clanking chains of reminiscence and unavailing regret at their heels. In the Teignmouth of yesterday there were no pavements but those made of pebbles gleaned off the beach, of the size and shape—and considerably more than the hardness—of kidney potatoes. It was a picturesque time, but painful for people with tender feet and thin shoes, for the pavements thus constructed were excruciatingly knobbly, and were only worn down to the level after some two generations and a half of wayfarers had progressed over them. To-day you shall find those old-style pavements only in the back streets and alleyways of the town: in the main thoroughfares you have paving-stones worthy of London itself.

There was doubtless a time when these kidney-potato pavements were looked upon as concessions to a growing spirit of luxury, and it is conceivable that, from the time when Teignmouth first arose beside the azure main (somewhere about the time of Edward the Confessor) until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the place did very well without pavings or sidewalks of any description. Sea-boots and shore-going footgear an inch thick in the sole, and well hobnailed, overcame any little difficulties with water, mud, or shingle; and it was only when seaside holidays first came into fashion and “visitors” appeared that any fine distinctions were drawn between roads and paths.

When the railway came to Teignmouth in 1846, it found a quiet, rather out-of-the-way little town and port, of narrow and winding streets, lined with rustic Devonian cob-built cottages, alternating with what had been modish little plaster-fronted villas with skimpy little balconies and bow fronts. Many of them still remain in the older part of the town, in French Street and Hollands Road. If they were larger, they would remind one of Brighton and the Regency, but, in the miniature sort, they are oddly reminiscent of Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell and their ringleted heroines.

In pre-railway days Teignmouth lay, as it were, in an eddy of traffic. The mail coaches went from Exeter to Plymouth far inland, and only strictly local stages hugged the coastwise roads; but with the opening of the South Devon Railway, as it then was, Teignmouth at once was placed on the main route from London to the West. There should certainly be a statue of Brunel on the Den at Teignmouth, for by planning the railway to run along the coast he not only made the fortune of the town, but added magnificently to the picturesqueness of the shore, in building that two and a half miles of massive sea-wall on which the railway comes into the town.

Teignmouth is one of those very few places the railway does not vulgarise, by bringing you in at the back door, so to speak, and through the kitchen and the scullery. You are brought along that sea wall, in full view of a gorgeously-coloured coast, into a fine airy station, expectant of the best, and are not disappointed in that expectation; if, indeed, a little mystified as to your bearings. To acquire those bearings, the proper way, after all, here as elsewhere, is to enter the town by road, whether by the extravagantly hilly high road along the cliff tops, or along the sea wall. That is the geographically educative way, by which you shall see how the original Teignmouth was built on a flat sandy spit at the mouth of the Teign estuary, and how by degrees it has grown upwards and backwards, away from river and sea, even to the lower slopes of the lofty moorland of Haldon.

The most outstanding peculiarity, and one of the finest features of Teignmouth is “the Den,” the wide sweep of lawn that ornaments the whole of the seaward side of the town and at once stamps Teignmouth as something wholly out of the ordinary. “The Den,” properly “dene,” was originally a flat sandy waste where the fishermen of the old fishing town dried their nets, and when the town suddenly was made to take on the appearance of a fashionable resort, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and a formal front was built, looking upon the sea, the houses were planned in a huge crescent, following the lines of that open space. Whether this was done from choice or necessity does not appear, but it would certainly seem that the builders of what was then “modern” Teignmouth were offered no alternative, and that they dared not lay hands upon what was really common land.

Within the memory of many visitors to Teignmouth the grassy Den has wonderfully improved. A comparatively few years ago it was still scrubby and common-like, and its bordering flower-beds and rockeries were rich only in rocks, but the grass now grows green, the flowers flourish, and sheltering shrubs have grown phenomenally. The fishermen still exercise their ancient prescriptive right of spreading their seine nets out to dry on the grass, but, for some reason or another, not so greatly as before.

The sea-front of Teignmouth, following the semi-circle of the Den, is decoratively imposing when viewed at a little distance, for there is much virtue, architecturally, in a crescent, however little there may be in the houses individually. They are ambitious buildings, chiefly in these times boarding-houses, but with the “Royal Hotel” and the ugly East Devon and Teignmouth Club prominent among them. According to intention and to the description given of the Club-house in local literature, it is in the Ionic style, but seeing that it is of brick and rubble, faced with plaster masquerading as stone, we shall not be far wrong in declaring that, in spite of—nay, because of—its colonnade of squatty columns pretending to be Greek, its style is more fitly to be described as “ironic.”

There is, indeed, a great deal of very bad architecture in Teignmouth, of the pretentious kind; very solid, stolid and ugly, and the newer houses, although more pleasing to the eye, are generally of an incredible flimsiness. If the natural scenery of sea, land, and river were not so surprisingly beautiful, the builders’ handiwork would long ago have ruined Teignmouth, and it says much for the natural advantages of the place that, although there are less than half a dozen decent bits of architecture, ancient or modern, in the town, it is voted delightful by thousands of holiday-makers.

It is because I love Teignmouth so well that I criticise it so closely. For the sake of the place that nature has endowed so richly, one must needs protest against the things that have been done, the blunders and the vulgarities that have been perpetrated. Was ever there a place where advertisements could look more offensive? Yet the entrance to the pier is smothered with them. They stand boldly out against the scenery, and your view across to Torbay or to Exmouth is obliterated by the pushful poster and the enamelled iron sign. Frankly, they are grievous mistakes. One does not always want to be playing Rogers’ pianos, nor even, for that matter, Paish’s; and there are times—incredible though it may seem—when Fry’s Cocoa and Dunville’s Whisky are distinctly de trop. But enough!

Coming into Teignmouth by the sea-wall, almost the first building met with is East Teignmouth Church, almost wholly rebuilt in recent years, from the 1887 Jubilee Tower downwards. It is one of Teignmouth’s two parish churches that once formed a couple owning the unenviable distinction of being pre-eminently the ugliest churches in all Devon, but now that the Jubilee and later activities have utterly altered the aspect of this church of St. Michael, East Teignmouth, that unlovely brotherhood has been dissolved, and St. James’s, West Teignmouth, reigns supreme in the kingdom of the grotesque.

Not by any means that these much-criticised buildings were offensively ugly. Their ugliness was of that supreme and old-fashioned kind so greatly prized in (for example) old china. It transcended the merely ugly and rose into the realms of the hideously quaint. St. Michael’s tower, for instance, was a very gem of misbegotten early nineteenth-century “Saxon” architecture, done in grim grey stucco, and looking like the architectural monstrosities of nightmare-land. It would have genuinely astonished any Saxon privileged to revisit the earth after a thousand years and seeking the original Saxon building he had known on this site. The present tower, in the Perpendicular style, is ornately pinnacled and windowed, and although so very florid, is a beautiful and entirely successful feature. The almost wave-washed position of St. Michael’s is a startling surprise to the stranger, although the inhabitants and the congregation take it soberly enough; as well they may, considering that, although it stands so little removed from high-water mark, and although the salt sea spray of winter’s storms flecks its walls, the sea does not appear to have gained the fraction of an inch since the first church arose on this site, in the tenth century. On a wall of this peculiarly seaside place of worship the stranger may read a pathetic story of the sea, in the epitaph to John and Richard Westlake, lost in the foundering of the brig Isla, in the storm of October 29th, 1823, “within sight of this church.”

St. James’s church, the surviving ugly brother, stands commandingly at the crest of the steep rise through the town, at the entrance to Bitton. It is often known as the “round church” because of its central lantern tower, which is octagonal. It is only with a difference I endorse the received opinion among architectural critics that this church of West Teignmouth is so ugly. Architecturally, the lantern-tower and the odd octangular interior additions made nearly a century ago are enormities, but looked at from the lay point of view, the whole mass of the building, while singular, is imposing—and I am afraid the uninstructed public rather like it.

This is almost enough about churches, save for the fact that we are here come, in this beautiful West country, into a deeply religious land, where the Church of England weakens and Dissent takes firm hold.

CHAPTER XII
TEIGNMOUTH—THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN—THE TEIGN—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS

The further West you go, the more distinctly religious you find the people, and the stronger you find the hold of Dissent upon them. Religion is a very real thing in the West, and the more real it is, the weaker is the hold of the Established Church. Peculiarly strong, among other forms of Dissent, are the Plymouth Brethren in Devonshire, and the Bible Christians in Cornwall.

It should be said at once that “Plymouth Brethren” is only the name by which the world at large knows that body of Christians, who, like the “Friends,” whom the world styles “Quakers,” do by no means label themselves with any specific title. They are among themselves just “Brethren,” and their places of worship are merely the “Brethren’s” meeting-rooms. The “Plymouth Brethren,” who more closely than any other sect resemble the Quakers, follow the practice of the early Christians, insomuch that all are brothers in Christ; and no dogma made of man, nor any official hierarchy or pastorate, has yet been suffered to obscure that essential fraternity.

The “Plymouth Brethren”—to speak of them by the style which the world has agreed to use—took their origin about 1827, in the workings of conscience of John Nelson Darby and A. N. Groves, who, independently of one another, had arrived at the conclusion that no existing church was firmly based upon the Gospel. Darby, who was at that time twenty-seven years of age, had been educated for the law, but had entered the Church, and was a curate in Ireland when the light that came to him led to his resigning. He was brought into communication with Groves, and in 1830 the first meeting of the “Brethren” was opened, in Dublin. That same year, on a visit to Oxford, Darby was asked to open a meeting at Plymouth, whither he forthwith proceeded and took “Providence Chapel,” thus, with the spread of the movement from that town, unwittingly giving a topographical name to the new religious body.

The tenets of the “Brethren” are simple. They rely upon the teaching and the promises of the Gospel, and reject all ecclesiastical forms. Like the Quakers, they have no ministers and no prayer-books. Prayer at meeting is extempore, and offered up when the Spirit moves, by members of the meeting. It is thus, it will be seen, essentially a democratic body, but in practice those whose natural vocation is preaching, missioning and district-visiting become more prominent, and, if they feel they have a call, will obey that call by giving up all worldly occupations. Those with a sufficiency of means of their own, will give themselves and their wealth to the work of the Master, and those others who have nothing will devote their lives to the work of spreading the Gospel, visiting the sick, and in general performing the salaried work of a clergyman of the Endowed Church; all without stipend, without fee or reward asked, suggested, or hinted, except in secret to that One whose work they do. This it is to “live by faith,” as they term it. Nor is that faith misplaced. Shall I not, although a sinner, speak of that which I know, and testify to the miracles I have seen wrought in my own generation, by which I am assured of the love of the living God for His servants?