THE SOUTH DEVON COAST

THE SOUTH DEVON
COAST

BY
CHARLES G. HARPER

London: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.
1907

PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

If the map of Devon be measured across in a straight line, it will be found that, from Lyme Regis, where it joins Dorsetshire, to King’s Tamerton on the River Tamar, where Devonshire at its westernmost extremity looks across to Saltash, in Cornwall, South Devon is fifty-five miles across. That line, however, would miss quite two-thirds of the coast, and would pass so far inland as Ashburton, on the borders of Dartmoor; the profile of the South Devon Coast exhibiting a remarkably bold and rugged south-westerly trend out of a straight line, westward of the Exe, and an almost equally bold north-westerly direction after passing Prawle Point. The actual coast-line is therefore very much greater, and is prolonged by the many important estuaries and their subsidiary arms; such, for example, as that of the Exe, which is navigable as far as the port of Exeter, nine miles from the open sea; the Teign, four miles; the Dart, nine miles; Kingsbridge River, seven miles; the Avon, three miles; the Erme, two miles; the Yealm, four miles; and the Hamoaze and Tamar, from Devonport to Calstock, ten miles. In one way and another, the South Devon Coast, tracing the creeks and the coastguard-paths, is not less than one hundred and eighty-nine miles in length.

It is a historic coast, and plentifully marked with towns and villages; with this result, that it is by no means to be treated of shortly. Devon has produced fully her share of great men, and many of them have been born within sight and sound of the sea; while the mere mention of Torquay, Brixham, Dartmouth, and Plymouth, recalls, not merely local annals, but prominent events in the history of England.

As the South Devon Coast is the most beautiful of coasts, so is it also among the most hilly. One hesitates to say that it is not the coast for exploring by means of a cycle, but certainly those who perform their touring in that sort must expect severe gradients, and must not anticipate, even so, an uninterrupted view of the actual coast; for there are many and considerable stretches along which you come to the sea only by unrideable footpaths. The pedestrian alone can explore this seaboard thoroughly, and he will find, in the tourist season, at least, that his progress is limited by the climate, which not infrequently in the months of July and August, resembles the moist and enervating heat of the great Palm House in Kew Gardens.

Lyme Regis, whence this exploration starts, is at the very door of Devonshire, and was, indeed, in recent years within an ace of being transferred from Dorset. At Lyme, which lies, as it were, at the bottom of a cup, you perceive at once the sort of thing in store for those who would fare westward: exquisite scenery combined with extravagantly steep roads.

CHAPTER II
ROUSDON—THE DOWLANDS LANDSLIP

Close by the border-line of the two counties, as you make from Lyme Regis, across the pleasant upland meadows to Uplyme, which is in Devonshire, is Middle Mill. The mill has seen its best days and no longer grinds corn, and the great wheel is idle, for the very excellent reason that the stream that once sent it ponderously revolving has been diverted. The thatched mill-house and its adjoining cottage, together with the silent wheel are, in short, in that condition of picturesque decay which spells romance to artists, who, discovering it, cannot resist a sketch. It appealed irresistibly, some years ago, to an artist in another craft; to none other, in short, than that distinguished novelist, Sir Walter Besant, who laid the scenes of his eighteenth-century story, ’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay, chiefly here and at Rousdon.

He describes Middle Mill just as it is situated: “At the back of the mill was an orchard, where the pink and red cider apples looked pleasant—they could not look sweet. Beyond the orchard was a piggery, and then you came to the bed of a stream, which was dry in summer, save for a little green damp among the stones, by the side of which was a coppice of alder-trees, and behind the alders a dark, deep wood, into which you might peer all a summer’s day and dream boundless things.”

The only objection that can be taken to the verisimilitude of this description is the reference to the cider apples. As a matter of fact, they do look sweet—and are not. The novelist refers to the richly ruddy “Devonshire reds,” whose beautiful colour presupposes in the mind of strangers to cider-apples a fruit luxuriously sweet and juicy. Devonshire farmers take little care to fence their cider-apples from the stranger, who steals and tastes as a rule only one, finding with the first bite that sweetness is by no means necessarily housed within that captivating exterior.

The story is one of smuggling and of rival loves. At Middle Mill lived the miserly Joshua Meech, whose unrequited affection for Pleasance Noel, and whose revengeful jealousy, bring about all the trouble. To punish him for his betrayal of his friends to the Revenue Officers, Pleasance by night steals eight bags of his hoarded wealth from under the hearthstone, where Joshua kept his domestic bank, and hides them under the millwheel. The wheel “stood there, under a broad, sloping penthouse of heavy thatch, which made it dark in the brightest day”; and so you may find it, exactly as described, except that the penthouse is tiled, and not thatched.

The actual coast, for the six miles between Lyme Regis and Seaton is a roadless, and in parts an almost trackless, stretch of strenuous clambering among rocks and tangled thickets; among landslips old and new, and undercliffs overgrown with such a wilderness of trees and shrubs and bracken, and blackberry brakes as only Devon can produce. But for all these difficulties, perhaps because of them, the way is preferable to the hard high road that goes, a little way inland. Here, at least, “exploration” is no straining after effect, no misuse of the word.

When you have left the Cobb at Lyme Regis behind and passed the coastguard station, you have come to sheer wildness; the deserted cement works, standing amid a waste of wrecked earthy cliffs, themselves forming a not inappropriate prelude to the perfect abandonment of nature. Here the low promontory of Devonshire Point ends the Ware Cliffs; and the tangle, with the gaping fissures between the rock and earth half hidden by grass and bushes, becomes so nearly impenetrable as to render a retreat up along the boulders into Holmbush Fields absolutely necessary; Holmbush Fields, with their rustic stiles and hedgerow timber, and the winding footpath across, giving a sober and graceful interlude; and then you come upon a mile or so of wonderful pathway, roughly shaped amid the wild jungle that here has overgrown a tract of oozy and boggy undercliff, formed by a century or more of continual landslides. There surely is no more beautiful wilderness of the particular type in England, than this: a very great deal of its beauty being due to the happy circumstance that neither Lyme Regis nor Seaton are as yet large enough to admit of it being overrun. Hardy pioneers have beaten out the devious pathway, and the few who have followed in their footsteps have kept it from being again overgrown. Spring—the month of May—is the ideal time for this part of the coast; when the birds have again wakened to song, and the young foliage is tender and the landsprings have not been dried up.

Even the pioneers have not made all the way easy; for you come at last to what Devonshire people call “zoggy plaaces,” where the willow and hazel bushes stand in mossy ground, and the primroses grow an unwonted size, by reason of the excessive moisture. Here you must calculate every step and nicely test the mossy hummocks before fully trusting them; finally emerging upon an open plain midway between the sea below and tall cliffs above; a plain where rocks of every shape and size have been hurled down in extraordinary confusion. Here the explorer requires not a little of the suppleness and agility of the chamois, and growing at last weary of bounding hazardously from crag to crag, climbs with extraordinary labour, past monstrous grey, ivy-grown spires and pinnacles of limestone, up a winding footpath in the face of the cliff, to where the Whitlands Coastguard station looks down upon the tumbled scene. From this point the coastguard-path lies along the cliffs’ edge, to where the cliffs die down to the waterside in the deep coombe in whose woods the sea comes lapping at Charton Bay. Here a limekiln, that looks romantic enough for a castle, stands on the beach, with the dense woods climbing backwards, and on the skyline the roofs and tower and chimneys of Rousdon.

Rousdon is a remarkable place. It shows you what may be done in the wholesale grocery way of business, for the estate was enclosed, and the great mansion built by Sir Henry Peek, between 1871 and 1883. When that wealthy baronet set about becoming a landed proprietor here, he found a wild expanse stretching down from the high land by the main road between Lyme and Seaton, toward the sea, and he enclosed some two hundred and fifty acres, and on the upper part built a magnificent house, whose beauties we will not stop to describe in this place, because, if a beginning were made with it, and the collections of various sorts within, it would be no easy task to conclude. He found here, amid these solitudes, the ruinous little church of St. Pancras, of Rousdon, used as the outhouse of a farm. Its rector was an absentee, not greatly needed, for the entire parish numbered but sixteen persons, all employed on the farm itself. A new church was built in the grounds, and a member of the Peek family appointed rector; and thus we see the remarkable spectacle of a parish as self-contained as any box of sardines; with the whole of the inhabitants employed upon the estate, and free trade in religion abolished. I think no monarchy is quite so absolute.

A remarkable feature of Rousdon mansion is the extensive use, internally, of Sicilian marble. The great staircase, and other portions of the house are built of it, and a beautiful dairy is wholly decorated with this material. It came here in a romantic and wholly unexpected way; having been the cargo of a ship wrecked on the rocks off Rousdon at the time when plans for the building were being made.

By more undercliff footpaths you come at length, through the steamy hollows of Rousdon, to that “lion” of this district, the great Dowlands landslip, an immense wedge of cliff and agricultural land that on the Christmas night of 1839 suddenly parted its moorings with the mainland and made for the sea, halting before quite immersing itself, and ever since presenting the extraordinary spectacle of a jagged gorge winding between two sheer walls of cliff, with weird isolated limestone pillars, from one to two hundred feet in height, thrusting up here and there. It is the Landscape of Dream, and only saved from being that of nightmare by the soft beauty of the enshrouding verdure that has clothed the place since then. The well-known landslip in the Isle of Wight is altogether smaller and inferior to this: and more hackneyed.

The cause of this extraordinary happening is found in the geological features of this immediate neighbourhood; the limestone and other rock resting on a deep stratum of sand, which in its turn was based on blue clay. Springs percolating through the sand were probably obstructed, and the water found its way in unusual quantities to the blue clay, which in course of time became one vast butterslide, and thus brought about a landslip that engulfed fields and orchards, and sunk two cottages, unharmed fortunately, to a level one hundred and seventy feet lower than they had before occupied.

A charge of sixpence is attempted at a farm at the Seaton end, to view this remarkable place, and it is worth an entrance-fee; but explorers coming from Lyme Regis are not unlikely to stumble into the place, unaware; and in any case the attempt is an impudent and illegal imposition, for the question of free access was fought out successfully some years ago by the Lyme Regis corporation.

Word-painting is all very well as a pastime, but the result makes poor reading. We will, therefore, not emulate the local guide-books; which, to be sure, transcend the descriptive art so greatly as to come out at the other end, as works of unconscious humour. Thus, when in those pages we read of “Dame Nature,” and “Old Father Time,” working these miracles of landslides, we get a mental picture of a stupendous old couple that fairly takes the breath away. Moreover, the scene is compared with “the island home of Robinson Crusoe,” and likened to “the wildness of Salvator Rosa or the fairy scenes of Claude,” while “the huge boulders you can convert into sphinxes,” and find “deep and thickly wooded dingles, in which lions and tigers could lurk unseen.” Still more, we read: “If you give full scope to your imagination, you may fancy that the pale moonlight would inhabit the ruins with the spirits of those who lived in the ages of mythology.” In short, if these directions are faithfully followed, and these lions and tigers and these spirits of mythological creatures—the “Mrs. Harrises” of ancient times—are duly conjured up, the too-imaginative explorer is likely to emerge fully qualified for a lunatic asylum.

The exceptional beauty of the scene does not require any of these fantastical aids to appreciation, and the hoar ivied rocks, the fairy glades, the brakes and willow woods are sufficient in themselves.

The mile-long beauty of the great Dowlands Landslip having been traversed, the way lies across the down over Haven Cliff, the striking headland that shuts in Seaton from the east.

CHAPTER III
SEATON

Down there lies Seaton, looking very new, along the inner side of a shingly beach, with the strath of the river Axe running, flat and green, up inland to the distant hills, and the silvery Axe itself looping and twisting away, as far as eye can reach.

But Seaton is not so new as might be supposed. Down there, on the wall that runs along the crest of the beach, is painted in huge black letters the one word Moridunum, which to passengers coming in by steamboat seems the most prominent feature in the place, and at first sight is generally taken to be the impudent advertisement of some new quack electuary, tooth-paste, hair-wash, or what not? “Use Moridunum,” you unconsciously say, “and be sure you get it”; or “Moridunum for the hair,” “Moridunum: won’t wash clothes,” and so forth. Seaton claims—and, it is evident, claims it boldly—to be the Moridunum of Roman Britain; but is it? In short, seeking it here, have you got it?

That is a question which various warring schools of antiquaries would dearly like settled. The Roman grip upon Britain weakened greatly as it came westward, and Roman roads in Devon are few and uncertain. The famous Antonine Itinerary—that most classic of all road-books—gives but one station between Durnovaria, Dorchester, and Isca Damnoniorum, Exeter. That is Moridunum, this ancient and well-gnawed bone of contention. The name was a Roman adaptation, either of the British Mor-y-dun or sea-town, or Mawr-y-dun, “great hill-fort”; which, it is impossible to say. All depends upon which of two routes was selected to Exeter. If it was the inland route, the likelihood rests with the great hill-top Roman camp at Hembury, near Honiton; while if it was the way by Axminster and Sidmouth, then Seaton or High Peak, Sidmouth, is the site.

Whatever may some day prove to be the solution of the mystery, it is certain, from remains of Roman villas discovered near Seaton, that it was a favourite place of residence; and therefore it is not so new as it looks. Indeed, in days long gone by, before the mouth of the River Axe had been well-nigh choked with shingle, Seaton and the now tiny village of Axmouth, a mile up-stream, were ports. “Ther hath beene,” said Leland, writing in the reign of Henry the Eighth, “a very notable haven at Seton. But now ther lyith between the two pointes of the old haven a mighty rigge and barre of pible stones in the very mouth of it.”

The mighty ridge is still here, and has acquired so permanent a character that part of modern Seaton is built on it, while cattle graze on the pastures that grow where the ships used to ride at anchor.

The place was become in Leland’s time a “mene fisschar town.” “It hath,” he continued, “beene far larger when the haven was good;” and so, looking at the ancient church, away back from the sea, it would seem.

Many attempts were made to cut a passage through the shingle, but what the labourers removed, the sea replaced with other. The last attempt was about 1830, when John Hallett of Stedcombe dug a channel and built a quay at the very mouth of the river, under the towering mass of Haven Cliff. Modern Seaton should gratefully erect a statue to this endeavourer, for thus he kept the tiny port going, and the coals and timber that would have then been so costly by land carriage came cheaply to his quays. Then, after a while, came the railway, and his wharves were deserted. There, under the cliff, they remain to this day, and the little custom-house has been converted into a kind of seashore bathing-place and belvedere, attached to the beautiful residence of Stedcombe, nestling on the bosom of the down.

When a branch railway was opened to Seaton, in 1868, the town began to grow. A very slow growth at first, but in the last few years it has expanded suddenly into a thriving town, and the astonished visitor in these latter days perceives such amazing developments as a giant hotel and a theatre; and if he be a visitor over Sunday, will observe the might and majesty of railways exercised in the bringing down from London of day trippers, who set out from Waterloo at an unimaginably early hour and are dumped down upon Seaton beach at midday. He will witness scrambling hordes, indecently thirsty, besieging the refreshment-places of the town, and if he be a Superior Person, will, with tumultuous feelings of relief, see the crowded train-load depart as the summer evening draws in and the church-bells begin to chime. The sheer Average Man, however, who witnesses this Sunday irruption, will merely wonder how any one can find it worth while to expend six shillings on an excursion ticket, entitling him to make a double journey of three hundred and four miles and fourteen hours, solely for the fleeting pleasure of five hours on a shingly beach.

What renders that excursion so popular? Well, partly a love of nature, and very greatly that love of a bargain which makes many keen people purchase what they do not want. It is quite conceivable that there are many people who would want to be paid a great deal more than six shillings for the discomfort of fourteen hours railway travel on a Sunday.

The dominant note of Seaton is its apparent newness. From the golf links and the club-house on the down by Haven Cliff on the east, to Seaton Hole on the west, it looks a creation of yesterday, and the casual visitor is incredulous when told of a fourteenth-century parish church. But such a building exists, nearly a mile inland, with a hoary tower and curious monuments; among them one to “Abraham Sydenham, Salt Officer for 40 years”: an inscription reminiscent of the old salt-pans industry in the levels by the Axe, and of the long-forgotten salt-tax. That most famous smuggler of the West of England, Jack Rattenbury, lies in Seaton churchyard, but no stone marks the spot.

Seaton Hole, just mentioned, is the innermost nook of Seaton Bay, just under the great mass of White Cliff; called white only relatively to the surrounding cliffs, which are red. White Cliff, in fact, is rather light browns and greys, with masses of green vegetation, and incidental whitish streaks. Here is the exclusive part of Seaton, with a fine bathing-beach, and numbers of very fine new residences—not merely houses, mark you—cresting the best view-points. And up-along and over the hill, ever so steeply, and then down, still more steeply, and you are at Beer.