The South Devon Coast

CHAPTER IV
JACK RATTENBURY, SMUGGLER—BEER

The name of Beer is famous in smuggling annals, for it was in the then rather desperate little fisher-village that Jack Rattenbury, smuggler, who lies in Seaton churchyard was born, in 1778. Smugglers and highwaymen in general are figures that loom dimly in the pages of history, and, like figures seen in a fog, bulk a good deal larger than they ought. But the famous Jack Rattenbury is an exception. He does not, when we come to close quarters with him, diminish into an undersized, overrated breaker of laws. Instead, he grows bigger, the more you learn: and a great deal may be learned of him, for he printed and published the story of his life in 1837.

It seems that he was the son of a Beer shoemaker, who, by going for a sailor and never being heard of again, vindicated the wisdom of that proverb which advises the cobbler to stick to his last. Young Jack Rattenbury never knew his father. He began his adventures at nine years of age, as boy on a fishing-smack, and then became one of the crew of a privateer which set out from Brixham during the war with France and Spain, to prey upon the enemy: meeting instead, at the very outset, with a French frigate, with the unexpected result that privateer and crew were speedily taken, as prize and prisoners, to Bordeaux. Escaping on an American ship, he at last reached home again, and engaged for a time in fishing. But fishing was poor employment for an adventurous spirit, and Rattenbury soon found his way into smuggling. He first took part in the exploits of a Lyme Regis boat, trading in that illegitimate way to the Channel Islands, and then found more lawful employment on a brig called The Friends, of Beer and Seaton. But the very first trip was disastrous. Sailing from Bridport to Tenby, for culm, he again experienced capture: by a French privateer on this occasion. The privateer put a prize-crew of four men on the brig, with orders to take her to the nearest French port. “Then,” says Rattenbury, “when the privateer was gone, the prize-master ordered me to go aloft and loose the main-topgallant sail. When I came down, I perceived that he was steering very wildly, through ignorance of the coast, and I offered to take the helm, to which he consented, and directed me to steer south-east by north. He then went below, and was engaged in drinking and carousing with his companions. They likewise sent me up a glass of grog occasionally, which animated my spirits, and I began to conceive a hope, not only of escaping, but also of being revenged on the enemy.”

The artful Rattenbury then steered up to Portland, and when the master asked what land it was, replied “Alderney.” Presently they came off St. Aldhelm’s Head, and were distinctly suspicious when told it was Cape La Hogue.

“We were now within a league of Swanage, and I persuaded them to go on shore to get a pilot. They then hoisted out a boat, into which I got with three of them. We now came so near shore that people hailed us. My companions began to swear, and said the people spoke English. This I denied, and urged them to hail again; but as they were rising to do so, I plunged overboard, and came up the other side of the boat. They then struck at me with their oars, and snapped a pistol at me, but it missed fire. The boat in which they were now took water, and finding they were engaged in a vain pursuit, they rowed away as fast as possible, to regain the vessel.”

Rattenbury swam ashore and sent messengers, with the result that the Nancy, revenue cutter, went in pursuit of the brig and, recapturing her, brought her into Cowes the same night.

He was then forcibly enlisted in the Navy by the Press Gang, and, escaping from His Majesty’s service, went cod-fishing off Newfoundland. Returning, the ship he was on was captured by a Spanish privateer and taken into Vigo. Escaping with his usual dexterity, he reached home and added another thrilling item to his hazardous career by getting married, April 17th, 1801. After a quiet interval of piloting, he resumed smuggling, in earnest; with the usual ups and downs of fortune incidental to that shy trade.

Having made several successful voyages, and feeling pretty confident, he went ashore to carouse with some friends in one of the old taverns of Beer. In the same room were a sergeant and several privates of the South Devon Militia, among others. “After drinking two or three pots of beer,” he says, “the sergeant, whose name was Hill, having heard my name mentioned by some of my companions, went out with his men, and soon they returned again, having armed themselves with swords and muskets. The sergeant then advanced towards me and said, ‘You are my prisoner. You are a deserter, and must go along with me.’ For a moment I was much terrified, knowing that if I was taken I should, in all probability, be obliged to go aboard the fleet; and this wrought up my mind to a pitch of desperation. I endeavoured, however, to keep as cool as possible, and in answer to his charge, I said, ‘Sergeant, you are surely labouring under an error; I have done nothing that can authorise you in taking me up or detaining me. You must certainly have mistaken me for some other person.’”

This shows us, pretty clearly, that some one must have written Rattenbury’s reminiscences for him. He probably was incapable of such book-English, and certainly would not have spoken anything else than the broadest of Devonshire speech. However, he describes how he drew the sergeant into a parley and how, while it was going on, he jumped through a trap-door into the cellar. “I then threw off my jacket and shirt, to prevent any one from holding me, and having armed myself with a reaping-hook and a knife, which I had in my pocket, I threw myself into an attitude of defence at the entrance, which was a half-hatch door, the lower part of which I shut, and then declared that I would kill the first man that came near me, and that I would not be taken from the spot alive. At this the sergeant was evidently terrified; but he said to his men, ‘Soldiers, do your duty; advance and seize him.’ To which they replied, ‘Sergeant, you proposed it; take the lead and set us an example, and we will follow.’ No one offered to advance, and I remained in the position I have described for four hours, holding them at bay.”

The sergeant sent for aid, but before that arrived the women of Beer rushed in with an artful story of shipwreck, attracting the soldiers’ attention. Rattenbury, seizing the opportunity, dashed among them, half-naked, and escaped to the beach, where he hastily took boat and went off to his own vessel, and safety.

In 1806 he, his crew, and his cargo of spirit-tubs were captured by the Duke of York cutter, when returning from Alderney. He was fined £100, and with his companions was sentenced to the alternative of imprisonment or service on board a man-o’-war. They chose the sea, and were accordingly shipped aboard the brig Kate, in the Downs; but soon, while the officers were all more or less drunk, he found an opportunity of escaping, and was presently home again.

The smuggling exploits of this master of the art were endless. Perhaps the most amusing—to the reader, at any rate—is that incident at Seaton Hole, where, one dark night, going up the cliff with a keg on his back, one of a cargo he had just landed, he was so unfortunate as to stumble over a donkey, which began to bray so horribly that, what with his trumpeting and the noise of the smuggler’s fall, a Revenue officer, sleeping at the post of duty, was aroused, and seized forty kegs, nearly the whole of that run.

After serving three terms of imprisonment for smuggling, and for being unable to pay a fine of £4,500, Rattenbury’s many adventures came to an end in 1833. His later years were devoted to fishing and piloting, and between whiles, to composing his reminiscences. In those pages you read this rather pitiful little note: “The smuggler gratefully acknowledges the kindness of the Right Honourable Lord Rolle, who now allows him one shilling per week for life.” What lavish generosity!

That was a picturesque village in which this Old Master and prime exponent of smuggling lived. The one street led steeply down to the sea, with a clear rivulet purling along the gutter, with quaint pumps at intervals and bordered by cob cottages. The peasant women sat at the doors making the pillow-lace of Devonshire, and the children, for lack of better toys, played the great game of “shop” with the fish-offal in the kennel.

But the old Beer of this picture has vanished, and a new and smart village has arisen in its stead, with just two or three of these characteristic survivals, to make us the more bitterly regret that which we have lost. The place that was so inspiring for the artist has become an impossibility for him, except, at the cost of veracity, he dodges the Philistine surroundings of those surviving “bits.” One little circumstance shall show you how artificial this sometime unconventional and simple village has become. When it was the haunt of painters, there was none who loved Beer so much as, or visited it more constantly than, Hamilton Macallum, who died here, aged fifty-five, in 1896. He had endeared himself to the people, and they and some of his brother artists combined to set up the bronze tablet to his memory that stands in the tiny pleasure-ground or public garden in the village street. And here is the sorry humour of it, that shows the damnable artificiality of the times, which has spoiled so much of Old England. The “public garden” is kept locked through the winter and the spring, lest the children go in and spoil it; and only thrown open when the brief visitors’ season begins. There could be no more bitter indictment.

There was once a humble little church in this same street of Beer. A very humble church, but in keeping with the place. And now? Why a large and highly ornate building, infinitely pretentious and big enough for a cathedral, has arisen on the site of it. It is, however, still in keeping with Beer, for as deep calls unto deep, so across this narrow street pretentiousness bids “how d’ye do” to pretence.

There are polished marble pillars in this new church of Beer, where there should be rough-axed masonry, and a suburban high finish in place of a rustic rudeness; and the sole relics of what had once been are the two memorial tablets, themselves sufficiently rural. One is to “John, the fifth sonn of William Starr of Bere, Gent., and Dorothy his wife, which died in the plauge was here Bvried 1646.” John Starr was one of a family which, about a century earlier, had become owners of a moiety of the manor. The house he built in Beer street bears on one chimney the initials “J. S.” and on another a star, in punning allusion to his name.

The other memorial in the church is to “Edward Good, late an Industrious fisherman, who left to the Vicar and Churchwardens for the time being and their successors for ever TWENTY POUNDS in TRUST for the Poor of this Parish. The interest to be Distributed at Christmas in the proportion of two thirds at Beer and one at Seaton. He died November 7, 1804, in sixty-seventh year of his Age.”

Of the four industries of Beer—stone-quarrying smuggling, fishing, and lace-making—the shy business of smuggling has alone disappeared. Those who do not carry their explorations beyond the village street will see nothing of the stone-getting, for the quarries lie away off the road between Beer and Branscombe, where, in a cliff-like scar in the hillside they are still busily being worked.

It must be close upon two thousand years since building-stone was first won from this hillside, for the quarries originated in Roman times. Since then they have been more or less continually worked, and although the ancient caves formed by the old quarrymen in their industry have long been abandoned for the open working, they exist, dark and damp, and not altogether safe for a stranger, running hundreds of yards in labyrinthine passages into the earth. It is of Beer stone that the vaulting and the arches of the nave in Exeter Cathedral were built, 600 years ago; it was used, even earlier in the crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster; in Winchester Cathedral, and many other places; and to-day is as well appreciated as ever, huge eight and ten-ton blocks being a feature in the trucks on the railway sidings down at Seaton. It greatly resembles Bath stone in its fine texture, but is of a more creamy colour and, while softer and more easily worked when newly quarried, dries harder.

In ancient times the stone was shipped from the little cove of Beer, which was thus no inconsiderable place. To improve it, in the words of Leland: “Ther was begon a fair pere for socour of shippelettes, but ther cam such a tempest a three years sins as never in mynd of man had before bene seene in that shore”; and so the pier was washed away, and the fragments of it are all that is to be seen in the unsheltered cove at this day.

The fishermen of Beer are a swarthy race, descended, according to tradition, from the crew of a shipwrecked Spanish vessel, who found the place almost depopulated by that plague of which John Starr was a victim. They and their trawlers, which you see laboriously hauled up on the beach, are in the jurisdiction of the port of Exeter.

Here, in the semicircular cove, the summer sea laps softly among the white pebbles, as innocently as though it had never drowned a poor fisherman; and the white of the chalk cliffs, the equal whiteness of the sea-floor and the clearness of the water itself give deep glimpses down to where the seaweed unfurls its banners from rock and cranny, where the crabs are seen walking about, hesitatingly, like octogenarians, and jelly-fish float midway, lumps of transparency, like marine ghosts. The sea is green here: a light translucent ghostly green, very beautiful and at the same time, back of one’s consciousness—if you examine your feelings—a little mysterious and repellent, suggesting not merely crabs and jelly-fish, but inimical unknown things and infinite perils of the deep, sly, malignant, patiently biding their time. The green sea has not the bluff heartiness of the joyous blue.

The little cove, enclosed as it is by steep cliffs, looks for all the world like a little scene in a little theatre. You almost expect a chorus of fishermen to enter and hold forth musically on the delights of seine-fishing, but they only suggest to the contemplative stranger that it is “a fine day for a row,” and ask, in their rich Devonian tones, if you want a “bwoat.”

The white cliffs of Beer are crannied with honeycombings and fissures, banded with black flints, and here and there patterned with ochreous pockets of earth, where the wild flowers grow as though Dame Nature had been making the workaday place gay with bedding-out plants for the delight of the summer visitors. The visitors are just that second string to their old one-stringed bow of fishing the deep blue sea, which the fishermen sorely need to carry them through the twelve months that—although most things that existed in the nineteenth century have been changed—still make a year; and the visitors who are taken out boating beyond the cove to see the smugglers’ caves are never tired of hearing of Jack Rattenbury, whose tale I have already told.

CHAPTER V
BRANSCOMBE

It is, of course, up-hill out of Beer. One has not been long, or far, in Devonshire before recognising that almost immutable law of the West, by which you descend steeply into every town or village and climb laboriously out. Here it is Beer Head to which you ascend. Beer Head is white, so exceptionally and isolatedly white on this red coast that when, far westward, down Teignmouth and Brixham way, you look back and see along the vaguely defined shore a misty whiteness, you will know it for none other than this headland.

Beyond it and its chalky spires and pinnacles the coast becomes a mere traveller’s bag of samples for awhile; finally, coming to the opening of Branscombe, deciding upon “a good line” of red sandstone, mixed with red marl.

A very serious drawback incidental to the exploration of districts that grow increasingly beautiful as you proceed is that all the available stock of admiratory adjectives is likely to be expended long before the journey’s end. They must be carefully husbanded, or you come at last to a nonplus. Therefore, please at this point to assume beauties that—in the Early Victorian phrasing—can be “more easily imagined than described.” For the rest, conceive a wedge-like opening in the cliffs, cleft to permit the egress to the sea of a little stream, at all times too tiny for such a magnificent portal, and often in summer altogether dried up. On the western side plant a coastguard station, built like a fort and walled like a defensive stockade; and there you have the seaward aspect of Branscombe.

The landward look of it is entirely different. Looking from the sea, and walking away from it, three valleys converging seaward are discovered; each one profound, each richly wooded and fertile, and in each little instalments of Branscombe village, dropped casually, as it were, here and there. I had at first assumed the name “Branscombe” (which is pronounced with a broad “a,” like “ar”) to be derived in part from the British brân, a crow, and “Crowcombe” it might well be; but it seems, by the dedication of the church to SS. Winifred and Bradwalladr, that it is really St. Brannoc’s Combe, for “Brannoc” is an alias of Bradwalladr.

Away up the valley road are little groups of the quaintest cottages, with tiny strips of gardens scarce more than two feet wide, forming, as it were, a fringe or hem to the walls, and merging directly, without fence, into the roadway. But no gardens anywhere can show greater fertility or a more pleasing variety of flowers. Among them are to be seen spoils of the neighbouring cliffs, in the shape of petrified vegetation from the coast between Branscombe and Weston Mouth.

Where the roadway climbs round the most impressive bend, and the great wooded hills look down on the other side of the valley, with almost equidistant notches in their skyline, like the embrasures of cyclopean fortifications, stands the ancient church of Branscombe. It is oddly placed, considerably below the level of the road, and is so old and rugged, and has been so long untouched, that it looks more like some silver-grey and lichened rocky outcrop, rudely fashioned in the form of a church, than the work of builder and architect. And it is in such entire accord with the rocks and trees, the ferns and grasses, the spouting rivulets and moist skies of this secluded valley, that the dedication of it should more appropriately be to the sylvan gods of the classic age. There have been those scribbling tourists who, passing by and looking upon the time-worn building, have acted the part of agent provocateur to “restoring” zealots by dwelling upon the dampness of it, and the “meanness” of the box-like deal pews of the interior; but not yet have their instigations to crime against the picturesque been acted upon, and the ferns and mosses still sprout from the time-worn tower and the interior is still, in its whitewash, its pews, and its wooden pulpit, an example of the simple sway of the churchwarden and the village carpenter of a simpler age.

One highly elaborate monument redeems the church from a charge of emptiness. It is the interesting memorial of Joan Tregarthin, her husbands, John Kellaway and John Wadham, and her twenty children; all of them duly sculptured in effigy. The Wadhams were the great landowners of Branscombe, away back to the fourteenth century. Among those twenty children is Nicholas Wadham, the last of his race, who died in 1609, and with his wife Dorothy founded Wadham College, Oxford.

The churchyard of Branscombe is a well-stored repository of unusual epitaphs, ranging from the sentimental to the unconsciously humorous and the terrifying. Of the last sort the following is a good example:

The uncertainty as to what this malignant gentleman really intends to convey does by no means lessen his impressiveness.

The lengthiest of them all is the following, on a time-worn altar-tomb outside the porch:

Another records the end of a labourer accidentally shot on his returning home from work, and yet another is to an exciseman, “who fell from the cliff between Beer and Seaton, as he was extinguishing a fire which was a signal to a smuggling boat.” The verse on Joseph Braddick, a farmer, who died suddenly at sheep-shearing, hesitates between flippancy and exhortation:

This collection is ended with the touching record of a French sailor-lad:

There is fine, rough walking up over the cliffs past the coastguard station of Branscombe, or down by the sandy shingle to Littlecombe Shoot and Weston Mouth, where the landsprings well out of the marly cliff-sides and petrify everything within reach. At the cost of scaling some of the buttery slides of red mud, and becoming more or less smothered with an ochreous mess resembling anchovy paste, it is possible to find most interesting examples of petrified moss and blackberry brambles; but the weaker brethren and those “righteous men” (as defined by Mrs. Poyser), who are “keerful of their clothes,” purchase such specimens as they may at Branscombe, and on their return home, yarn about the Alpine difficulties of discovering them.

On the summit to the western side of Weston Mouth, away back from the beetling edge of Dunscombe Cliff, 350 feet above the sea, stands the picturesque group of Dunscombe Farm and the ruined, ivy-mantled walls of what seems to have been an old manor-house. To this succeeds the valley of Salcombe, with the village of Salcombe Regis, away a mile inland.

It is a long, long way into Sidmouth, through Salcombe Regis, whose “Regis” was added so long ago as the time of Athelstan, who owned the manor and the salt-pans down in the combe by the sea. When you have come to the houses and think this is Sidmouth, it is only Landpart, and there is very near another mile to go; which, if you have acquired what the Devon people call a “kibbed”—that is to say a rubbed—heel by dint of much walking, is a distressing thing.

CHAPTER VI
SIDMOUTH

Coming into Sidmouth, you see at once that you are arrived in a Superior Place, and, before you are perceived, make haste to brush the dust off your boots, put your headgear straight, and, in general making yourself look as respectable as may be possible to a rambler in the byways, step forth with a jaunty air; just as the postboys in the old days, driving my lord home, although their horses might be exhausted, always “kept a gallop for the avenue.”

Sidmouth was the first of Devonshire seaside resorts, and had arrived at that condition long before Thackeray wrote of it as “Baymouth,” in Pendennis. Do you remember how “Pen flung stones into the sea, but it still kept coming on”? It seems hardly worth while to have said as much, but having been said, let it be put on record that it has lost none of its ancient courage in the meanwhile, and in spite of every intimidation, will still “come on” if you follow Pen’s example; unless, indeed, you choose the ebb, when, strange to say, it will retreat. It is believed that this odd phenomenon has been observed elsewhere.

Before Torquay, Teignmouth, Exmouth, and other places had begun to develop, Sidmouth was a place of fashion, and the signs of that early favour are still abundantly evident in the town, which is largely a place of those prim-frontaged, white-faced houses we associate with the early years of the nineteenth century. It belongs, in fact, to the next period following that of Lyme Regis, and has just reached the point of being very quaint and old-world and interesting, as we and ours will have become in the course of another century. The stucco of Sidmouth is not as the plaster of Torquay, any more than that of Park Lane is like the plaster of Notting Hill. It is of the more suave, kid-glove texture we associate with Park Lane, is white-painted, and is only a distant cousin of the later plaster of Notting Hill and Torquay, which is grey, and painted in wholly immoral shades of drab and dun, green, pink, and red; in anything, indeed, but the virginal white of Sidmouth.

And now, in this town which ought to be jealously preserved as a precious specimen of what the watering place of close upon a century ago was like, the restless evidences of our own time are becoming plentiful; older houses giving way to new, of the pretentious character so well suited to the age, and in red brick and terra-cotta; the inevitable architectural reach-me-downs that have obtained ever since Bedford Park set the vogue.

Why, confound the purblind, batlike stupidity of it! red brick is not wanted at Sidmouth, where the cliffs are the very reddest of all Devon. We need not give the old builders of white-faced Sidmouth any credit for artistic perceptions, for they could not choose but build in the fashion of their age, and everywhere alike, after our own use and wont; but, by chance, they did exactly the right thing here, and in midst of this richest red of the cliffs, this emerald green of the exquisite foliage, this yellow of the beach, deep blue of the sea, and cerulean blue above, planted their terraces and isolated squares of cool, contrasting whiteness. It was a white period, if you come to consider it, a time of book-muslin and simplicity, both natural and affected, and although Sidmouth was fashionable it was not flamboyant.

To this place, for health and quiet, on account of their embarrassed finances, and for the sake of their infant daughter, the Princess Victoria, then only a few months old, the Duke and Duchess of Kent came in the autumn of 1819, and took up their residence at the pretty cottage in Woolacombe Glen, still standing at the western extremity of the town. Here, quite unexpectedly, for he was a robust man, and but fifty-three years of age, the Duke died, January 23rd, 1820, from inflammation of the lungs, the result of a chill. Croker wrote of the event: “You will be surprised at the Duke of Kent’s death. He was the strongest of the strong. Never before ill in all his life, and now to die of a cold when half the kingdom have colds with impunity. It was very bad luck indeed. It reminds me of Æsop’s fable of the oak and the reed.”

Sidmouth continued to grow in favour for years afterwards, and only began to experience neglect when the opening of the railways to the West discovered other beautiful spots in Devonshire. Next to the Royal association already recounted, Sidmouth most prides itself on the fact that in 1831 the Grand Duchess Helene of Russia for three months resided at Fortfield Terrace. Without recourse to a book of reference I do not quite know who exactly was this Grand Duchess, and am not so impressed as I doubtless ought to be. Nor do I think any one else is impressed; but the local historian will never forget the circumstance, and indeed it is devoutly kept in remembrance by the black effigy of a double-headed eagle on the frontage of the terrace.

The railway that took away the prosperity of Sidmouth is now instrumental in keeping it prosperously select, for it is something of a business to arrive in Sidmouth by train, and a great deterrent to trippers to have to change at Sidmouth Junction and, journeying by a branch line, to be deposited on the platform of Sidmouth station, one mile from the town.

Sidmouth is in these days recovering something of its own. Not perhaps precisely in the same way, for the days of early nineteenth-century aristocratic fashion can never again be repeated on this earth. But a new vogue has come to it, and it is as exclusive in its new way as it was in the old; if not, indeed, more exclusive. More exclusive, more moneyed, not at all well-born, jewelled up to the eyes, and only wanting the final touch of being ringed through the nose. Oddly enough, it is a world quite apart from the little town; hidden from it, for the most part, in the hotels of the place. Most gorgeous and expensive hotels, standing in extensive grounds of their own, and all linked together in a business amalgamation, with the object of keeping up prices and shutting out competition.

It is not easy to see for what purpose the patrons of these places come to Sidmouth, unless to come down to breakfast dressed as though one were going to a ball, and dressing thrice a day and sitting in the grounds all day long be objects sufficient. From this point of view, Sidmouth town is a kind of dependence to the hotels, an accidental, little known, unessential hem or fringe, where one cannot wear ball-dresses and tiaras without exciting unpleasant criticism.

Bullion without birth, money without manners are in process of revolutionising some aspects of Sidmouth, and it is quite in accord with the general trend of things that the newest, the largest, the reddest, and the most insistent of the hotels should have shoved a great hulking shoulder up against the pretty, rambling, white-faced cottage in Woolacombe Glen, where some earliest infant months of Queen Victoria were passed, and that it should have exploited the association by calling itself the “Victoria.”

There is no river mouth at all at Sidmouth, and the Sid, which so plentifully christens places on its banks, has not water enough to force its way to sea, as a river should. Instead, it abjectly crawls through the pebbles of the beach, as though wishful of escaping observation; but when storms heap up sand and shingle and the Sid is denied even this humble outlet, then it becomes an urgent matter to hire labour for the speedy digging out a passage, lest the low-lying town should be flooded.

The sea-front of Sidmouth is, indeed, yet an unsolved problem. Many centuries ago, there seems to have been a harbour where the beach and the walk of the Esplanade now stand, the constant easterly drift of shingle being kept well out to sea by a cliff projecting from the Western end of the town, where its last remains, the Chit Rock, stood until 1824. But that protecting headland was gradually worn away and by sure degrees the river mouth was choked with shingle. It is much the same story as that which belongs to the Axe and to other rivers and obliterated harbours of South Devon.

Many projects have from time to time been set afoot to remedy this state of affairs, but without success. A plan to excavate the river mouth and form a harbour was mooted in 1811, and another in 1825. Again, in 1836, an attempt was made to construct a harbour pier on the site of the Chit Rock, but was soon abandoned. Even the more modest attempt made in 1876, to build a pier on either side of the river mouth—or rather, where the river mouth should be—failed; and it seems as though what was long ago written of Sidmouth will long continue to be true of it: “In times past a port of some account, now choaked with chisel and sands by the vicissitudes of the tides.”

At present, Sidmouth beach is open and exposed, like that of Seaton, but even when Turner made his drawing for the projected work on the “Harbours of England,” although there was certainly nothing even remotely like a harbour here, the Chit Rock remained, to afford some slight protection.

But the Chit Rock itself has disappeared. It vanished in that terrible November storm of 1824, of whose traces there seems to be no end on the southern coasts. With the rock went a number of cottages, and with the cottages almost went the inhabitants, among them the real original Dame Partington, who was rash enough to attempt to mop up the waves.

Mrs. Partington might never have attained immortality, had it not been for Sydney Smith, who in 1831 compared the House of Lords, rejecting the Reform Bill, with her. Reform, he said, would come. The Lords were like Dame Partington at Sidmouth, who attempted to keep out the Atlantic with a mop, and failed. “She was excellent at a slop or puddle, but should never have meddled with a tempest.”

The old parish church was rebuilt, except the tower, in 1859. It was a rather wanton work, and to some minds the purely secular use made of a portion of its stones may be shocking. Those of the most sacred part of the building, the chancel, were sold and used in the erection of a singular-looking villa close at hand, named from this circumstance, “The Old Chancel.”

There can be few more charming nooks than that of Woolacombe Glen, where the cottage of Princess Victoria’s early infancy still stands; a white-fronted, long, low, rambling building set in midst of the most cool and delightful lawns and overhung by trees. But, charming though it be, the Glen is not what it was at that time, for the broad road leading down to the Esplanade is a modern innovation constructed on the site of other lawns, through which a little stream flowed to the sea. Alas! for that clear-running Woolabrook. It has been compelled into an underground pipe. And—a last little irritating pin-prick—the “Woolacombe” in the name of the glen is now shorn of the peculiarly Devonian connecting and softening a between the syllables, and has become merely “Woolcombe.” How horrid the deed, and how excruciating the thought that, if the same amputating process were extended throughout the county, we should exchange Babbacombe for “Babbcombe,” Lannacombe for “Lanncombe,” Ellacombe for “Ellcombe,” and the less lovely like of them!

High Peak, the tremendous hill and cliff that shuts in Sidmouth on the west, is well named. The road up to the top of it is a mile of exhausting gradients, with fortunately a little grassy ledge on the way, whence you look down on to a distant beach and along the pebbly coast to Ladram Bay and Otterton Point. Ladram Bay is reached either by cliff-top or along that tiring beach; or, greatly to be recommended above all other courses, by boat from Sidmouth, one of whose boatmen, with the pachydermatous hands that would scarce feel any effect from rowing fifty miles, will take you there if you give him a chance.

Ladram Bay was undoubtedly made expressly for picnics. There cannot be the least question of it. Geologists write profound things about the raised beach and the pebbles—Triassic, Silurian, or what not jargon—that compose it, but Nature most certainly in prophetic mood designed beach, natural arch, and caves for lunch and laughter, and as a romantic background for flirtations.

CHAPTER VII
OTTERTON—EAST BUDLEIGH—SIR WALTER RALEIGH

At the summit of High Peak is the common of Muttersmoor, whence the way goes steeply down into the valley of the River Otter, at length reaching the village of Otterton, down the sides of whose one quaint street, of a rustic, straw-littered, farm-like untidiness, flow streamlets bridged by little brick and timber spans.

Otterton is thoroughly Devonian. What it is to be so will, perhaps, not be understood by those unfamiliar with rustic Devon; but here is the recipe for such a characteristic place. Take an Irish, a Welsh, a Highland, and a Breton village, stir them up well in a fine, confused Celtic medley, add abundance of flowers, wild and cultivated, and then leave in the sun.

On a rise, above the river and the village street, stands the “fayre howse” built by Richard Duke, who in 1539 bought the Otterton property of Sion Abbey, and set up for lord of the manor. His shield-of-arms, sculptured over the door, is still visible, but his fair house has come down in the world, and the line of Duke of Otterton ended in 1775, when the Rolles acquired their belongings. The traveller in South East Devon very soon has a surfeit of Rolles, who seem to be pervading the land and rebuilding the interesting churches, and generally occulting everything. Here again the old church has been replaced by a new.

Below church and manor-house runs the lovely Otter to the sea. The Otter is twin brother to the Axe, and the Exe is the big brother of both. The strath—that is to say the verdant, low-lying meadowland—of the Otter is of that quiet, wooded, pastoral beauty which makes the nearness of the sea seem strange. But the speciality of the Otter seems to be its pebbles, or “popples,” as the name is, locally. There are more pebbles on the Chesil Beach; but then, that is one of the two greatest repositories for them in the world, and the popples of the Otter and of the seashore at Budleigh Salterton, where they are not only numerous, but very fine and large as well, are a class to themselves. Little beaches of them skirt the course of the river, and the matter of two and a half miles up-stream from Otterton is a village, as one may say, dedicated to them, in its name of Newton Poppleford; and there the popples muster as strongly as ever by the ford, which is now superseded by a bridge.

But now, crossing the Otter, we come to East Budleigh, by threading the mazes of two or three byways.

East Budleigh is a pretty village, with a little stream, clear-running, down one side of its street and a great church on the rise at the end; but, for all that, I should not have come out of the way to see it, were it not that a landmark of more than common interest lies half a mile on the other side. That landmark is Hayes Barton, the still extant farmstead that was the birthplace of Sir Walter Raleigh.

The first part of the name of Hayes Barton derives from the Anglo-Saxon haga, a hedge, or cultivated enclosure from surrounding wastes, and there are, to this day, “hayes,” and “hays,” in abundance in this shire of Devon. Even in the urban circumstances of Exeter we find them, in the enclosed public pleasure-ground of Northernhay, and the square of Southernhay. “Barton” has a variety of meanings, from granary, rickyard, farmyard, and cattle-shed, to a large farm; a small farm being generally, in Devon, styled a “living.” In the time of Sir Walter Raleigh’s father, Hayes Barton was sold to the Duke family, of Otterton, and from its old name of Poerhayes, or Power’s Heys, it became known as Dukesheyes. In the eighteenth century, as we have already seen, it passed to the Rolles, whose paws have comprehended so much of the land between Seaton and Exmouth.

The old farm-house, smartened up with a facing of that stucco which is so beloved by Devon folk that it is almost a wonder they don’t make it an article of diet, stands now as ever in a hollow of the hills, remote; for although Budleigh Salterton has expanded into a townlet, I do not suppose the village of East Budleigh has grown appreciably in all these centuries. Bating that stucco, and the sixty-year-old brick outhouses, the farm must be much the same, and you may still see the old woodwork and the old stone flags of the lower rooms, and may even, by courtesy, peep into the bedroom—that is the window of it, the upper window in the left-hand gable—where that gallant soul first saw the light of day.

Here, in this modest farmstead, that great Elizabethan was born, in 1552, son of Walter Raleigh and his wife Katherine, who came of that old Devon family, the Champernownes of Modbury. She had first married Otto Gilbert, who died leaving her with two sons, themselves to grow up explorers and colonists. She would seem, therefore, to have been a woman of remarkable character.