The interesting person, who thus cheated the unfortunate Richard Jarvis of the few years that probably, in the course of nature, would have remained to him, was one Rebecca Downing, who was executed at the end of the following July at Ringswell, Heavitree, near Exeter; the old-time spot where Devonshire criminals and martyrs suffered; but this was really not quite so fearful an execution as it looks, for she was first hanged and her body then cut down and burnt. The exceptional treatment of hanging and then burning the body of the criminal was owing to the crime being, over and above that of murder, the particularly heinous one, in the eye of the old laws, of petit treason, the murdered person being the master of, and person in authority over, the assassin.

Coming down a breakneck path from Portlemouth to the ferry, you find yourself come, not only to an out-of-the-way spot, but to a place where, for the first time, you have a foretaste of the Cornish way of speech. Some one aboard the ferry-boat compares this arm of the sea with Fowey. “Aw, my dear man,” says the ferryman, “’tes wider yur than ’tes tu Foy: ees, feth.”

That is a kind of middle-marches compromise between the Devon talk and that of Cornwall, where, instead of say “yes, faith,” they say, “iss, fay.”

CHAPTER XXIII
SALCOMBE—KINGSBRIDGE—SALCOMBE CASTLE—BOLT HEAD—HOPE

It is quite a narrow passage across the Kingsbridge River to Salcombe, and shut in majestically by dark rocks and a winding channel. The little town dabbles its feet in the deep water of this arm of the sea, and is in every way a fishy and marine place; but, unless you are lodged in one or other of the houses that rise sheer from the water, it is little or nothing of the sea you will get a sight of. Only from the two narrow alleys leading to the ferry stairs, or down the infrequent passages on to littery quays, is any outlook possible; and it is quite a mile before the jealously walled-in villas and estates of the outskirts cease and one comes to the little bay of South Sands. The naturally uncomfortable physical circumstances of Salcombe, which has no foreshore for the visitor, no pier, and no seats anywhere, are jealously preserved in all their rigours by the luxurious villadom of the place, which has hitherto succeeded in keeping the railway out, and would, if it were possible, put a ring-fence around the neighbourhood and exclude every one but those who are necessary to minister to their wants. Salcombe is probably the most exclusive place on this, or any other coast, and its exclusiveness is, singularly enough, shared by all classes in the place. Here is a literally reproduced conversation that enforces the point.

“Why, ’tes like this yur, ye see, Salcombe don’ want no railway; we’m martel glad, I zhuree, ’ur didden coom no furder’n Kingsbridge, an’ them as wants et now’d be main zorry et ever comed, ef’t du coom. Some on ’em wrote their names down on what they carled a petition for et. That old feller nex’ door to me was one on ’em. ‘Aw, yo’ ole fule,’ I ses, friendly like, ‘what av’ee dued now; baintee zatisfied tu be left peaceable? Why, yo’ must be maazed; vair zillee, fer zure. Scralee out yer name to-rights,’ ses I; ‘us-uns, don’ wan’ no railways yur.’”

“And the railway has been abandoned, then?”

“Zim zo: leastways we’m niver yurd nuthin’ more on’t.”

“But why object to a railway: it would bring more people? Look how prosperous Kingsbridge has become since the railway was opened.”

“Aw, my dear sawl, ther’s no livin’ fer poor vo’k wher’ ther’s a railway. It doubles yer rent an’ the price of yer food, an’ all the gentry goes away, an’ all them as cooms into the place on business, an’ usen’d be able to git out’n it agen in a hurry, why, they’m off agen same arternoon.”

And that’s true enough, as Kingsbridge has discovered. Meanwhile, Salcombe remains a place which may not inaptly be compared with a lobster pot or a beetle-trap. It is not difficult to enter, but it is difficult to leave, unless you are prepared to hoof it, as many a commercial traveller knows.

Touch is kept with the outer world by means of an omnibus to Kingsbridge and by a steamer plying up and down the river; and sometimes the Kingsbridge Packet voyages out to sea, and comes at last to a safe haven in Plymouth Barbican after having casually taken ground on a mud-bank or two down the river. The Kingsbridge Packet is not precisely a liner, and is indeed a cargo-boat which does not even disdain potatoes and live sheep.

“Kingsbridge River” is altogether a misnomer. It is a five-mile long inlet of the sea, with numerous subsidiary creeks winding between the hills. The scenery is rendered comparatively desolate by the lack of woods, and it is of a peculiar solitude. Kingsbridge town itself sits at the head of the creek, and is a thriving little place. The villages of Charleton, Frogmore, and South Pool stand on their respective creeks.

Salcombe is not a little proud of its literary association with Froude, who entertained Tennyson at his residence, Woodcot, toward the close of their respective careers, and it is a cherished article of faith that the Poet Laureate here received the inspiration of his “Crossing the Bar.” Froude himself sleeps in the cemetery on the hill-top, where his epitaph may be read with interest:—

In Memory of
James Anthony Froude, M.A.,
Regius Professor of
Modern History, Oxford.
Son of the Rev. R. H. Froude,
late Archdeacon of Totnes.
Born at Dartington
April 23, 1818,
Died at Salcombe,
October 20, 1894.

He drew a picture of Carlyle which hero-worshippers have bitterly resented, but a picture that shows the man, alike in his strength and his weakness; that makes him just human, instead of the infallible philosopher, superior to all littlenesses and prejudices, of a growing tradition.

Salcombe Castle, or Fort Charles, situated on a rocky islet off South Sands, was a ruinous mediæval tower in the time of the Cromwellian wars, but the perfervid loyalty of the West repaired it and fortified the place with cannon, throwing in an armed garrison, fully provisioned, at a cost, as the surviving accounts state, of £3,196 14s. 6d. During a four months’ bombardment in 1646, in which the gunners were such extravagantly bad marksmen that only one person on each side was killed, Sir Edmund Fortescue held the fort, and then, only through some doubts of the loyalty of members of his garrison, capitulated and marched out, with guns firing, drums beating, and colours flying, to the seclusion of his own mansion at Fallapit. The bravado of this capitulation was more fatal than the siege, for three persons were accidentally shot.

If the landowners of Salcombe had their way it is little of the coast scenery hereabouts the public would see. Of late years the grassy summit of the cliffs looking upon Salcombe Castle has been enclosed and planted, and now, passing the inlet of South Sands, and coming to Splatt’s Cove, a notice-board beside the path announces that “by the order of Ford’s Trustees” there is no right of way. My own advice to those who are confronted with notices such as this is, enter if you wish; and in this instance the Salcombe Urban District Council have given the lie direct to the impudent contention of the Trustees, and have erected a prominent notice of their own, side by side with the other, stating that, notwithstanding this warning, a right of way does exist.

Changeful has been the policy here. A former Earl of Devon, resident at the Moult, caused the Courtenay Walk to be cut midway up the once-inaccessible face of the cliffs round to Bolt Head, or, to speak by the card, “The Bolt.” And now, passing the mutually destructive notices above Splatt’s Cove, and under a recently built hotel, we find the entrance to that walk flanked with offensively worded injunctions to keep to the path; by which it is abundantly evident that the present owner would dearly like to close it altogether. Here stands, or clings, a modern villa, on the edge of the sloping cliff, with a little terrace down below, like a tiny gun-platform.

The Walk begins by burrowing through a stunted wood, that looks romantic enough to be pixie-haunted. And, by the same token, the foxglove grows abundantly in its shade, so the pixies must needs foregather here; for the foxglove provides gloves for the little “folk” and has nothing at all to do with foxes. They are the splendidest gloves you ever saw, much superior to the best gants de suéde that ever were, and neither Fownes nor Dent and Allcroft have ever made anything like them. That is quite certain. And if you come here at midnight and turn round three times and say “willie-willie wiskins,” you will see—what you will see. I can say no more than that, because whoso gives away the secrets of the little folk is lost.

Beyond the wood you come to very weird scenery indeed, along the boulderesque footpath, with bracken and hoar rock intermingled, and the blue sea below on the left and great grey spires of cliff overhead on the right, splashed with lichens red, golden, tawny, pallid green—all colours. Then rise in front of you the Pinnacles. You see at once, when you are come in sight of them, that you are come by quick change from the territory of the little folk into some Arthuresque land of the giants, for the great fantastic pinnacles are in twisted and contorted forms that suggest having originally been fashioned when warm and plastic by some Titan hand.

The slaty stratification of the surrounding rocks lends itself to the most outlandish horrent shapes of monstrous jibing faces, anvils, halberds, battle axes, and the likeness of a perfect armoury of magic weapons of offence, taking their most uncanny guise in the ragged mists that almost always enwrap and cling about The Bolt.

It seems that, contrary to general belief, this headland, of which these Pinnacles are the culminating point, is not the real Bolt Head. It is the further point, across the intervening valley, where the explorer finds the coastguard path die away, and himself perilously walking on the treacherous grassy slopes, where a slip will conduct at express speed on to some particularly sharp and cruel-looking rocks. It is like an inferno down there, in the sense that the descent is fatally easy, and to retrace one’s steps—or rather, flight—impossible. It is here that, warily shirking the point, you wish you hadn’t come; that you were a goat or a chamois, or, at the very least of it, that you had spikes in the soles of your shoes.

But they are lovely, as well as awe-inspiring, glimpses down there, sheer into the sea, where the cliff-walls are as black as coal and the sea now a dark, now a light green, here and there ringing a half-submerged rock with creamy foam. Hollow sound the surges in those cavernous depths, and reverberant the cries of the seagulls. Such is the extremity of the real Bolt, out yonder.

The descent from the Pinnacles leads down into a solitary valley, with towering fantastic rocks on the one side and the sea on the other. A deserted cottage standing near the sea emphasises the loneliness. The cottage has a story, for it was built to house the submarine cable from Brest, landed here in May 1870. Here, thank goodness, you plunge out of the over-civilisation of to-day, and, leaving hotels behind, come for a space into something of the rural England of sixty years since. Here, where nature is so beautiful and the littlenesses of towns are left behind, one can understand something of that latter-day portent, Anarchism, which, in this close touch with mother earth, reveals itself as a divine discontent with lovely things exploited and degraded, rather than the bogey of statesmen and sociologists.

Stair Hole Bottom they call this valley. It is carpeted with bracken; a little peaty stream comes oozing along in boggy places, or purling, as from the lip of a jug, over scattered boulders, overhung by the nodding foxglove. It is, in a word, Cornish, rather than Devonian, and, as commonly is the case in Cornwall, you have to pick your way among the chancy places, for lack of road or path.

Looking back, the Pinnacles show fitfully through the mist, the hole through them, like an All-seeing Eye, glowering darkly as the mists close in, or lightening, with a tinge of beneficence, in the sun.

On those moist, hot, steamy Devonshire days, when the mist, condensed off the sea, rolls like smoke over the rocky ledges, you look over the cliffs’ edge into a pillowy whiteness, which, for all you may discover, is the next field, or a sheer drop of three hundred feet on to a rocky beach. But through the smother, like a warning cry, comes dully the turmoil of the waves, the husky voice of the sea, sounding to the unromantic Londoner like the roaring of the traffic in his native streets, as heard from one of the metropolitan parks.

The coastguard path is rugged and perilous, and the whitened stones of it are apt to fail one at critical moments, like moral resolutions in the pathway of life. Sometimes they are not there at all, and in some spots they are so overgrown with bracken that you barge into them unawares, with painful results.

Up at Clewer signal station, where the coastguard, outside his tiny whitewashed hut, does incomprehensible things with strings of flags, the wild growths of these downs run riot, kept in subjection only by the winds, which have imposed the oddest shapes upon them. The gorse-bushes have been buffeted by them into closely compacted hummocky figures, the heather is disposed in hemispherical groups, the brambles, turn in upon themselves in a way the free-born hedgerow bramble would despise, and only the bracken, which is a summer growth and, like the grass of the field, here to-day and gone to-morrow, is independent and upstanding. The beautiful bracken! Come here in July, and you will think all the strawberries in the world are on t’other side of the next shoulder of hill; for in that month the bracken has a perfume like that of the ripest and choicest and sweetest strawberries ever grown.

There are rabbits on these uplands, as with a painful wrench of the ankle you are not unlikely to discover, when your foot plunges unexpectedly into one of their burrows. There are moles, too, evidently, and slow-worms wriggle plentifully across the path.

And thus, now up, now down and around, with the perspiration streaming from you in the still, close hollows, and drying off on the breezy heights, you come by astonishing rocks down to a little sandy rock-girt cove, solitary, without even a Man Friday’s footprints on the yellow sand, through which a little stream trickles. But though no human footprint may be seen, the sands are patterned by the thousand with the broad-arrow prints of the gulls’ feet, as though the War Office had descended upon the place and thus prodigally marked it for its ownest own.

One could and two could even better—go a-Robinson-Crusoeing here very comfortably for awhile in the summer, with the aid of a tent, despite the unlovely name of the place, which is Sewer Mill Cove.

What’s in a name? Not much here, at any rate, for it has really nothing to do with drains. There are several “sewer” farms in the neighbourhood, east and west, and the district in general is called “The Sewers”: the name deriving from the Anglo-Saxon description of the folk living here, the “Sæware,” the sea-folk, as distinguished from those who, living a little more inland, obtained their livelihood from the land. The process by which the place took its name is not an unusual one; and Canterbury—the “burgh of the Kent-ware,” or Kentish folk—may be taken as a prominent and familiar instance.

Sewer Mill Cove was the scene in 1885 of one of the many wrecks that have made this coast dreaded by mariners, for then the Hallowe’en teaship was cast away here, fortunately without loss of life.

The downs here, at the summit of the cliffs between this and Hope, are those of Bolberry, whence comes, some consider, the name of Bolt Head. Heather clothes them and the cliff-tops with a more than imperial magnificence. Imperial mantles are poor things and tawdry beside such purple splendour. If Solomon in all his glory were not arrayed like the lilies of the field, certainly no emperor has ever attained to the gorgeousness of the heather.

It is an untameable wilderness on these heights, for the land is of such negative quality that it is worth no farmer’s while to touch it, and moreover, great fissures and holes, like those of earthquakes, partly masked by undergrowth, exist here. The country people speak of them as Ralph’s Pits, Vincent Pits, Rotten Pits. Ralph, they tell you, was a smuggler, and that is the closest touch you can make to him. Ralph is as insubstantial as the mists that come streaking over the downs.

Now we come to Bolt Tail and the signal-station, overlooking Ramilies Cove, where the Ramilies man-o’-war was wrecked in 1760. Seven hundred and eight of the seven hundred and thirty four men on board perished. Down below lies Hope village, in its tiny cove, where an island can be seen in the making; a great mass of rock dividing the cove in two being joined to the mainland only by strips of sand and heaps of tumbled boulders. It was here that one of the many ships of the Spanish Armada was wrecked: so many ships and so many wrecks that the pen revolts from writing about them, even as the London apprentices revolted, in the centuries gone by, against salmon every day. These Spanish Armada ships are the “salmon every day,” or the toujours perdrix, if you like to put it in terms of a surfeit of game, of the historian of the coasts. Scarce a cove but they dashed their stout timbers to pieces upon its rocks, and those beaches are few that have no legends of silver ingots, pieces of eight, moidores, doubloons, dollars, and all the glittering galaxy of treasure-trove deriving from such a romantic source; but devil a dollar has rewarded the quest of this pilgrim, errant with the best will to it.

Then, if you have faith, you may see in every dark-featured Devonian a descendant from a captured or shipwrecked Don. There are the names of Miggs and Jenny (among others), which may, or again may not, derive from Miguel and Jeronimo, and Cantrell has been recognised as a debased form of Alcantara, but ’tis a far cry. Here, at any rate, we know the name and rating of the Spanish vessel. She was the hospital-ship St. Peter the Great, and was on her way home, after having, in flight from Drake and his fellows, circumnavigated Great Britain. One hundred and fifty of the one hundred and ninety aboard of her were saved; and possibly the Delmers, the Jaggers, and the Murrens to be met with are descendants of that crew.

Hope is just bidding “good day t’ye” to the old immemorial times, when it was just a hamlet of crabbers and lobster-catchers and the like, for villas and bungalows are putting the old cottages of cob and rock to shame, and they are becoming, although still a small community, as up-to-date as you please, or you don’t please. No longer, I think, is the once-famous “White Ale” of South Devon made or sold at Hope, or even at Kingsbridge; once, in some sort, the metropolis of its brewing. But we need not regret the disappearance of this heady nastiness, which was not in the least like ale, and more nearly resembled that extremely potent and convivial compound, “egg-flip,” than anything else. But “White Ale” had a great and an ancient reputation, and was described a couple of centuries ago as “the nappiest ale that can be drunk.” It was held to be the “ancient and peculiar drink of the Britons and Englishmen, and the wholesomest, whereby many in elder times lived a hundred years.”

If we can frame to believe that, then the disappearance of it is something like a national disaster; but it may well be supposed that although the numbers of police-court cases would sensibly increase with the re-introduction of “White Ale,” those of centenarians would not. The composition of this tipple, which is really grey, seems to be milk, gin, and spice, and, bottled, it blows off in hot weather like a high-pressure boiler.

CHAPTER XXIV
THURLESTONE—THE AVON—BOROUGH ISLAND—RINGMORE—KINGSTON—THE ERME

The little headland enclosing the western side of Hope Cove forms the eastern horn of Thurlestone Bay, and as you rise the neck of land dividing the two, you see the strange rock with the hole through it—the Thurlestone—which gives a name, not only to the sandy bay, but to the village of Thurlestone, which stands with its ancient church on the bare hillsides beyond. The Thurlestone, is a mass of red conglomerate, oddly isolated amid the neighbouring slate, standing in deep water, surrounded by a group of small satellite rocks and reefs, and derives its name from the Anglo-Saxon, “thyrlian,” to pierce. It is thus “the drilled,” or pierced stone, and claims philological kin with “nostril,” or nose-hole, and “thrall,” a slave whose ear has been pierced. That standby of topographers, the Domesday Book, calls the village “Torlestan,” which is as near as the Norman-French scribe could arrive at the sound of the Saxon word. My own respect for the Thurlestone is considerably heightened by this evidence of its having worn, a thousand years ago, very much the same appearance it does now. Curiously enough, there is a Thirlestane Castle in Scotland.

When the south-westerly winds bring great seas raging into the bay, with towering white combers dashing in upon the sands, the Thurlestone finds a voice and calls with a sound of roaring, all over this countryside. The rustics say that at such times you shall hear the bellowing of the Thurlestone ten miles distant.

For myself, I have come to Thurlestone at a time when there are no voices, save the cat-like screaming of the gulls and the horrible squawking noises of the cruiser setting out to sea from Hope Cove, and bidding a series of half-suffocated good-byes with her steam-whistles, dreadfully like some one being very offensively sick. Noises are not common on Thurlestone strand, and I would even say it was lonely, save that the millions of sand-fleas inhabiting the shore forbid the thought.

I have bought a piece of Dutch cheese and some biscuits, and disregarding the inmates of the one hideously plastered boarding-house recently built here, take off shoes and stockings, and sitting on a convenient rock sliding down into deep water, come into intimate touch with the infinities, and make these notes. Two pennyworth of Dutch cheese, with biscuits to match, a comfortable seat on a rocky ledge, your feet dabbling in the clear water, and sunshine over all, will bring you into close relation with the Infinite. Here I hew off in the rough a slab of the Simple Life, and enjoy it hugely. It is, I suppose, the sunshine and the solitude in collaboration. At any rate, it is obviously enough not the white ale.

There are cornelians and lovely pebbles on this lonely strand, and sea-anemones, to the eye appetisingly like fruit-jellies, on the rocks. Alas! they are not good to eat, and as fairy gold, we all know, turns to sere leaves, so the translucent pebbles of the wet sea-shore become the commonplace opaque stones that the next day we turn disgustedly out of our pockets. In short, it is life in little you find reflected here, and reduces the heady optimism of a summer noon to something like tears. I don’t expect, or hope, every one who comes to this salt margin of Devon will feel thus. This it is to be cursed with temperament, to be, against your will, a snivelling sentimentalist, whom the lowing of the cattle at eventide, the distant tinkling of the sheep-bells, or the very beauty of day or place will suffice to reduce to a chastened melancholy.

Thurlestone church is neighboured on the hillside in these expansive times by a golf club, which, in the interest of golf-balls, has actually had the impudence to spread wire-netting over the charming little rustic stream that here flows to the sea; and near by are the ornate brand-new villas built and furnished by speculators with an eye on the possible huge profits to be earned from letting them for the summer season, in these times of a revived appreciation of the countryside. It is with a malignant joy that the wayfarer perceives the speculators to have overreached themselves, and the villas—“white elephants” says the ferryman at Bantham—to be unlet. How, indeed, should Thurlestone become a place of resort? It is remote, and its sands, unstable and shelving steeply to the sea, are extremely dangerous.

The dark, stern, upstanding Perpendicular tower of the old church looks down grimly upon these white and red and yellow upstarts. It is a fine, large church, the successor of an earlier, as the great Norman bowl-font of red sandstone would seem to prove, and the designers of it designed in a fine, large, broad style, suited to the coarse-grained granite and limestone of their building-materials. That Rev. Mr. John Snell, chaplain to Charles I., who was with the Royalist garrison in Salcombe Castle, was rector here, and although one of the articles of surrender declared that he was not to be disturbed in his living, he was plundered of his goods, and his farm-stock was twice carried off by the Puritans, so that he found it prudent to leave. Unlike so many others, he lived to return to his parish, and, I have no doubt, rendered things in his turn, extremely uncomfortable for some. One little natural human touch of him remains, in the entry in the register under his hand, against the years covered by the Commonwealth:—

The iron had evidently entered into his soul.

The interior of the church has of late been exquisitely decorated and repaired: we will not say “restored,” for that word is rightly of ill-savour in these times. In place of the almost inevitable pitch-pine pews, or the commonplace chairs, there are green-stained, rush-bottomed chairs, with woodwork of the same hue: all very artistic and delightful, and sufficing to show that the more usual order of things is less inevitable than might be supposed, and only so common because taste is a quality of the rarest. Only, I would that these things did not so commonly go with that new reforming zeal which is sending the Church of England Romewards, so fast as its clergy dare. Here a faculty has been obtained for a rood-screen, and in general things are developing at a rate dangerous to that new movement itself and bringing that counter-reformation which is presently to repeat history. History, it is true, does repeat itself, but not on precisely identical lines, and the newer Reformation will be the disestablishment and disendowment of an unworthy Church, and free-trade in religion.

There are weird rocks out beyond Thurlestone, on the coastwise route round to the Avon estuary; one of them—it may be glimpsed in the background of the Thurlestone illustration—resembling some monstrous growth of the mushroom kind. The direct way to the crossing of the Avon is through Thurlestone street, and thence by the hillside village of Buckland, and by Bantham, a hamlet nestling under the lee of the Ham, a great sandy elbow thrown up, ages ago, by the sea and the winds, in vain efforts to fling back the Avon upon itself. That river is no rushing torrent, but just a softly gliding stream; and the sand dunes have not sufficed to imprison it. All they have done is to turn its course aside, due west instead of south, and there, denied a direct access to the sea, it has eaten away the cliffs in a great semicircular mouthful, and goes gliding out to the Channel through a waste of flat sands.

It was here in 1772 that the Chanteloupe, homeward-bound from the West Indies, was totally wrecked, and of all those on board only one person saved. Those were the times when the fisherfolk and shore-dwellers generally prayed for wrecks, and if none was forthcoming, helped Providence to produce them by exhibiting false lights on shore, to lure vessels to their doom. They thought no shame of asking, “O Lord, give us a good wreck,” and were perhaps very little more civilised than the savages of strange lands, who, thinking shipwrecked sailors, to have been shipwrecked at all, must be under the high displeasure of the gods, murder them out of hand, and consider themselves, in so doing, the vicars of those affronted deities.

“A good wreck,” especially if there were no survivors left to tell the tale, or to claim anything, would keep the seaboard of half a county in luxury of sorts for quite a considerable time, and as survivors were such detrimentals, they were, in those “good old times,” very quickly made not to survive. It was a rude, but practical application of that Socialistic doctrine of collectivism, of which we hear so much nowadays, “the greatest good to the greatest number.”

The story of the Chanteloupe is a dark and repellent instance of those practices. It narrates how a lady named Burke, familiar with the evil reputation of these people, and fearful of being murdered, put on all her jewellery when the ship struck, and was flung ashore glittering with precious stones. If she had thought to purchase life with that display, she made the most fatal of errors, for the sight only served to arouse the worst passions of those beach-combers, who slaughtered the unfortunate woman for the sake of her rings and other trinkets. When enquiries were set afoot, her body was discovered in the sands, bloodstained, with fingers cut off and ears mutilated; but it does not appear that the guilt was brought home to any one. The fisherfolk, doubtless, all hung together, lest they should hang separately.

Two years earlier a local Quaker, one Henry Hingeston, had published a pamphlet denouncing the wrecking propensities of this coast:

“I have been deeply affected,” said he, “to see and feel how sweet the report of a shipwreck is to the inhabitants of this country, as well professors as prophane, and what running there is on such occasions, all other business thrown aside, and away to wreck. … I am verily persuaded that it hath been more sweet to hear that all the men are drowned, and so a ‘proper wreck,’ than that any are saved, and by that means hinder their more public appearance on that stage for getting money. O! the cruelty that hath been acted by many. My heart hath been often heavy to consider it, insomuch that I think multitudes of heathen are nothing near so bad. Remember the broadcloth slupe, stranded in Bigbury Bay, richly laden. O! for shame, for shame, I am really vext that ever my countrymen should be guilty of such devilish actions.”

But the estimable Hingeston might just as effectively have preached to the gulls and the cormorants on the iniquity of catching fish, as to have denounced wrecking. ’Twas in the blood, and that is all there is to it.

These old tales of long-vanished days seem very remote and indistinct, but they came very near and vivid when a few years ago some children digging in the sand of the Ham, turned up a skull, pronounced to be that of a negro. It was considered, together with heaps of bones afterwards discovered, to be a relic of the tragedy of the Chanteloupe.

The Devonshire folk—the rustic sort, at any rate—generally call their Avon the “Aune,” and a little hamlet not far from this same Bantham is “Aunemouth;” while the village of Aveton Gifford, standing up-river, where the salt estuary becomes a freshwater stream, is impartially “Aveyton,” or “Auton,” “Jifford.”

At Bantham Ferry the boatman puts you across for twopence, or however much or little he thinks you will stand—and it is only the matter of a dozen strokes at low water. And then you have the sands, the loose stones, and the rustling bennets and the sedges all to yourself; a kind of seashore Sahara. Then you round a rocky point; and there before you is Burr Island, a majestic reek of acetylene, or other gas, and people. Wide stretch the sands at ebb, but they are not so wide but that the prints of footsteps have disfigured them pretty thoroughly; for where the land slopes down to the shore in grassy fields, the Plymouth people have built bungalows, and are building more. Burr, or Borough, Island is tethered to the mainland at ebb by this nexus of sand. It is in this circumstance a kind of minor St. Michael’s Mount, and like it again in that it once owned a chapel dedicated to St. Michael. The chapel disappeared in the lang syne, and when the solitary public-house—whose deserted roof-tree may still be seen—ceased business, civilisation and Borough Island wholly parted company.

Beyond this point is the little sand-smothered bight of Challaborough, with a coastguard station, where this explorer, at least, met coastguards of exceptional stupidity and astonishing ignorance of the coast beyond their own insignificant nook. Why, they could not even spell or pronounce the name of their own station properly, and made it “Shellaborough.” “Erme Mouth?” they had never heard of it, nor of the Erme River, but dimly conceived “Muddycombe,” to be meant. And as for the coast, they spoke of it in such awestruck terms that (it shall be confessed) the time drawing on towards evening, I made inland, and so do not know’ what manner of dragons and chimeras those are, which no doubt inhabit the three miles and a half of a not very rugged shore, awaiting the advent of a fine juicy tourist.

Primitive, indeed, are those villages that lie away back from the sea in these parts. First comes Kingmore, where the rock outcrops from the macadam in the main road, where the cottages are half-smothered in flowers, and where the domestic fowls that squatter and plunge in dust-baths in the middle of the street are the only signs of life. Reminiscences of the old window-tax are called up by a house with a walled-up window, carefully painted with a pretence of being a genuine one of panes and sashes. Even the brass catch has not been forgotten by the artist in illusion, whose treatment is so literal, he must have been the forerunner of the Newlyn School. The brass catch is rendered more than a thought too brassy, and the unfortunately painted panes are by no means convincing. But the deception although so grotesquely obvious, could not, under such opaque circumstances, be called transparent, could it?

Like the Reverend Mr. Snell of Thurlestone, William Lane, rector of Ringmore, was a militant Royalist. He raised and trained a company of men and, laying hands upon some cannon, opened out a battery against the Parliamentary forces on their way to the leaguer of Salcombe. His exploit made him a marked man, and he was considered sufficiently important for an expedition to be sent against him by sea from the Parliamentary stronghold of Plymouth. The orders given the commander of this force were to capture and shoot the combatant cleric; but Mr. Lane, advised of what was afoot, took refuge in the tower of his church, where the secret room, provided with a fireplace, in which he hid is still to be seen. Here he lay three months, fed by his faithful parishioners, but was at last obliged to escape to France. At last, venturing to return, he worked for awhile as a labourer in the limestone quarries near Torquay, until his little dwelling was pillaged by a French privateer. He died at last when on his return from London, whither he had journeyed on foot to ventilate his grievances.

The ancient church of Ringmore contains a relic of more recent strife, in the shape of an icon from Sebastopol.

At Kingston, on the way across to the river Erme, there is but one inn. The “Sloop” is the name of it, and there, if you wait half-an-hour, while the cocks and hens run in and out of the rooms and passages, they will get you tea. There is very little of a Lyons’ or other tea-shop about the “Sloop.” And Kingston village is to match; primitive Devonian in style, which is a style partaking of all the characteristics belonging to the untamed villages of Cornwall, Ireland, and the Highlands of Scotland. There are very few of the type left now, which is a cause for thankfulness, or regret, as you will, and they ought to be preserved on ice and kept for the admiration, or otherwise, of posterity.

Out of Kingston the road runs deep down below the level of the fields, in true Devonshire sort, with high banks and tall hedges on either side, so that no view is possible. Nor would it have mattered had it been otherwise when this Stanley of these remote parts passed this way, for the whole face of the land and sea and the blue of the sky was blotted out on this warm and close evening of a hot summer’s day by a white pillowy fog, which, the nearer the shore, grew more dense.

After long tramping comes a left-hand turn, with a signpost inscribed “Mothecombe.” The name suggests some moth-eaten hamlet that would be all the better for plenty of camphor and a good airing; but presently one realises that this is the place called by the coastguards “Muddycombe,” and more usually, in local speech, “Muthycombe.”

It is a solitary road that leads down from this signpost, and the fog discloses only one person on the way: a boy, driving a cow. “Coom oop, Primrose,” says he, and that mild-featured dame and he turn into a field, the whiteness engulfs them at once, and the wayfarer is alone in the world.

Suddenly the road ends, upon a sandflat. This is really the mouth of the Erme, the estuary where it slides out to sea, but it is infinitely mysterious in this smother of fog and woolly silence. The stranger, of course, assumes a village from the direction of that curt, staccato signpost up the road, but devil a house can he find here; only a something looming out from under low cliffs, which at first he takes to be an inn, and then a blockhouse fort, resolving itself finally into the inhospitable likeness of a ruined limekiln.

The distant rustle and whispering of waves on the sea-shore comes fitfully through the fog, which breaks mysteriously and shows the river, with occasional glimpses of the woody banks opposite. For the rest, all is silence, save for an odd continuous buzzing or sizzling undertone, like bacon-frying, piano. It is marvellously like, and only the smell is wanting to complete the illusion, which is produced by the billions of sand-fleas living their little crowded hour in the sands and among the drying seaweed. Every time you kick over a tuft of weed you disturb a little world, and rouse that frying-bacon sound, as though a rasher had been turned in the frying-pan.

Meanwhile, the way is obviously across that river, but how to win to that other side? No one, nor any house, is in sight, but here, by fortunate chance, is a fisherman’s boat, and I up-anchor, cast off, and row myself to the opposite shore, expectant all the while of an angry shout from somewhere. But anything, rather than stay the night over yonder with the sand-fleas. No one, however, witnessed that little act of piracy, and I walked up out of that steamy laundry-like hollow, where one is reduced to the limpness of washing hung over a clothes-line, and wondered what yon fisherman said and thought when he found himself on the one side of the river and his boat on the other. I hope it is not many miles round to the first bridge, or ford.

CHAPTER XXV
MOTHECOMBE—REVELSTOKE—NOSS MAYO—THE YEALM—WEMBURY—THE MEWSTONE

Mothecombe is a place where explorers and visitors of any kind are severely discouraged, the local landowners, the Mildmays of Flete, a magnificent modern mansion whose park extends for several miles along the Erme and the Pamflete creek, having abolished the inns, while their tenants dare harbour no such chancey thing as a stranger. It seems rather mediæval. Far from being aggrieved at this, the chance wayfarer is so impressed that he is only too grateful to be allowed to live, instead of being shot at sight. It is, in any case, a difficult matter to explore the coast at beautiful Mothecombe, for the summer atmosphere is that of a stewpot, and merely to gently walk the shortest distance bathes one in perspiration. The only thing to do is to enquire the way to Revelstoke, the next place marked on the map, and to make for it under as easy conditions as may be.

When at last, after leaving inhospitable Mothecombe, the explorer comes to Revelstoke, whose name, at any rate, promises something better, he finds himself in rather worse case, and understands why it was the country-people, even within a few miles of it, put their heads together and consulted with one another so deeply, and with so little result. For, beyond a ruined church, solitary on the verge of the cliffs, and at the end of a tangled footpath, overgrown with brambles and nettles, there is no Revelstoke at all, and the hospitality foreshadowed by its name is seen to be a thing impossible. It is a very pleasant and romantic place to come to on a bright summer’s morning, but to come strange to it at night——! Praise be to the powers that took me, after Mothecombe, inland to Holbeton instead.

This ruined church of St. Peter, near Stoke Point, nearly overhangs the cliffs of a rocky inlet, but the building itself is so shrouded with ivy, even to the apex of its saddle-backed roof, that it is almost reduced to terms of vegetation, and is, moreover, so overhung with trees that neither from the sea nor from any distance inland is it visible.

The nice taste generally exhibited by newly ennobled personages in their selection of titles is worthy of all praise. When Edward Charles Baring was created a baron, in 1885, he had a choice, among his surrounding properties, of such names as Membland, Battisborough, Noss, Newton, and Worsewell. Noss and Worsewell, I should think, were, on the score of euphony, quite out of the question. But—in the phrasing of the newest slang—what was wrong with Membland, Newton, or Battisborough? Nothing at all; but there is doubtless a something about the sound of Revelstoke that suggests aristocratic devilry and high jinks, infinitely pleasing. Not that the name necessarily signifies anything of the kind, for the Middle-English meaning of “revel” was not so much a jollification as a disturbance; which seems to have been the inevitable result of those ancient drinking-bouts. The “Revel” of this place-name is said to derive from reafful, meaning rapacious. The place, according to this view, is christened after some early reafere, rover, or robber, a progenitor, possibly of that “Sir Ralph (or Rafe) the Rover,” familiar to us in the poem of the Inchcape Rock, off the coast of Scotland; and the “Stoke” was his stockade, the defence of his robber’s lair. Who this robbing rover was—or who they were, for there must needs have been a band of them—there can be little doubt. They were an isolated party of the marauding Danes or vikings of the ninth century, whose main body was defeated in A.D. 851 at Wembury.