MORWENSTOW.
MORWENSTOW.
Not far from Kilkhampton is another church that some of us may care to see, though the long lane that leads to Morwenstow is by no means one that has no turning. Indeed, it would need some ingenuity to find room for any more corners in these narrow ways; but if progress is slow the country is attractive and the sea is before us, with flat-topped Lundy Island in the distance. We come rather suddenly on the church in its steep and narrow valley, with the tower darkly outlined against the blue sea, and a bold sweep of heather for background: the remote romantic glen where Morwenna the hermit had her cell near the sea, and died with her eyes fixed upon her native Wales: the glen of which Hawker wrote: “Here within the ark we hear onlythe voices of animals and birds, and the sound of many waters.”
He must have heard the voices of a good many animals; for even when he went to church he was followed by nine or ten cats, they say, which wandered, while he was preaching, about this beautiful building with the Norman arches, and the chancel with the marble floor. Here at the foot of the pulpit is the grave of his wife, the devoted wife who was older than his mother. Morwenstow, in its utter loneliness, its wild beauty, its deep, full colouring, needs nothing to give it charm; but its name, probably, would be known to few if it had not had, for many years, a vicar whose eccentric, poetical, heroic nature made his name and his dwelling-place memorable. We can forgive his errant cats to a man who wrote verses so sonorous—and above all to a man who fought the wreckers as Hawker fought them here.[16]His dust is not in the church he loved and cared for; but his epitaph is on the lips of those who knew him.“His door was always open to the poor,” they say.
The twisted lanes take us back to the main road, and on a splendid surface we cross the border into Devon.
Surface variable; steep gradients invariable.
After a few miles of brisk running over the breezy heights of Welsford Moor we return to the steep, winding, narrow lanes that have grown so familiar, and pass slowly down the long hill to the woods of Clovelly. To the left is Clovelly Court, where the Careys lived, and the church where they were buried, and to the right is the turn towards the entrance of the Hobby Drive, and the garage where the car must be left.
CLOVELLY.
CLOVELLY.
There are two ways into the village. The shortest way is by the path that drops almost from our feet, as we stand by the gate of the beautiful Drive that motorists may not enter. Very soon this path that winds down the face of the cliff mergesinto the village street, the famous street that we know so well, even if we have never seen it. For that very reason, because it is so well known, I would advise those who are here for the first time to follow the road to the left, and after a short walk that is almost painful—so steep is the way and so loose are the stones—to enter Clovelly at the bottom of the hill, near the quay. Here there is an unfamiliar and beautiful picture for one’s first impression of the loveliest village in England. Overhead are the trees that clothe all this hillside in sweeping draperies of green; the picture is framed in stems and ivy-grown rocks; clustered under the cliff are the irregular roofs of a group of cottages; a large boat is drawn up by the wayside; and towering in the distance is the soft mass of trees through which the Hobby Drive winds unseen. Almost at once we reach the little pier, and Clovelly, hanging between sky and sea, is facing us.
STREET IN CLOVELLY.
STREET IN CLOVELLY.
For some of its beauty one is prepared. The little white houses clambering up the precipitous hillside, the long, winding streetof cobbled stairs, the curving pier with its nets and poles and nights of steps, the jerseyed fishermen and pretty Devon faces, the boats that fill the harbour and the donkeys that climb the street, are all things that one has been taught to expect. But neither pen nor brush can give, in a single picture as we have it here, the extraordinary variety and brilliancy of their setting: the clematis that trails about the verandahs, the fuchsias and hydrangeas, pink and blue, that guard the doors, the crimson valerian that runs riot on the walls, the brown cliffs and ruddy rocks, the woods that roll from the skyline to the shore, and at their feet the little shining pools and many-coloured seaweed, and beyond them the long curve of Bideford Bay and the sea, unutterably blue.
“Now that you have seen Clovelly,” said Kingsley to his wife, “you know what was the inspiration of my life before I met you.” Here on the little quay he heard his father, the rector, many a time read prayers for the fishermen before they put to sea; and it was the sad teaching of Clovelly, where he saw so many men work and somany women weep, that gave its pathos to the song of the Three Fishers. When his health was failing, it was the air of Clovelly that he pined for. He came to lodgings at the top of this winding street that we climb so laboriously, “the narrow, paved cranny of a street,” as he called it, and stayed there happily for weeks.
It would be easy to be happy here for weeks; but in the summer there is some difficulty in finding shelter even for one night. Fortunately Bideford is not far off, and when we have made our way slowly back to the high road there are only ten miles of a good surface between us and a comfortable hotel.
CLOVELLY HARBOUR.
CLOVELLY HARBOUR.
To reach it we must cross the famous bridge. This “very stately piece,” as an old writer calls it, has played a very prominent part in the history of the town. “A poore preste” began it, we are told, being “animatid so to do by a vision. Then al the cuntery about sette their handes onto the performing of it.” Sir Theobald Grenville, Lord of Bideford and Kilkhampton, a young ruffler who had lately been in trouble with the Church, made common cause with the bishop who hadordered his excommunication, and after being duly absolved became “an especial furtherer” of the work. Grandison’s contribution took the form of indulgences; the rich gave their lands and the poor gave their time; and so the pride of Bideford arose on its foundation of woolsacks, and to this day gives distinction to a town that is otherwise rather in need of it. For wherever it was possible old things have been made new here. The old part of the Royal Hotel, once the house of a merchant prince, has been so carefully hidden that no one would guess it was there: the splendid panelling of the room where Kingsley wrote much of “Westward Ho!” has been painted: the church was rebuilt in the nineteenth century: even the tombstones have been tidied up and marshalled in rows round the churchyard wall. Within the church a few relics have survived: the Norman font, the remains of two screens, and the canopied altar-tomb of Sir Thomas Grenville, called the Venerable, who fought against Richard III. and was esquire of the body to Henry VII. The tombstone of the Indian who was brought home by the great Sir Richardseems to have been lost or obscured by the redistribution of graves in the churchyard; but there is a modern brass on the south wall to Sir Richard himself, who lived here when he was not upon the high seas.
This is the only memorial, in his birthplace, to the greatest of the “men of Bideford in Devon;” but Charles Kingsley has a full-length statue at the end of the promenade. Kingsley, I imagine, would have preferred a different arrangement.
Two miles away to the west is Westward Ho! We shall see it under the hill if we drive out to Appledore, where the sands are very yellow and the sea is very blue. We shall also see a spot called Bloody Corner, which is said to be the burial-place of the scourge of Saxon England, Hubba the Dane, the devastator of Yorkshire, the marauder of our coasts, the rifler of monasteries. A slab of slate has been fixed in the wall on the right side of the road, and an inscription engraved on it by someone who was a lover of history, but no poet.
The shortest, but not the most direct way to Barnstaple from Bideford is by the coastroad, whence we see, across the brown and yellow sands, the river-mouth from which seven ships of Bideford sailed out to fight the Armada. This road is level, but extremely dusty in dry weather except near Barnstaple, where it has a “prepared” surface. The direct road over the hills is so steep in places that its directness is merely nominal; but here the scenery is lovely.
There is a third alternative: to drive up the Torridge valley, cross over by Winkleigh to the valley of the Taw, and follow that river to Barnstaple. This is a course greatly to be commended.
Especially on a hot afternoon this is one of the most desirable runs in Devon. From Bideford to Torrington the road is shaded nearly continuously by high banks of trees rising from the wayside: on the left the cool stream winds beside us. Torrington, on its abrupt hill above the river, must have been a place of dignity when its castle dominated the valley. Through these streets where we are driving Fairfax chased the royalists one night in the dark, after a long resistance “with push of Pike and butt endof Musket”—chased them clean through the town and out of it to the bridges. This engagement, wrote the general, was “a hotter service than any storme this Army hath before been upon.” The royalists meantime had bribed “a desperate villain” to fire their store of powder in the church, lest the army of the Parliament should benefit by it; with the unexpected result that when “the Lead, Stones, Timber, and Ironwork of the Church were blowne up into the Ayre” two hundred royalist prisoners were blown up too. Hardly any of the Parliament-men were injured, though Fairfax himself had a narrow escape, and was obliged to return to “Master Rolls his house” for the night, “in regard the Quarter at Torrington was inconvenient, the Windowes broken in pieces, and the houses so shattered with the great blast that they could not performe a convenient shelter from the raine.” This church on our right among the trees replaced the one that was blown into the air so completely that hardly a fragment of the old building remains; and this street by which we pass through the town is the oneby which Fairfax rode back that night to Master Rolls his house. He went straight on to Stephenstone, but we turn away to the right on the road that skirts the castle hill and passes near the Waterloo obelisk.
We see little more of the Torridge; but this splendid Exeter road takes us through very lovely scenery; by woods, and beds of fern, and level heaths, and fields of meadowsweet, and rows of shady beeches, while for the last time our view is bounded by the beloved hills of Dartmoor. It is a curiously lonely road: hardly a village, and indeed for some miles hardly a cottage, breaks the solitude. Between the two valleys, as we pass through Winkleigh and bear round to the left to cross the Taw, the country is less beautiful and the surface rougher; but after the sharp turn at Morchard Road Station we have a splendid run to Barnstaple.
This is the most level road in Devon. This fact alone commends it to us, but there are many other facts to make it memorable: woods of oak, and larch, and mountain-ash, and chestnut-trees, not only shadowing usbut filling all the landscape: tall red fir-stems, and ferns beside the road, and wildflowers everywhere. All the way we follow the railroad, swinging past station after station, Eggesford and South Molton and Portsmouth Arms and Umberleigh, while the valley widens and narrows and opens out again; and all the time the Taw is close at hand, growing from a tiny stream between low banks of red earth and grass to a strong river rippling over the shingle, with trees dipping into its sunny waters.
Somewhere in Bishop’s Tawton lies the dust of the first Bishop of Devon. It was here that the see was originally fixed; but when the second bishop was murdered it was thought wise to move to a more central position at Crediton. Beyond the pretty village the estuary widens, and we see Barnstaple before us through the trees.
ON THE TAW.
ON THE TAW.
Barnstaple, says Mr. Warner of the eighteenth century, “is by far the most genteel town in North Devon.” This is a very happy word; though why a town whose history includes the days of Athelstane, a town that has had a castle and a priory and alife by no moans dull, should be “genteel” when all is said, is hard to understand. The nice public gardens and open spaces, the air of clean prosperity, and the colonnade with the fluted pillars give it an eighteenth-century air, at latest. Yet, if we look behind the church with the crooked spire we shall find the brown stone grammar-school where Bishop Jewell and the poet Gay learnt their lessons; and in the narrow street near the Imperial Hotel are some almshouses whose granite pillars and beautiful moulded gutters date from 1627; and spanning the river is the “right great and sumptuus bridge of stone” that was “made long sins by a merchaunt of London caullid Stamford.” Nothing is left of the priory where Sir Theobald de Grenville was excommunicated with bell, book, and candle; nor of the castle that belonged at various times to Judhael of Totnes, and the Tracy who murdered Becket, and Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. Even at the beginning of the Civil War it was “a place of small strength,” and during the struggle it led a hard life. The Colonel Basset who defended it while it wasin royalist hands figures among John Prince’s Worthies. “This gentleman as to his stature was somewhat short, but of an high crest and noble mind. As to his religion he did not boast great matters, but lived them … he being as plain in his soul as he was in his garb, which he resolved should be proud of him rather than he of it.”
The road that crosses the hill between Barnstaple and Ilfracombe leaves the town by the suburb of Pilton, whose white houses and gaily painted shutters and high walls have rather a foreign air. There is a long but well-graded hill before us, and a surface that is not very good. Each flowery village is followed by another as gay, and each green valley leads into another as green, and still we climb higher and higher till we come to the heather. For a little time the scenery is dull; then the road winds down a deep valley, and we see Ilfracombe in a gorge below.
Ilfracombe, like everyone’s grandmother, was lovely when it was young. That, however, was some time ago, and at present its charms are a matter of taste. That thousands love its piers and pierrots is evident ata glance, but some of us can only look sadly at its bluffs and sparkling sea, and long for the days that are no more. The change must have come very quickly, for only fifty years ago George Eliot thought Ilfracombe the loveliest sea place she ever saw, and found Tenby tame and vulgar after it. “But it would not do,” she adds, “for those who can’t climb rocks and mount perpetual hills; for the peculiarity of this country is that it is all hill and no valley.”
There are hills, and valleys, too, in astonishing numbers along this coast. The contour of the road between Ilfracombe and Porlock makes a sinister picture. But those thirty miles include some of the finest scenery in England; and by making them more than thirty, one may avoid some of the worst gradients without missing any of the beauty.
For the first few miles the road clings to the brow of the cliff, twisting round curve after curve, and mounting and falling and mounting again. All the colours of the rainbow are in the landscape. There are headlands of every shade of purple and red, foliage of every tint of green, shadows thatare intensely blue, sands that are really golden, and a sea of a colour that has no name. We swing round a curve and see the white houses of Combe Martin wedged between the brown cliffs, and a few minutes later we turn away from the sea and mount the long village street. Combe Martin may be defined as length without breadth; for though it is a mile and a half long it is in no place wider than two little houses. It has contributed in its day to the honour of its country, for Edward III. and Henry V., it is said, made use of the silver-mines of Combe Martin during their wars with France. Elizabeth gave cups of the same silver to her friends; but Charles I., though ingenious in the art of extracting the precious metals, sought here in vain.
The road, as it climbs up to Exmoor, grows rather rough. From Blackmoor Gate the direct way to Lynton is of course through Parracombe, where there are two hills of some renown, a descent and a climb. The inconvenience here is in the fact that the change from the downward to the upward gradient is in the middle of the village, anda run is out of the question. None the less this hill, though steep, is quite practicable; but the still more famous hill between Lynton and Lynmouth thoroughly deserves its reputation, and, after personal experience, I strongly advise motorists to avoid it unless they have absolute confidence in the staunchness of their car, the power of their brakes, and the scope of their steering-locks. Its difficulty lies, not only in the gradient—though at one point that is steeper than one in four—but in the extremely acute angle that occurs at the steepest spot and makes it impossible, if there should chance to be so much as a wheelbarrow by the wayside, for a car of any size to turn without pausing. An added difficulty is the looseness of the surface, for the constant use of drags has ploughed the road into a mass of stones and sand. It is possible now to take cars on the “lift,” or funicular railway that runs up and down the cliff; but it seems to me that the simplest plan is to drive round by Simonsbath to Lynmouth. There is shelter there for both man and car; but those who prefer to stay at Lynton—and they are many—may leavetheir cars at the bottom of the hill, and mount it themselves, with their luggage, in the cliff railway.
At Blackmoor Gate, then, instead of taking the road to Parracombe, we must go straight on till we turn to the left at Challacombe. The country is not inspiring. Technically, I suppose, this is part of Exmoor; but there is nothing in these undulating fields and hedgerows to suggest the hunting of the red deer by Saxon kings, or the jealous guarding of forest-rights by the Conqueror. For William, though he gave away these lands, was very strict about the hunting. “He loved the tall deer as though he had been their father,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. His love was like that of the little boy who was so fond of animals that he always went to see the pigs killed.
LYNMOUTH.
LYNMOUTH.
At Simonsbath there is a sudden outburst of beauty. The tiny village lies in a hollow among the fir-clad hills, and makes an idyllic picture with its stream and bridge; and here the road turns and winds up to a fine expanse of true moorland. It is sterner than Dartmoor. There is no luxuriance of brackenhere, nor acres of purple, but mile beyond grassy mile of stately, rolling hills, very austere at noonday, but in the light of a summer sunset transfigured into splendour. The new road to Lynmouth turns abruptly back upon the hillside, and on it we plunge into the green depths.[17]
If Nature is austere upon these hills, in the valley she is riotous. We seem to be dropping down and down into her generous heart, and, like the poet, we bless ourselves with silence. Far above us, as we wind beside the river, the tall sides of the valley are clear-cut against the sky; but just below the line of rock and heather the rich woods rise up and take triumphant possession of the hills, and fill every curve and hollow, and clothe the steep heights, and hang over the stream, and rustle by the wayside. We have dropped so suddenly and deeply into these green waves that we almost expect them to close over our heads. And as the road winds on we think at every cornerthat all this beauty must come to a sudden end. Surely we have passed the climax: surely the next curve will take us out of this enchanted valley into the world we know. But the beauty does not end. It grows; and only finds its climax in the red and green headlands, and in the lovely village that lies between the hills where the valley ends in the sea.
Lynmouth below and Lynton above, when one recalls them, seem, like Clovelly, too good to be true. All the charms of Devon are here. Charms that elsewhere seem incongruous are here in accord; grandeur and homeliness agree together; the lion lies down with the lamb. Boats and heather are in the same picture; the cliffs are clothed with woods almost to the water’s edge. The two places cannot be compared; they are so different that neither is complete without the other. Some love best the boats and shallow pools and shaded river of Lynmouth; and to some the wide view from Lynton hill seems the fairest thing in England.
VIEW FROM LYNTON.
VIEW FROM LYNTON.
Wherever we stay ourselves, there is little to be gained by taking the car up the cliff.The only roads that lead away from Lynton are the Parracombe road and the road to Hunter’s Inn, which is not open to motors—that wonderful road that runs through the wild Valley of Rocks, and past the Castle Rock with its fine views of the coast, and past Lee Abbey on its grassy plateau, and then for miles along the face of the cliff, with dense woods closing round it on every side, and, through the trees, hints of a blue sea very far below. This narrow way that is hung so high in air, and has so many sharp corners and steep pitches, is truly not a motoring road. It turns inland where a gap comes in the cliffs, and ends at Hunter’s Inn, in a narrow gorge that is sheltered from every wind.
From Lynton we look over the roofs of Lynmouth to Countisbury Hill and the red road that climbs it—apparently quite perpendicularly. Into the mind there steals a hope that this is not our road. But it is.
We may avoid it, of course, by going back to Simonsbath and taking the road through Exford and Whiddon Cross to Dunster—a road that is fairly good, if dull. But most ofus will think the loss of all the beauty of the moors and woods is too heavy a price to pay for ease of travelling. The lower part of Countisbury Hill, it is true, is quite as rough and nearly as precipitous as the hill to Lynton, but as we rise the surface becomes quite good, and the gradient is nowhere so steep as at the bottom. And from the top of the cliff we look away across the heather to the high uplands of Exmoor, and see below us on the right the green cleft in the hills that is the Doone Valley.
RIVER LYN.
RIVER LYN.
No steep hills.
Surface on the whole very good.
Porlock is a word of dread significance to those who are interested in the roads of England. A precipitous hill nearly three miles long, with a surface of sand and stones and several sharp corners—such is the vision that this name invokes. There is, however, not the least necessity to lower ourselves into Porlock on these alarming gradients. Near the top of the hill there is a private road that turns off to the left, and may be used for the sum of one shilling. It is narrow, and has a poor surface and two “hairpin” turns, but it is nowhere steep, and the woods through which it runs are entrancing. The car slips gently down among the birches and rowan-trees, and soon we see the bay below us with its dark grey beach, and Porlock under the hill.
PORLOCK.
PORLOCK.
The two roads join, and run into the village together, at the corner where the “Ship” Inn and the cottages round it, with their thatched roofs and porches and gay creepers, make a pretty picture with the green hill for background. Indeed, all Porlock is made of pretty pictures: an inland village could hardly be more decorative. There was a time when it was not an inland village, but a favourite landing-place for visitors of various nations but of one marauding aim. It does not to-day appear a promising field for a robber of any ambition, but time was, I believe, when it was quite a stirring place, with a royal palace and much prosperity. When the Danes landed here in the night they were routed to their ships with empty hands: but when, a hundred and fifty years later, no less a man than Harold Godwinson sailed in from his exile in Ireland, he was not content with plundering and burning Porlock itself, but made it a centre for expeditions. He built himself a fort here, whence he could comfortably raid the country that was afterwards his own kingdom. The French invasion of the seventeenth centuryturned out to be a false alarm, but none the less the inhabitants arose as one man, armed themselves valiantly with scythes and pikes, and hurried away to Exeter to join William of Orange—which seems an original way of repelling invasion.
There is an interesting church here. The alabaster figures of a knight and his lady in elaborate headdresses represent Lord Harington of Aldingham and his wife, afterwards Lady Bonville; whose finely carved garments and faces have been thickly covered with deep-cut initials by those who love antiquities as the Conqueror loved the tall deer.
Those whose love of antiquities is of another kind will find it worth their while to run to the “Anchor” Inn at Porlock Weir, where every room is rich in ancient furniture and vessels of copper and brass. The road that leads to it is excellent, and so is the one that takes us on to Dunster, though the redness of its surface adds a new terror to dust. We pass through Allerford with a fine view of the hills and a glimpse of the old pack-horse bridge; but when we reachthe by-way to Selworthy we shall do well to turn aside. For this pretty lane, which is roofed with foliage as completely as a pergola, leads not only to an interesting church and a tithe-barn, but to a group of almshouses that is unequalled in its simple way: half a dozen thatched and gabled cottages ranged, not in a stiff row, but round a sloping green, with wild woods to shelter them, and walnut-trees to shade them, and hollyhocks and fuchsias to make them gay. Between them and the woods a tiny stream trickles through the moss, and over it a rough tree-stem has been flung to serve as bridge.
After a few more miles on the fine red road, with Dunkerry Hill conspicuous on the right, we see, first Minehead lying by the sea and spreading up the hill, and then the watch-tower of Dunster. A minute later we drive into the Middle Ages.
This street of Dunster makes one half in love with the feudalism that could produce so perfect a picture. On one side are the porch and archway of the “Luttrell Arms”; on the other the octagonal yarn-market, gabledand tiled and mossy, with a little mullioned window in each gable; between them lies the straight, wide street; and in the background, dominating and protective, the castle towers are lifted high upon their wooded hill. Through all the centuries between the Conquest and to-day this castle has had no masters but the Mohuns and the Luttrells, and there is nothing in Dunster that is not connected, directly or indirectly, with one of these two ancient names. These buildings to right and left of us, for instance—this inn with the mediæval porch and the beautiful north wing, and this market-house that used to be the scene of “a very celebrate market at Dunstorre ons a wekes”—were both built by George Luttrell of the sixteenth century and repaired by George Luttrell of the seventeenth. And if we walk down the wide street and turn to the left we shall find the church of the Mohuns’ priory, the Benedictine priory that the first Mohun of Dunster founded, “pricked by the fear of God.”
DUNSTER.
DUNSTER.
It is a very notable church. “The late priory of blake monkes,” says Leland, “stoodeyn the rootes of the north-west side of the castelle, and was a celle to Bathe. The hole chirch of the late priory servith now for the paroche chirch. Afore tymes the monkes had the est parte closid up to their use.” Of late years the church has been restored to the form it had aforetimes, with the seats of the prior and monks, and the monastic choir. The very beautiful rood-screen with the canopy of fan-tracery, which was set up in the fifteenth century, forms the entrance to the parish choir: the choir of the monks is reached through the curious arch that is wider below than above—an arrangement made by the brothers themselves to allow room for their processions. Round about the high altar of the priory are monuments of the Luttrells. Thomas Luttrell, whose great Elizabethan memorial is in the south-east chapel, was the father of the man who rebuilt the castle and did so much for Dunster—George Luttrell, who kneels here in effigy; and the slab that now lies under the window of the south aisle once covered the grave of the Lady Elizabeth who, as a widow, bought the manor of Dunster fromthe widow of Sir John de Mohun. On the north side of the altar is the alabaster figure, though probably not the tomb, of her son Sir Hugh, first Luttrell of Dunster, Great Seneschal of Normandy, Steward of the Household to Queen Joan, a warrior who won much renown in fighting the French and the great Glyndwr and the little Perkin Warbeck. Most of the Mohuns were buried at their abbey of Bruton, but here in the monks’ choir, under a canopy, is the figure of Dame Hawise, wife of the second Sir Reynold de Mohun.
Near the church are some remains of the monastic buildings: the refectory, the prior’s apparently impregnable barn, a couple of archways, and, in the vicarage garden, a lovely thirteenth-century dovecot with a tiled roof and hanging creepers.
Although the “glory of this toun rose by the Moions,” and though the memory of them is everywhere, it is so many centuries since they went away to Cornwall—to Hall near Fowey, and later to Boconnoc—that there are few actual relics of them left. Of the three castles that they built successivelyupon the hill there remains little more than a gateway of the third, the gateway with the massive door and the mighty knocker of iron. It is just within the main entrance, and strangely enough was built by the husband of Dame Hawise, whose tomb is the only Mohun monument in the church. The castellated gatehouse itself is the work of the first Luttrell of Dunster. His descendants still live in the great red dwelling-house with the martlets of the Luttrells over the door, but by their kindness we are allowed, with a guide, to climb the steep path under the yew-hedge that is sixty feet high; and to see the strange half-tropical plants of the gardens, the cork-tree and the lemon-tree upon the wall; and then to climb still higher to the bowling-green and look out upon the park and the Severn Sea.
This was not always a bowling-green. It was here that the keep stood till great Robert Blake, as formidable on shore as at sea, brought all his batteries against it, and the Parliament finally dismantled it. The whole castle, indeed, would have been ruinedif it had not been wanted as a prison for poor Mr. Prynne. Some years earlier, while there was a royalist garrison in the castle, young Prince Charles was sent hither for safety; and here, as elsewhere, tradition has assigned a certain Red Room to him, for no other reason than that it contained a hiding-hole.[18]
There is a real delight, after all our experiences on the rough precipitous hills of Devon, in swinging away from Dunster on a good and level road—the road that is on the whole the best in Somerset. So pleasant is it that some, no doubt, will stoutly refuse to pause or turn aside for many a mile. For others, however, the lure of ancient stones is very strong; and these will leave the highway more than once between Dunster and Taunton. In Washford, for instance, there is a turn to the right that leads in a moment to the Abbey of Cleeve. Here in a rough field stands the gatehouse with the genial motto,Patens porta esto,ulli claudaris honesto, and the statue of the abbey’s patron-saint, and upon the inner side the crucifix and the tablet with the builder’s name, Dovel. Poor William Dovel, last abbot of Cleeve, had a sore heart when he passed out under these pointed arches that he had raised for others, not himself, to use, and saw his own name overhead upon the masonry, and remembered all his loving, futile work upon the walls of his abbey. It was a poor Cistercian house, with a small income and no jewels nor golden chalices to tempt a king; but even trifling sums were acceptable to Henry, and though a thousand marks were offered for “his grasious goodnes,” the abbey was doomed. So William Dovel went forth of this gate, and with him “XVII prystes off very honest lyffe and conversation,” who “kept alwayes grett hospytalyte to the relyffe off the countre.” There is much of Dovel’s work in the buildings of the monastery. As we enter the garth the western cloister is on our left, with Perpendicular windows and mossy roof; facing us are the little pointed windows of the dormitory, and below themthe Early English doorway of the vaulted chapter-house. Dovel’s refectory, with timbered roof and carved finials, is reached by a staircase on the southern side of the quadrangle, and behind it in a little garden is a pavement of heraldic tiles, bearing the arms of many benefactors. Of the church hardly anything remains.
GATEHOUSE, CLEEVE ABBEY.
GATEHOUSE, CLEEVE ABBEY.
Our good road takes us on, through Williton, to the foot of the Quantocks, with the sea and the distant Welsh shore upon the left. Beyond the railway we bear round to the right and drive below the green and purple slopes of the hills that were loved and often trodden by Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and Hazlitt, the hills on which the writing of theAncient Marinerwas planned. At Crowcombe among the trees there is a tall cross in the village, and a beautiful one in the churchyard, and a porch with fan-tracery. About three miles beyond this we may turn aside for a moment to Combe Florey, and see the old red manor-house of the Floreys with their three flowers over the gateway, and the village where Sydney Smith’s blue pills were a doubtful blessing,and the church where he preached, and the vicarage on the hill, where he tried to impose upon his London visitors by fastening antlers to his donkeys’ heads. It was here that Henry Luttrell spent a day with him. “He had not his usual soup-and-pattie look,” wrote Sydney Smith, “but a sort of apple-pie depression, as if he had been staying with a clergyman.… He was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of veal soup.”[19]
At Bishop’s Lydeard is a church that is fine enough in itself to wile us from the highway. The bishop who gave it its name was the learned and literary Asser, who has told us himself how King Alfred asked for his friendship, which indeed seems to have been worth having. “He asked me eagerly to devote myself to his service and become his friend, to leave everything I possessed … and he promised he would give me more than an equivalent for it in his own dominions.” This manor of Bishop’s Lydeard was part of the equivalent he gave, when Asser, after some hesitation, left St. David’s and cameto be Bishop of Sherborne. Having forsaken the main road to see the splendid tower of this church, and the painted screen and bench-ends, and the tall cross in the churchyard, we may as well drive on a little further to the very foot of the wooded Quantocks, to the church and manor-house of Cothelstone. For many centuries this land was owned by the Stawells, who have left their cross-lozengy above the house-door and in the church; and in later years it became the home of Shelley’s blue-eyed daughter, Ianthe. As we pass the outer gateway, on which two of Jeffreys’ victims swung in Lord Stawell’s despite, we can catch a glimpse of the inner gatehouse and of the red-tiled roof and Jacobean doorway beyond. This is but a fragment of the old manor-house, for when that “loftie proud man,” Sir John, raised four troops for Charles I. he was sent to prison for it, and his house was brought low by Blake.
There is a letter still existing, yellow now with age and very fragile at the folds, in which Sir John’s bailiff writes to him piteously concerning this disaster. “Thecruell and base dealyng,” he says, “wch is now acted at Cothelstone doth astonish and amaze all people wch do either see it or heare of it; for they have now taken downe all the Leads of the house … and have already taken downe that part of the house wch is over against my Ladye’s garden.… I am very sorry that ther is occasion gyven me to make soe sadd a relation unto you.… I beseech God to send us better tymes.” It was in the eighteenth century that this restored wing of the old house passed to the Esdailes, ancestors of that Edward Esdaile who married Shelley’s daughter.
Behind the house is the church that was once the private chapel. It has some carved bench-ends and some old glass, but its special features are the two beautiful tombs in the south chapel: the finely carved figures of a fourteenth-century Stawell and his wife, with their painted shields below them, and the still more beautiful Elizabethan tomb with the effigies of marble. In a corner of the churchyard is a white stone “in sweet memory of Ianthe.”
Again we return to our high-road, and this time do not pause till we drive into the market-place of Taunton, the quiet centre of a country-town, where cabbages are bought and sold, and loitering cabmen smoke their pipes without a thought of Monmouth or of Jeffreys. Yet some of these very houses were wreathed with flowers at the coming of the foolish duke: here where the fountain is he stood and smiled while the pious maids of Taunton, made rebels by his handsome face, gave him a Bible, and a fine banner of their own working, “One would have thought the people’s wits were flown away in the flights of their joy.” Here he was proclaimed King James and called King Monmouth, and here his followers paid for their ill-placed devotion in torrents of blood. Into this market-place came Kirke and his Lambs with their victims in chains; and over there at the corner of Fore Street and High Street stood the “White Hart,” whose signpost was the gibbet. Hither came Jeffreys of the sinister face. “He breathed death like a destroying angel,” says Toulmin, “andensanguined his very ermines with blood. The victims remained unburied; the houses and steeples were covered with their heads, and the trees laden almost as thick with quarters as with leaves.” He went in to his monstrous work through that arch with the embattled towers; and passed on through the inner entrance of yellow stone, where Henry VII.’s shield and Bishop Langton’s are above the door. Within it is the great hall, with the timbered roof and the whitewashed walls that were hung with scarlet while Jeffreys, “mostly drunk,” stormed at his victims of the Bloody Assizes. The little girl—she was hardly more than a child—who had won Monmouth’s easy smiles by her speech among the June flowers in the market-place was ransomed with her schoolfellows; but her sister had seen the Judge’s face, and died of the terror of it.