Part 8

We have a fine drive back to Bodmin over the moors, where the hills are many but the road is good. There is no heather here, but a great expanse of grass and waving fern, and scattered stones, and slopes of gorse, and now and then, impressive in its loneliness, an ancient Celtic cross of granite by the wayside. We enter Bodmin by an over-arching avenue, and pass out of it on the Wadebridge road, at the back of the asylum.

The short run to Wadebridge is through a lovely country of woods and valleys and rivers, on a road that is well-graded if hilly. There is little obvious attraction in Wadebridge itself, however, for at low tide the river winds through mud-flats that are not flat enough to be picturesque, and the famous bridge--“the longest, strongest, and fairest that the shire can muster”--is not as striking in fact as it appears in pictures. Like Bideford Bridge, it is said to be founded on sacks of wool. Its founder was one Lovibond, the vicar of this old church of Egloshayle that we see beside the river. We do not cross the bridge, but turn to the right on the road to Camelford; and a few minutes later pass near a British camp called Castle Killibury or Kelly Round. We are entering Arthur’s country--a land of shadowy legend, a land that has been peopled for us with a host of adorable, improbable figures, a land of disillusionment, but none the less of unconquerable romance. For this round encampment by which we drive is thought to be one of the few authentic relics of the authentic Arthur, the Kelliwic of the Welsh Triads, a stronghold and court of the British prince who truly lived, and fought, and died of a grievous wound--but not at Camelford.

We are on our way now to the spot that was long believed, and is still believed by many, to be the scene of his last battle: Slaughter Bridge. We turn off to the left in the outskirts of Camelford on rather a rough road to Camelford Station, and there take a narrow lane on the right which leads in a moment to the little grey bridge with the grim name. There is grim truth behind the name, moreover, for if it was not here, but in Scotland, that Arthur died, there has been slaughter on a large scale on the rushy banks of this brook that sings so gaily. Here, in the ninth century, Britons and Saxons fought and died by thousands, and no one knows to-day who won the battle.

On the left is the old gateway of Worthyvale. A little way within it is a wooden shed, where we shall find a guide to show us the ancient stone that does duty alternately as Arthur’s grave and his resting-place when he was wounded. Its age and position and probable origin are sufficiently romantic, for it is thought to be the tombstone of some warrior who was slain in the great battle. It lies now on level grass below the rocky bank, with the stream close beside it, and tree stems fringed with hart’s-tongues leaning over it. The path that leads to it is very steep and very slippery, and as one struggles down it the little barefooted guide prattles cheerfully of the ladies and old gentlemen who have, from time to time, fallen headlong into the stream.

From Slaughter Bridge a few miles, a few lanes, a few hills bring us, with hearts--even middle-aged hearts--beating a little faster than usual, to the very citadel and stronghold of that Land of Faery of which Arthur is the King.

Who can tell wherein the enchantment of Tintagel lies? Its crown of towers is gone; its glory is departed. Only, on the summit of the dark, steep island a few low walls, a doorway, and a window remain of the mediæval castle that seems to have no history. Not a stone here speaks of Arthur. Yet it is of Arthur only that we think.

And if there is no fragment here of the castle where Arthur was born, neither have we any visions of the Table Round, nor of Guinevere and her ladies, nor of Launcelot, nor Galahad; for the King’s court was not here. Only La Beale Isoud we may see sitting in her bower upon this rock, and Tristram kneeling at her feet, and behind him Mark with the uplifted sword. This was the stronghold of the ancient Cornish Earls; and if Arthur was born here it was because his birth was the result of magic, and not because Uther Pendragon had any rights in this place. But since we are here in a world of legend we may surely take the legend of our choice. Let us forget the ugly tale of Uther and Igerne, and remember only how, after the thunders of the storm upon this shore--

“There came a day as still as heaven, and then They found a naked child upon the sands Of dark Tintagel by the Cornish sea; And that was Arthur.”

There are the sands below us, the little bay in the curve of the cliff, the transparent sea that brought the mysterious King to his kingdom.

And because all is mystery here, because behind the veil there is so little that is solid, so little that we know, it is not in the sunshine of a summer day that Tintagel has the most meaning. It is when the mists are trailing on the sea, and the dark rock is wrapped in a cloud as impenetrable as the legends that shroud Arthur, and for a moment a passing gleam lightens the fog above our heads and shows the pale ghost of a castle-wall uplifted against the sky--it is then that Tintagel seems indeed to be the heart of the world of dreams, the most perfect symbol of the mingled mystery and truth of the story of Arthur.

More than three hundred years ago Carew gave his impressions of the island fortress. “In passing thither,” he says, “you must first descend with a dangerous declining, and then make a worse ascent by a path as everywhere narrow so in many places through his stickleness occasioning, as through his steepness threatening, the ruin of your life with the failing of your feet. At the top two or three terrifying steps give you entrance to the hill.” Those who suffer from unsteady heads will feel this lively description to be most accurate as regards the island; but the castle on the mainland may be reached by a path which, though narrow and tortuous enough, does not occasion, nor even threaten, the ruin of one’s life. And from those crumbling twelfth-century walls we may walk along the cliff to the little grey church that has stood here, buffeted by every wind of heaven, since the days of the Saxons. Part of the Saxon masonry is still here, and an old font green with moss, and various ancient stones. What this bleak cliff has to bear in the way of sea-winds may be seen in the churchyard, where all the tombstones--thin slabs of slate--are strongly buttressed by masonry three times as thick as themselves. In a corner is the poetical grave of an Italian sailor drowned on this shore: an ordinary ship’s life-buoy nailed to a rough wooden cross.

We drive away through the pretty village of Trevena, dip into the wooded and flowery dell of Bossiney on a steep and rather rough road, and soon run down into Boscastle among the orchards. The narrow gorge, where the village lies smothered in trees, ends in a little landlocked harbour, and high up on the hill to the left stands the church of Forrabury--the church whose bells, says the legend, are lying at the bottom of the sea with the bones of the blasphemous skipper who was bringing them to Boscastle. R. S. Hawker tells the story in “The Silent Tower of Bottreaux.” We cross the stream and begin a very long climb. This hill has a bad reputation; but its steepest gradient--one in six--is quickly past, and above it there is nothing very serious. After three miles of climbing we find some fine wide views; and as we drive between the high hedges on the rough road to Bude, catch glimpses of sea and headland on the left.

The charm of Bude, I imagine--and many people find it very charming--lies more in its surroundings than itself, more in the splendid coast and rolling sea than in the rather dull little town. The sands and boats at the river-mouth are picturesque, and so is the “cross-pool,” where Hawker in his sealskin coat once masqueraded as a mermaid (of a somewhat full habit), to the sad confusion of the youth of Bude.

Far more attractive in itself is Stratton, hard by, with the dark church-tower raised above the street, and half its houses hidden by the trees. In this church with the fine roof and the granite pillars is buried, under a black marble slab elaborately inlaid with brasses, a Sir John Arundel of the sixteenth century; the father, I believe, of John-for-the-King. And in the north aisle, with no stone to tell the tale of his brave and faithful service, lies Anthony Payne, the tender-hearted giant who taught little boys to fish, and fought with the strength of ten by Bevill Grenville’s side, and wrote a letter for which alone, if for nothing else, he deserves an epitaph. When Sir Bevill died at Lansdowne Hill it was Anthony Payne who broke the news to Lady Grenville. “You know, as we all believe,” he wrote, “that his soul was in heaven before his bones were cold. He fell, as he did often tell us he wished to die, in the great Stewart cause, for his country and his King. He delivered to me his last commands, and with such tender words for you and for his children as are not to be set down with my poor pen, but must come to your ears upon my heart’s best breath. Master John, when I mounted him upon his father’s horse, rode him into the war like a young prince as he is.… I am coming down with the mournfullest load that ever a poor servant did bear, to bring the great heart that is cold to Kilkhampton vault. O! my lady, how shall I ever brook your weeping face?”[12]

Down in the street we may find the house where this servant with the heart and tongue of gold was born and died. It was once a manor-house of the Grenvilles, but is now the “Tree” Inn, and shows little sign of age. Until lately there was a hole still in the ceiling through which Anthony Payne’s huge body was lowered after his death, since it was impossible to bring it down the narrow stairs; but now this room has been rebuilt. Fixed in the outer wall of the inn, however, is a relic of the battle on Stamford Hill, where “ye army of ye rebells … receiued A signall ouerthrow by ye Valor of Sir Bevill Granville and ye Cornish army,” and where Anthony Payne was valiant as his master. Once this stone was on the battle-field, but the owner of the land was so greatly harassed by sightseers that in his rage he dug out the memorial and built a house upon the spot!

Here, as we drive out of Stratton on a fine curving road, is the green slope on our left where the desperate battle of Stamford Hill, and the landlord’s desperate act of self-defence, took place. It was on that hilltop that Sir Bevill’s valour won him a personal letter from the King, the letter that was found in his pocket when he was dead. “Keep this safe,” he had written on it; for the Grenvilles were “King’s men,” not perfunctorily but passionately. It is but a few miles, on rather a rough road, to Kilkhampton, where Sir Bevill and most of his house are buried.

Indeed, Kilkhampton Church is as it were the shrine of the gallant Grenvilles, and deserves that high honour. A shady avenue leads from the modern lych-gate to the porch that was built by a Grenville and the Norman door through which so many Grenvilles have passed to their prayers, and so many have been carried to their graves: Roger, who for his lavish table was called the Great Housekeeper, and John the privateer, and Richard the Marshal and poet,[13] and Sir Bernard, son of the greatest of the Grenvilles and father of Sir Bevill. Sir Richard of the _Revenge_, as we all know, died “with a joyful and quiet mynde” on a distant sea, leaving behind him “an everlastynge fame of a valyante and true soldier that has done hys dutie as he was bounde to do.”[14] But Sir Bevill, thanks to Anthony Payne, lies in the vault of Kilkhampton, and with him is the wife who could not live long without him, and the boy who rode into the war like a young prince and became as ardent a royalist as his father.

Everywhere we see the Grenville arms: the three strange objects that some call “horsemen’s rests,” and some call rudders, and some clarions. They are outside the south-east door, and in the chancel, and on one of the elaborately carved bench-ends, and on the old granite font, and in much magnificence of paint and gilding on the south wall. And here on the same wall is the ugly eighteenth-century monument to Sir Bevill, with its long epitaph. “A brighter courage and a gentler disposition were never marryed together,” said Lord Clarendon. A better memorial of his bright courage than this thing of gilt and marble is the well-worn helmet that hangs beside it; and of his gentle disposition we have proof enough in his own and his wife’s letters, with their engaging mixture of romance and domesticity. “Would God but grant you were home,” writes Lady Grenville, “till when my heart will never be quiett.” “The Plaisters you sent, I trust in God, hath done me much good.” “I pray you make haste and come home.… I am and still will be yours ever and only.… PS.--I pray you let your Coate be well ayr’d and lye abroad awhile before you weare it. To my dearest and best Frend Mr. Bevill Grenvile, these.” “Beseeching God to encline yr heart to love her who will in spite of the divill ever be yrs immoveably.” “If you please to bestowe a plaine black Gownd of any cheape Stufe on me I will thanke you.”[15]

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 only the 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.

NORTH DEVON

SUMMARY OF RUN THROUGH NORTH DEVON

DISTANCES.

Morwenstow Clovelly 12 miles Bideford 12 ” Barnstaple, viâ Torridge and Taw Valleys 52½ ” Ilfracombe 11¾ ” Lynmouth, viâ Simonsbath 28½ ” Porlock 12 ” ---------- Total 128¾ miles

ROADS.

Surface variable; steep gradients invariable.

VI

NORTH DEVON

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.

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 merges into 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.

For some of its beauty one is prepared. The little white houses clambering up the precipitous hillside, the long, winding street of 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 so many 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.

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 had ordered 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 Richard seems 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 coast road, 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.