Part 18 (1/2)
Close by is a glen, which Mrs Bray says, 'I have ventured to name the Valley of Waterfalls, on account of the vast number of small but exquisitely beautiful falls seen there.' A narrow lane with high hedges leads round the shoulder of the hill to the steep little valley, where the Tavy jostles against obstructive boulders, and a high, narrow, unstable-looking bridge of tarred timber (sometimes called a 'clam'
bridge) crosses the stream. Climbing up on the farther side, the road soon reaches the village of Mary Tavy. In reference to these villages a very old joke is told of a Judge unacquainted with these parts who, in trying a case, not unnaturally confused the names with those of witnesses, and ordered that Peter and Mary Tavy be brought into court.
Mary Tavy has not the unusual attractiveness of Peter Tavy. It looks barer, and is overshadowed by that peculiarly comfortless air always given by chimneys or machinery of mines. The church stands above the road, and beside it a large old tree, whose lower branches are so abundantly covered with polypody that the fronds hang like long fringes from either side of each branch. The porch has a white groined ceiling, crossed with fragments of the old timber roof, on which are bosses carved in different designs.
From Mary Tavy a road runs nearly parallel to the river. Beyond Horndon the houses are fewer and more scattered, and somehow there is a suggestion that one is coming nearer and nearer to the verge of civilization. The few houses look nice in themselves, with the exception of a farm, so cheerless and neglected-looking, that it was a surprise to find it inhabited; and not far beyond this house the road reaches another and very different farm, looking full of comfort--and goes no farther. This farm has the significant name of Lane End, and one realizes from its solitary, exposed position that the high and substantial wall surrounding it was built for sound reasons. It stands on the moor, and the cultivation is of the roughest kind; the fields, such as they are, being plentifully sprinkled with huge boulders. In winter, when there is much fear of snow, these fields serve as an enclosure for the ponies that are driven-in off the moor--looking like wild animals in their long, hanging, furry coats. The river is heard das.h.i.+ng over the rocks below, and about a mile farther on is Tavy Cleave.
The last time I saw it a vague threat hung over everything, adding a cold fascination to the moor. The hills showed tints of faint green and palest brown, and patches of bracken gave a consoling shade of russet.
Hare Tor rose beyond, silent and impressive, covered with snow. The Tavy had a new beauty, for it was almost frozen over, and the dark water, and along whirling sc.r.a.ps of foam, showed between the blocks of ice and snow, and the boulders were each bordered with s.h.i.+ning white. The sky was heavy with snow-clouds, and beneath them and in the rifts were stormy red sunset tints, while a cold blue-grey mist was creeping up the valley.
There are some places--the Castle of Elsinore, for instance--that seem to have an amazing and incomprehensible gift of resisting civilization.
They may be brought up to date, and trimmed, and filled with inappropriate people, and everything else done that should spoil them, but in spite of it all they do not for a moment look as if any modern extraneous objects had a meaning for them. They belong to their own day and its manner, and to no other.
The same sort of feeling hovers about Tavy Cleave, and a great sense of the mystery that here more, there less, broods over the moor. But there is no suggestion as to who it is that the moor has most truly and absolutely belonged to, nor even the region of time: only the feeling that the valley is, in a finer than the usual sense, haunted.
As a valley Tavy Cleave is very beautiful, with its steep sides and clear rus.h.i.+ng stream and red granite rocks, half in and half out of the river, that have a charm they entirely lose when once away from the water. Mr Widgery shows how admirable they are in their proper place, with their reflections quivering beneath them. Sometimes a kind of black moss grows upon them, and tiny bits of white lichen, giving together a curious tortoisesh.e.l.l look. Above, the hill-sides are covered with heather and broom and whortleberries among ma.s.ses of loose rocks, and now and again there is the vivid green of a patch of bog. The great ma.s.ses of rocks crowning the separate points on the hill-side, like ruined rock-castles, add to the air of mystery.
Looking to the west from above the Cleave, one sees--as from any distance round one sees--the most characteristic height of Brent Tor, with the tiny church on the top. It is not that the tor is so very high, but in some astonis.h.i.+ng way it always seems to appear as a landmark, north, south, east, or west, when one imagines it to be absolutely out of range. The sides are steep and rocky, and the church stands 'full bleak and weather-beaten, all-alone as it were, forsaken, whose churchyard doth hardly afford depth of earth to bury the dead; yet doubtless they rest there as securely as in sumptuous St Peter's until the day of Doom.'
The story told of the church is that a man once almost gave himself up for lost--some say in a storm, others in an impenetrable, unending fog--in the Channel, and vowed that, if he ever came safe to sh.o.r.e, he would build a church on the first bit of land he saw. As Brent Tor is far inland, the fog story sounds the more probable, for there is no saying how mist wreaths may drift. The church is dedicated to St Michael de la Rupe, and here another tradition comes in, for it is popularly supposed that, when the building of the church was begun, the devil pulled away all the day's work in the night. At last St Michael came to the rescue, and hurled such an enormous ma.s.s of rock upon the devil that he fled away and hindered no more. The building is very tiny, and a countryman told me that as a child he used to be puzzled by the cryptic warning: 'If you get into the second aisle of Brent Tor Church, you will never get out again.' Of course--there is no second aisle.
The beauty of many of the places on the banks of the Tamar is celebrated. Among the exquisite woods and lawns of Endsleigh--through which one Duke of Bedford cut no less than forty miles in rides--the river twists and winds for a long distance at one point, and curves round almost into a ring. A little farther south are Morwell Rocks, which Mr Norway had the good fortune to see in the spring. 'The trees stretch far away along the river, dense and close to the water's edge, a mountain of gold and sunny green, broken in the midst by a high grey crag, which stands up sheer and grey amid the ma.s.s of gorgeous colour.
This is the first peak of a great range of limestone cliffs, which for the most part, as the hill sweeps round above the village of Morwellham, are hidden in the woods. But when that tiny cl.u.s.ter of cottages and wharves is left behind, the stream creeps closer to the hill, and it is as if the buried rock stirred and flung the coppice off its shoulders, for the limestone precipices rise vertically out of the water to a vast height. The summits are weathered into most fantastic shapes, pinnacles and towers break the skyline, and wherever a crevice in the rock has allowed the lodging of a little earth, some oak-tree roots itself, or a wild tangle of greenery drops down the scarred surface of the cliff.'
A little farther down, the Tamar and the Tavy join, and with the Cornish Lynher form the Hamoaze--a view of land and water that is very admirable. It is not a scene whose dimly realized charm grows gradually stronger, but one whose triumphant beauty is beyond dispute. The innumerable creeks and inlets, the rich abundance of foliage and pasture, and the sweeping sense of s.p.a.ciousness from the open sea that comes off Plymouth Sound, help to make the grand effect; and the feelings of few can be quite unstirred by the battles.h.i.+ps, or perhaps black sinister destroyers, and the mult.i.tude of other s.h.i.+pping lying at anchor in that famous haven, and by the thought of all that they mean to us.
CHAPTER XI
The Taw and the Torridge
'Hither from my moorland home, Nymph of Torridge, proud I come; Leaving fen and furzy brake, Haunt of eft and spotted snake ...
Nursling of the mountain sky, Leaving Dian's choir on high, Down her cataracts laughing loud, Ockment leapt from crag and cloud, Leading many a nymph, who dwells Where wild deer drink in ferny dells....
Graecia, prize thy parsley crown; Boast thy laurel, Caesar's town; Moorland myrtle still shall be Badge of Devon's Chivalry!'
KINGSLEY: _Westward Ho!_
'All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge, where salmon wait for autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland in the west. Above the town the hills close in, cus.h.i.+oned with deep oak-woods, through which juts here and there a crag of fern-fringed slate; below they lower and open more and more on softly rounded knolls and fertile squares of red and green, till they sink into the wide expanse of hazy flats, rich salt-marshes, and rolling sand-hills, where Torridge joins her sister Taw, and both together flow quietly toward the broad surges of the bar and the everlasting thunder of the long Atlantic swell.'
It is difficult to imagine that there could be a more fitting description of Bideford than that drawn in the opening words of 'Westward Ho!' Bideford, it has been said, is spoilt by ugly modern houses, but the remark implies a matter-of-fact view, for the ugliness and modernness are only skin-deep, and can easily be ignored. A matter of far greater importance is that there is an old-world essence, a dignity in the whole tone and spirit of the town, that keep it in touch with the glorious past.
Faithful followers of the heroes on the borderland of myth--King Arthur, Charlemagne, Holger Danske--believed that in their country's need these would arise from the shades to lead their people to victory; and at Bideford one feels that, should any 'knight of the sea' return, he would find a town not strange to him, and, if the stress were sharp enough to pierce the thin husk that later civilization has added, a people who would understand and not fail him.
The name comes from By-the-ford, but a ford between East-the-water and the town must have been rather perilous, and only possible at low-tide.
In the early part of the fourteenth century some of the chief inhabitants resolved to build a bridge, but several efforts were made in vain, for they were always thwarted by failure to find a firm enough foundation. Then Sir Richard Gurney, priest of the place, was 'admonished by a vision ... to begin that excellent work ... where he should find a stone fixed in the ground.' This dream he thought nothing of, 'until, walking by the river, he espied such a stone or rock there rolled and fixed firmly, which he never remembered to have seen formerly,' and was hereby convinced 'that his dream was no other than an heavenly inspiration.' The whole neighbourhood combined to help, the rich sending money and lending the services of their workmen, and the poor giving such time and labour as they could afford. The bridge, which has since been widened, is a very fine one, of twenty-four arches.
Westcote says: 'A bark of 60 tons (without masts) may pa.s.s and repa.s.s with the tide, which flows near five miles above it.'
Gifts and bequests were made to the bridge, and the funds belonging to it became so large, and the business connected with them so important, that in 1758 a hall was built for the use of the feoffees, and decorated with the royal arms and the arms of the bridge.