Part 7 (1/2)

In the centre of the long main street is the yarn-market, a beautiful wooden building of the seventeenth century, built by Sir George Luttrell when Dunster was still a centre of the wool industry. It is built with wide overhanging caves, pierced by eight little dormer-windows, with a lantern at the apex of the roof, and is a unique little building whose characteristic features have been sketched and photographed many scores of times, and is comparable, perhaps, only with the b.u.t.ter-market at Bingley in Yorks.h.i.+re. Opposite is the Luttrell Arms, a quiet, comfortable, harmonious stone building of the eighteenth century, but with part of the older building still preserved inside--a wall that overlooks a paved court, with windows set in frames of beautiful carved oak, and a gabled roof, a moulded plaster over-mantle also, and yet with that general air of disregard for these treasures, amid a hurrying to and fro with plates and bottles, which, to me, is one of the special charms of these long-established country inns.

To anyone who loves England, and that beauty which is so characteristically English, where the life of the present day is visibly linked with the life of the past through long centuries of security, where age has ripened all, the great old trees, the colours of old oak and weather-beaten tiles and warm brick, has gently undulated straight lines, and softened all sharp angles, where the very sunlight has the mellowness of old wine, to a mind perceptive of this peculiar and intimate charm of England, Dunster makes a special call, set amid the suave curves of its rich country, crowned by its ancient castle, dignified by its old, beautiful church (grown, like the castle, through Norman and Early English and Perpendicular styles of architecture), yet intimate and familiar, and beautiful most of all because of the use and wont of daily life within its walls.

CHAPTER VIII

LUNDY

It is curious in this twentieth century of ours, when every corner of the habitable globe is docketed, measured, mapped, and surveyed, when a railroad runs across ”darkest Africa,” and the great ice-wall of the Antarctic cannot keep its inviolability from the feet of those resolute and heroic explorers who go with camera, microscope, and theodolite, against such forces of Nature as would daunt anything but the resolute human heart--it is curious to come across small corners of the world where the law of nations seemingly does not run, and the current of the modern world sweeps by, leaving them in a backwater, strangely aloof and undisturbed.

Such is the island of Herm, in the Channel Isles; such are one or two volcanic rocks in the Greek Archipelago, which you may purchase for a song, and live on if you can, though their barren waterlessness under the midsummer suns will compel you to put out to sea again for all the dangers of swift currents and black crags; such, too, I imagine, are some of those enchanted small islands in the South Seas of which Conrad writes: ”It was as if the earth had gone on spinning, and had left that crumb of its surface alone in s.p.a.ce”; such, too, is Lundy.

But Lundy is only fourteen miles from the English coast, this populous and organized England, and in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, in the direct track of all the s.h.i.+pping of the West--sighted, it is estimated, by at least a million vessels a year in their business up and down the world--and yet, to within the last generation, it was almost as inaccessible as in the days when the de Mariscos built their castle there and defied the King and all his armies.

Even now, though in the summer pleasure steamers run from Ilfracombe and Minehead, and land their noisy crowds on the south-eastern corner of the island, the narrow peninsula of Lametor, it is during barely three months of the year; they have ceased before the coming of the October gales, and the island goes back to its solitude, and the wild clamour of its innumerable sea-birds, while its few inhabitants wait their bi-weekly post, and the coming of the Trinity boat on the 1st and 15th of the month, for news of the outside world.

For Lundy is a great rock, about three and a half miles long, and averaging half a mile in depth, cutting the strong tidal stream which runs round the south coast of Wales and up the Bristol Channel, with steep cliffs and outlying crags and peaks of rock over which the surf is flung ceaselessly, even on still summer days, and with a dangerous tidal race at its northern end and the south-west and south-east angles. It stands, too, in the highway of the winds as well as of the waters, and is so scored and buffeted by gales that hardly any trees, except the stunted dwarf-elder, can survive the winter fury on its open slopes. When a westerly gale is blowing, many s.h.i.+ps run in under its lee-sh.o.r.e for shelter; but its only landing-place is at the south-east angle by Rat Island, and that becomes dangerous in an easterly wind, so that boats have to be beached on the south or west side, though with difficulty and some danger. Add to this that the road from the landing-stage is so narrow and steep that it could be held by two men, and its suitability as a robber stronghold becomes clear.

It is a land of romance, singular in every aspect: in the formation of its rocks, in the birds that haunt its cliffs and the beasts that haunt its caves, in its antiquities, and the whole course of its adventurous history. It is a granite rock, with here and there patches of clay-shale, notably at the south-eastern corner; but the granite is differentiated from the granite of Devon, to which it is so proximate, and of so marked a character that it can be traced in many buildings along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, princ.i.p.ally in towers and churches, proving that quarries must have been worked on Lundy at some time during the Middle Ages, and before the fifteenth century; for there is comparatively little building of churches after that date. A company was formed in 1863 to work the Lundy granite-quarries, and it was intended to use this stone in the building of the Thames Embankment; but the difficulty of s.h.i.+pment from so inaccessible a spot proving insuperable, the enterprise was abandoned.

But apart from the height and boldness of these granite cliffs, rising in places almost sheer to a height of more than seven hundred feet, with outlying reefs and insular rocks bristling black and jagged through the foaming waters, with gully, creek, and cave, worn by the action of rain and sea, there is a further wildness given to the island by a great series of clefts or fissures, running for a considerable distance in a line irregularly parallel to the cliff, sometimes from ten to twenty feet across, and as much as eighty feet deep, where they can be measured; at other places too narrow for sounding, but seeming to strike right down into the bowels of the earth. Locally this phenomenon is called the ”earthquake,” and the popular tradition of the island ascribes its appearance to the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755; but it is certainly older than that date. However, the shock of that great disturbance may have further rent the granite and displaced the mighty boulders. It extends for about two miles from the southern coast, running in a northerly direction, and where the slate formation meets the granite it is fractured in the same sharp manner. Some upheaval of the earth's crust in far-off prehistoric times must have cracked the granite and made these mighty chasms; the wildness and singularity of their appearance, and the confined locality in which they occur--for there is no trace of such disturbance elsewhere in the island--make one wonder if it were no imprisoned demon or angry G.o.d, chained in the blackness under Lundy, who, stretching his mighty sinews to be free, so contorted and rent the solid granite above him. The absence of legend or ancient tradition (for the tradition of the Lisbon earthquake is comparatively recent) about so arresting a spectacle I ascribe to the condition of Lundy's history; there has been no continued habitation of the simple people of the land to pa.s.s on, from generation to generation, the ancient names and the ancient stories of their dwelling-place, untouched by the changes of rule and owners.h.i.+p which go over them.

For this reason another strange phenomenon of Lundy, about which the imagination of an earlier people must have lingered, pa.s.ses barely remarked. There is a great promontory on the coast, opposite the reef called the Hen and Chickens, which is pierced by a sort of tunnel about eight hundred feet in length and sixty feet in height, through which a boat can sail on calm days at high-water; and in the centre of the tunnel, bubbling up through the sea, rises a perpetual spring of fresh water. This is called the Virgin's Well, and I can discover no story or legend with which it is connected, though the name may possibly contain some earlier myth, not based upon Christian wors.h.i.+p.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lynton: The Devil's Cheesering]

The names of other remarkable features of the island, the great rocks which are piled along its coasts, are all descriptive and not legendary names--the Devil's Chimney, the Cheeses, the Templar's Rock, the Gannett Rock, the Mousehole. These names will have been given in comparatively recent times, at least since the Saxon invasion, for they show a different mentality from the Celtic names which are found widely in Cornwall, Devon, Wales, and Northumberland, and which have a poetic and imaginative quality. Such is the difference between Heddon's Mouth, ”the Giant's Mouth,” or Dunster, ”the Tower on the Hill,” and such names as I have quoted above. The very name of Lundy itself, which is ”Lund-ei,” the island of Lund, as Caldy is ”Cald-ei,” the island of Cald, show a Teutonic origin, perhaps Scandinavian, but not named so by the Celts of Britain or Ireland.

But ”there were great men before Agamemnon”; certainly there were great men on this island before the adventurer Lund landed upon it and gave it his name.

In 1850, in digging foundations near a farmhouse in the southern part of the island, a great grave, or series of graves, was discovered.

There were two stone coffins, made of hewn blocks of granite, just deep enough to contain a body, and with the covers sloped and cut each from a single block. One was ten feet in length, and contained the huge skeleton of a man, over eight feet high; the other was eight feet long, and contained a skeleton well over six feet, which ”was imagined to be that of a woman,” but on what grounds I cannot discover, as it does not seem to have been carefully examined, and is therefore probably mere conjecture, based upon its juxtaposition to the larger coffin. In the account of the excavation a ”macabre” incident is recorded. One of the workmen, seizing the s.h.i.+n-bone of the giant, placed it against his own leg, and found that it reached halfway up his thigh; whereupon, taking up the lower jawbone, he fitted it easily over his own lower jaw, though he was a burly man and bearded.

”To what base uses a man may return, Horatio! . . .”

”Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw.”

For that these were the bones of a man mighty in his day the workmans.h.i.+p of his coffin goes to prove. For he lay with a stone rest for his head and feet, made each of a cubic block of fine granite, and a deep depression hollowed in his pillow to take his head, resting sideways towards his shoulder. As these great blocks were cut and squared and hollowed with stone tools, the labour which they betoken may be imagined; and none, I suppose, but an imperious Caesar could have exacted it. The skeleton was covered and surrounded by a ma.s.s of limpet-sh.e.l.ls. There were seven other skeletons buried in a line with these two, but without coffins, and they were not of the race of giants; and then, at a little distance, there was a great pit, filled with the bones of men, women, and children, as if a slaughtered mult.i.tude had been flung into a common grave. In this pit were found some beads, light blue in colour, some sherds of red glazed pottery, and a few fragments of bronze. Over all was scattered a vast heap of limpet-sh.e.l.ls.

Here is one of the fascinating problems of archaeology, which comes with the touch of romance to the dry study of minutiae: When were these burials made? Are they of two different dates? The giant of the stone coffin perhaps belonged to the far-off Stone Age, already grown dim and legendary to these later peoples, who knew of the working of metal and the making of gla.s.s. And were they sacrificed to him, as a dark hero or demi-G.o.d of the past, to propitiate him against plague or conquest?

And what is the magical significance of the limpet-sh.e.l.ls, which cover them and him alike? These questions, and many others, will, I am convinced, be answered by the patient research of archaeology within comparatively few years. The suggestion that this interment is Danish, and is the remnant of the force defeated by Alfred the Great outside Kenwith Castle, is, I think, untenable; the bones of women and children being found with those of men alone disproves it, apart from the inaccessibility of Lundy and the very great antiquity of the stone coffins.

But whoever they may be who left their bones here, it is certain the story of their lying there is a tragedy, of b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice or more b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacre, like all the histories of wild animals and of primitive peoples.

Not far from the Giant's Grave, as this site is locally called, is another relic of h.o.a.ry antiquity, in the shape of a tumulus, which, when opened, laid bare a kistvaen, or sepulchral chamber, formed of a great block of granite, weighing nearly five tons, resting on two upright granite slabs, and enclosing a s.p.a.ce about six feet square.

This method of burial is well known throughout the old world; such burial chambers have been found in Greece, and in considerable numbers in Ireland, where they are primitive Celtic. In the Lundy kistvaen no skeleton was found, nor anything, indeed, save a small fragment of pottery, though ”there was a rank odour in the cavity, very different from that of newly turned earth.”

There is a logan-stone on the eastern side of the island, which, within the memory of Mr. Heaven, the last owner of the island, was a true logan-stone, and could be rocked with the hands, but has now slipped from its socket. But the whole question of these logan-stones is controversial, some claiming them as relics of antiquity of whose use and meaning we are ignorant, and others as the chance product of the natural forces of rain and weather.