Motor Tours in the West Country 16

Motor Tours in the West Country 16

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]

 

[Illustration: 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 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.

 

[Illustration: 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 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.

 

[Illustration: STREET IN CLOVELLY.]

 

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.

 

[Illustration: 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 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