A WEST COUNTRY PILGRIMAGE

Eden Phillpotts

TINTAGEL.

A WEST COUNTRY PILGRIMAGE

BY

EDEN PHILLPOTTS

AUTHOR OF
“DANCE OF THE MONTHS,” “A SHADOW PASSES,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY A. T. BENTHALL

LONDON
LEONARD PARSONS
PORTUGAL STREET

First Published, May 1920

Leonard Parsons, Ltd.

CONTENTS

HAYES BARTON

HAYES BARTON.

[9]

East of Exe River and south of those rolling heaths
crowned by the encampment of Woodberry, there lies a green
valley surrounded by forest and hill. Beyond it rise great
bluffs that break in precipices upon the sea. They are dimmed
to sky colour by a gentle wind from the east, for Eurus, however
fierce his message, sweeps a fair garment about him. Out of
the blue mists that hide distance the definition brightens and
lesser hills range themselves, their knolls dark with pine, their
bosoms rounded under forest of golden green oak and beech;
while beneath them a mosaic of meadow and tilth spreads in pure
sunshine. One field is brushed with crimson clover; another
with dull red of sorrel through the green meadow grass; another
shines daisy-clad and drops to the green of wheat. Some
crofts glow with the good red earth of Devon, and no growing
things sprout as yet upon them; but they hold seed of roots
and their hidden wealth will soon answer the rain.

In the heart of the vale a brook twinkles and buttercups
lie in pools of gold, where lambs are playing together.

Elms set bossy signets on the land and throng the hedgerows,
their round tops full of sunshine; under them the
hawthorns sparkle very white against the riot of the green.
From the lifted spinneys and coverts, where bluebells fling[10]
their amethyst at the woodland edge, pheasants are croaking,
and silver-bright against the blue aloft, wheel gulls, to link the
lush valley with the invisible and not far distant sea. They
cry and musically mew from their high place; and beneath
them the cuckoo answers.

Nestling now upon the very heart of this wide vale a
homestead lies, where the fields make a dimple and
the burn comes flashing. Byres and granaries light gracious
colour here, for their slate roofs are mellow with lichen
of red gold, and they stand as a bright knot round
which the valley opens and blossoms with many-coloured
petals. The very buttercups shine pale by contrast, and the
apple-blooth, its blushes hidden from this distance, masses
in pure, cold grey beneath the glow of these great roofs. Cob
walls stretch from the outbuildings, and their summits are
protected against weather by a little penthouse of thatch.
In their arms the walls hold a garden of many flowers,
rich in promise of small fruits. Gooseberries and raspberries
flourish amid old gnarled apple trees; there are strawberries,
too, and the borders are bright with May tulips and peonies.
Stocks and wallflowers blow flagrant by the pathway, murmured
over by honey bees; while where the farmhouse itself
stands, deep of eave under old thatch, twin yew trees make
a dark splash on either side of the entrance, and a wistaria
showers its mauve ringlets upon the grey and ancient front.
The dormer windows are all open, and there is a glimpse of
a cool darkness through the open door. Within the solid
walls of this dwelling neither sunshine nor cold can penetrate,
and Hayes Barton is warm in winter, in summer cool. The[11]
house is shaped in the form of a great E, and it has been
patched and tinkered through the centuries; but still stands,
complete and sturdy in harmony of design, with unspoiled
dignity from a far past. Only the colours round about it
change with the painting of the seasons, for the forms of hill
and valley, the modelling of the roof-tree, the walls and the
great square pond outside the walls, change not. Enter, and
above the dwelling-rooms you shall find a chamber with wagon
roof and window facing south. It is, on tradition meet to be
credited, the birthplace of Walter Ralegh.

Proof rests with Sir Walter’s own assertion, and at one time
the manor house of Fardel, under Dartmoor, claimed the
honour; but Ralegh himself declares that he was born at Hayes,
and speaks of his “natural disposition to the place” for that
reason. He desired, indeed, to purchase his childhood’s home
and make his Devonshire seat there; but this never happened,
though the old, three-gabled, Tudor dwelling has passed through
many hands and many notable families.

“Probably no conceivable growth of democracy,” says a
writer on Ralegh’s genealogy, “will make the extraction of
a famous man other than a point of general interest.”
Ralegh’s family, at least, won more lustre from him than
he from them, though his mother, of the race of the
Champernownes, was a mother of heroes indeed. By her
first marriage she had borne Sir Walter’s great half-brother,
Humphrey Gilbert; and when Otho Gilbert passed, the widow
wedded Walter Ralegh, and gave birth to another prodigy.
The family of the Raleghs must have been a large and scattered
one; but our Western historian, Prince, stoutly declares that[12]
Sir Walter was descended from an ancient and noble folk,
“and could have produced a much fairer pedigree than some
of those who traduc’d him.”

The tale of his manifold labours has been inadequately told,
though Fame will blow her trumpet above his grave for ever;
but among the lesser histories Prince’s brief chronicle is
delightful reading, and we may quote a passage or two for
the pleasure of those who pursue this note.

“A new country was discovered by him in 1584,” says the
historian, “called in honour of the Queen, Virginia: a country
that hath been since of no inconsiderable profit to our nation,
it being so agreeable to our English bodies, so profitable to the
Exchequer, and so fruitful in itself; an acre there yielding over
forty bushels of corn; and, which is more strange, there being
three harvests in a year: for their corn is sow’d, ripe and cut
down in little more than two months.”

I fear Virginia to-day will not corroborate these agricultural
wonders.

We may quote again, for Prince, on Sir Walter’s distinction,
is instructive at this moment:—

“For this and other beneficial expeditions and designs,
her Majesty was pleased to confer on him the honour of Knighthood;
which in her reign was more esteemed; the Queen
keeping the temple of honour close shut, and never open’d
but to vertue and desert.”

Well may democracy call for the destruction of that
temple when contemplating those that are permitted entrance
to-day.

Then vanished Elizabeth, and a coward king took her place.[13]

“Fourteen years Sir Walter spent in the Tower, of whom
Prince Henry would say that no King but his father would
keep such a bird in a cage.”

But freedom followed, and the scholar turned into the
soldier again. Ultimately Spain had her way with her scourge
and terror. James ministered to her revenge, and Ralegh
perished; “the only man left alive, of note, that had helped
to beat the Spaniards in the year 1588.”

The favour of the axe was his last, and being asked which
way he would dispose himself upon the block, he answered,
“So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head
lieth.”

“Authors,” adds old Prince, “are perplexed under what
topick to place him, whether of statesman, seaman, soldier,
chymist, or chronologer; for in all these he did excel. He
could make everything he read or heard his own, and his own
he would easily improve to the greatest advantage. He
seemed to be born to that only which he went about, so dextrous
was he in all his undertakings, in Court, camp, by sea, by land,
with sword, with pen. And no wonder, for he slept but five
hours; four he spent in reading and mastering the best authors;
two in a select conversation and an inquisitive discourse;
the rest in business.”

We may say of him that not only did he write The History
of the World, but helped to make it; we may hold of all Devon’s
mighty sons, this man the mightiest. Fair works have been
inspired by his existence, but one ever regrets that Gibbon, who
designed a life of Ralegh, was called to relinquish the idea
before the immensity of his greater theme.[14]

In the western meadow without the boundary of Hayes
Barton there lies a great pool, where a cup has been hollowed
to hold the brook. Here, under oak trees, one may sit, mark
a clean reflection of the farmhouse upon the water, and regard
the window of the birth chamber opening on the western
gable of the homestead. Thence the august infant’s eyes first
drew light, his lungs, the air. He has told us that dear to
memory was that snug nook, and many times, while he wandered
the world and wrote his name upon the golden scroll, we may
guess that the hero turned his thought to these happy valleys
and, in the mind, mirrored this haunt of peace.

THE SAD HEATH

THE SAD HEATH.

[17]

Through the sad heath white roads wandered, trickling
hither and thither helplessly. There was no set purpose
in them; they meandered up the great hill and sometimes
ran together to support each other. Then, fortified by
the contact, they climbed on across the dusky upland, where it
rolled and fell and lifted steadily to the crown of the land:
a flat-headed clump of beech and oak with a fosse round about
it. Only the roads twisting through this waste and a pool
or two scattered upon it brought any light to earth; but
there were flowers also, for the whins dragged a spatter of
dull gold through the sere and a blackthorn hedge shivered
cold and white, where fallow crept to the edge of the moors.
For the rest, from the sad-coloured sky to the sentinel pines
that rose in little detached clusters on every side, all was
restrained and almost melancholy. The pines specially distinguished
this rolling heath. They lifted their darkness in
clumps, ascending to the hill-tops, spattered every acre of
the land, and sprang as infant plants under the foot of the
wanderer. Scarcely a hundred yards lacked them; and they
ranged from the least seedling to full-grown trees that rose
together and thrust with dim red branch and bough through
their own darkness.[18]

There was no wind on the heath, and few signs of spring.
She had passed, as it seemed, lighted the furzes, waked a
thousand catkins on the dwarf sallows in the bogs, and
then departed elsewhere. One felt that the deserted heath
desired her return and regarded its obstinate winter robes
with impatience. It was an uplifted place, and seemed to
shoulder darkly out of the milder, mellower world beneath.
Far below, an estuary shone through the valley welter
and ran a streak of dull silver from south to north; while
easterly rose up the grey horizons of the sea.

In the murk of that silent hour, a spirit of thirst seemed
to animate the heather and the marshes that oozed out beneath.
The secret impressed upon my conscious intelligence was one of
suspense, a watchful and alert attitude—an emotion shared
by the trees and the thickets, the heath and the hills. It
ascended higher and higher to the frowning crest of the land,
where round woods made a crown for the wilderness and marked
castramentations of old time. So unchanging appeared this
place that little imagination was needed to bring back the past
and revive a vanished century when the legions flashed where
now the great trees frowned and a hive of men, loosed from
a hundred galleys, swarmed hither to dig the ditches and
pile these venerable earthworks for a stronghold.

Thus the place lay in the lap of that tenebrous hour and
waited for the warm rain to loose its fountains of sap and
brush the loneliness with waking and welcoming green. It
endured and hoped and seemed to turn blind eyes from the
pond and bog upward to question the gathering clouds.

Nigh me, a persistent and inquiring thrush clamoured[19]
from a pine. I could see his amber, speckled bosom shaking
with his song.

“Why did he do it? Why did he do it? Why did he?”

He had asked the question a thousand times; and then a
dark bird, that flapped high and heavy through the grey
air, answered him.

“God knows! God knows!” croaked the carrion crow.

DAWLISH WARREN

DAWLISH WARREN.

[23]

There is a spit of land that runs across the estuary of the
Exe, and as the centuries pass, the sea plays pranks with it.
A few hundred years ago the tideway opened to the West,
not far from the red cliffs that tower there, and then Exmouth
and the Warren were one; but now it is at Exmouth that the
long sands are separated from the shore and, past that little
port, the ships go up the river, while the eastern end of the
Warren joins the mainland. So it has stood within man’s
memory; but now, as though tired of this arrangement,
wind and sea are modifying the place again, for the one has
found a new path in the midst, and the other has blown at
the sand dunes until their heads are reduced by many feet
from their old altitude.

These sands are many-coloured, for over the yellow staple
prevails a delicate and changing harmony of various tones,
now rose, now blue, as though a million minute shining particles
were reflecting the light of the sky and bringing it to
earth on their tiny surfaces. But in truth these tender shades
show where the sand is weathered, for if we walk upon it and
break the thin crust created by the last rain, the dream tints
depart, and a brighter corn colour breaks through. Coarse
mat-grass binds the dunes and helps to hold them together
against the forces of wind and water; but their tendency is[24]
to decrease. Perhaps observation would prove that their
masses shift and vanish more quickly than we guess, for the
sand is the sea’s toy, and she makes and unmakes her castles
at will.

As a lad, I very well remember the silvery hills towering
to little mountains above my head; and again I can hear the
gentle tinkle of the sand for ever rustling about me where I
basked like a lizard in some sun-baked nook. I remember
the horrent couch grass that waved its ragged tresses above
me, and how I told myself that the range of the sand dunes
were great lions with bristling manes marching along to Exmouth.
Presently they would swim across to the shore and
eat up everybody, as soon as they had landed and shaken
themselves. And the mud-flats I loved well also, where the
sea-lavender spread its purple on sound land above the network
of mud. I flushed summer snipe there and often lay motionless
to watch sea-birds fishing. Many wild flowers flourished
and the glass-wort made the flats as red as blood in autumn.
It was a dreamland of wonders for me, and now I was seeking
mermaids’ purses in the tide-fringe and sorrowing to find them
empty; now I was after treasure-trove flung overboard from
pirate ships, now hunting for the secret hiding-places of
buccaneers in the dunes.

The ships go by still; but not the ships I knew; the flowers
still sparkle in the hollows and brakes; but their wonder has
waned a little. No more shall I weave the soldanella and sea-rocket
and grey-green wheat grass into crowns for the sea-nymphs
to find when they come up from the waves in the
moonlight.[25]

It is a place of sweet air and wonderful sunshine. On a
sunny day, with the sand ablaze against the blue sky, one might
think oneself in some desert region of the East; but then
green spaces, scarlet flags and a warning “fore!” tell a different
story. For golfers have found the Warren now. Where
once I roamed with only the gulls above and rabbits below
for company, and for music the sigh of the wind in the bents
and the song of the sea, half a hundred little houses have
sprung up, and bungalows, red and white and green, throng
the Warren. At hand is a railway-station, whence hundreds
descend to take their pleasure, while easterly this once peaceful
region is most populous and the Exmouth boats cross the
estuary and land their passengers.

One does not grudge the joy of the place to townsfolk or
golfers; one only remembers the old haunt of peace, now
peaceful no more, the old beauties that have vanished under
the little dwellings and little flagstaffs, the former fine
distinction that has departed.

Dawlish Warren now gives pleasure to hundreds, where
once only the dreamer or sportsman wandered through its
mazes; and that is well; but we of the old brigade, who
remember its far-flung loneliness, its rare wild flowers, its
unique contours, its isolation and peculiar charm, may be
forgiven if we forget the twentieth century for a season and
conjure back the old time before us.

Topsham, in the estuary, wakens thoughts of the Danes
and their sword and fire, when Hungar and Hubba brought
their Viking ships up the river, destroyed the busy little port,
and, pushing on, defeated St. Edmond, King of the East[26]
Angles. The pagans scourged this Christian monarch with
whips, then bound him to a tree and slew him.

So writes the old poet quoted by Risdon, who adds that the
Danes, cutting off St. Edmond’s head, “contumeliously threw
it in a bush.”

But Topsham in Tudor times was a place of importance, a naval port, a
mart and road for ships. Thanks to weirs built across the waterway by
the Earls of Devon, Exeter began to lose its old-time trade, when the
tide was wont to ascend to the city. Therefore Exeter fought the earls,
and in the reign of Henry VIII. the city obtained a grant to cut a canal
from Topsham. Thus vessels of fifteen tons burthen could ascend to the
capital, and Topsham sank under the blow and lost its old importance.

Exmouth also figures in the reign of Edward I. as a naval
port. In 1298 she contributed a fighting ship to the Fleet,
and in 1347 sent ten vessels to aid the third Edward’s expedition
against Calais. From Exmouth, too, Edward IV. and
Warwick, “the King Maker,” embarked for the Continent.

Risdon also makes mention of Lympston, another village
in the estuary, aforetime in the lordship of the Dynhams,
“of which family John Dynham, a valiant esquire siding with
the Earl of March, took the Lord Rivers and Sir Anthony
his son at Sandwich in their beds, when he was hurt in the leg,
the 37th Henry 6.”[27]

The villages are worth a visit still, but Exmouth is best
known to those who visit Dawlish Warren now. For the open
sea welcomes all who come hither, and the little holiday homes
that stand on either side of the tidal stream are too few for
those who would dwell here in July and August if they could.

I have seen dawn upon the Exe, and watched the mists
rise upon these heron-haunted flats to meet the morning.
Then the villages twinkle out over the water, and a land
breeze wakens the sleepy dunes, ruffles the still waters and
fills the red sails of little fishers that come down to the sea.

THE OLD GREY HOUSE

THE OLD GREY HOUSE.

[31]

Among the ancient, fortified manors of the West Country
there is a pleasant ruin whose history is innocent of event,
yet glorified with a noble name or two that rings down through
the centuries harmoniously. You shall find Compton Castle
where the hamlet of Lower Marldon straggles through a deep
and fertile valley not many miles from Torbay.

Compton’s time-stained face and crown of ivy rise now
above a plat of flowers. Trim borders of familiar things
blossom within their box-hedges before the entrance, and at
this autumn hour fat dahlias, spiring hollyhocks, and rainbows
of asters and pansies wind a girdle beneath the walls.

It is a ruin of wide roofs and noble frontage. Above its
windows sinister bartizans frown grimly; the portals yawn vast
and deep; only the chapel-windows open frankly upon the face
of the dwelling; but above, all apertures are narrow, up to
the embattled towers.

In the lap of many an enfolding hill Compton huddles its
aged fabric, and, despite certain warlike additions, can have
risen for no purpose of offence, for the land rakes it on every
side; it stands at the bottom of a great green cup, whose slopes
are crowned with fir and beech, whose sides now glimmer under
stubble of corn, green of roots, and wealth of wide orchards,
bright with the ripening harvest. Close at hand men make[32]
ready the cider-presses again, and the cooper’s mallet echoes
among his barrels.

Much of the castle still stands, and the entrance hall,
chapel, priest’s chamber, and kitchen, with its gigantic hearth
and double chimney, are almost intact. A mouldering roof
of lichened slates still covers more than half of the ruin; but
the banqueting hall has vanished, and many a tower and
turret, under their weight of ivy, lift ragged and broken to the
sky. Where now jackdaws chiefly dwell and bats sidle through
the naked windows at call of dusk; where wind and rain
find free entrance and pellitory-of-the-wall hangs its foliage
for tapestry, with toadflax and blue speedwell; where Nature
labours unceasing from fern-crowned battlement to mossy
plinth, there dwelt of old the family of Gilbert.

One Joan Compton conveyed the manor for her partage in
the second Edward’s reign; and of their posterity are justly
remembered and revered the sons of Otho Gilbert, whose lady—a
maiden of the Champernownes—bore not only Humphrey,
the adventurer, who discovered Gilbert’s Straits and founded
the first British settlement of Newfoundland; but also his
more famous uterine brother, Walter Ralegh. For upon Otho
Gilbert’s passing, his dame mated with Walter Ralegh of
Fardel, and by him brought into the world the poet,
statesman, soldier, courtier, explorer, and master-jewel of
Elizabeth’s Court. A noble matron surely must have been
that Katherine, mother of two such sons; and less only in
honour to these knights were Sir Humphrey’s brothers, of
whom Sir John, his senior, rendered himself acceptable to God
and man by manifold charities and virtues; while Adrian[33]
Gilbert is declared a gentleman very eminent for his skill
in mines and matters of engineering and science.

Within these walls tradition brings Sir Walter and Sir
Humphrey together. We may reasonably see them here
discussing their far-reaching projects, while still the world
smiled and both basked in the sunshine of Royal favour.
Yet, at the end of their triumphs, from our standpoint in
time, we can mark, stealing along the avenue of years, the
shadow, hideous in one case and violent in both, destined
presently to put a period to each great life.

When the little Squirrel, a vessel of but ten tons burthen,
was bearing Sir Humphrey upon his last voyage from Newfoundland,
before his vision there took shape the spectre of
a mighty lion gliding over the sea, “yawning and gaping wide
as he went.” Upon which portent there rose the storm whereby
he perished. Yet the knight’s memory is green, and his
golden anchor, with pearl at peak, badge of a Sovereign’s
grace, is not forgot; nor his crest of a squirrel, whose living
prototype still haunts the fir trees beside the castle; nor his
motto, worthy of so righteous a genius and steadfast a man:
“Malem mori, quam mutare.”

The navigator passed to his restless resting-place in 1584;
his half-brother, still busy with the colonisation of Virginia,
did not kneel at Westminster and brush his grey hair from the
path of the axe until Fate had juggled with him for further
four-and-thirty years. Then his sword and pen were laid down;
his wise head fell low; and the portion of the great: well-doing,
ill report, was won.

At gloaming time, when the jackdaws make an end; when[34]
the owl glides out from his tower to the trees and the beetles
boom, twilight shadows begin to move and the old grey house
broods, like a sentient thing, upon the past; but no unhappy
spirits haunt its desolation, and the mighty dead, despite their
taking off, revisit these glimpses of the moon to clasp pale
hands no more. Abundant life flows to the gate and circles the
walls. Arable land ascends the hills, and the clank of plough
and cry of man to his horses will soon be heard in the stubble
of the corn. The orchards flash ruddy and gold; to-morrow
they will be naked and grey; and then again they will foam
with flowers and roll in a white sea to the castle walls. Time
rings his rounds and forgets not this sequestered hollow. Today,
beside the entrance-gate of Compton, the husbandman
mounts his nag from that same “upping-stock” whence a
Gilbert and a Ralegh leapt to horse in England’s age of gold.

BERRY POMEROY

BERRY POMEROY.

[37]

Hither, a thousand years and more ago, rode Radulphus
de la Pomerio, lord of the Norman Castle of the Orchard; for
William I. was generous to those who helped his conquests.
Radulphus, as the result of a hero’s achievements at Hastings,
won eight-and-fifty Devon lordships, and of these he chose
Beri, “the Walled town,” for his barony, or honour.

Forward we may imagine him pressing with his cavalcade,
through the wooded hills and dales, until this limestone crag
and plateau in the forest suddenly opened upon his view, and
the Norman eagle, judging the strength of such a position,
quickly determined that here should his eyrie be built. For
it was a stronghold impregnable before the days of gunpowder.

So the banner with the Pomeroy lion upon it was set
aloft on the bluff, and soon the sleep of the woods departed
to the strenuous labour of a thousand men. There is a
great gap in the hill close at hand that shows whence came
these time-worn stones, when a feudal multitude of workers
were set upon their task. Then, grim, squat and stern,
with a hundred eyes from which the cross-bow’s bolts
might leap, arose another Norman castle, its watch-towers
and great ramparts wedged into the woods and beetling over[38]
the valley beneath. It sprang from the solid rock, dominated
a gorge, and so stood for many hundred years, during which
time the descendants of Ralph exercised baronial rights and
enjoyed the favour of their princes. The family, indeed, continued
to prosper until 1549, but then disaster overtook them
and they disappeared, disgraced. It was during this year that
Devon opposed the “Act for Reforming the Church Service.”
Tooth and nail she resented the proposed changes; and among
the malcontents there figured a soldier Pomeroy, now head
of his house, who had fought with distinction in France
during the reign of Henry VIII. Like many another military
veteran since his time, he assumed an exceedingly definite
attitude on matters of religion, and held tolerance a doubtful
virtue where dogma was involved. Him, therefore, the discontented
gentlemen of the West elected their leader, and, after
preliminary successes, the baron lost the day at Clist Heath,
nigh Exeter. He was captured, and only escaped with his
life. He kept his head on his shoulders, but Berry Pomeroy
became sequestrated to the Crown.

By purchase, the old castle now owned new masters, for
the Seymours followed the founders in their heritage, and
the great Elizabethan ruin, that lies in the midst of the
Norman work and towers above it, is of their creation.

Sir Edward—a descendant of the Protector—it was who,
when William III. remarked to him, “I believe you are of
the family of the Duke of Somerset?” made instant reply,
“Pardon, sir; the Duke of Somerset is of my family.” This
haughty gentleman was the last of his race to dwell at Berry
Pomeroy; but to his descendants the castle still belongs, and[39]
it can utter this unique boast: that since the Conquest it has
changed hands but once.

The fabric of Seymour’s mansion was, it is said, never
completed, but enough still stands to make an imposing ruin;
while the earlier fragments of the original fortress, including
the southern gateway, the pillared chamber above it and the
north wing of the quadrangle, complete a spectacle sufficiently
splendid in its habiliments of grey and green.

Nature had played with it and rendered it beautiful. Ivy
crowns every turret and shattered wall; its limbs writhe
like hydras in and out of the ruined windows, and twist
their fingers into the rotting mortar; while along the
tattered battlements and archways, grass and wild flowers
grow rankly together and many saplings of oak and ash
and thorn find foothold aloft. Over all the jackdaws chime
and chatter, for it is their home now, and they share it with
the owl and the flittermouse.

Seen from beyond the stew ponds in the valley below, the
ruins of Berry still present a noble vision piled among the
tree-tops into the sky, and never can it more attract than at
autumn time, when the wealth of the woods is scattered and
only spruce and pine trail their green upon the grey and
amber of the naked forest. Then, against the low, lemon
light of a clear sunset, Berry’s ragged crown ascends
like a haunted castle in a fairy story; while beneath the
evening glow, the still water casts many a crooked reflection
from the overhanging branches, and the last leaves hanging
on the osiers splash gold against the gloom of the banks.
The hour is very still after wind and rain; twilight broods[40]
under gathering vapours, while another night gently obscures
detail and renders all formless and vast as the darkness falls.
The castle is swallowed up in the woods; the first owl
hoots; then there is a rush overhead and a splash and scutter
below, as the wild duck come down from above, and, for a
little while, break the peace with their noise. Their flurry on
the water sets up wavelets, that catch the last of the light
and run to bank with a little sigh. Then all is silent and
stars begin to twinkle through the network of boughs at
forest edge.

BERRY HEAD

BERRY HEAD.

[43]

Upon this seaward-facing headland the great cliffs slope
outward like the sides of an old “three-decker.” They bulge
upon the sea, and the flower-clad scales of the limestone are
full of lustrous light and colour, shining radiantly upon the
still tide that flows at their feet. For, on this breathless
August day, the very sea is weary; not a ripple of foam
marks juncture of rock and water.

The cliffs are spattered with green, where scurvy-grass and
samphire, thrift and stonecrop find foothold in every cleft;
but the flowers are nearly gone; the rare, white rock rose
which haunts these crags has shed her last petal and the
little cathartic flax and centaury; the snowy dropwort, storks-bill
and carline thistles have all been scorched away by days
of sunshine and dewless nights. Only the sea lavender still
brushes the great, glaring planes of stone with cool colour, and
a wild mallow lolls here and there out of a crevice.

By the coastguard path holiday folk tramp with hot faces,
but, save for the gulls, there is little sound or movement, for
land and sea are swooning in the heavy noontide hour. The
birds are everywhere—cresting the finials of the rocks, swooping
over the sea, busy teaching the little grey “squabs” to
use their wings and trust the air. Now and then a coney
thrusts his ears from a burrow, likes not the heat, and pops[44]
back again to his cool, dark parlour. Brown hawks hang
above the brown sward. Life seems to be retreating before
the pitiless sun, yet the sear, scorched grasses will be green
again in a few weeks when the cisterns of the autumn rains
open upon them. Already tiny, blue scilla autumnalis is
pressing her head through the turf.

Islets lie off-shore, so full of light that they glow like
bubbles blown of air and seem to float on the surface of the
sea. Their shadows fall in delicious purple on the aquamarine
waters and warm hues percolate their ragged, silver faces,
while the gulls cluster in myriads upon them, and, black and
silent among the noisy sea-fowl, stand dusky cormorants with
long necks lifted. Like pale blue silk, shot and streamed over
with pure light, the Channel rises to the mists of the horizon.
Light penetrates air and water and earth, so that the weight
of land and water are lifted off them and lost; indeed the
scene appears to be composed of imponderable hazes and
vapours merging into each other; it is wrought in planes of
light—a gorgeous, unsubstantial illumination as though the
clouds were come to earth. The eternal melody of the gulls
pierces the picture with sound, hard and metallic, until their
din and racket seem of heavier substance and reality than the
mighty cliffs and sea from which it pours. Yet the birds
themselves, in their floatings and their wheelings, are lighter
than feathers. They make the only movement save for fisher
craft with tan-red sails now streaming in line round the Head
to sea. For the Scruff they are bound—a great, sandy
bottom where sole and turbot dwell ten sea-miles off-shore.

Inland gleam cornfields of heavy grain ripe for harvest[45]—pale
yellow of oats and golden brown of wheat, where the
poppies stir with the gipsy rose; and flung up upon the cliff-edge
rise lofty ramparts, ribbed with granite and bored by
portholes for cannon. A modern gun a league out at sea
would crumble these masonries like sponge-cake; but they
were lifted in haste a hundred years ago, when England
quaked at the threatened advent of “Boney,” whose ordnance
could not have destroyed them. The great fortresses were
piled by many thousands of busy hands, yet time sped quicker
than the engineers, and before the forts were completed,
Napoleon, from the deck of the Bellerophon in the bay beneath,
had looked his last on Europe.

Still the unfinished work sprawls over the cliffs, and whence
cannon were meant to stare, now thrust the blackberry, brier
and eagle-fern through the embrasures, and stunted black-thorns
and white-thorns shine green against the grey.

One clambers among them to seek the gift of a patch of
shade, and wonders what the first Napoleon would have
thought of the hydroplane purring out to sea half a mile
overhead.

THE QUARRY AND THE BRIDGE

THE QUARRY AND THE BRIDGE.

[49]

Lastrea and athyrium, their foliage gone, cling in silky
russet knobs under the granite ledges, warm the iron-grey
stone with brown and agate brightness, and promise many a
beauty of unfolding frond when spring shall come again. For
their jewels will be unfolding presently, to soften the cleft
granite with misty green and bring the vernal time to these
silent cliffs.

The quarry lies like a gash in the slope of the hills. To
the dizzy edges of it creep heather and the bracken; beneath,
upon its precipices, a stout rowan or two rises, and everywhere
Nature has fought and laboured to hide this wound driven so
deep into her mountain-side by man. A cicatrix of moss and
fern and many grasses conceal the scars of pick and gunpowder;
time has weathered the harsh edges of the riven stone; the
depths of the quarry are covered by pools of clear water,
for it is nearly a hundred years since the place yielded its
stores.

One great silence is the quarry now—an amphitheatre
of peace and quiet hemmed by the broken abutments of
granite, and opening upon the hillside. The heather extends
over wide, dun spaces to a blue distance, where evening lies
dim upon the plains beneath; round about a minor music of
dripping water tinkles from the sides of the quarry; a current
of air brushes the pools and for a moment frets their pale
[50]
surfaces; the dead rushes murmur and then are silent; here
and there, along the steps and steep places flash the white
scuts of the rabbits. A pebble is dislodged by one of them,
and, falling to the water beneath, sets rings of light widening
out upon it and raises a little sound.

In the midst, casting its jagged shadow upon the water,
springs a great, ancient crane from which long threads of iron
still stretch round about to the cliffs. It stands stoutly yet
and marks the meaning of all around it.

At time of twilight it is good to be here, for then one
may measure the profundity of such peace and contrast
this matrix of vanished granite with the scene of its present
disposal; one may drink from this cup all the mystery that
fills a deserted theatre of man’s work and feel that loneliness
which only human ruins tell; and then one may open the
eye of the mind upon another vision, and suffer the ear of
imagination to throb with its full-toned roar.

For hence came London Bridge; the mighty masses of
granite riven from this solitude span Thames.

Away in the heath and winding onward by many a curve
may yet be traced the first railroad in the West Country. It
started here, upon the frontier hills of Dartmoor, and sank
mile upon mile to the valleys beneath. But of granite were
wrought the lines, and over them ran ponderous wagons.
Many thousand feet of stone were first cut for the railway,
before those greater masses destined for London set forth
upon it to their destination.

Like the empty quarry this deserted railway now lies silent,
and the place of its passing on the hills and through the forest[51]
beneath is at peace again. From the Moor the tramway drops
into the woods of Yarner, and here, between a heathery hillside
and the fringes of the forest, the broken track may still be
found, its semi-grooved lengths of granite scattered and clad
in emerald moss, where once the great wheels were wont to
grind it. The line passes under interlacing boughs of beeches
and winds this way and that, like a grey snake, through the
copper brightness of the fallen leaves; it turns and twists,
dropping ever, and ceases at last at the mouth of a little canal
in the valley, where barges waited of old to carry the stone
to the sea.

Here also is stagnation now, but picturesque wrecks of
the ancient boats may still be seen at Teigngrace in the
forgotten waterway. They lie foundered upon the canal with
bulging sides and broken ribs. Their shapes are outlined in
grasses and flowers; sallows leap silvery from the old bulwarks
and alders find foothold there; briar and kingcups
flourish upon their decay; moss and ferns conceal their
wounds; in summer purple spires of loosestrife man their
water-logged decks, and the vole swims to and from his
hidden nest therein.

Here came the Hey Tor granite, after dropping twelve
hundred feet from the Moor above. Leaving the great wains,
it was shipped upon the Stover Canal and despatched down
the estuary of Teign to Teignmouth, whence larger vessels
bore it away to London for its final purpose.

It came to supersede that bridge of houses familiar in the
old pictures, the bridge that was a street; the bridge that in
its turn had taken the place of older bridges built with wood:[52]
those mediæval structures that perished each in turn by flood
or fire.

It was in 1756 that the Corporation of London obtained
an order to rebuild London Bridge; but things must have
moved slowly, for not until fifty years later was the announcement
made of a new bridge to pass from Bankside, Southwark,
to Queen Street, Cheapside. The public was invited to invest
in the enterprise, and doubtless proved willing enough to
do so. The ancient structure, long a danger to the
navigation of the river, vanished, and in 1825, with great
pomp and ceremony, the foundation-stone of the “New London
Bridge” sank to its place. A recent writer in The Academy
has given a graphic picture of the event, and described the
immense significance attached to the occasion. From the
earliest dawn of that June morning, London flocked to waterside
and thronged each point of vantage. Before noon the
roofs of Fishmongers’ Hall, of St. Saviour’s Church, and every
building that offered a glimpse of the ceremony were crowded;
the river was alive with craft of all descriptions; the cofferdam
for the erection of the first pier served the purpose of a
private enclosure, where notable folk sat in four tiers of
galleries under flags and awnings.

At four o’clock, by which time the great company must have
been weary of waiting, two six-pounder guns at the Old Swan
Stairs announced the approach of the Civic and State authorities.
The City Marshal, the Bargemasters, the Watermen, the
members of the Royal Society, the Goldsmiths, the Under-Sheriffs,
the Lord Mayor and the Duke of York appeared.

“His Lordship, who was in full robes,” so says an eye-witness[53]
of the event, “offered the chair to his Royal Highness,
which was positively declined on his part. The Mayor, therefore,
seated himself; the Lady Mayoress, with her daughters
in elegant dresses, sat near his Lordship, accompanied by two
fine-looking, intelligent boys, her sons; near them were the
two lovely daughters of Lord Suffolk, and many other
fashionable ladies.”

Then followed the ceremony. Coins in a cut-glass bottle
were placed beneath a copper plate, and upon them descended
a mighty block of Dartmoor granite. “The City sword and
mace were placed upon it crossways, the foundation of the
new bridge was declared to be laid, the music struck up
‘God save the King,’ and three times three excessive cheers
broke forth from the company, the guns of the Honourable
Artillery Company on the Old Swan Wharf fired a salute, and
every face wore smiles of gratulation. Three cheers were
afterwards given for the Duke of York, three for Old England,
and three for the architect, Mr. Rennie.”

Then did a journalist with imagination dance a hornpipe
upon the foundation-stone—for England would not take its
pleasure sadly on that great day—and subsequently many ladies
stood upon it, and “departed with the satisfaction of being enabled
to relate an achievement honourable to their feelings!”

And still the noble bridge remains, though the delicate
feet that rested on its foundation-stone have all tripped to
the shades. The bridge remains, and its five simple spans—the
central one of a hundred and fifty-two feet—make
a startling contrast with the nineteen little arches and huge
pedestals of the ancient structure. New London Bridge is[54]
more than a thousand feet long; its width is fifty-six feet;
its height, above low water, sixty feet. The central piers are
twenty-four feet thick, and the voussoirs of the central arch
four feet nine inches deep at the crown and nine feet at the
springing. The foundations lie twenty-nine feet, six inches
beneath low water; the exterior stones are all of granite;
while the interior mass of the fabric came half from Bramley
Fall and half from Derbyshire.

More than seven years did London Bridge take a-building,
and it was opened in 1831. The total costs were something
under a million and a half of money—less than is needed for
a modern battleship.

And already, before it is one hundred years old, there
comes a cry that London’s heart finds this great artery too
small for the stream of life that flows for ever upon it. One
may hope, however, that when the necessity arrives, this
notable bridge will not be spoiled, but another created hard
by, if needs must, to fulfil the demands of traffic. Perhaps
a second tunnel may solve the problem, since metropolitan
man is turning so rapidly into a mole.

From quarry to bridge is a far cry, yet he who has seen
both may dream sometimes among the dripping ferns, silent
cliff-faces and unruffled pools, of the city’s roar and riot
and the ceaseless thunder of man’s march from dawn till
even; while there—in the full throb and hurtle of London
town, swept this way and that amid the multitudes that
traverse Thames—it is pleasant to glimpse, through the reek
and storm, the cradle of this city-stained granite, lying silent
at peace in the far-away West Country.

BAGTOR

BAGTOR.

[57]

From the little southern salient of Bagtor at Dartmoor
edge, there falls a slope to the “in country” beneath.
Thereon Bagtor woods extend in many a shining plane—from
wind-swept hill-crowns of beech and fir, to dingles and snug
coombs in the valley bottom a thousand feet beneath.

On a summer day one loiters in the dappled wood, for
here is welcome shade after miles of hot sunshine on the
heather above. Music of water splashes pleasantly through
the trees, where a streamlet falls from step to step; the last
of the bluebells still linger by the way, and above them great
beech-boles rise, all chequered with sun splashes. On the earth
dead leaves make a russet warmth, brighter by contrast with
the young green round about, and brilliant where sunlight
winnows through. There, in the direct beam, flash little flies,
which hang suspended upon the light like golden beads; while
through the glades, young fern is spread for pleasant resting-places.
Pigeons murmur aloft unseen, and many a grey-bird
and black-bird sing beside their hidden homes.

At last the woodlands make an end, old orchards spread
in a clearing, and the sun, now turning west, has left the
apple trees, so that their blossom hangs cool and shaded on
the boughs. Behind—a background for the orchard—there
rise the walls of an ancient house, weathered and worn—a
mass of picturesque gables and tar-pitched roofs with red-brick[58]
chimneys ascending above them. No great dignity or
style marks this dwelling. It is a thing of patches and
additions. Here the sun still burns radiantly, makes the roof
golden, and flashes on the snow-white “fan-tails” that strut
up and down upon it.

Great Scotch firs tower to the south, and the light burns
redly in their boughs against the blue sky above them. A
farmhouse nestles beside the old mansion under a roof of
ancient thatch, that falls low over the dawn-facing front, and
makes ragged eyelashes for the little windows. The face of
the farm is nearly hidden in green things, and a colour note of
mauve dominates the foliage where wistaria showers. There
are climbing roses too, a Japanese quince, and wallflowers and
columbines in the garden plot that subtends the dwelling.
Mossy walls enclose the garden, and beneath them spreads the
farmyard—a dust-dry place to-day wherein a litter of black
piglets gambol round their mother. Poultry cluck and scratch
everywhere, and a company of red calves cluster together in
one corner. A ploughman brings in his horses. From a byre
comes the purr of milk falling into a pail.

On still evenings bell music trickles up to this holt of
ancient peace from a church tower three miles away; for we
stand in the parish of Ilsington on the shoulder of Dartmoor,
and the home of the silver “fan-tails” is Bagtor House—a
spot sanctified to all book-lovers. Here, a very mighty
personage first saw the light and began his pilgrimage; at
Bagtor was John Ford born, the first great decadent of English
letters, the tragedian whose sombre works belong to the sunset
time of the spacious days.[59]

In April of 1586 the infant John received baptism at
Ilsington church; while, sixteen years later, he was apprenticed
to his profession and became a member of the Middle
Temple. At eighteen John Ford, who wrote out of his own
desire and under an artist’s compulsion only, first tempted
fortune; and over his earliest effort, Fame’s Memorial, a
veil may be drawn; while of subsequent collaborations with
Webster and Decker, part perished unprinted and Mr. Warburton’s
cook “used up” his comedies. Probably they are
no great loss, for a master with less sense of humour never
lived. But The Witch of Edmonton in Swinburne’s judgment
embodies much of Ford’s best, and his greatest plays all
endure.

The man who wrote The Lover’s Melancholy, ‘Tis Pity
She’s a Whore, The Broken Heart and Love’s Sacrifice was born
in this sylvan scene and his cradle rocked to the murmur of
wood doves. True he vanished early from Devonshire, and
though uncertain tradition declares his return, asserting that,
while still in prime and vigour, he laid by his gown and pen
and came back to Bagtor, to end his days where he was born,
and mellow his stormy heart before he died, no proof that
he did so exists. His life’s history has been obliterated and
contemporary records of him have yet to appear.

As an artist he must surely have loved horror for horror’s
sake, and, too often, our terror arouses not that pity
to which tragedy should lift man’s heart, but rather
generates disgust before his extraordinary plots and the
unattractive and inhuman characters which unravel them.
One salutes the intellectual power of him, but merely[60]
shudders, without being enchained or uplifted by the nature
of his themes. It has been well said of Ford that he
“abhorred vice and admired virtue; but ordinary vice or
modern virtue were to him as light wine to a dram drinker….
Passion must be incestuous or adulterous; grief must be
something more than martyrdom, before he could make them
big enough to be seen.”

There is a little of Michaelangelo about Ford—something
excruciating, tortured. The tormented marble of the one
is reflected in the wracked and writhing characters of the
other; but whether Ford felt for the sorrow of earth as the
Florentine; whether he shared that mightier man’s fiery
patriotism, enthusiasm of humanity and tragic griefs before
the suffering of mankind, we know not. One picture we have
of him from old time, and it offers a gloomy, aloof figure, little
caring to win friendship, or court understanding from his
fellows:—

So depicted the gloomy artist might serve for tragedy’s
self—arms crossed, brows drawn, eyes darkling under the
broad-brimmed beaver, with the plotter’s night-black cloak
swept round his person. Or to a vision of Michaelangelo’s “Il
Penseroso” we may exalt the poet, and see him in that
solemn and stately stone, finally at peace, his last word
written and the finger of silence upon his gloomy lips.

Hazlitt finds John Ford finical and fastidious. He certainly
is so, and one often wonders how this mind and pen
should have welcomed such appalling subjects. He plays[61]
with edged tools and too well knows the use of poisoned
weapons, says Hazlitt; and the criticism is just in the opinion
of those who, with him, account it an artist’s glory that he
shall not tamper with foul and “unfair” subjects, or sink
his genius to the kennel and gutter. That, however, is the
old-world, vanished attitude, for artists recognise no “unfair”
subjects to-day.

Indeed, Ford can be not seldom beautiful and tender and
touched to emotion of pity; but by the time of Charles, the
golden galaxies were gone; their forces were spent; their
inspiration had perished; England, merry no more, began
to shiver in the shadow of coming puritan eclipse; and that
twilight seems to have cast by anticipation its penumbra
about Ford.

There is in him little of the rollicking, superficial coarseness
of the Elizabethans; the stain is in web and woof. His great
moments are few; he is mostly ferocious, or absurdly sentimental,
and one confesses that the bulk of his best work,
judged against the highest of ancient or modern tragedy,
rings feebly with a note of too transparent artifice. He is
moved by intellectual interest rather than creative inspiration;
there is far more brain than heart in his writings.

Perhaps he knew it and convinced himself, while still at
the noon of intelligence, that he was no creator. Perhaps he
abandoned art, through failure to satisfy his own ideals. At
any rate it would seem that he stopped writing at a time
when most men have still much to give.

One would like at least to believe that he found in his
birthplace the distinguished privacy he desired and an abode[62]
of physical and mental peace. He may, indeed, have come
home again to Devon when his work was ended; he may have
passed the uncertain residue of life in seclusion with wife and
family at this estate of his ancestors; his dust may lie
unhonoured and unrecorded at Ilsington, as Herrick’s amid
the green graves not far distant at Dean Prior.

It is all guesswork, and the truth of John Ford’s life, as
of his death, may be forever hidden. One sees him a notable,
silent, subtle man, prone to pessimism as a gift of heredity—a
man disappointed in his achievement, soured by inner
criticism and comparison with those who were greater than he.

So, weary of cities and the company of wits and poets, he
came back to the country, that he might heal his disappointments
and soothe his pains. His life, to the unseeing eyes
around him, doubtless loomed prosperous and complete; to
himself, perchance, all was dust and ashes of thwarted ambition.
Again he roamed the woods where he had learned to
walk; won to the love of nature; underwent the thousand
new experiences and fancied discoveries of a townsman fresh
in the country; and, through these channels, came to contentment
and sunshine of mind, bright enough to pierce the
night of his thoughts and sweeten the dark currents of his
imagination. It may be so.

OKEHAMPTON CASTLE

OKEHAMPTON CASTLE.

[65]

A high wind roared over the tree-tops and sent the leaf
flying—blood-red from the cherry, russet from the oak, and
yellow from the elm. Rain and sunshine followed swiftly
upon each other, and the storms hurtled over the forest,
hissed in the river below and took fire through their
falling sheets, as the November sun scattered the rear-guard
of the rain and the cloud purple broke to blue. A great
wind struck the larches, where they misted in fading brightness
against the inner gloom of the woods, and at each buffet,
their needles were scattered like golden smoke. Only the
ash trees had lost all their leaves, for a starry sparkle of
foliage still clung to every other deciduous thing. The low
light, striking upon a knoll and falling on dripping surfaces of
stone and tree trunk, made a mighty flash and glitter of it, so
that the trees and the scattered masonry, that ascended in
crooked crags above their highest boughs, were lighted with
rare colour and blazed against the cloud masses now lumbering
storm-laden from the West.

The mediæval ruin, that these woods had almost concealed
in summer, now loomed amid them well defined. Viewed from
aloft the ground plan of the castle might be distinctly traced,
and it needed no great knowledge to follow the architectural
design of it. The sockets of the pillars that sprang to a groined[66]
entrance still remained, and within, to right and left of
the courtyard, there towered the roofless walls of a state
chamber, or banqueting hall, on the one hand, a chapel,
oratory and guard-room on the other. The chapel had a
piscina in the southern wall; the main hall was remarkable
for its mighty chimney. Without, the ruins of the kitchens
were revealed, and they embraced an oven large enough to
bake bread for a village. Round about there gaped the
foundations of other apartments, and opened deep eyelet
windows in the thickness of the walls. The mass was so
linked up and knit together that of old it must have presented
one great congeries of chambers fortified by a circlet
of masonry; but now the keep towered on a separate hillock
to the south-west of the ruin, and stood alone. It faced
foursquare, dominated the valley, and presented a front
impregnable to all approach.

This is the keep that Turner drew, and set behind it a
sky of mottled white and azure specially beloved by Ruskin;
but the wizard took large liberties with his subject, flung up
his castle on a lofty scarp, and from his vantage point at
stream-side beneath, suggested a nobler and a mightier ruin
than in reality exists. One may suppose that steps or secret
passages communicated with the keep, and that in Tudor
times no trees sprang to smother the little hill and obscure
the views of the distant approaches—from Dartmoor above
and the valleys beneath. Now they throng close, where oak
and ash cling to the sides of the hillock and circle the stones
that tower to ragged turrets in their midst.

Far below bright Okement loops the mount with a brown[67]
girdle of foaming waters that threads the meadows; and
beyond, now dark, now wanly streaked with sunshine, ascends
Dartmoor to her border heights of Yes Tor and High Willhayes.
Westerly the land climbs again and the last fires of
autumn flicker over a forest.

I saw the place happily between wild storms, at a
moment when the walls, warmed by a shaft of sunlight,
took on most delicious colour and, chiming with the gold
of the flying leaves, towered bright as a dream upon the
November blue.

At the Conquest, Baldwin de Redvers received no fewer
than one hundred and eighty-one manors in Devon alone,
for William rewarded his strong men according to their
strength. We may take it, therefore, that this Baldwin de
Redvers, or Baldwin de Brionys, was a powerful lieutenant to
the Conqueror—a man of his hands and stout enough to hold
the West Country for his master. From his new possessions
the Baron chose Ochementone[1] for his perch; indeed, he
may be said to have created the township. With military
eye he marked a little spur of the hills that commanded
the passes of the Moor and the highway to Cornwall
and the Severn Sea; and there built his stronghold,—the sole
castle in Devon named in Domesday. But of this edifice no
stone now stands upon another. It has vanished into the
night of time past, and its squat, square, Norman keep scowls
down upon the valleys no more.

The present ruins belong to the Perpendicular period of
[68]later centuries, and until a recent date the second castle
threatened swiftly to pass after the first; but a new lease of
life has lately been given to these fragments; they have been
cleaned and excavated, the conquering ivy has been stripped
from their walls, and a certain measure of work accomplished
to weld and strengthen the crumbling masonry. Thus a
lengthened existence has been assured to the castle. “Time,
which antiquates antiquities,” is challenged, and will need
reinforcement of many years wherein again to lift his scaling
ladders of ivy, loose his lightnings from the cloud, and marshal
his fighting legions of rain and tempest, frost and snow.

THE GORGE

THE GORGE.

[71]

Reflection swiftly reveals the significance of a river gorge,
for it is upon such a point that the interest of early man is
seen to centre. The shallow, too, attracts him, though its
value varies; it must ever be a doubtful thing, because the
shallow depends upon the moods of a river, and a ford is not
always fordable. But to the gorge no flood can reach. There
the river’s banks are highest, the aperture between them most
trifling; there man from olden time has found the obvious
place of crossing and thrown his permanent bridge to span the
waterway. At a gorge is the natural point of passage, and
Pontifex, the bridge-builder, seeking that site, bends road to
river where his work may be most easily performed, most
securely founded. But while the bridge, its arch springing
from the live rock, is safe enough, the waters beneath are like
to be dangerous, and if a river is navigable at all, at her gorges,
where the restricted volume races and deepens, do the greatest
dangers lie. In Italy this fact gave birth to a tutelary genius,
or shadowy saint, whose special care was the raft-men of Arno
and other rivers. Their dangerous business took these foderatore
amid strange hazards, and one may imagine them on
semi-submerged timbers, swirling and crashing over many a
rocky rapid, in the throats of the hills, where twilight homed[72]
and death was ever ready to snatch them from return to
smooth waters and sunshine. So a new guardian arose to
meet these perils, and the boldest navigator lifted his thoughts
to Heaven and commended his soul to the keeping of San
Gorgone.

Sublimity haunts these places; be they great as the Grand
Cañon of Arizona and the mountain rifts of Italy and France,
or trifling as this dimple on Devon’s face of which I tell to-day,
they reveal similar characteristics and alike challenge the mind
of the intelligent being who may enter them.

Here, under the roof of Devon, through the measures that
press up to the Dartmoor granite and are changed by the
vanished heat thereof, a little Dartmoor stream, in her age-long
battle with earth, has cut a right gorge, and so rendered
herself immortal. There came a region in her downward
progress when she found barriers of stone uplifted between
her and her goal; whereupon, without avoiding the encounter,
she cast herself boldly upon the work and set out to cleave
and to carve. Now this glyptic business, begun long before
the first palæolithic man trod earth, is far advanced; the river
has sunk a gulley of near two hundred feet through the solid
rock, and still pursues her way in the nether darkness, gnawing
ceaselessly at the stone and leaving the marks of her earlier
labours high up on either side of the present channel. There,
written on the dark Devonian rock, is a record of erosion set
down ages before human eye can have marked it; for fifty
feet above the present bed are clean-scooped pot-holes, round
and true, left by those prehistoric waters. But the sides of
the gorge are mostly broken and sloping; and upon the shelves[73]
of it dwell trees that fling their branches together with amazing
intricacies of foliage in summer-time and lace-like ramage in
winter. Now bright sunshine flashes down the pillars of
them and falls from ledge to ledge of each steep precipice; it
brightens great ivy banks and illuminates a thousand ferns,
that stud each little separate knoll in the great declivities,
or loll from clefts and crannies to break the purple shadows
with their fronds. The buckler and the shield fern leap
spritely where there is most light; the polypody loves the
limb of the oak; the hart’s tongue haunts the coolest, darkest
crevices and hides the beauty of silvery mosses and filmy
ferns under cover of each crinkled leaf. And secret waters
twinkle out by many a hidden channel to them, bedewing their
foliage with grey moisture.

On a cloudy day night never departs from the deepest
caverns of this gorge, and only the foam-light reveals each
polished rib and buttress. The air is full of mist from a waterfall
that thunders through the darkness, and chance of season
and weather seldom permit the westering sun to thrust
a red-gold shaft into the gloom. But that rare moment is
worth pilgrimage, for then the place awakens and a thousand
magic passages of brightness pierce the gorge to reveal its
secrets. In such moments shall be seen the glittering concavities,
the fair pillars and arches carved by the water, and
the hidden forms of delicate life that thrive upon them,
dwelling in darkness and drinking of the foam. Most notable
is a crimson fungus that clings to the dripping precipices like
a robe, so that they seem made of polished bloodstone, and
hint the horror of some tragedy in these loud shouting caves.[74]
Below the mass of the river, very dark under its creaming
veil of foam, shouts and hastens; above, there slope upwards
the cliff-masses to a mere ribbon of golden-green, high aloft
where the trees admit rare flashes from the azure above them.
Beech and ash spring horizontally from the precipices, and
great must be the bedded strength of the roots that hold their
trunks hanging there. With the dark forces of the gorge
dragging them downward and the sunshine drawing them
triumphantly up—between gravitation and light—they poise,
destruction beneath and life beckoning from above. They
nourish thus above their ultimate graves, since they, too,
must fall at last and join those dead tree skeletons whose
bones are glimmering amid the rocks below.

Here light and darkness so cunningly blend that size is
forgotten, as always happens before a thing inherently fine.
The small gorge wrought of a little river grows great and
bulks large to imagination. The soaring sides of it, the shadow-loving
things beneath, the torture of the trees above, and the
living water, busy as of yore in levelling its ancient bed to the
sea, waken wonder at such conquest over these fire-baked rocks.
The heart goes out to the river and takes pleasure to follow
her from the darkness of her battle into the light again, where,
flower-crowned, she emerges between green banks that shelve
gently, hung with wood-rush and meadow-sweet, angelica and
golden saxifrage. Here through a great canopy of translucent
foliage shines the noon sunlight, celebrating peace. Into the
river, where she spreads upon a smooth pool, and trout dart
shadowy through the crystal, the brightness burns, until the
stream bed sparkles with amber and agate and flashes up in[75]
sweet reflections beneath each brier and arched fern-frond
bending at the brink.

Nor does the rivulet lack correspondence with greater
streams in its human relation; she is complete in every
particular, for man has found her also; and dimly seen, amid
the very tree-tops, where the gorge opens, and great rocks
come kissing close, an arch of stone carries his little road
from hamlet to hamlet.

THE GLEN

THE GLEN.

[79]

There is a glen above West Dart whence a lesser stream
after brief journeying comes down to join the river. By many
reaches, broken with little falls, the waters descend upon the
glen from the Moor; but barriers of granite first confront
them, and before the lands break up and hollow, a mass of
boulders, piled in splendid disorder and crowned with willow
and rowan, crosses the pathway of the torrent. Therefore the
little river divides and leaps and tumbles foaming over the
mossy granite, or creeps beneath the boulders by invisible ways.
Into fingers and tresses the running waters dislimn, and then,
that great obstacle passed, their hundred rillets run together
again and go on their way with music. By a descent that
becomes swiftly steeper, the burn falls upon fresh rocks, is
led into fresh channels and broken to the right and left where
mossy islets stand knee-deep in fern and bilberry. Here
spring up the beginnings of the wood, for the glen is full of
trees. Beech and alder, with scrub of dwarf willow at their
feet, cluster on the islets and climb the deepening valley
westward; but in the glen stand aged trees, and on the crest
of the slope haggard spruce firs still fight for life and mark,
in their twisted and decaying timbers and perishing boughs,
the torment of the unsleeping wind. Great is the contrast
between these stricken ruins with death in their high tops,[80]
and the sylva beneath sheltered by the granite hill. There
beech and pine are prosperous and sleek compared with the
unhappy, time-foundered wights above them; but if the
spruces perish, they rule. The lesser things are at their feet
and the sublimity of their struggle—their mournful but
magnificent protest against destiny—makes one ignore the
sequestered woodland, where there is neither battle nor victory,
but comfortable, ignoble shelter and repose. The river kisses
the feet of these happy nonentities; they make many a stately
arch and pillar along the water; in spring the pigeon and the
storm-thrush nest among their branches; and they gleam with
newly-opened foliage and shower their silky shards upon the
earth; in autumn they fling a harvest of sweet beech mast
around their feet. The seed germinates and thousands of
cotyledon leaves appear like fairy umbrellas, from the waste
of the dead leaves. The larger number of these seedlings
perish, but some survive to take their places in fulness of
time.

By falls and rapids, by flashing stickles and reaches
of stillness, the little river sinks to the heart of the glen;
but first there is a water-meadow under the hills where an old
clapper-bridge flings its rough span from side to side. This is
of ancient date and has been more than once restored against
the ravages of flood since pack-horses tramped that way in
Tudor times. Here the streamlet rests awhile before plunging
down the steeps beyond and entering the true glen—a place of
shelving banks and many trees.

In summer the dingle is a golden-green vision of tender
light that filters through the beeches. Here and there a[81]
sungleam, escaping the net of the leaf, wins down to fall on
mossy boulder and bole, or plunge its shaft of brightness
into a dark pool. Then the amber beam quivers through
the crystal to paint each pebble at the bottom and reveal
the dim, swift shades of the trout, that dart through it
from darkness back to darkness again. In autumn the
freshets come and the winds awaken until a storm of foliage
hurtles through the glen, now pattering with shrill whispers
from above and taking the water gently; now whirling in
mad myriads, swirling and eddying, driven hither and thither
by storm until they bank upon some hillock, find harbour
among holes and the elbows of great roots, or plunge down into
the turmoil of the stream. The ways of the falling leaf
are manifold, and as the rock delays the river, so the trees,
with trunk and bough, arrest the flying foliage, bar its hurrying
volume and deflect its tide. In winter the glen is good,
for then a man may escape the north wind here and, finding
some snug holt among the river rocks, mark the beauty
about him while snow begins to touch the tree-tops and the
boughs are sighing. Then can be contrasted the purple masses
of sodden leaves with the splendour of the mosses among
which they lie; for now the minor vegetation gleams at this,
its hour of prime. It sheets every bank in a silver-green
fabric fretted with liquid jewels or ice diamonds; it builds
plump knobs and cushions on the granite, and some of the
mosses, now in fruit, brush their lustrous green with a wash
of orange or crimson, where tiny filaments rise densely to bear
the seed. Here, also, dwelling among them, flourishes that
treasure of such secret nooks by stream-side, the filmy fern,[82]
with transparent green vesture pressed to the moisture-laden
rocks.

Man’s handiwork is also manifested here; not only in
the felled trees and the clapper-bridge, but uniquely and
delightfully; for where the river quickens over a granite
apron and hastens in a torrent of foam away, the rocks
have tongues and speak. He who planted this grove and
added beauty to a spot already beautiful, was followed by
his son, who caused to be carved inscriptions on the boulders.
You may trace them through the moss, or lichen, where the
records, grown dim after nearly a hundred years, still stand.
It was a minister of the Church who amused himself after this
fashion; but in no religious spirit did he compose; and the
scattered poetry has a pleasant, pagan ring about it proper
to this haunt of Pan.

Upon one great rock in the open, with its grey face to the
south-west and its feet deeply bedded in grass and sand, you
shall with care decipher these words:—

Beside the boulder a willow stands, its finials budding with
silver; upon the north-western face of the stone is another
inscription whose legend startles a wayfarer on beholding the
bulk of the huge mass. “This stone was removed by a
flood 17—.”

On the islets and by the pathway below, sharp eyes may
discover other inscribed stones, and upon one island, which
the bygone poet called “The Isle of Mona,” there still exist[83]
inscriptions in “Bardic characters.” These he derived from
the Celtic Researches of Davies. Furnished with the
English letters corresponding to these symbols, one may, if
sufficiently curious, translate each distich as one finds it.
Elsewhere, beside the glen path, a sharp-eyed, little lover of
Nature, tore the coat of moss from another phrase that beat
us both as we hunted through the early dusk:—

This was the complete passage, and we puzzled not a little to
solve its meaning. On dipping into the past, however, I
discovered that the inscription was intended to have read as
follows:—

The rhyme was designed to honour the poet’s father, who set
the forest here; but accident must have stayed the stone-cutter’s
hand and left the distich incomplete.

And now a sudden flash of red aloft above the tree-tops
told that the sun was setting. Night thickened quickly,
though the lamp of a great red snow-cloud still hung above the
glen long after I had left it. Beneath, the mass of the beech
wood took on wonderful colour and the streamlet, emerging
into meadows, flashed back the last glow of the sky.

A DEVON CROSS

A DEVON CROSS.

[87]

There are two orders of ancient human monuments on
Dartmoor—the prehistoric evidences of man’s earliest occupation
and the mediæval remains that date from Tudor times,
or earlier. The Neolith has left his cairns and pounds and hut
circles, where once his lodges clustered upon the hills. The
other memorials are of a different character and chiefly mark
the time of the stannators, when alluvial tin abounded and
the Moor supported a larger population than it does to-day.
Ruins of the smelting houses and the piled debris of old tin-streaming
works may be seen on every hand, and the moulds
into which molten tin was poured still lie in hollows and ruins
half hidden by the herbage. Here also, scattered irregularly,
the Christian symbol occurs, on wild heaths and lonely hillsides,
to mark some sacred place, indicate an ancient path, or
guide the wayfaring monk and friar of old on their journey
by the Abbot’s Way.

Of these the most notable is that venerable fragment known
as Siward’s Cross—a place of pilgrimage these many years.

Now, on this day of March, snow-clouds swept the desert
intermittently with their grey veils and often blotted every
landmark. At such times one sought the little hillocks thrown
up by vanished men and hid in some hollow of the tin-streamers’
digging to escape the pelt of the snow and avoid the buffet[88]
of the squall that brought it. Then the sun broke up
the welter of hurrying grey and for a time the wind lulled and
the brief white shroud of the snow melted, save where it had
banked against some obstacle.

The lonely hillock where stands Siward’s Cross, or “Nun’s
Cross,” as Moormen call it, lies at a point a little above
the western end of Fox Tor Mire. The land slopes gently to
it and from it; the great hills roll round about. To the east
a far distance opens very blue after the last snow has fallen;
to the south tower the featureless ridges of Cator’s Beam with
the twin turrets of Fox Tor on their proper mount beneath
them. The beginnings of the famous mire are at hand—a
region of shattered peat-hags and morasses—where, torn to
pieces, the earth gapes in ruins and a thousand watercourses
riddle it. All is dark and sere at this season, for the
dead grasses make the peat blacker by contrast. It is a
chaos of rent and riven earth ploughed and tunnelled by bogs
and waterways; while beyond this savage wilderness the
planes of the hills wind round in a semicircle and hem the
cradle of the great marshes below with firm ground and good
“strolls” for cattle, when spring shall send them in their
thousands to the grazing lands of the Moor again.

The sky shone blue by the time I reached the old cross
and weak sunlight brightened its familiar face. The relic
stands seven feet high, and now it held a vanishing patch of
snow on each stumpy arm. Its weathered front had made
a home for flat and clinging lichens, grey as the granite for
the most part, yet warming to a pale gold sometimes. Once
the cross was broken and thrown in two pieces on the heath;[89]
but the wall-builders spared it, for the monument had long
been famous. Antiquarian interest existed for the old relic,
and it was mended with clamps of iron, and lifted upon a
boulder to occupy again its ancient site.

For many a year experts puzzled to learn the meaning of
the inscriptions upon its face, and various conjectures concerning
them had their day; but it was left for our first Dartmoor
authority, William Crossing, who has said the last word
on these remains, to decipher the worn inscription and indicate
its significance. He finds the word “Siward,” or “Syward,”
on the eastern side, and the word “Boc-lond,” for “Buckland,”
on the other, set in two lines under the incised cross that
distinguishes the western face of the monument.

“Siward’s Cross” is mentioned in the Perambulation of
1240. “It is named,” says Mr. Crossing, “in a deed of
Amicia, Countess of Devon, confirming the grant of certain
lands for building and supporting the Abbey of Buckland,
among which were the manors of Buckland, Bickleigh and
Walkhampton. The latter manor abuts on Dartmoor Forest,
and the boundary line, which Siward’s Cross marks at one of
the points, is drawn from Mistor to the Plym. The cross,
therefore, in addition to being considered a forest boundary
mark, also became one to the lands of Buckland Abbey, and
I am convinced that the letters on it which have been so
variously interpreted simply represent the word ‘Bocland.’
The name, as already stated, is engraved on the western
face of the cross—the side on which the monks’ possessions
lay.”

Elsewhere he observes that Siward’s Cross, “standing as[90]
it does on the line of the Abbot’s Way, would seem not improbably
to have been set up by the monks of Tavistock as
a mark to point out the direction of the track across the Moor;
and were it not for the fact that it has been supposed to have
obtained its name from Siward, Earl of Northumberland, who,
it is said, held property near this part of the Moor in the
Confessor’s reign, I should have no hesitation in believing such
to be the case.”

No matter who first lifted it, still it stands—the largest
cross on Dartmoor—like a sentinel to guard the path that
extended between the religious houses of Plympton, Buckland
and Tavistock. And other crosses there are beyond the Mire,
where an old road descended over Ter Hill. But the Abbot’s
Way is tramped no more, and the princes of the Church, with
their men-at-arms and their mules and pack-horses, have
passed into forgotten time. Few now but the antiquary and
holiday-maker wander to Siward’s Cross; or the fox-hunter
gallops past it; or the folk, when they tramp to the heights
for purple harvest of “hurts” in summer-time. The stone
that won the blessings of pious men, only comforts a heifer
to-day; she rubs her side against it and leaves a strand of
her red hair caught in the lichens.

The snow began to fall more heavily and the wind increased.
Therefore I turned north and left that local sanctity from
olden time, well pleased to have seen it once again in the stern
theatre of winter. It soon shrank to a grey smudge on the
waste; then snow-wreaths whirled their arms about it and
the emblem vanished.

COOMBE

COOMBE.

[93]

Life comes laden still with good days that whisper of
romance, when in some haunt of old legend, our feet loiter for
a little before we pass forward again. I indeed seek these
places, and confess an incurable affection for romance in my
thoughts if not my deeds. I would not banish her from art,
or life; and though most artists of to-day will have none of
her, spurn romantic and classic alike, and take only realism
to their bosoms; yet who shall declare that realism is the last
word, or that reality belongs to her drab categories alone?

“There is no ‘reality’ for us—nor for you either, ye sober
ones, and we are far from being so alien to one another as ye
suppose, and perhaps our goodwill to get beyond drunkenness
is just as respectable as your belief that ye are altogether
incapable of drunkenness.”

A return to romance most surely awaits literature, when
our artists have digested the new conditions and discovered
the magic and mystery that belong to newly created things—whether
Nature or her human child has made them; but for
the moment, those changes that to-day build revolution, stone
on stone, demand great seers to record the romantic splendour
of their promise, sing justly of all that science is doing, write
the epic of our widening view and show man leading the
lightning chained in his latest triumph. For us, who cannot
measure such visions, there remains Nature—the incurable[94]
romantic—who retains her early methods, loves the sword better
than the pruning-hook, and still sometimes strikes jealously
at her sophisticated child, who has learned to substitute a
thousand wants for the simple needs that she could gratify.

At Coombe, on the coast of North Cornwall, there
yet lies a nest of old romance, wherein move, for dream-loving
folk, the shadows of an old-time tale. Nature reigns
unchanged in the valley and her processions and pageants
keep their punctual time and place; but once a story-teller
came hither, and the direct, genial art of a brave spirit found
inspiration here. From this secluded theatre sprang Westward
Ho! and none denies willing tribute to him who made that
book.

Seen on this stormy December day with a north-wester
raging off the sea and the wind turning the forest music to
“a hurricane of harps,” Coombe Valley lives with music and
movement. Far away in the gap eastward rises a blue mound
with Kilkhampton Church-tower perched thereon, and thence,
by winding woods, the way opens to the historic mill. Full
of tender colour are the tree-clad hills—a robe of grey and
amber and amethyst, jewelled here and there, where the last
of the leaves still hang. Wind-beaten oak and larch, beech
and ash twine their arms together and make a great commotion
where the woven texture of their boughs is swaying
and bending. Their yield and swing challenge the grey daylight,
and it plays upon them and flings a tracery of swift
brightness over the forest. The light is never still, but
trembles upon the transparent woods, so that every movement
of their great mass wins an answering movement from the[95]
illumination that reveals them. Beneath, under the tremulous
curtain and visible through its throbbing, lies the earth’s
bosom, all brown with fallen leaves. It swells firm and solid
under restless branch and bough, and listens to the great
song of the trees. Sometimes a sunburst from the sky touches
the woodland, and the ramage aloft sparkles like a gauze of
silver over the russet and gold beneath.

In the heart of the valley there runs a river, and, freed
from her work, the mill-stream leaps to join it. The mill-wheel
thunders, as it did when little Rose Salterne set stout
hearts beating and dreamed dreams, wherein no sorrow homed
or horror whispered. But time has not forgotten Coombe
Mill, and, to one who may love flowers, the evidence of progress
chiefly lies among them. There is a garden here and many a
plant, that had not yet faced the buffets of an English winter
when Kingsley’s heroine tended her clove-pinks and violets,
now thrives contented in this little garth.

Beside the mill-pond, flogged by the December storm,
Kaffir lilies wave their crimson and the red fuchsia flourishes.
A bush of golden eleagnus is happy, and a shrubby speedwell
thrives beside it; honeysuckles climb to the thatch of the
white-washed homestead; a rambler rose hangs out its last
blossoms; and a yellow jasmine also blooms upon the wall.
Marigolds and lavender and blue periwinkles trail together in
a bright wreath against the darkness of the water-wheel;
there are stocks and Michaelmas daisies, too, with the silver
discs of honesty and the fading green of tamarisk.

Many suchlike things flourish in this cradle of low hills,
for winter is a light matter here, and great cold never comes[96]
to them. They push forth and creep into the lanes and
hedges; they find the water-meadows and love the shelter of
the apple trees and the brink of the stream.

Beside the mill there towers a great ivy-tod in fruit, and
rises the weathered mill-house, stoutly built to bear the strain
within. Once granite mill-wheels ground the corn, but now
their day is over and they repose, flower crowned, in the hedges
outside. The eternal splashing of water has painted a dark
stain here, and ferns have found foothold. One great hart’s
tongue lolls fifty wet green leaves out from the gloom of
the wheel-chamber.

All is movement and bustle; the mill-stream races away
to the river, and the river to the sea. The tree-tops bend and
cry; the clouds tell of the gale overhead, now thinning to let
the sunshine out, now darkening under a sudden squall and
dropping a hurtle of hail.

From the mill-pool to the west opened another vision of
meadows with a little grey bridge in the midst of them. Hither
winds the stream, trout in every hover, and the brown hills rise
on either side, barren and storm-beaten. Then, at the mouth
of the land between them, a great welter of white foam fills
the gap, for the storm has beaten the sea mad, and the roar
of it ascends in unbroken thunder over the meadows. Behind
the meeting-place of land and ocean, there roll the lashed
and stricken seas, all dim and grey; and their herds are
brightened with sunshine or darkened by cloud, as the wind
heaves them to shore. But there is no horizon from which
we can trace them. They emerge wildly out of the flying
scud of cloud that presses down upon the waters.

OLD DELABOLE

OLD DELABOLE.

[99]

Where low and treeless hills roll out to the cliffs, and the
gulls cry their sea message over farms and fields, a mighty
mouth opens upon the midst of the land and gapes five hundred
feet into the earth. In shape of a crater it yawns, and its many-coloured
cliffs slope from the surface inwards. The great cup is
chased and jewelled. Round it run many galleries, some deserted,
some alive with workers. Like threads of light they circle
it, now opening upon the sides of the rounded cliffs, now suspended
in air under perpendicular precipices. In the midst is
the quarter-mile incline that descends to the heart of the cup
and connects the works above with the works below; and
elsewhere are other gentle acclivities, where moraines of fallen
stone ooze out in great cones beneath the cliffs. Under them
stand square black objects, dwarfed to the size of match-boxes,
which wrestle with this huge accumulation of over-burden.
Steam puffs from the machines; they thrust their scoops into
the fallen mass; at each dig they pick up a ton and a half of
rubbish and then deposit it in a trolley that waits for the load
hard by. A network of tram-lines branches every way in the
bottom of the cup, and extends its fingers to the points of
attack; and where they end—at smudges of silver-grey scattered
about the bottom of the quarry—there creep little atoms, like
mites on a cheese.[100]

Centuries have bedecked and adorned the sides of this
stupendous pit; and while naked sheets and planes of colour,
the work of recent years, still gleam starkly, all innocent of
blade and leaf, elsewhere in deserted galleries and among
cliff-faces torn bare by vanished generations of men, green
things have made their home and flourished with luxuriance,
to the eternal drip of surface water. Ferns and foxgloves and
a thousand lesser plants thrive in niches and crevices of the
stone; and there is a splendid passage of flame, where the
mimulus has found its way by some rivulet into the quarry,
and sheets a precipice with gold.

By steps and scarps the sides fall, narrowing always
to the bottom; but the cliff planes are huge enough for
sunshine and shadow to paint wonderful pictures upon them
and find the colours—the olive and blue and mossy green,
or the great splashes and patches of rose and russet that make
harmony there. They melt together brokenly; and sometimes
they are fretted with darkness and spotted with caverns, or
mottled and zigzagged by rusty percolations of iron.

One noble cliff falls sheer five hundred feet to a wilderness
of rock, and across its huge front there hang aerial threads, like
gossamers, while at its crown black wheels and chimneys tower
into the sky. Below, upon the bluff of a crag, there turns
a wheel, and a great pump, with intermittent jolt and grunt,
sucks the water from the bottom of the quarry and sends it to
tanks up aloft. This machine, with its network of arms and
wheels, hangs very black on the cliff-side, and a note of black
is also carried into the midst of the grey and rosy cliff-faces
by little wheels that hang from the gossamers and tiny threads[101]
depending from them. They drop to the mites in the silver-grey
cheese beneath, and from time to time masses and wedges
of nearly two tons weight are hoisted upward and float through
the air to the surface, like thistle-down.

The quarry is full of noises—the clank of the pumps, the
rattle of the trucks, the hiss of pneumatic and steam drills, the
clink of tampers and the rumble and rattle of the great rocks
dislodged by crowbars from the cliffs. Men shout, too, and
their voices are as the drone of little gnats; but sometimes, at
the hour of blasting, an immense volume of sound is liberated,
and the thunder of the explosion crashes round and round
the cup and wakes a war of echoes thrown from cliff to cliff.

Once there were dwellings within the cup; but the needs
of the quarry caused their destruction, and now but two
cottages remain. The ragged cliff-edges creep towards them,
and they will soon vanish, after standing for a hundred years.

Everywhere the precious stone, now silver-green, now
silver-grey, is being dragged up the great incline, or wafted
through air to the workers above; and once aloft, another army
of men and boys set to work upon it and split and hack and chop
and square it into usefulness. On all sides the midgets are
burrowing below and wrestling with the stone above; thousands
of tons leave the works weekly, and yet such is the immensity
of the mass, that the sides of the quarry seem hardly changed
from year to year. For more than three hundred and fifty
years has man delved at Old Delabole. Elizabethans worked
its rare slate; and since their time, labouring ceaselessly, we
have scratched out this stupendous hole and covered our
habitations therefrom, through the length and breadth of the[102]
United Kingdom. Cathedrals and cottages alike send to
Delabole for their slates; there are extant buildings with roofs
two hundred years old, that show no crack or flaw; while
more ancient than the stones that cover man’s home must be
those that mark his grave, and Delabole slates in churchyards,
or on church walls, might doubtless be found dating from
Tudor times.

Five hundred men and boys are employed at Old Delabole,
and their homes cluster in the little village without the works.
Their type is Celtic, but many very blonde, high-coloured men
labour here. All are polite, easy, and kindly; all appear to
find their work interesting and take pleasure in explaining its
nature to those who may be interested. The slate fills countless
uses besides that of roofing, and the methods of cleaving and
cutting it cannot easily be described. Steam plays its part,
and the masses are reduced to manageable size by steel saws
which slip swiftly through them; then workmen tackle the imperishable
stuff, and with chisel and mallet split the sections
thinner and thinner. It comes away wonderfully true, and a
mass of stone gives off flake after flake until the solid rock has
turned into a pile of dark grey slates, clean and bright of cleavage
and ready for the roof. Green-grey or “abbey-grey” is the
mass of the quarry output; but a generous production of
“green” is also claimed. This fine stuff runs in certain veins,
and offers a tone very beautiful and pleasant to the eye. Lastly,
there are the reds—jewels among slates—that shine with russet
and purple. This stone is rare, and can only be quarried in small
quantities. All varieties have the slightest porosity, and take
their places among the most distinguished slates in the world.

TINTAGEL

[105]

Ragged curtains of castellated stone climb up the northern
side of a promontory and stretch their worn and fretted grey
across the sea and sky. They are pierced with a Norman door,
and beyond them there spreads a blue sea to the horizon; above
it shines a summer sky, against whose blue and silver the ruin
sparkles brightly. Beneath, a little bay opens, and the dark
cliffs about it are fringed with foam; while beyond, “by
Bude and Bos,” the grand coastline is flung out hugely, cliff
on cliff and ness on ness, until Hartland lies like a cloud on the
sea and little Lundy peeps above the waters. Direct sunshine
penetrates the haze from point to point, now bringing this
headland out from among its neighbours, now accentuating
the rocky islands, or flashing on some sea-bird’s wing.

Shadow, too, plays its own sleight; the cliff that was sun-kissed
fades and glooms, while the scarps and planes before
shaded, shine out again and spread their splendour along the
sea. Light and darkness race over the waves also, and now
the fringes of foam flash far off in the sunshine and streak the
distant bases of earth; now they are no more seen, when the
cloud shadows dim their whiteness and spread purple on the
blue.

A ewe and her lamb come through the gateway in the castle
wall. They share the green slopes with me and browse along
together. Overhead the gulls glide and a robber gull chases a[106]
jackdaw, who carries a lump of bread or fat in his beak. The
gull presses hard upon the smaller bird, and Jack at last, after
many a turn and twist, drops his treasure. Whereupon the
gull dives downward and catches it in mid-air before it has
fallen a dozen yards.

The flora on these crags is interesting, though of little
diversity. Familiar grasses there are, with plantain and
sheep’s sorrel, the silene and cushion pink, the pennywort and
blue jasione, the lotus and eye-bright; but unsleeping winds
from the west affect them as altitude dwarfs the alpines, and
these things, though perfect and healthy and fair to see,
are reduced to exquisite miniatures, where they nestle in the
crannies of the rocks and flash their pink and white, or blue and
gold, against the grey and orange lichens that wash the stones
with colour and climb the ruin in the midst.

In sheltered nooks the foxglove nods, but he, too, is dwarfed,
yet seems to win a solid splendour of bells and intensity of tint
from his environment.

Other castle fragments there are—scattered here and on
the neighbour cliff to the east; but they are of small account—no
more than the stumps of vanished ramparts and walls.
Even so, they stood before any word was printed concerning
them, or pictures made. An ancient etching of more than
two hundred years old shows that their fragments were then
as now, and only doubtful tradition furnishes the historian with
any data.

But the castle is perched on a noble crag, whose strata of
marble and slate and silver quartz slope from east to west
downward until they round into sea-worn bosses and dip under[107]
the blue. The story of gigantic upheavals is written here,
and the weathered rocks are cleft and serrated and full of
wonderful convolutions for dawn and dusk to play upon. Here
more wild flowers find foothold, and the wild bird makes her
home. The cliffs are crested with samphire, and the white
umbels of the carrot; they are brushed with the pale lemon
of anthyllis, and the starry whiteness of the campion; they
are honeycombed beneath by caverns, where the sea growls
on calm days and thunders in time of storm.

Westward of the mount, guarding the only spot where boat
can land from these perilous waters, a fragment of the ruin
still holds up above the little bay, within bow-shot of any
adventurous bark that would brave a landing.

Here is all that is left of the last castle on this famous
headland. Of the so-called “Arthurian” localities, the most
interesting and richest in tradition is that of North Cornwall,
and at its centre lie these ancient strongholds. In addition to
the Castle of Tintagel one finds King Arthur’s Hall and Hunting
Seat, his bed and his cups and saucers, his tomb and his grave.

It is a long and intricate story, and none may say what
fragment of reality homes behind the accumulated masses of
myth and legend. With the bards of the sixth century and
those that followed them we find the English beginnings of
Arthur and his celebration as a first-class fighting man. Then
it would seem he disappeared for a while, and takes no place,
either in history or romance, until the ninth century. In 858,
however, one Nennius, a Briton, made a history of the hero,
some three centuries after his supposed death in 542. The
“magnanimous Arthur” of Nennius fought against the Saxons,[108]
and, amid many more noble than himself, was twelve times
chosen commander of his race. The Britons, we learn, conquered
as often as he led them to war; and in his final and
mightiest battle—that of Badon Hill—we are to believe that
940 of the enemy fell by Arthur’s hand alone—a Homeric
achievement, unassisted save by the watching Lord. Thereafter
his activities ranged over other of the Arthurian theatres
and campaigns before he died at Camlan.

But alas for song! From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Tennyson,
that last prodigious battle on the Camel has been the joy
of poetry, and the mighty adventure between Arthur and
Mordred has been told and retold a thousand times; yet if those
warriors ever did meet, it was certainly in Scotland, and not
Cornwall, that the encounter took place. Camlan is Camelon
in the Valley of the Forth, and here a tolerably safe tradition
tells that the King of the Picts, with his Scots and Saxons,
defeated the Britons and slew their King.

Leland reported to Henry VII. that “This castle hath been
a marvellous strong fortress and almost situ in loco inexpugnabile,
especially from the dungeon that is on a great and terrabil
crag environed with the se, but having a drawbridge from the
residue of the castel on to it. Shepe now feed within the
dungeon.”

That Arthur was begotten at Tintagel we may please to
believe; but that he died far from the land of his birth seems
sure.

As for the existing ruin, it springs from that of the castle
which saw the meeting of Arthur’s parents, Uther Pendragon
and the fair Igraine; but the original British building has long[109]
since vanished, and the present remains, dating from the
Norman Conquest, did not rise until six hundred years later
than the hero’s death. An old Cornish tradition declares that
Arthur’s mighty spirit passed into a Cornish chough, and in the
guise of that beautiful crow with the scarlet beak, still haunts
the ruins of his birthplace.

A CORNISH CROSS

A CORNISH CROSS.

[113]

Kerning corn waved to the walls of the little churchyard
and spread a golden foreground for the squat grey mass of the
church that rose behind it. The building stood out brightly,
ringed with oak and sycamore, and the turrets of the tower
barely surmounted the foliage wrapped about it. Rayed in
summer green the trees encircled church and burying-ground
with shade so dense that the sun could scarce throw a gleam
upon the graves. They lay close and girdled the building
with mounds of grass and slabs of slate and marble. The
dripping of the trees had stained the stones and cushions of
moss flourished upon them. Here was the life of the hamlet
written in customary records of triumphant age, failures
of youth, death of children—all huddled together with that
implicit pathos of dates that every churchyard holds.

But more ancient than any recorded grave, more venerable
than the church itself, a granite cross ascended among the
tombs. Centuries had weathered the stone so that every angle
of its rounded head and four-sided shaft was softened. Time
had wrought on the granite mass, as well as man, and fingering
the relic through the ages, had blurred every line of the form,
set grey lichens on the little head of the Christ that hung
there and splashed the shaft with living russet and silver
and jade-green. The old cross rose nine feet high, its simple[114]
form clothed in a harmony of colours beautiful and delicate.
The arms were filled with a carved figure of primitive type
and a carmine vegetation washed the rough surfaces and
outlined the human shape set in its small tunic stiffly there.
Green moss covered the head of the cross and incised patterns
decorated its sides to within a foot or two of the grass by
a churchyard path from which it sprang.

The design was of great distinction and I stood before one
of the finest monuments in Cornwall. On the north side ran
a zigzag; while to the south a more elaborate key-pattern was
struck into the stone—a design of triangles enfolding each other.
The back held the outline of a square filled with a cross and
a shut semicircle carved beneath; while upon the face, under
the head which contained the figure, there occurred another
square with a cross. The shaft upon this side was adorned
with the outline of a tall jug, or ewer, from which sprang the
conventional symbol for a lily flower.

There was another detail upon the southern side which
seemed to lift this aged stone back into the mists of a past
still more remote, for there, just above the ground, might be
read the fragment of an inscription in debased Latin capitals.
They were no longer decipherable save for the solitary word
“FILIUS” which was easily to be distinguished, and this fragment
of an obliterated inscription spoke concerning a period
earlier by centuries than the carving and decoration. Indeed
it indicated that the memorial was a palimpsest—a pre-Christian
pillar-stone transformed at a later age to its present significance.

There are above three hundred old crosses still standing
in Cornwall, and not a few of these, dating from time[115]
beyond the Roman period, originally marked the burying-places
of the pagan dead. At a later period, long after
their original erection, they were mutilated. But the greater
number of these grand stones belong to Christianity, and by
their varied decorations the age of them may approximately
be learned.

Some bear the Chi Rho monogram, which stands for the
first two letters of the Greek “Christos,” and these belong to
the seventh century; but the more numerous appear to date
from that later period when the sacred figure of the Christ
began to be substituted in religious architecture for the symbolic
lamb that always preceded it. The Eastern Church authorised
this innovation, after A.D. 683, and pronounced that “The
Lamb of Christ, our Lord, be set up in human shape on images
henceforth, instead of the Lamb formerly used.” The earliest
type is not particularly human, however, and the little, archaic,
shirted doll of Byzantine pattern, which ornaments so many
of these Cornish crosses, has not much save archæological
interest to commend it. Until Gothic times this was the
conventional pattern, and it is assumed that these early
crucifixes dated from the eighth century and onward until
a more naturalistic figure began to appear.

Scattered over the far-flung landscape of the West our
Cornish crosses stand; by meadow and tilth and copse, among
the little hamlets of the peninsula, in lonely heaths and waste
places overrun by wild growing things, they shall be found.
Sometimes the Atlantic is their background and sometimes the
waters of the Channel. They were set on the roads that led
to the churches, and served not only as places for prayer, but[116]
also as sign-posts on the church-ways. Now many of the more
splendid specimens have been rescued, as in the case of this
great cross, and stand in churchyards, or under the shadow
of sanctified buildings. Their fragments are also scattered
over the land, here set in walls, here at cross-roads, now as a
gate-post, or a stepping-stone, or foot-bridge. Sometimes they
serve for boundary stones, and are yearly beaten; occasionally
they support a sundial; not seldom the Ordnance Surveyors
have outraged them with bench marks. Often only the
stunted head and limbs of the wheel-crosses remain, their shafts
vanished forever; still more frequently the cross-bases or
pedestals alone have been chronicled and the stones that surmounted
them exist no longer. None can say how numerous
they were of old time; and it may happen, while many have
been destroyed past recovery or restoration, that others still
exist in obscure places, or sheltered by the saving earth, for a
future race of antiquaries to discover and reclaim.