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24 chapters
CHAPTER I DEVONSHIRE
CHAPTER I DEVONSHIRE
The original Celtic name for Devonshire, the name used by the Britons whom Caesar found here when he landed, was probably "Dyfnaint," for a Latinized form of it, "Dumnonia" or "Damnonia," was used by Diodorus Siculus when writing of the province of Devon and Cornwall in the third century A.D. So that the name by which the men of Devon call their country is the name by which those ancient men called it who erected the stone menhirs on Dartmoor, and built the great earth-camp of Clovelly Dykes, or
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Bossington Hill from Porlock Hill
Bossington Hill from Porlock Hill
The grave of Hubba lies under the sea, like King Arthur's lost country of Lyonesse, where the fisher-folk say they can hear the bells ring from the drowned churches as they sail over them on still summer mornings; but near Porlock the sea has yielded the strip of land it has stolen from Bideford, and the Danish long-ships rode what are now the green fields around Porlock. That it was so the very name Porlock shows, for Port-locan means an enclosed place for ships, under which name it is mentione
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CHAPTER II SOME LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS
CHAPTER II SOME LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS
From Barnstaple to Dunster, and from Tiverton to Lynton, this beautiful piece of country is peculiarly rich in literary associations. Nor is this to be wondered at when we consider the variety and the loveliness of the scenery, the great open, heathery wastes of Exmoor, the wind-swept cliffs and highlands, the fair and luxuriant valleys where the pure bright waters of these hill-fed streams flow through a green tunnel of overarching trees, making a fertile paradise of flower and fern in their co
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Dunkerry Beacon
Dunkerry Beacon
We find a trace, firstly, of the chief of poets and greatest name of all—Shakespeare—in the municipal records of Barnstaple, where under the date 1605 an entry records: "Geven to the Kynges players being in the town this year xs." That is all, and Shakespeare is not named; but we know that he was associated with the Kynges Players for many years, and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, who is a well-known authority on this subject, asserts that at this date Shakespeare was still one of the company. It is a
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The Doone Valley
The Doone Valley
I have spoken of Henry Kingsley's novel "Ravenshoe," and it is impossible to write of the literary associations of this district without mention of his elder and more famous brother; for though "Westward Ho!" deals with Bideford and its adjacent villages of Appledore and Northam—it was at the latter village that Amyas Leigh lived with his mother—-and this book elects to deal only with the country from Barnstaple northwards and westwards, yet Charles Kingsley is the presiding local deity and guar
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CHAPTER III BARNSTAPLE
CHAPTER III BARNSTAPLE
Barnstaple is a pleasant English country town, with that air of cleanliness and quiet prosperity, of excellent sanitation and odd historic corners, side by side with big new modern buildings and exquisite green gardens where the old gnarled apple-trees are afroth with blossom in the spring, which is the peculiar flavour of an English country town. The incongruity is the charm; you step from a modern drapery store, with a respectable display of plate-glass, on to the clean narrow pavement, and fi
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Woody Bay and Duty Point, West Lynton
Woody Bay and Duty Point, West Lynton
This little passage in Westcote is, I think, of great interest, as showing the difficulties which had already arisen in the time of James I, with the extension of industry, which must always flourish at the expense of agriculture, and which seems to tend, nevertheless, both to personal and to national prosperity. It is a problem for which we have not yet found a solution, and at the present time it comes before us with especial vividness and force. Westcote gives a list of the various fabrics th
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The Shepherd's Cottage, Doone Valley
The Shepherd's Cottage, Doone Valley
But the twenty miles of hilly road may prove too much even for good walkers, and as the coach service between Ilfracombe and Lynton is suspended at present, owing to the war, it is best to take the little narrow-gauge railway that runs from Barnstaple to Lynton. There might be many more unfavourable ways, too, of seeing this stretch of country. The narrow line twists and winds across the hills, seeming to hang, sometimes, on a tiny viaduct, while many feet below a mountain stream pours down its
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CHAPTER IV LYNTON
CHAPTER IV LYNTON
And so, round a spur of the hills, and high above the wooded gorges of the West Lyn, we come to Lynton. It lies upon the north-western slope of a hill, deep among trees; the few houses and hotels—which is all that it consists of—seem to have their roots stuck deep into the ground, while their tall chimneys soar above the tree-tops. If you are freakish-minded, indeed, you may pitch cherry-stones down your neighbour's chimneys, for the houses stand one atop of each other, clustering along the Nort
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Lynmouth Bay and Foreland
Lynmouth Bay and Foreland
The stony white road from the station and from Lynmouth struggles up the hill to a small open space—what in any Italian hill-town would be called a piazza, though it is only a few score feet in extent—opposite the church and the Valley of Rocks Hotel. This, I believe, is the only level spot in the village, save a club tennis-ground, which has been levelled out of the hillside, for the few shops or houses run precipitately down the little side-streets, or up towards the top of Hollerday Hill. It
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The Valley of Rocks
The Valley of Rocks
The Castle Rock stands at the mouth of the Valley of Rocks, about which so much has been written, which has been compared to an amphitheatre of giants, or the scene of some titanic conflict, where the huge granite crags and boulders have been torn up and tossed about by supernatural and terrific forces. In honesty I must admit that this seems to me an exaggeration. Any walker who goes with this in his mind must, I think, be disappointed; the place is wild enough, and barren enough, a bleak, bare
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Heddon's Mouth, near Lynton
Heddon's Mouth, near Lynton
Then a great cleft runs inland, fenced by a bold headland on either hand, and I have rounded Highveer Point and am looking down Heddon's Mouth. Heddon is the corruption of the Celtic word "etin," which means a giant, and the Celtic spirit which so named this wild valley had indeed a sense of the poetry and grandeur of places. Sheer either side rise the slate hills, bare, waterless, and treeless. The southern hill is one steep slope of scree; the northern hill, Highveer Point, on which I stand, i
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Castle Rock, Lynton
Castle Rock, Lynton
The woods of the Lyn Valley climbed to my feet, and I sat down in the shade of the outermost fringe of trees to eat my lunch, and dream and muse, and doze away the first hot hours of the afternoon. I sat looking down over the valley; below me and to right and left the green spikes of the larches were aflutter in the wind; before me rose a great bare shoulder of hill, outlined sharply against the blue. Overhead the sun was blazing, but in the wood the sunlight hung mistily among the trunks and br
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CHAPTER V LYNTON (continued), COUNTISBURY, AND NORTHWARD
CHAPTER V LYNTON (continued), COUNTISBURY, AND NORTHWARD
The word "Lynton," Mr. Chanter tells us in his interesting monograph on the village, means the town on the lyn, and "lyn" is the Celtic word, not for river, but for pool, and occurs in this meaning all over England, in Northumberland, Yorkshire, Kent, Herefordshire. It is strange, perhaps, that this rushing mountain stream should have been named from its very rarely occurring pools, but the authority is indubitable. The Celtic folk who named it, the "early Britons," as our childish history books
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Duty Point
Duty Point
And this is positively all the history of Lynton, until, in the time of the French Revolution, when the turbulent state of the Continent made it inadvisable to spend a holiday abroad, its beauty was discovered by those eager to find in England that enjoyment of the picturesque which before they had looked for in Italy and Southern France. We use "picturesque" now in a slightly derogatory sense, or we use it patronizingly, because it is old-fashioned and belongs to the nineteenth century, and Rus
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The Moors near Brendon Two Gates
The Moors near Brendon Two Gates
The Foreland is a great bold promontory looking towards the Welsh coast, which hangs on the horizon like a low silver cloud above the faint haze of the summer sea. Below lie Sillery Sands, and the caves of the beach; beyond, the opening heights of Exmoor, in long flat curves, featureless, spacious, and beautiful, purple and sombre under the wrack of rain-clouds, grey and arid in the fierce blaze of the midsummer sun, most lovely of all on crisp September mornings, when the heather is abloom in m
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CHAPTER VI PORLOCK AND EXMOOR
CHAPTER VI PORLOCK AND EXMOOR
The road now lies in Somerset; we pass Glenthorne, lying five hundred feet below, among its beautiful green woods and stretches of vivid green turf, and separated by some five miles of barren brown moors from the village of Porlock. The road that leads from Exmoor down to Porlock is incredibly steep, the steepest coach-road in England. It twists dangerously in sharp right-angle turns, the surface is loose and stony, worn by the dragging of brakes and the scouring of winter rains, and on a summer
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Harvest Moon, Exmoor
Harvest Moon, Exmoor
The "forest" of Exmoor is about thirty-five miles in extent from east to west, and twenty from north to south, running from the valley of Crowcombe, near the Quantocks, to Hangman Point, near Combe Martin. It is a stretch of country which makes its appeal to the sportsman, the antiquarian, the artist, and the mere idle, happy walker; it is a little country within a country, having many peculiarities of scenery and structure, plant life and animal life, history and custom, peculiar to itself. And
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CHAPTER VII IN SOMERSET
CHAPTER VII IN SOMERSET
"In Somerset," says Miss Celia Fiennes with considerable severity, "they are likewise as careless when they make cider; they press all sorts of Apples together, else they might have as good sider as in any other parts, even as good as the Herriforshire." This young lady, with her keen criticisms, her spirit of intrepidity, and her variable spelling, betook herself on a tour on horseback through England in the reign of William and Mary, and kept a diary of her travel, noting with equal solemnity
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The Doone Valley in Winter
The Doone Valley in Winter
The fury of such a storm across these always windy Exmoor heights can hardly be imagined; only Conrad could convey in words some adequate idea of the fury and the force, as he has done in "Typhoon." Anyone who was in Exmoor during these three days would have been fortunate to have reached shelter alive, and not to have been lost, as were so many unfortunate sheep and ponies, in the deep snowdrifts. There is a scene in "Lorna Doone," where John Ridd and his servant Fry go out on a bleak stormy mo
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CHAPTER VIII LUNDY
CHAPTER VIII LUNDY
It is curious in this twentieth century of ours, when every corner of the habitable globe is docketed, measured, mapped, and surveyed, when a railroad runs across "darkest Africa," and the great ice-wall of the Antarctic cannot keep its inviolability from the feet of those resolute and heroic explorers who go with camera, microscope, and theodolite, against such forces of Nature as would daunt anything but the resolute human heart—it is curious to come across small corners of the world where the
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Lynton: The Devil's Cheesering
Lynton: The Devil's Cheesering
The names of other remarkable features of the island, the great rocks which are piled along its coasts, are all descriptive and not legendary names—the Devil's Chimney, the Cheeses, the Templar's Rock, the Gannett Rock, the Mousehole. These names will have been given in comparatively recent times, at least since the Saxon invasion, for they show a different mentality from the Celtic names which are found widely in Cornwall, Devon, Wales, and Northumberland, and which have a poetic and imaginativ
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CHAPTER IX THE LAST STRONGHOLDS OF TRADITION
CHAPTER IX THE LAST STRONGHOLDS OF TRADITION
Schools, newspapers, and railways have gone far in the past hundred years to destroy the wealth of oral tradition which once satisfied the imagination and taxed the memories of the country-dwelling population of England. And do not let us too greatly deplore this; let us recognize that it is better for the general welfare of the world that a man who dwells three hundred miles from London should have some interest, however slight, in international politics, and some knowledge, however fragmentary
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Dunkery Beacon, from Horner Woods
Dunkery Beacon, from Horner Woods
So notable a height might well have been chosen by those Druid peoples as a fitting stage for the celebration of their worship, and the tradition which holds it "lucky" to climb the Beacon on a spring morning is just such a memory and faint superstition as lingers from an old and forgotten faith. The country-folk round Keswick used to drive their cattle up to the Druid circle on the hill-top near on the first of May, light a fire within the circle, and drive their cattle through the smoke "for l
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