at the point, just where the river and the sea meet, off the toy lighthouse, is the noblest view of the ness, the great red bluff that turns a jagged front to the sea, and lifts a shaggy head of firs to the sky. with a dark and oily smoothness that betokens depth and strength of current, the estuary of the teign empties itself at the ebb, and fills again with feathered spray on yonder rocks. above shaldon, opposite, rise the great hills, up whose sides climbs the road to torquay: hills fertile to their very summits, and remarkable for their subdivision by hedgerows all the way up those staggering gradients. from nowhere better than from teignmouth can this beautiful and characteristic feature of a devonshire landscape be seen.
let us leave teignmouth here by the ferry-boat, in preference to walking over the long bridge. both bridge and ferry belong to one company, and the toll each way, by either of them is the same modest penny. the ferry goes from one sandy beach to another, touching the[112] opposite shore immediately under the roadway, the little forecourt gardens, and the bow-windowed houses of shaldon, which seems to the stranger the oddest, brightest, cleanest and most quiet of townlets, and for a while puts teignmouth in the shade. shaldon, however, is very much of a “dead end,” a backwater, or still pool of life, and when the visitors are gone, when the children have deserted the warm sands, and the half-dozen ferry boats that are required in summer are reduced to two; and when nature, with autumn past, frugally turns the lights down until next spring, shaldon is apt to be dull. but there is always the harbour to look out upon, and teignmouth across the river; although, to be sure, there is the reverse view of the harbour and of shaldon from teignmouth. for myself, i incline to think the outlook upon the harbour and shaldon and the hills from teignmouth the best, especially since the appearance on the bitton estate of those houses you wot of. but this is certain, while human nature remains true to itself: wherever you are not, there you would be, just as, whatever you are doing, you look forward to the doing of something quite different; or else, doing nothing, yearn to be busy, and being busy, long for idleness.
it is a rocky scramble round beyond the ness to the open sea and labrador, and no one, fortunately, has yet engineered a neat path that way. for one thing, it would be scarce worth the trouble of doing so while great fragments of rock come hurtling down from the cliff, thrust out by[113] the frosts and thaws of winter. the way is strewn with these immense pieces of red conglomerate, weighing anything from five to twenty tons; and those who wear india-rubber shoes and can best imitate the chamois in rock-leaping are those who like best the exploration of the ness. for others there is that “harvest of the quiet eye” down in the rock-pools that the tide has left, where, among the trailing seaweeds, the limpet clings with the tightness of a moribund government clinging to power, and only to be removed in the same way; by the sudden, unexpected blow, like the parliamentary snap-division; where transparent things, showing their inwards in the most indelicate way, flit about unconcerned at that publicity, and the hermit-crab justifies his sponsors by hurrying, presto, to some rocky cell when you disturb this little mare clausum.
tumbled rock-heaps, alternating with beaches, lead to the foot of the cliff by whose up-on-end path you breathlessly reach labrador, a place known to every one who has visited teignmouth. local traditions tell how this cottage and garden, half-way up the four hundred feet of cliff, were the work of a retired sea-captain who, settling here from a long career in the newfoundland trade, christened the place by the name it still bears. i do not suppose he ever contemplated it being converted into a picnic inn, but he may have had an eye to a snug little traffic in smuggling, for which in his time it must have been especially adapted.
however that may be, there is no questioning the popularity of labrador, where teas are provided and swings tempt the giddy-minded, and roses clamber over the house-front in a manner suggestive of persia and omar khayyàm. why, with leisure—and genius—one might compose another rabaiyat when the tea-takers were gone.
“i reckon,” says one of the soil, whom we meet here and exchange remarks with, “twize up and down es a gude day’s work,” and it really is a leg-aching job to climb to the top of the cliff, which must be done to gain the torquay road. south devon is sleepy, and, experiencing this steepest of paths and hottest of hot corners, the stranger is not surprised. at any time it is possible to sit down and drop into a “bit of a zog”—which is devonian for a nap.
[115]
the torquay road is inexorably hilly and white and hot, but it looks inland down on to samples of canaan, where, amid a blue haze of fertility, you see trees and grass more nearly blue than green, among the freshly turned fields that are red. it is a land of fatness. there, down in those folded valleys, is a distant glimpse of the teign, with the white-faced, yellow-thatched cottages of “stokeintinny” and “cumeintinny” enwrapped in an air of prosperity; and here is the ridge-road, like an oven. “aw! my dear sawls, ’tes tar’ble hot.”
here stands the old toll-house the country folk call “solomon’s post”; but why? ah! he who pervades the country asking for the reasons of things is not to be envied. for my part, the likeliest reason of this name is that the tolls on this turnpike-trust may have been farmed by one of those numerous jews who took up that class of business.
lanes on the left-hand presently lead down to minnicombe and maidencombe, where there are embowered hamlets giving upon the sea; and in another mile yet another leads down to watcombe. watcombe is not what it was fifteen years ago. then a countryfied lane opened out upon a grassy valley dropping to the sea. from the turf there soared aloft the ruddiest of all the ruddy cliffs of south devon, seamed and seared with the weathering of ages, and as thickly pocketed with holes as a post office poste-restante rack. the cliff is there, as ever, and the holes,[116] and the pigeons and jackdaws that inhabit them, but the undergrowth has grown up in dense and tangled masses everywhere, the hedges of the rustic lane have given place to stone walls, and all the pleasant approaches are enclosed in the grounds of somebody’s private domain. confound somebody, say i: may the dogs defile the grave of his great-great-grandmother. but let us take these outrages as calmly as we may, or not seek to further explore; for the approach to torquay through babbacombe and marychurch is a perfect orgie of wall. it must have been a difficult and an expensive matter to so successfully shut out the scenery, but it has been so thoroughly done that when you do at last come to the cliff-top of babbacombe downs, the lovely clear outlook there over the sea and down to the beach seems, by contrast, like a hole in the wall.
but we anticipate, as the authors of early victorian novels were accustomed to remark, and have not finished with watcombe, which is remarkable for having supplied the romans with potters’-clay and for providing us moderns with the same material. the watcombe terracotta works, that stand by the high road, were established somewhere about 1875. their products of statuettes for advertising purposes are sufficiently well-known, and i dare not hazard a guess how many of that famous group, “you dirty boy!” the works produced for an eminent firm of soap-makers. when what has been called the “æsthetic craze” set in, and all manner of[117] weird wares, alleged to have some “art” quality, were thrust upon the public, the watcombe terracottas were fashioned in the most awkward and “artistic” shapes, and painted with sunflowers and the most abhorrent colours, and in them that good, long-suffering public for a time found artistic salvation. but that was long ago, and the sunflower has wilted and the lily faded away. to-day, rustic humour and old english models combined, capture the tourist. puzzle-jugs and scraps of country talk find the readiest sale, and many a holiday-maker takes home with him butter-dishes, jugs, and plates with such legends as “go aisy with the butter,” “help yo’self to some demsher crayme,” or that noble triolet—
“du zummat,
du gude ef yo can,
du zummat.”
beyond watcombe begins st. marychurch. at the threshold of that suburb a long lane leads to the left, down to pettitor, where there are busy quarries of devon marble, so greatly in favour with church-furnishers that specimens of it are nowadays to be found in use, not in england only, but in remote parts of the world.
you would not for a moment suspect the domesday antiquity of st. marychurch, but it appears in that remarkable work—as a church—the earliest, it is said, in devon. rebuilt in 1861, it is now merely one of the many ornate places of worship in which torquay, with its large, rich[118] and idle residential classes, greatly priest-ridden, abounds. only the ancient font, sculptured with a number of engaging devils, remains.
st. marychurch would probably not produce so much disfavour in the beholder were it not for its natural surroundings. this is a parable, but one easily resolved into a plain statement. the place is, in short, a bad nightmare of plaster. quâ plaster, not so very shocking, but taken in conjunction with the exceptionally lovely nature of the scenery, nothing less than a crime. a wanton, indefensible crime, too, for the neighbourhood abounds with excellent limestone, most suitable for building. i conceive there must be something radically wrong—beyond a mere error of taste—with the generations that will go out of their way to use a short-lived pretence like plaster, when limestone, calculated to last until the universe shall again be thrown into the melting-pot, offers. but there, it is done, and not unless all torquay itself were razed to the ground, and the place begun anew, could it be remedied. oddly enough, the first signs of enlightenment in this direction are shown by the various banks, which are being substantially and tastefully built of honest materials.
the long, long streets lead past furrow cross, where, turning to the left, along the babbacombe down road, that lovely opening, looking out upon the sea, is disclosed. here, from the carefully railed-in cliff-edge, one looks sheer down on to the white pebble beaches of oddicombe[119] and babbacombe, with winding walks through luxuriant greenery, leading hundreds of feet down to them. red cliffs, white beaches, dark blue sea, light blue sky, and the cool green of the vegetation; what a feast of colour is the south devon coast! and the abounding growth of flowers and shrubs in the gardens on these heights! geraniums, putting to shame the best efforts of ivy a-clinging and climbing: fuchsias, making growth like trees, with substantial trunks; veronica shrubs in hedges, the lovely blue masses of the heliotrope-like ceanothus, and others of the acclimatised beauties of the southern hemisphere: all these glories are rendered possible by the soft climate, which laps you as in cotton wool, and takes all the energy out of you, and has rendered the folk of devon the kindly lotus-eaters they are.
