it is quite a narrow passage across the kingsbridge river to salcombe, and shut in majestically by dark rocks and a winding channel. the little town dabbles its feet in the deep water of this arm of the sea, and is in every way a fishy and marine place; but, unless you are lodged in one or other of the houses that rise sheer from the water, it is little or nothing of the sea you will get a sight of. only from the two narrow alleys leading to the ferry stairs, or down the infrequent passages on to littery quays, is any outlook possible; and it is quite a mile before the jealously walled-in villas and estates of the outskirts cease and one comes to the little bay of south sands. the naturally uncomfortable physical circumstances of salcombe, which has no foreshore for the visitor, no pier, and no seats anywhere, are jealously preserved in all their rigours by the luxurious villadom of the place, which has hitherto succeeded in keeping the railway out, and would, if it were possible, put a ring-fence around the neighbourhood and exclude every one but those who are[219] necessary to minister to their wants. salcombe is probably the most exclusive place on this, or any other coast, and its exclusiveness is, singularly enough, shared by all classes in the place. here is a literally reproduced conversation that enforces the point.
“why, ’tes like this yur, ye see, salcombe don’ want no railway; we’m martel glad, i zhuree, ’ur didden coom no furder’n kingsbridge, an’[220] them as wants et now’d be main zorry et ever comed, ef’t du coom. some on ’em wrote their names down on what they carled a petition for et. that old feller nex’ door to me was one on ’em. ‘aw, yo’ ole fule,’ i ses, friendly like, ‘what av’ee dued now; baintee zatisfied tu be left peaceable? why, yo’ must be maazed; vair zillee, fer zure. scralee out yer name to-rights,’ ses i; ‘us-uns, don’ wan’ no railways yur.’”
“and the railway has been abandoned, then?”
“zim zo: leastways we’m niver yurd nuthin’ more on’t.”
“but why object to a railway: it would[221] bring more people? look how prosperous kingsbridge has become since the railway was opened.”
“aw, my dear sawl, ther’s no livin’ fer poor vo’k wher’ ther’s a railway. it doubles yer rent an’ the price of yer food, an’ all the gentry goes away, an’ all them as cooms into the place on business, an’ usen’d be able to git out’n it agen in a hurry, why, they’m off agen same arternoon.”
and that’s true enough, as kingsbridge has discovered. meanwhile, salcombe remains a place which may not inaptly be compared with a lobster pot or a beetle-trap. it is not difficult to enter, but it is difficult to leave, unless you are prepared to hoof it, as many a commercial traveller knows.
touch is kept with the outer world by means of an omnibus to kingsbridge and by a steamer plying up and down the river; and sometimes the kingsbridge packet voyages out to sea, and[222] comes at last to a safe haven in plymouth barbican after having casually taken ground on a mud-bank or two down the river. the kingsbridge packet is not precisely a liner, and is indeed a cargo-boat which does not even disdain potatoes and live sheep.
“kingsbridge river” is altogether a misnomer. it is a five-mile long inlet of the sea, with numerous subsidiary creeks winding between the hills. the scenery is rendered comparatively desolate by the lack of woods, and it is of a peculiar solitude. kingsbridge town itself sits at the head of the creek, and is a thriving little place. the villages of charleton, frogmore, and south pool stand on their respective creeks.
salcombe is not a little proud of its literary association with froude, who entertained tennyson[223] at his residence, woodcot, toward the close of their respective careers, and it is a cherished article of faith that the poet laureate here received the inspiration of his “crossing the bar.” froude himself sleeps in the cemetery on the hill-top, where his epitaph may be read with interest:—
in memory of
james anthony froude, m.a.,
regius professor of
modern history, oxford.
son of the rev. r. h. froude,
late archdeacon of totnes.
born at dartington
april 23, 1818,
died at salcombe,
october 20, 1894.
he drew a picture of carlyle which hero-worshippers have bitterly resented, but a picture that shows the man, alike in his strength and his weakness; that makes him just human, instead of the infallible philosopher, superior to all littlenesses and prejudices, of a growing tradition.
salcombe castle, or fort charles, situated on a rocky islet off south sands, was a ruinous mediæval tower in the time of the cromwellian wars, but the perfervid loyalty of the west repaired it and fortified the place with cannon, throwing in an armed garrison, fully provisioned, at a cost, as the surviving accounts state, of £3,196 14s. 6d. during a four months’ bombardment in 1646, in which the gunners were such extravagantly[225] bad marksmen that only one person on each side was killed, sir edmund fortescue held the fort, and then, only through some doubts of the loyalty of members of his garrison, capitulated and marched out, with guns firing, drums beating, and colours flying, to the seclusion of his own mansion at fallapit. the bravado of this capitulation was more fatal than the siege, for three persons were accidentally shot.
if the landowners of salcombe had their way it is little of the coast scenery hereabouts the public would see. of late years the grassy summit of the cliffs looking upon salcombe castle has been enclosed and planted, and now, passing the inlet of south sands, and coming to splatt’s cove, a notice-board beside the path announces that “by the order of ford’s trustees” there is no right of way. my own advice to those who are confronted with notices such as this is, enter if you wish; and in this instance the salcombe urban district council have given the lie direct to the impudent contention of the trustees, and have erected a prominent notice of their own, side by side with the other, stating that, notwithstanding this warning, a right of way does exist.
changeful has been the policy here. a former earl of devon, resident at the moult, caused the courtenay walk to be cut midway up the once-inaccessible face of the cliffs round to bolt head, or, to speak by the card, “the bolt.” and now, passing the mutually destructive notices above splatt’s cove, and under a recently built hotel,[226] we find the entrance to that walk flanked with offensively worded injunctions to keep to the path; by which it is abundantly evident that the present owner would dearly like to close it altogether. here stands, or clings, a modern villa, on the edge of the sloping cliff, with a little terrace down below, like a tiny gun-platform.
the walk begins by burrowing through a stunted wood, that looks romantic enough to be pixie-haunted. and, by the same token, the foxglove grows abundantly in its shade, so the pixies must needs foregather here; for the foxglove provides gloves for the little “folk” and has nothing at all to do with foxes. they are the splendidest gloves you ever saw, much superior to the best gants de suéde that ever were, and neither fownes nor dent and allcroft have ever made anything like them. that is quite certain. and if you come here at midnight and turn round three times and say “willie-willie wiskins,” you will see—what you will see. i can say no more than that, because whoso gives away the secrets of the little folk is lost.
beyond the wood you come to very weird scenery indeed, along the boulderesque footpath, with bracken and hoar rock intermingled, and the blue sea below on the left and great grey spires of cliff overhead on the right, splashed with lichens red, golden, tawny, pallid green—all colours. then rise in front of you the pinnacles. you see at once, when you are come in sight of them, that you are come by quick change from the territory[229] of the little folk into some arthuresque land of the giants, for the great fantastic pinnacles are in twisted and contorted forms that suggest having originally been fashioned when warm and plastic by some titan hand.
the slaty stratification of the surrounding rocks lends itself to the most outlandish horrent shapes of monstrous jibing faces, anvils, halberds, battle axes, and the likeness of a perfect armoury of magic weapons of offence, taking their most uncanny guise in the ragged mists that almost always enwrap and cling about the bolt.
it seems that, contrary to general belief, this headland, of which these pinnacles are the culminating point, is not the real bolt head. it is the further point, across the intervening valley, where the explorer finds the coastguard path die away, and himself perilously walking on the treacherous grassy slopes, where a slip will conduct at express speed on to some particularly sharp and cruel-looking rocks. it is like an inferno down there, in the sense that the descent is fatally easy, and to retrace one’s steps—or rather, flight—impossible. it is here that, warily shirking the point, you wish you hadn’t come; that you were a goat or a chamois, or, at the very least of it, that you had spikes in the soles of your shoes.
but they are lovely, as well as awe-inspiring, glimpses down there, sheer into the sea, where the cliff-walls are as black as coal and the sea now a dark, now a light green, here and there ringing a half-submerged rock with creamy foam. hollow[230] sound the surges in those cavernous depths, and reverberant the cries of the seagulls. such is the extremity of the real bolt, out yonder.
the descent from the pinnacles leads down into a solitary valley, with towering fantastic rocks on the one side and the sea on the other. a deserted cottage standing near the sea emphasises the loneliness. the cottage has a story, for it was built to house the submarine cable from brest, landed here in may 1870. here, thank goodness, you plunge out of the over-civilisation of to-day, and, leaving hotels behind, come for a space into something of the rural england of sixty years since. here, where nature is so beautiful and the littlenesses of towns are left behind, one can understand something of that latter-day portent, anarchism, which, in this close touch with mother earth, reveals itself as a divine discontent with lovely things exploited and degraded, rather than the bogey of statesmen and sociologists.
stair hole bottom they call this valley. it is carpeted with bracken; a little peaty stream comes oozing along in boggy places, or purling, as from the lip of a jug, over scattered boulders, overhung by the nodding foxglove. it is, in a word, cornish, rather than devonian, and, as commonly is the case in cornwall, you have to pick your way among the chancy places, for lack of road or path.
looking back, the pinnacles show fitfully through the mist, the hole through them, like an all-seeing eye, glowering darkly as the mists close[231] in, or lightening, with a tinge of beneficence, in the sun.
on those moist, hot, steamy devonshire days, when the mist, condensed off the sea, rolls like smoke over the rocky ledges, you look over the cliffs’ edge into a pillowy whiteness, which, for all you may discover, is the next field, or a sheer drop of three hundred feet on to a rocky beach. but through the smother, like a warning cry, comes dully the turmoil of the waves, the husky voice of the sea, sounding to the unromantic londoner like the roaring of the traffic in his native streets, as heard from one of the metropolitan parks.
the coastguard path is rugged and perilous, and the whitened stones of it are apt to fail one at critical moments, like moral resolutions in the pathway of life. sometimes they are not there at all, and in some spots they are so overgrown with bracken that you barge into them unawares, with painful results.
up at clewer signal station, where the coastguard, outside his tiny whitewashed hut, does incomprehensible things with strings of flags, the wild growths of these downs run riot, kept in subjection only by the winds, which have imposed the oddest shapes upon them. the gorse-bushes have been buffeted by them into closely compacted hummocky figures, the heather is disposed in hemispherical groups, the brambles, turn in upon themselves in a way the free-born hedgerow bramble would despise, and only the bracken, which is a summer growth and, like the[232] grass of the field, here to-day and gone to-morrow, is independent and upstanding. the beautiful bracken! come here in july, and you will think all the strawberries in the world are on t’other side of the next shoulder of hill; for in that month the bracken has a perfume like that of the ripest and choicest and sweetest strawberries ever grown.
there are rabbits on these uplands, as with a painful wrench of the ankle you are not unlikely to discover, when your foot plunges unexpectedly into one of their burrows. there are moles, too, evidently, and slow-worms wriggle plentifully across the path.
and thus, now up, now down and around, with the perspiration streaming from you in the still, close hollows, and drying off on the breezy heights, you come by astonishing rocks down to a little sandy rock-girt cove, solitary, without even a man friday’s footprints on the yellow sand, through which a little stream trickles. but though no human footprint may be seen, the sands are patterned by the thousand with the broad-arrow prints of the gulls’ feet, as though the war office had descended upon the place and thus prodigally marked it for its ownest own.
one could and two could even better—go a-robinson-crusoeing here very comfortably for awhile in the summer, with the aid of a tent, despite the unlovely name of the place, which is sewer mill cove.
what’s in a name? not much here, at any rate, for it has really nothing to do with drains.[233] there are several “sewer” farms in the neighbourhood, east and west, and the district in general is called “the sewers”: the name deriving from the anglo-saxon description of the folk living here, the “sæware,” the sea-folk, as distinguished from those who, living a little more inland, obtained their livelihood from the land. the process by which the place took its name is not an unusual one; and canterbury—the “burgh of the kent-ware,” or kentish folk—may be taken as a prominent and familiar instance.
sewer mill cove was the scene in 1885 of one of the many wrecks that have made this coast dreaded by mariners, for then the hallowe’en teaship was cast away here, fortunately without loss of life.
the downs here, at the summit of the cliffs between this and hope, are those of bolberry, whence comes, some consider, the name of bolt head. heather clothes them and the cliff-tops with a more than imperial magnificence. imperial mantles are poor things and tawdry beside such purple splendour. if solomon in all his glory were not arrayed like the lilies of the field, certainly no emperor has ever attained to the gorgeousness of the heather.
it is an untameable wilderness on these heights, for the land is of such negative quality that it is worth no farmer’s while to touch it, and moreover, great fissures and holes, like those of earthquakes, partly masked by undergrowth, exist here. the country people speak of them as[234] ralph’s pits, vincent pits, rotten pits. ralph, they tell you, was a smuggler, and that is the closest touch you can make to him. ralph is as insubstantial as the mists that come streaking over the downs.
now we come to bolt tail and the signal-station, overlooking ramilies cove, where the ramilies man-o’-war was wrecked in 1760. seven hundred and eight of the seven hundred and thirty four men on board perished. down below lies hope village, in its tiny cove, where an island can be seen in the making; a great mass of rock dividing the cove in two being joined to the mainland only by strips of sand and heaps of tumbled boulders. it was here that one of the many ships of the spanish armada was wrecked: so many ships and so many wrecks that the pen revolts from writing about them, even as the london apprentices revolted, in the centuries gone by, against salmon every day. these spanish armada ships are the “salmon every day,” or the toujours perdrix, if you like to put it in terms of a surfeit of game, of the historian of the coasts. scarce a cove but they dashed their stout timbers to pieces upon its rocks, and those beaches are few that have no legends of silver ingots, pieces of eight, moidores, doubloons, dollars, and all the glittering galaxy of treasure-trove deriving from such a romantic source; but devil a dollar has rewarded the quest of this pilgrim, errant with the best will to it.
then, if you have faith, you may see in every dark-featured devonian a descendant from a[235] captured or shipwrecked don. there are the names of miggs and jenny (among others), which may, or again may not, derive from miguel and jeronimo, and cantrell has been recognised as a debased form of alcantara, but ’tis a far cry. here, at any rate, we know the name and rating of the spanish vessel. she was the hospital-ship st. peter the great, and was on her way home, after having, in flight from drake and his fellows, circumnavigated great britain. one hundred and fifty of the one hundred and ninety aboard of her were saved; and possibly the delmers, the jaggers, and the murrens to be met with are descendants of that crew.
hope is just bidding “good day t’ye” to the old immemorial times, when it was just a hamlet of crabbers and lobster-catchers and the like, for villas and bungalows are putting the old cottages of cob and rock to shame, and they are becoming, although still a small community, as up-to-date as you please, or you don’t please. no longer, i think, is the once-famous “white ale” of south devon made or sold at hope, or even at kingsbridge; once, in some sort, the metropolis of its brewing. but we need not regret the disappearance of this heady nastiness, which was not in the least like ale, and more nearly resembled that extremely potent and convivial compound, “egg-flip,” than anything else. but “white ale” had a great and an ancient reputation, and was described a couple of centuries ago as “the nappiest ale that can be drunk.”[236] it was held to be the “ancient and peculiar drink of the britons and englishmen, and the wholesomest, whereby many in elder times lived a hundred years.”
if we can frame to believe that, then the disappearance of it is something like a national disaster; but it may well be supposed that although the numbers of police-court cases would sensibly increase with the re-introduction of “white ale,” those of centenarians would not. the composition of this tipple, which is really grey, seems to be milk, gin, and spice, and, bottled, it blows off in hot weather like a high-pressure boiler.
