lee—morte point—morthoe and the tracy legend—woolacombe—georgeham—croyde—saunton sands—braunton, braunton burrows, and lighthouse
the way out of ilfracombe to lee, for the pedestrian, is through the tors walks, and so by clearly defined cliff paths for two miles. the carriage road leads past ilfracombe parish church, and, turning to the right, goes up hill to slade. finally, having climbed to an extravagant height, it plunges alarmingly down, and still down, steep and winding, through a luxuriant valley, where you encounter the hot steamy air, like entering a conservatory. fuchsias in full-bloom take the place in the hedgerows generally occupied by privet, thorn, or blackberry-bramble, for this is the locally famed “valley of fuchsias,” where frost comes rarely and the keenest winds are robbed of their sting. at the foot of this descent, the village of lee is gradually disclosed; a graceful little early english church, built in 1836, the old post office, where visitors do most resort for tea, a few clusters of cottages, and then the sea, furiously rushing into a little rocky bay, or calmly lapping among the rocks, or retired at low tide,132 leaving exposed a thick bed of seaweed that sends up a strong bracing scent; all according to the mood and circumstances of the moment. a strikingly handsome hotel—the “manor hotel,” standing amid lawns and gardens, for it was once the manor-house—occupies the middle of the tiny bay, and is the resort of those who like to be within easy reach of ilfracombe, and yet out of its exuberant life; and that is all there is of lee. the coastguard path clambers round to bull point lighthouse, and there is a steep and rocky, but hopeful-looking, lane on the left which promises a short cut for the stray cyclist to morthoe. appearances are deceptive, and, quite a long way up hill, the lane ends and the aggrieved stranger finds himself in an almost trackless succession of fields of oats. negotiating these with what patience he may, and floundering through the fearsome mud of the two farmyards (heaven send it be not wet weather!) of warcombe and damage bartons, he comes at length to a road, which, to his dismay, he finds is a private road to bull point lighthouse. from it there is no exit towards morthoe save through a formidable padlocked gate eight feet high, but a notice (on the outer side of the gate only, and therefore likely to be overlooked by the raging cyclist within) directs those who want to drive or ride to the lighthouse to call for the keys at a neighbouring cottage. as for the lighthouse, it is own brother to dozens of other modern structures of the kind, and was built in 1874. it was built especially to guard against the133 dangers of morte point, and in addition to its occulting light has a lower fixed red beacon on the west, to mark the position of morte stone. a reef-strewn indentation, known as rockham bay, separates this spot from morte point.
morte point does not impress me, and although i have every wish to “write it up” to its grim name—as every journalist who properly understood what is expected of him would most assuredly do—i cannot see the grimness of it; only a projecting tongue of land that runs down to the sea and ends in low, insignificant cliffs, with a chaotic scatter of formless rocks projecting from the waves, and the “morte stone,” rather larger than the others, seaward. and there are, you know, squalid little gardens of the allotment type in the fields, and morthoe village itself is so commonplace that the tragical names, “death point,” “the hill of death,” seem absurdly misapplied. but morte point is a great deal more deadly than it looks, and although the landsman who sees with his own vision, rather than at second hand, may slight the name, seafaring men dread it more than the really magnificent spectacular bulk of hartland point. it is not the size, but the awkward situation, of morte point, together with the currents which set about it, that make it dangerous to shipping. the removal of morte point is, naturally enough, beyond the powers of man, but it should at any rate, in these days of high explosives and engineering skill, not be impossible to abolish the isolated rock of morte134 stone, in spite of the ancient sardonic jest that the only person to remove it will be the man who can rule his wife.
morthoe (locally “morte”) village is a wan, desolate-looking collection of a few houses on the cliff-top, overlooking the wide expanse of blue sea and yellow sands of woolacombe bay. it can never have worn anything but a stern, stark, weather-beaten appearance, but that is giving way in these times to something even less attractive; commonplace plaster-fronted houses, that would not pass muster in even one of the less desirable london suburbs, having sprung up around the ancient weatherworn church, while a grocer’s shop, styling itself “stores,” looks on to the churchyard. at a place named so tragically “morthoe,” you do most ardently demand that the scene be set somewhat in accordance with the ominous name. the stranger does not insist upon a mortuary full of shipwrecked sailors, as (so to say) a guarantee of good faith, but he does resent, most emphatically, the sheer commonplace that dashes his anticipations remorselessly to extinction.
the ancient family of tracy, associated closely with barnstaple, and with many another locality in north and mid devon, are mentioned in histories of the neighbourhood as early as the beginning of the twelfth century. ever after the murder of thomas à becket in 1170, in which william de tracy bore a part, the tracys were said, in the wild legends of old, to have always “the wind in their faces.” the belief provided135 a rough rhyme, and satisfied a queer idea of retributive justice by which root and branch alike of that unfortunate family suffered for the acts of one who it appears was not himself, after all, of that race: having been a de sudeley by birth, and only assuming the name of tracy after his marriage with grace, daughter of sir william de tracy. the legends that have gathered like the incrustation on old port-wine bottles, round the assassination of becket and the after-history of the four knights who murdered him, tell how tracy fled to morthoe and passed the rest of his life in prayers and penitence, but it seems to be fully established that he fled the country and died three years later, in calabria; after having, according to a yet further variant, thrice unsuccessfully attempted to make pious pilgrimage to the holy land, and being beaten back on every occasion by adverse winds.
morthoe.
the legend associating the assassin with136 morthoe would appear to have been invented to account for the ancient altar-tomb, covered with an inscribed slab of black marble, bearing the name of one william de tracy, that still stands in the south chapel of the old church. there was not, in the days when this tale originated, the disposition to criticise any story that imaginative persons might choose to tell. research, for the purpose of recovering facts obscured by lapse of time, was unthinkable in the days when travel to the repositories of learning could be undertaken only at great risks and incredible cost; and so, what with both the will and the power wanting to arrive at mere facts, many an incredible tale has been started on its career. it seems, in this instance, never to have occurred to the people of morthoe, who long accepted this story, that among the numerous tracys with whom they were in old times surrounded, there must have been more than one william. william, indeed, appears to have been a favourite name among them. in short, the man whose tomb remains here was a tracy who from 1257 to 1322 was rector of morthoe. he thus died close upon a hundred and fifty years later than becket’s assailant.
remains of the incised figure of a priest are yet traceable on the tomb, together with an inscription which has been deciphered, “syre guillaume de tracy, gist ici. dieu de son alme eyt merci.” the interior of the tomb was rifled long ago. in the quaint description by old westcote, who wrote in 1620, “he rested in ease until some ill-affected137 persons, seeking for treasure, but disappointed thereof, stole the leaden sheets he lay in, leaving him in danger to take cold.”
this early english church with aisleless nave and two chapels, has few other memorials, none of them ancient; but many of the old carved bench-ends remain, the balance of them being imitations, carved locally, when the church was restored in 1857. in recent years the east windows of chancel and north and south chapels have been filled with beautiful stained glass, designed by henry holiday, and the space above the chancel-arch decorated in gold and coloured mosaic, with four stiffly decorative angels in the burne-jones convention, by selwyn image. the dangers of morthoe, not only to seafaring folk, but also to bathers, appear in the memorial window to thomas lee, architect, of barnstaple, who was drowned off barricane beach in 1834. the memorial of a more recent tragedy is seen in the churchyard, where a tombstone records the drowning of “winifred, youngest daughter of sir walter forster, m.p., who was swept away by the treacherous ground-swell, while bathing in coombes gate, morthoe, aug. 14, 1898, aged 21.” near by is a rhymed epitaph upon one “albion bale harris, aged 13,” who was killed in 1886 by falling off a cliff at ilfracombe.
the long, steep road that descends from morthoe to the flat shore of woolacombe bay, is becoming plagued with a growth of tasteless lodging-houses, whose neutral-tinted stucco is put to shame by the splendour of sea, sky, and sands.138 when last i came this way, two italian piano organists, with a cage of canaries, were grinding out their mechanical music-mongery in an exceptionally lone spot, away from those new houses; wasting, like the flowers in the wilderness, their sweetness on the desert air. none but the rocks heard them, for not another living soul was near. they were not drunk, neither did they appear to be mad. i have not yet discovered the true inwardness of it; is it possible that here at last were two artists, for art’s sake, piano-organing for the very love of it? dark doubts cloud the idyllic picture!
below the road, before you come to woolacombe bay, is the little inlet of barricane beach, shut in between two projecting reefs. charles kingsley, many years ago, writing of woolacombe sands, referred to them as really composed of shells, but it would seem that barricane beach alone can claim his remarks:
“every gully and creek there among the rocks is yellow, but not with sand. those are shells; the sweepings of the ocean bed for miles around, piled there, millions upon millions, yards deep, in every stage of destruction. there they lie, grinding to dust, and every gale brings in fresh myriads from the inexhaustible sea-world. the brain grows dizzy and tired, as one’s feet crunch over the endless variety of their forms—and then one recollects that every one of them has been a living thing—a whole history of birth, and growth, and propagation, and death.”
139 the little inlet, so shut in, has an exclusive air, in contrast with the open semicircular three-miles sweep of woolacombe sands; but refreshment caterers have descended upon the place with tents. they have done the like at woolacombe bay itself, for in these days woolacombe bay is a name denoting more than an expanse of water with a sandy fringe. the safe bathing in the sea, and the extensive golfing on the sand hills or in the flat fields have converted what was, literally, a “howling waste”—for the winds occasionally blow great guns here—into the semblance of a seaside resort. there were, but a few years ago, only some three houses here, including the old manor mill, whose water-wheel formed a picturesque object beside the little stream that empties itself into the bay; but now there is a great red brick hotel with the usual “special terms to golfers,” and a little red town has sprung up around it, with a fringe of rather blear-eyed shops facing the sea, and some better, turned at right angles to it. there is so impossible a look about the whole thing, that “here we have no abiding place” is a quotation that rises promptly to the mind of the observer. it looks, with its refreshment booths and array of chairs on the shore in summer, like some camp-meeting in a desolate part of america. but it is intended to last; a permanent water-supply has been installed and a kind of modern missionary tin church, dedicated to st. sabinus, who voyaged across from ireland a thousand years ago, to convert the140 heathen of this neighbourhood—and was wrecked on this shore—has been erected. woolacombe bay, however, is a melancholy place. it has had no past, and it is difficult to imagine it with a future. only a fanatical golfer to whom the world beyond his putting-greens and his bunkers is merely incidental, could long find occupation here.
that is a terrible road—preposterously steep, deep in loose sand, and strewn with large stones—which leads up from this resort in the making to the high table-land down on whose other side lies the village of georgeham, whose inhabitants, quite exceptionally, insist upon it being styled, not “georg’m,” but emphatically “georgham.” that is their pronunciation, and they bid you use none other. in the fine, but rebuilt church, is the cross-legged effigy of an ancient st. aubyn—one sir mauger of that ilk, who died in 1293—and an ugly and greatly-decayed monument of the chichesters, with medallion-portraits of many seventeenth-century bearers of that name. in the churchyard, where the humbler sleep just as comfortably, is the epitaph of simon gould and his wife julian, who died in 1817, after seventy-five years of married life, each aged 107, and near by may still be found a stone to one william kidman, who, with all his mates, was drowned in the wreck of h.m.s. weazel, guardship stationed off appledore, at baggy point, in february 1799. an epitaph upon sergeant job hill, of the 40th foot, completes this list of interesting relics, on a martial note:
141
nor cannon’s roar nor rifle shot
can wake him in this peaceful spot.
with faith in christ and trust in god,
the sergeant sleeps beneath this clod.
leafy lanes and rugged lead to the hamlet of putsborough, very much removed from the snares and pitfalls of the world of affairs, and on the road to nowhere at all, unless it be the rocks of baggy point, which forms the southern horn of morte bay. putsborough takes its name from some saxon earl, just as croyde derives its own from crida; and doubtless it was to convert the people of putta and crida, or their descendants, from the fierce heathen rites of the saxons, that st. sabinus, st. brannock, and many another irish missionary landed in the long ago on these shores.
putsborough lies embedded in leafy seclusion. a farmstead or two, and their attendant cottages, together with a most delightful thatched manor-house, overhung with tall trees, comprise the whole place. the manor-house and its lawn and garden stand whimsically islanded by surrounding roads, and a little stream trickles by, in a water splash. it is a most primitive place and some of the lanes leading on to croyde are fit fellows with it, being cut deeply into the rock and overhung, ten feet high, with brambly growths.
croyde is not so entirely removed from social intercourse. it is still a pretty, scattered rustic village lining a road running down a valley to the sea, with a brawling stream beside the road; but on the shore of croyde bay, where there are142 yellow sands, some recent seaside houses have been built. it is a pretty and cheerful little bay; not large enough to look melancholy and desolate, like that of woolacombe, and the road on to saunton is excellent; having really been remade across saunton down, as part of a “development” scheme. excellent, that is to say, from the point of view of a motorist, for it is broad and straight, and the surface is beyond reproach. but it is, it must be added, more than a trifle bald and uninteresting to those who do not regard roads as the nearer perfection the more closely they resemble a race-track.
whether saunton be “sand-town” or whether it was originally named “sainct tun,”—as, in some sort, a holy district—is still a vexed question; and likely to remain undecided, for these shores are remarkable both for saints and sands. we have already told briefly how st. sabine—or suibine, as he was known in ireland—landed in disorder on woolacombe sands in the dim past. here were chapels of saint sylvester, saint michael, and saint helen; and here st. brannock came ashore in a.d. 300, to convert the heathen, and incidentally to found the church called after him at what is now braunton, in “brannock’s-town.” more of him anon. but legends tell how he built his early church of timber cut in forests by the seashore, and dragged inland by harnessed stags. where, it has been asked, did these forests stand? no one knows where legend begins and fact ends; but it is certain that underneath these143 miles of blown sand, on to braunton burrows, and again at northam burrows and on to westward ho, there lie the remains of a prehistoric forest, overwhelmed by sea and sand, or in some ancient subsidence, many centuries ago.
there is no town at saunton, and the mere fringe of houses beside the road is very new; this coast having been of old too dreary and inhospitable to afford a home for honest folk. smugglers, wreckers, and such shy cattle, were among its scanty frequenters, and sometimes (the place being so lonely and secretive) refugees landed amid these wastes. among them was the duke of ripperda, who landed one dark night in the beginning of october 1728, out of an irish barque. he “had no one with him but the lady who had procured his deliverance, the corporal of the guard, and one servant.” this fugitive had escaped from the castle of segovia. he was entertained the night by one “mr. harris of pickwell,” and then went to exeter. thus the duke of ripperda, who is no national concern of ours, flits mysteriously across country to disappear again in foreign parts. it would puzzle a biographer to give him a domicile. born a dutchman, he seems to have been sent on a diplomatic mission to madrid, and there to have renounced holland and the protestant religion and to have become a spaniard and a catholic. philip the fifth rewarded him with a dukedom. eventually he is found in morocco, as a moorish subject of the deepest dye. at one period, we144 are told, he became a jew, but that is scarcely credible. at last, having been everything it was possible to be, he died in 1737.
sir john schorne and his devil.
old rotting ribs of wrecked ships, protruding like fangs from the wet margin of the sands, tell their own tale of unexpected and disastrous landfalls on the lonely shore.
on the left hand of the road is still to be seen “saunton court,” an old farmhouse mentioned with glowing description in blackmore’s “maid of sker,” but the interest of the house in the novel is not reflected in the present circumstances of the place.
the road leads directly into braunton; a large, sprawling village of cob-walled, whitewashed cottages; a place that has, so far, not been affected in the slightest degree by modern change. what braunton was a hundred years ago, it remains to-day. risdon, in “survey of devon,” 1630, says: “brannockston, so named of st. brannock, the king’s son of calabria, that lived in this vale, and 300 years after christ began to preach his holy name in this desolate place, then overspread with brakes and woods; out of which desert, now named the boroughs (to tell you some of the marvels of this man), he took harts, which meekly obeyed the yoke, and made them a plow to draw timber thence, to build a church. i forbear to speak of his cow, his staff, his oak, his well, and his servant abel, all of which are lively represented in that church, than which you shall see few fairer.” brannock’s cow is145 really well worth speaking of; for, after it had been killed and carved into joints, the pieces reunited at the word of the saint, and the animal, restored to life, began to quietly graze in the meadows, as though nothing had happened. that, at any rate, is the legend. a legend that demands faith of a character not quite so robust is that of the vision which led brannock to build his church here. in a dream he was shown a sow and her litter, and directed to select the spot where next day he should find the sow. a carved boss in the roof of the church represents the pig and her family, and st. brannock himself, with his cow, is carved boldly on one of the old bench-ends.
it is a remarkable church, inside and out; with tower and lead-sheathed spire out of the perpendicular. most of the old carved oak bench-ends, dated about 1500, remain, decorated with a large number of devices; among them, not only st. brannock and his cow, but a bishop with his crozier; the head of st. john baptist held up by the hair; judas’s thirty pieces of silver, and master john schorne, the charlatan rector of north marston, buckinghamshire, late in the thirteenth century, who imposed upon the credulous folk of that age by pretending to have conjured the devil into a boot. to convince the most sceptical by ocular demonstration, he contrived a mechanical impish-looking figure, fastened on a spring at the bottom of a long boot, of the kind worn by hunting-men. when the spring was released, the imp would fly up to the edge of the146 boot, in what was in those times, you know, a really terrifying manner. the good master schorne, however, had him well under control, and, as so powerful a devil-compeller, was naturally feared and respected. he was further revered as a certain exorciser of the ague. schorne and his devil in a boot are the originators of the children’s toy, “jack-in-the-box”; for to that complexion did his supernatural terrors come at last, when the springs that actuated the jumping imp were laid bare.
but schorne was in his day, and for long after, something very nearly like a saint, in popular estimation, and is indeed sometimes represented fully furnished with the saintly nimbus. pictures, or carved effigies, of him are extremely rare, for there are probably not more than six or seven in england. here, no doubt, through some confused version of the legend, the carver has shown him holding what appears to be a cup, instead of a boot.
braunton church.
braunton church is full of old pieces of carved woodwork, notably the jacobean gallery in the north chapel, and the churchwardens’ pew, dated 1632. in the south chapel stands a richly decorated spanish chest with undecipherable inscription;149 and another relic of the wreck of h.m.s. weazel in 1799, a tablet to the memory of william gray, surgeon of the ship, one of the one hundred and six who lost their lives on that occasion.
a prominent church-like tower, standing on the crest of a tall hill east of the church, and by the site of a hilltop chapel of st. michael, is less ecclesiastical than it looks, being in fact a political monument commemorating the passing of the reform bill in 1832.
braunton burrows are best explored by setting forth from braunton village as for barnstaple; but, when some little distance out, turning to the right, over the vellator railway crossing, and the little river, or creek, called the caen. thenceforward, the way is clear enough for those who are content to follow the creek to its junction with the estuary of the taw, and so along the sands, past the ship that forms the port of barnstaple hospital, to the lighthouse. but the true inwardness of the burrows is only to be found by continuing straight on past the level crossing, and so into a lane that finally turns to the left and then loses itself in loose sand.
braunton burrows.
there is a world of desolation in braunton burrows, and he who would thus come, overland, to the queer lighthouse that is perched at the seaward end of the estuary of the river taw, must needs quest doubtfully and with some physical discomfort, before reaching that point where the waste of shifting sand slopes down to the waves.150 just as no one becomes irreclaimably wicked in one plunge, but descends irretrievably by a series of slight moral lapses, so does the unwary traveller come by degrees into the baffling sand-wreaths of the burrows. a good riverside road from braunton village by degrees becomes an indifferent road; then, ceasing to be a road of any kind, becomes a more and more sandy lane, which, in its turn, insensibly degenerates to a track, and—there you are! you must not, however, imagine this sandy waste to be without its own peculiar beauties, or barren of vegetation. the winds have blown the immense accumulation of shifting sand into fantastic hummocks and weird hollows, where the dry surface is ribbed by their eddies, just as the retreating tide ribs the wet sand of the shore; but here and there coarse grasses have taken root and achieved the seemingly impossible task of anchoring the elusive substance: crowning the ridges with a wan growth; and in some151 sheltered hollows, where the wind comes scouring with less insistence, there are nurseries of pretty wild flowers which, although the unskilled explorer knows it not, are botanical treasures, some of them sought almost vainly elsewhere. mats and patches of candytuft form exquisite carpetings, the wild pansy blooms abundantly, and in july, beautiful above all else, the intense blue of borage competes vigorously with the yellow-brown of the sand. it has been affirmed that eight hundred varieties of wild flowers are found here, including the rare asperugo procumbens and teucrium scordium; while near the quaint lighthouse the curious will discover the mud-rush (isolepis holosch?nus), and a bad smell.
near the lighthouse! there’s the rub. to reach that goal is a matter of considerable difficulty; for, amid the labyrinth of hillocks and dales of sand, it cannot be seen afar off, and to come to it in anything like a straight course is, therefore, impossible. i know not which, among the inevitably uncomfortable and arduous circumstances of this enterprise, is the most distressing time. to wander here in rain, or in the bitter blast, must certainly be terrible; but no less terrible, in its own particular way, is it to explore this wilderness on some blazing hot day of august. the hollows are stifling, the sand everywhere soft and yielding, and in unexpected places lurk those “pockets,” or holes filled with yet more yielding sand, that, equally with the rabbit-runs, give the place the name of “burrows.”152 into these unsuspected places you may easily sink suddenly up to the knee of one leg, while the other remains on the surface. this sandy waste is, therefore, not without its dangers.
the lighthouse that guides mariners safely into the taw—or “barnstaple river,” as sailors prefer to call it—is an odd structure; not so ferociously ugly as every writer who has mentioned it would lead the stranger to believe. it has character. no one, for instance, would be in the least likely to confuse it with any other lighthouse; and that is a great point. nowadays, when the trinity house builds a new lighthouse, it is as exactly like the last in general appearance as that was like its predecessor. now braunton lighthouse is a very old affair, that came into being when a considerable amount of individuality survived. it stands here, sturdily performing in its secular way what the neighbouring st. ann’s chapel did for sailors as a religious duty, long, long ago. some few scanty remains of that little oratory and lighthouse combined were to be found, some years since, but they have now disappeared. the chapel measured fourteen feet six inches, by twelve feet. neighbouring farmers requisitioned its stones so freely that what was left, even a century ago, was little more than a ground-plan.
braunton lighthouse.
the existing lighthouse looks like the design of some one who set out to build an ordinary, four-square dwelling, and then conceived the idea of placing a tower on its roof; and this tower,153 tapering towards the lantern and carefully hung with slates, is strongly shored up with metal-sheathed timbers, lest the stormy winds that blow pretty constantly in winter overturn it. the lighthouse-man, who spends his summer days gasping for air on the shady side, holds the infrequent stranger in converse as long as possible, and does not appear altogether contented with his existence on a spot where, he says, you cannot bear to sit down on the sands in summer, for the heat, which is strong enough to almost scorch your breeks, to say nothing of your person, and in winter dare hardly put your nose out o’ doors, on account of the cold. he will illustrate for you the especial dangers of this point, against which the lighthouse is placed here to guard, and will explain that, on account of the shifting, sandy bar of the river, there are two lights provided: the fixed one on his tower, and another, low down, on a movable white- and black-striped box on rails. this is moved backwards and forwards, according154 to the movement of the bar, so that ships entering the river and keeping their course safely, shall get the two lights aligned.
the way between braunton and the approach to barnstaple, at pilton, is uninteresting. the road runs for the most part out of sight of the river and the sea. only one thing attracts the wayfarer’s attention; and that for its singularity, rather than for any intrinsic beauty. this object, beside the road, and so close to it that the wayfarer cannot fail to notice the queer, would-be gothic battlements, is heanton court, now a farmhouse; the “narnton court” of blackmore’s “maid of sker.”
