a sudden drop into the vale of porlock tilts the traveller neck and crop into the village street. you realise, when come to the village, that it stands in a flat, low-lying space giving upon a distant bay; a bay distant just upon one mile. once upon a time—a time so distant that history places no certain date against it—the village immediately faced the sea, and indeed took its name, which means “the enclosed port,” from the fact of the harbour running up to this point, deeply embayed between the enfolding hills. rich meadows now spread out where the sea once rolled; but the waves might surge there even now were it not for the continued existence of that great rampart of stones flung up in the long ago by the sea, which thus by its own action shut itself out from its ancient realm.
porlock has for “ever so long” been a show place, and, like any other originally modest beauty, has at last become a little spoiled by praise, and more than a little sophisticated. we do not 248greatly esteem the self-conscious beauty, especially when she paints.
the charm of porlock has been, and is being, still more sadly smirched by expansion and by that increasing intercourse with the world which has taken the accent off the tongues of the villagers, replaced the weirdly cut provincial clothes of an earlier era with garments of a more modish style, and brought buildings of a distinctly suburban type into the once purely rustic street. but these newer buildings, although sufficiently odious, do not by any means touch the depths of abomination plumbed by the local wesleyan methodist chapel, built in the ’30’s, and fully as bad, in its grey stuccoed, would-be classicism, as that date would imply.
the coming of the motor-car has been nothing less than a disaster to porlock. not only private cars, growing ever larger and more productive of dust, noise, and stink, rush through the once sweet-scented street, regardless of the comfort and convenience of villagers or visitors, but “public service” vehicles and chars-à-bancs as big as houses slam through the place, raising a stifling dust that penetrates everywhere. few sights are more distressing, to those who knew porlock as it was, than that of the clustered roses and jessamines that mantle so many of the houses, thickly covered with dust. it is a standing wonder that the inhabitants of pretty villages plagued almost beyond endurance by motorists do not arise and compel county councils and other authorities to 249take action. possibly they know only too well that the majority of members of those councils is formed by owners of cars, who are themselves among the worst offenders.
but, in any case, the simple old days of porlock are done. to have seen porlock with southey, how great that privilege! great, not only in the literary way, but in a glimpse of it in its unspoiled, unconscious beauty, before ever it had become notable as a show-place.
local connoisseurs of the picturesque prefer bossington, now that porlock is worn a little threadbare and grown so dusty. they are of opinion that bossington is the quainter of the two. but to come to judgment in this frame is not wholly in order, for the places are of such different types, and cannot fairly be compared. porlock is a considerable village, with numerous shops; and bossington is but a hamlet, without a church, and apparently with no shops at all. it is a very sequestered place, standing on the horner, about a mile distant, north-eastward, from porlock. the great recommendations of bossington in these latter days are that motor-cars never or rarely get there, and that it is by consequence quiet and dustless. porlock is on the main road—on the way to that somewhere else which is ever your typical motorist’s quest: a quest he relinquishes at night, only to resume it the next morning. bossington stands in the way to nowhere in particular, and the roads that lead to it are less roads than lanes. that they may 250long continue their narrow, rough, and winding character is the wish of those who wish bossington well.
bossington.
for the rest, it is pre-eminently a hamlet of chimneys. the chimneys of porlock are themselves a remarkable feature of that place, but at bossington they are the feature. they are all of a remarkable height. there are coroneted chimneys; round chimneys, with pots and without; chimneys square, and chimneys finished off with slates set up (as wind-breakers) at an angle, something like a simple problem in euclid. the next great feature of bossington is its immense walnut-tree, whose trunk measures sixteen feet in circumference. this is the chieftain of all the many walnut-trees that flourish in the neighbourhood.
251the modern wesleyan chapel of bossington puts its stuccoed brother at porlock to shame. it is a pretty building, designed in good taste, built of stone banded with blue brick, and is finished off with a quaintly louvred turret. not even the neighbouring restored chapel of lynch, rescued from desecration by the late sir thomas dyke acland, looks more worshipful.
bossington street, irregularly fringed with rustic cottages, and with the horner on one side fleeting amid its pebbles to the sea, is as unconventional as a farmyard, and ends at last on the great shingle-bank of porlock bay, where two or three ruined old houses stand against the skyline and look as if they had known stirring incidents of shipwreck and smuggling, as indeed they probably have, in abundance.
smuggling was the chief occupation of porlock and its surroundings in southey’s time. the lonely beach of huge pebbles that stretches between porlock weir and bossington, with low-lying, marshy meadows giving upon it, was most frequently the scene of goods being landed secretly and thence dispersed into the surrounding country. the revenue officials knew so well that smuggling was carried on largely that it behoved the “free-traders” to be at especial pains to baffle them. some of their ingeniously constructed hiding-holes have not been unearthed until comparatively recent years. thus, in so unlikely a situation as the middle of a field, a smugglers’ store-chamber was found in course of ploughing, 252between porlock and bossington. again, it was left to modern times for a smugglers’ hiding-hole in the picturesque farmhouse of higher doverhay to be discovered. this ingenious place of concealment for contraband goods had been constructed by the simple process of building a false outer wall parallel with the real wall of the farmhouse, leaving a narrow space between. when discovered the shelves with which this recess was fitted, for the reception of spirit-kegs, were still there; but the spirits themselves had departed.
the church of porlock, dedicated to st. dubritius, is generally regarded by visitors as an architectural joke. it is the curiously truncated shingled broach spire that produces this derogatory view. it is understood that the local clergy, seriously exercised in their minds about this attitude of unseemly mirth, would greatly like to rebuild tower and spire. but guidebooks and visitors alike, placing such stress upon this alleged grotesqueness, are quite wrong. the spire, as it is, has that all-too-rare thing, character, and it is a joy to the artist, and something on which visitors can exercise their wits. in short, porlock would be a good deal less than its old self were it abolished. with the huge and dilapidated churchyard yew, and the tall neighbouring cross, the old church, as a whole, forms a striking motif for a sketch.
porlock church.
the most notable feature of the interior is the noble altar-tomb of the fourth baron harington 253of aldingham, and his wife, elizabeth courtenay, daughter of the earl of devon, who died respectively in 1417 and 1472. she married, secondly, lord bonvile, of chewton, but chose to lie here; and here, in finely sculptured effigies, they are represented, the noble helmeted and in complete armour, and his lady with tall mitre headdress and coronet.
guide-books tell of the “curious epitaphs” at porlock, but they are not so curious as might thus be supposed; certainly not more so than those of the average country churchyard. the chief feature of these is their ungrammatical character, as where we read of henry pulsford and richard bale, “who was both drownd” at “lymouth,” in 1784. poetry—or rather, verse—that changed, in arbitrary fashion, from first person to third, was still possible in 1860, as witness these unpleasant lines upon one thomas fry:
for many weeks my friends did see
approaching death attending me.
no favour could his body find,
till in the earth it was confined,
and so forth.
the “ship” inn is almost, if not even quite, as well known a feature of porlock as the church, and is unaltered since southey sheltered here considerably over a hundred years ago—
by the unwelcome summer rain confined.
the thatch has, of course, been renewed from time to time, but always in the old traditional 254style, and the white walls are obviously what they were a couple of centuries or more ago. the oldest part of the inn is probably a curious little trefoiled-headed wooden window, of semi-ecclesiastical design, under the eaves.
inglenook, “ship” inn, porlock.
southey sat in the little parlour still existing, and, by the inglenook that has fortunately been preserved, wrote the oft-quoted lines:
porlock, thy verdant vale, so fair to sight,
thy lofty hills, which fern and furze embrown,
thy waters, that roll musically down
thy woody glens, the traveller with delight
recalls to memory, and the channel grey
circling it, surging in thy level bay.
255
“the ship” inn, porlock.
a small window in this chimney-corner commands a view up the road, just as of old, where the famed “porlock hill” begins that steep and long-continued rise which has made it known, far and near, as “the worst hill in the west of england.” this is a mile-long rise from porlock vale to the wild, exposed tableland that stretches, for seven miles, to countisbury, where it descends steeply to lynmouth. the rise of porlock hill is one thousand feet, but the tableland beyond it rises yet another 378 feet by culbone hill. the gradient of porlock hill is in parts as steep as one in six, and the surface is always, at all seasons of the year, bad in the extreme. a sharp bend to the right appears, a little way uphill. in summer a mass of red dust six or eight inches deep, and plentifully mixed with large stones, it is in winter a pudding-like mixture of a clayey nature. the spectacle of heavy-laden coaches toiling up this fearsome so-called “road” is a distressing one for those who love horses, and grieve to see them overtaxed. no cyclist could, of course, hope to ride up, while none but a madman would attempt to ride down.
a private road, however, engineered some forty years ago by colonel blathwayt through his domain of whitestone park, ascends the hillsides by a long series of zigzags, and thus admits of easy gradients. the distance is twice as long, but the ruling gradient is only one in ten, and the surface is good. the scenery also—the “new road,” as it is called, running through 256woodlands for the most part—is much preferable to that of the old road. in order to provide funds for keeping this “new road” in repair, certain tolls are payable: a penny for a cycle or a saddle-horse; fourpence for carriages, etc., with one horse, and threepence for every additional horse; and a shilling for motor-cars.
but, before leaving porlock behind, it will be well to visit porlock weir. porlock weir, or quay, as some style it, is the port of porlock. it is not, commercially speaking, much of a port, for the basin is neither large nor deep, and only the smallest of sailing-vessels may enter it.
as you come along the mile and a half of pretty country road that leads from porlock to porlock weir, passing many remarkably picturesque cob-walled and thatch-roofed cottages on the way, you catch glimpses of the kind of place this port is. porlock bay lies open to the view, and is revealed as a two-and-a-quarter mile semicircular sweep of naked pebble-ridge between hurlstone point and gore point. under the last-named wooded bluff, which forms the buttress, so to speak, on which rests the romantic domain of ashley combe, the village and harbour of porlock weir are snugly placed. “weir” stands, in the minds of most people, for a foaming waterfall on a river; but there is no stream whatever at this place, and the harbour that has been given the name is just a natural basin formed by a long-continued action of the tides in heaping up a great impervious outer bank of pebbles under 257this protecting bluff, where the bay finds its western termination. left to itself, the trench-like inlet thus formed would fill automatically with every flood-tide, and empty again with the ebb; but the mouth of it was closed, perhaps three centuries ago, by a wall and sluice-gates, by which the water could, at ebb, be kept in the harbour so easily constructed. that is porlock weir, upon whose primitive quays look a few picturesquely dilapidated waterside buildings. the spot is quiet and delightfully unconventional, and is frequented in summer by visitors who appreciate those qualities and the sea-fishing that is to be had off the beach. the old “ship” inn is a counterpart of that hostelry of the same name at porlock, and is generally old-fashioned and delightful. you catch a glimpse of copper warming-pans as you pass, and are in receipt of an impression of that kind of comfort which was the last thing in innkeeping life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
the “anchor hotel” is a gabled building, obviously built about 1885, when architects found salvation in gables, red-brick, rough-cast plaster, and a general queen annean attitude. besides these, there stands an omnium gatherum shop that will supply you at one end of the scale with a ton of coals and any reasonable requirement in fodder and corn-chandlery, or with a pennyworth of acid-drops at the other. the romantic-looking old cottages that face the road and have quaintly peaked combs to their thatches, display 258luxuriant gardens in front, and the sea on occasion clamours for entrance at the back; for it can be very rough here at times, as the pebble-ridge heaped up against the stout sea-wall protecting the road sufficiently witnesses.
the little harbour, although apparently so derelict, is not altogether a thing of the past, for porlock is some seven miles distant from any railway, and it still remains cheaper to bring coals into the place by sea than by any other method. and this, it would seem, must always be the case, for coal comes to porlock direct from the quays of the south wales coalfields. but, except for this class of goods, and for a few other miscellaneous and casual items, the harbour of porlock weir is nowadays practically deserted. it forms a curious spectacle. old vessels lie rotting in the ooze, with no one to clear away their discredited carcases; the caerleon of bridgwater, lying at the quay awaiting a discharge of her cargo of coals, the only craft obviously in commission.
porlock weir.
life certainly does not run with a strong current at porlock weir. overnight you may see jerseyed seafaring men sitting in a row on a waterside bench, their backs supported by a convenient wall. they are engaged in contemplating nothing in particular. vacuity of mind is set upon their countenances, and expresses itself in their very attitudes, hands drooping listlessly over knees, heads sunk upon chests. there they have sat, with intervals for refreshment, all day, 259and there they are sitting as twilight fades away into darkness. when the visitor comes down to breakfast at the “anchor” or the “ship” opposite, they are discovered in the selfsame place and in the same attitudes as before. they seem to hold constant session, but rarely speak; not because they hold silence to be golden, but for the simple reason that all subjects are exhausted.
this silent companionship is not often broken, the chief occasions of the break-up being those exciting times when some terrified, panting, hunted stag comes fleeting down out of the woods with the yelping hounds at his heels. the sea is the harried creature’s last resort, and in it he is generally lassoed and dragged to shore, where the hounds tear the unfortunate beast to pieces, amid interested crowds of onlookers. such is “sport.”
but this death of the stag on porlock beach is now very much a thing of the past, since the strong line of fencing that runs through the woods of ashley combe and culbone, as far as glenthorne, has come into existence, preventing the fugitive stags from taking this last desperate refuge. nowadays, more commonly, they take to the water at the eastern end of the beach, coming down through the horner valley to bossington. here, then, the hunt often ends, and spectators are treated to the extraordinary sight of huntsmen in scarlet clambering about the rocks of orestone point, or wading in hunting boots in the sea.
