From Gretna Green to Land's End Part 17

Our homeward walk, by a different road, gave us a clearer impression of the ranges of naked hilltops which make up the Hartland parish.

Upon those rounded summits rested a mellow western light which had dimmed into dusk when we finally risked our weary bones on the slippery "back staircase" of Clovelly.

We journeyed from Clovelly to Bideford by carrier's cart, sitting up with what dignity we could amidst a remarkable miscellany of packages. Once arrived at Kingsley's hero-town, we read, as in honour bound, the opening chapter of "Westward Ho!" crossed the historic bridge and sought out in the church the bra.s.s erected to the n.o.ble memory of Sir Richard Grenville, who drove the little _Revenge_ with such a gallant recklessness into the thick of the Spanish fleet, fought his immortal fight, and died of his wounds "with a joyful and quiet mind." The exceeding charm of this Bristol Channel coast made us intolerant of trains and even of coaches, so that at lovely, idle Ilfracombe we took to our feet again and walked on by a cliff path to Combe Martin. Here we were startled, on going to bed, to find packed away between the thin mattresses a h.o.a.rd of green pears, hard as marbles, and not much bigger, which the small boy of the inn, apparently intent on suicide, had secreted. The towered church, some eight or nine centuries old, was shown to us by a s.e.xton who claimed that the office had descended in his family from father to son for the past three hundred years. However that may be, he was an entertaining guide, reading off his favourite "posy-stones" with a relish, and interpreting the carvings of the curious old rood-screen according to a version of Scripture unlike any that we had known before. Thence our way climbed up for two toilsome miles through a muddy sunken lane, in whose rock walls was a growth of dainty fern. It was good to come out in view of the rival purples of sunny sea and heathery hills, good to be regaled on "cold shoulder" and Devons.h.i.+re junket in a stone-floored kitchen with vast fireplace and ponderous oaken settles, good to start off again across Trentishoe Common, glorious with gorse, and down the richly wooded combe, past a farmyard whose great black pig grunted at us fearsomely, and still down and down, through the fragrance of the pines. We turned off our track to follow the eddying Heddon to the sea, and had, in consequence, a stiff scramble to gain our proper path cut high in the Channel side of the cliff. We walked along that narrow way in a beauty almost too great to bear, but the stress of emotion found some relief in the attention we had to give to our footing, for the cliff fell sheer to the sunset-coloured waters. We spent the night at Wooda Bay, walking on in the morning for a jocund mile or two through fresh-scented larchwoods, then across Lee Abbey Park and through the fantastic Valley of Rocks, along another cliff-walk and down a steep descent to Lynmouth, where Sh.e.l.ley's "myrtle-twined cottage" stands upon the beach. Lynmouth, where the songs of sea and river blend, was more to our taste in its picturesque mingling of the old and the new, of herring-village and watering-place, than its airy twin, Linton, perched on the cliff-top four hundred feet above, but both are little paradises and, having located ourselves in one, the first thing we did was to leave it and visit the other. We lingered for a little in this exquisite corner of creation, till one blithe morning we could put up no longer with the saucy challenge of the Lyn and chased that somersaulting sprite, that perpetual waterfall, five miles inland, so coming out on the heathery waste of Exmoor.

We would gladly have turned gipsies then and there, if so we might have wandered all over and over that beautiful wild upland, and down through the undulating plain of mid-Devon, with its well-watered pastures and rich dairy-farms for whose b.u.t.ter and cheese the Devons.h.i.+re sailors, as Hakluyt's narratives tell, used to long sorely on their far voyages. But the genuine garden of Devon is South Hams, below Dartmoor and between the Teign and the Tamar. This is the apple-country of which the poet sings:

"For me there's nought I would not give For the good Devon land, Whose orchards down the echoing cleeve Bedewed with spray-drift stand, And hardly bear the red fruit up That shall be next year's cider-cup."

Little as Parson Herrick, the indignant inc.u.mbent of Dean Prior, enjoyed his Devons.h.i.+re charge, the cider industry of the region must have appealed to him.

But this broad county, outranked in size only by York and Lincolns.h.i.+re, has in its south, as in its north, a desolate tableland.

Dartmoor has been described as a "monstrous lump of granite, covered with a peaty soil." The rocks are rich in lead and iron, tin and copper, but the soil is too poor even for furze to flourish in it.

Heather, reeds, moss and whortleberries make s.h.i.+ft to grow, and afford a rough pasturage to the scampering wild ponies, the moor-sheep and red cattle. It is a silent land of rugged tors and black mora.s.ses, of sudden mists and glooms, of prehistoric huts, abandoned mines, and, above all, for "Superst.i.tion clings to the granite," of dark stories, weird spells, and strange enchantments. Indeed, it folds a horror in its heart,--Dartmoor Prison, where our American sailors suffered a century ago, and where English convicts are now ringed in by grim walls and armed sentries. It is said that even to-day, when a Dartmoor child gets a burn, the mother's first remedy is to lay her thumb upon the smarting spot and repeat:

"There came two angels out of the west, One brought fire, the other brought frost.

Out, fire! In, frost!

By the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!

Amen, amen, amen."

Among the mysterious groups of so-called Druid stones is a circle known as the Nine Maidens, for these uncouth grey shapes were once slender girls so fond of dancing that they would not cease on Sunday, and for that sin were petrified. And still every Sabbath noon these impenitent stones come to life and dance thrice around in a circle.

FOOTNOTE:

[9] Tennyson's "The Holy Grail," 36-64.

CORNWALL

But the veritable Pixydom lies south of the Tamar. In Cornwall, that stretch of deserted moors furrowed on either side by little river-valleys, that rocky promontory which seems to belong more to the kingdom of the sea than to England, the Celtic imagination has rioted at will. There were giants in the land in bygone days, for the wanderer among those strangely sculptured crags of granite, slate, and serpentine chances at every turn on a Giant's Cradle or a Giant's Chair, Giant's Spoon, Giant's Bowl, Giant's Key, Giant's Hat, Giant's Table, Giant's Well, Giant's Pulpit, Giant's Grave. Cornishmen have heard the music and seen the fairy dances, spied on fairy banquets, and peeped in on fairy funerals. The Small People have been gay and kindly neighbours, sometimes whisking away a neglected baby and returning the little mortal all pink and clean, wrapped in leaves and blossoms, "as sweet as a nut." These are the spirits of Druids, or of other early Cornwall folk, who, as heathen, may not go to heaven, but are too innocent for h.e.l.l. So they are suffered to live on in their old happy haunts, but ever dwindling and dwindling, till it is to be feared that bye and bye, what with all the children growing stupid over schoolbooks, and all the poets writing realistic novels, the Small People will twinkle out of sight. The Spriggans, lurking about the cairns and cromlechs, where they keep guard over buried treasures, could better be spared. They are such thievish and mischievous trolls, with such extraordinary strength in their ugly bits of bodies, it is more likely they are the diminished ghosts of the old giants. The Piskies are nearly as bad, as any bewildered traveller who has been Pisky-led into a bog would testify. The only sure protection against their tricks is to wear your garments inside out. Many a Cornish farmer has found a fine young horse all sweated and spent in the morning, his mane knotted into fairy stirrups showing plainly how some score of the Piskies had been riding him over night. And many a Cornish miner, deep down in the earth, has felt his hair rise on his head as he heard the _tap_, _tap_, _tap_ of the Knockers, souls of long-imprisoned Jews sent here by Roman emperors to work the tin-mines of Cornwall. The Brownies, who used to be so helpful about the house, have grown shy of late and can be depended on for a.s.sistance only when the bees are swarming. Then the housewife beats on a tin pan, calling at the top of her voice: "Brownie! Brownie!" till she sees that he has heard her and is persuading the bees to settle. Offended mermaids have choked up Cornish harbours and buried sea-coast villages under sand.

If you doubt it, go and look at the little church of St. Piran--the miners' saint, who came sailing from Ireland on a millstone and discovered the Cornish tin--the church that for seven centuries was hidden under the sands and then, as the restless winds sifted and searched them, rose again to human sight. Spectral hounds bay across the moors, and a phantom coach is sometimes heard rolling with a hollow rumble along the deep-hedged roads. Ghost s.h.i.+ps with all sail set drive by the sh.o.r.es on gusty nights, and the Death s.h.i.+p, tall, dark, square-rigged, with black sails and a demon crew, has been known to come, in crashes of thunder and flare of lightning, for the soul of a notorious wrecker. Drowned sailors call from under the tide or speed along the strand with dripping clothes and hair. Witches, sorcerers, fortune-tellers, charmers and "cunning men" are among the historic characters of Cornwall. In fact, the Witch of Freddam still rides the seas in her coffin, stirring up storms with her ladle and broom. The luckless sailor who has set eyes on her will not see his home again. Miners, too, have their special dangers. The goblins that they sometimes chance on underground, hunched up into uncouth shapes or tumbling heels over head, are not ill-met, as their presence indicates rich lodes, but it would never do to mark a cross on the wall of a mine gallery, or to pa.s.s a snail on your way to the shaft without dropping for it a morsel of tallow from your candle. The newly dead notify their friends of the event in many a curious fas.h.i.+on, even by shaking the milk in the pans and spoiling the clotted cream. A woman shamed to suicide haunts her betrayer in the form of a white hare. Cornishmen cannot die easy on a feather-bed, nor in a house where any key is turned or bolt is shot, nor would they be carried to the grave by a new road, nor buried on the north side of the church.

If rain fall--as in Cornwall it often does--on a bier, it is a sign that the soul has "arrived safe."

Amid all these supernatural influences, it is rea.s.suring to know that the Devil never enters this county, having a wholesome fear of being made into a pie. His cloven hoofs once ventured across the Tamar, but he was dismayed to find that the Cornish women put everything, fish, flesh, fowl, vegetables, whatnot, into pie. By the time poor Beelzebub had partaken of fishy pie, stargazy pie--made of pilchards,--conger pie--made of eels,--lamy pie--made of kid,--herby pie, parsley pie, and piggy pie, his nerves gave way, and he bolted out of the s.h.i.+re so precipitately that he strewed the hills and the coast with his travelling equipment of Devil's Bellows, Devil's Ovens, and Devil's Frying-pans.

It is mainly in West Cornwall that such fantastic figurings in the rocks are referred to the Devil or the giants. On the eastern moors they are more commonly attributed to King Arthur, whose Beds and Chairs and Cups and Saucers and the Footprints of whose horse are numerous enough to put the skeptic out of countenance. But not only our first encounter, as we entered Cornwall by the east, was with King Arthur, but almost our last, as we left the Duchy by the west,--for this s.h.i.+re is proud to be known as the Royal Duchy, claiming that the eldest son of the Crown is born Duke of Cornwall and only subsequently created Prince of Wales. Within what seemed but a short time after crossing the broad boundary stream, dotted with sleepy craft, we found ourselves at Liskeard, a sleepy old market-town blest with a n.o.ble church on whose outer wall is a sundial with the grave motto: "So soon pa.s.seth it away." It was already late in the afternoon, but a dark, thin, bright-eyed Cornishwoman in the railway carriage had given us most cheering information. Could we drive to Dozmare Pool before sunset? Easily; it was only a round of three or four miles and would take us by the Devil's Cheesewring and The Hurlers and St. Keyne's Well. The waters of this well, she went on to tell us, have the magic property of giving the upper hand to that one of a wedded pair first drinking of them after the ceremony; and she recited with charming vivacity s.n.a.t.c.hes of Southey's ballad, while a burly, red-faced, blue-eyed, beaming tourist from over the Tamar, the only man in the compartment, blurted out a gallantry to the effect that ladies ought to have their way anyhow, wells or no wells, and his silent little wife smiled a knowing little smile.

The people at the inn exchanged glances when we announced our route and although, setting out at five, we confidently ordered dinner at seven, the landlady slipped a packet of sandwiches and two bottles of ginger ale into the carriage. The coachman, thin and dark and vivid of countenance, like all the rest of this new Cornish world about us, kindly but firmly refused to include in the drive St. Keyne's Well, the Cheesewring, a curious pile of granite blocks some thirty feet high, whose topmost stone is so sensitive that it whirls about three times whenever _it hears_ a c.o.c.k crow, and The Hurlers, three prehistoric stone circles reported by legend, in its later Puritan garb, to be groups of young Cornishmen thus enchanted for indulging on a Sunday in the traditional Cornish sport of "hurling." Dozmare Pool was all that our determined Jehu would undertake, although he graciously allowed us, in pa.s.sing, a glimpse of St. Cleer's Well. This is not as famous as the well of St. Neot the Pigmy, who endowed the sacred waters with miraculous virtue by standing in them, day after day, immersed to his neck, while he repeated the entire book of Psalms, or of various others, but it is a spring of old renown, covered over by a steep-pitched roof supported on time-worn pillars and arches. The niches of this little open-air baptistry are now empty and its pinnacles are broken, but beside it still stands an ancient cross. The lofty-towered church of St. Cleer was close by, and we entered to bow our heads for a moment under its vaulted and timbered roof.

Our coachman would allow no further pause. The sunset was already casting a crimson light over the wastes of fern and bracken and the earthscars of abandoned mines, for the hills all about contain tin and copper, which it does not pay to work. Our old white nag--I hope his name was Merlin--seemed incapable of fatigue. I half suspect he was a sorcery steed of metal. Up and down the hills he scrambled with unquenchable enthusiasm. As the sun sank into a bed of bracken, we marvelled that the driver could be sure of his way across those dim and featureless moors, but he turned unerringly from one deep lane into another. As we drew nearer the Pool, that "middle mere" into which Sir Bedivere flung the jewel-hilted Excalibur, the evil powers began to array themselves against us. For the wild spirit Tregeagle, whose howling as he is chased by demon dogs has been heard all over Cornwall, is doomed for his sins in this mortal life to labour endlessly at the hopeless task of emptying Dozmare Pool. It is so deep--notwithstanding the awkward fact of its going dry in rainless summers--that not all the bell-ropes in Cornwall can reach to its bottom, and a thorn-bush, once flung into it, floated out into Falmouth harbour. The bailing must be done by a limpetsh.e.l.l with a hole in it and, altogether, it is no wonder that Tregeagle's temper has grown exceedingly morose. For change of occupation, he is sometimes taken to the north coast and set to spinning ropes of sand, or is given a choked-up harbour to sweep out, but these tasks please him no better, and the shrieks of his torment are borne on every storm.

As we drove on, a light mist crept over the meadows and defined the course of an attendant stream. Clouds and trees took on weird aspects.

There were Druid robes floating across the sky, misshapen figures crouching under the hedges, menacing arms shaken from the trees, and one wizard branch shot out and splashed our faces with unholy dew. The mist thickened and rose. The carriage left the road and b.u.mped uncertainly along till it came to a stop at what we vaguely made out to be the foot of a hill. For by this time the clinging vapours had driven us into our waterproofs and so blurred all vision that the driver, who could not leave his fiery veteran of a horse, would not let us attempt the half-mile climb alone, but sent a shout plunging through that wet, white air and brought out some bogie of the moor embodied as a gaunt old Cornish dame to be our guide. Feeling her way with a stout stick, she led us up the hill and along a stony track where we could not see our steps nor one another's faces. When she stayed us with her staff and said we had reached the pool, we could discern nothing of the sort, but reckless of life and limb we followed her down an abrupt bank and over a hummocky bit of ground to the very brink, as she a.s.sured us, of the bottomless tarn. We tried to think we saw a glimmer, although we heard not even

"the ripple was.h.i.+ng in the reeds, And the wild water lapping on the crag."

Lacking an Excalibur, I cast a stone into the invisible, hoping I might hit Tregeagle, but the hollow splash that came back aroused such uncanny echoes we all three with one accord skurried away and scrabbled back down sandy ruts to the haven of the carriage. As we gratefully munched our sandwiches, we reflected that perhaps the mystical mere was more impressive so than if we had actually beheld that little fresh-water pond, about a mile in circ.u.mference and some eight or ten feet deep, lying on its mid-Cornwall tableland with the crest of Brown Gilly rising up behind. Our eyes had told us nothing that we could urge against Malory's geography, with its sea-route from Dozmare to Glas...o...b..ry.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHURCH OF ST. COLUMB MINOR]

"Then Sir Bedivere took the King upon his back, and so went with him to that water side, and when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank hoved a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur. 'Now put me into the barge,' said the King; and so he did softly. And there received him three queens with great mourning, and so they sat them down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head, and then that queen said, 'Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me? Alas; this wound on your head hath caught overmuch cold.' And so then they rowed from the land, and Sir Bedivere cried, 'Ah, my lord Arthur, what shall become of me, now ye go from me and leave me here alone among mine enemies?'

'Comfort thyself,' said the King, 'and do as well as thou mayst, for in me is no trust for to trust in. For I will into the vale of Avalon to heal me of my grievous wound.'"

But the Cornish mist in which Arthur fought his last "dim, weird battle of the west" was to us no longer a fable.

"A death-white mist slept over sand and sea; Whereof the chill, to him who breathed it, drew Down with his blood, till all his heart was cold With formless fear; and ev'n on Arthur fell Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought.

For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew; And some had visions out of golden youth, And some beheld the faces of old ghosts Look in upon the battle."

Now that we had braved Tregeagle and done the deed, that heavy mist thinned away as suddenly as it had gathered, and when, at ten o'clock, we reached our inn, the sky was bright with stars, and a great moon was slowly drifting up from the horizon.

But the paramount Table Round locality in Cornwall is Tintagel on the western coast where Arthur's Castle stands and where, moreover, the hushed tide brought him first from the mystery of "the great deep."

"For there was no man knew from whence he came; But after tempest, when the long wave broke All down the thundering sh.o.r.es of Bude and Boss, There came a day as still as heaven, and then They found a naked child upon the sands Of wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea; And that was Arthur."

The high, bleak, rugged and desolate tract of Bodwin Moor, at whose heart is Dozmare Pool, lies between the four towns of Liskeard, Bodwin, Launceston and Camelford. This last was our starting-point for Tintagel. We had reached Camelford by a day's journey from Penzance, setting out by train through a country seamed all over with abandoned surface diggings of the tin mines, pierced by shafts and defaced by heaps of mineral refuse to which heather was already bringing the first healing of nature. We had our nooning at Newquay and would have been glad to linger on its broad beach, looking up at the twin barrows where sleep, according to tradition, two kings of long ago,--kings who fought on that open headland a whole day through and fell together at sunset, each slain by the last thrust of the other. But we pressed on by carriage, hardly glancing at the long, low, stately towered church of St. Columb Minor, and cutting short our survey of the curious old panels, so richly carved with sacred emblems--pelicans, crosses, the instruments of the Pa.s.sion, the pierced hand, a heart within a crown of thorns, the lamb, the wafer and the cup--in the brother church of St. Columb Major. From the depths of our Cornish road shut in by banks and hedges some ten or twelve feet high, we eyed the ripe blackberries hanging well above our reach; we saw a blazing rick on one side and, on the other, a maze of white b.u.t.terflies circling among the fuchsia trees; we met a group of rustic mourners pus.h.i.+ng a bier set on wheels; and just as the hedges began to open here and there, giving us vistas of wheatfield, moor, and sea, we found ourselves at Wadebridge, a little town with a street of ivy-greened houses dignified by a grey church-tower. We crossed a stone bridge of many arches that seemed too big for its river, and took train for Camelford. On our right we had the granite ma.s.ses of Brown w.i.l.l.y and Rough Tor and presently, on our left, the great gashes of the Delalobe slate quarries.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARTHUR'S CASTLE, TINTAGEL]

These held the close attention of a Cornish miner who, after forty years of fortune-seeking in Australia, was coming home to Camelford for a visit. He drove up with us in the rattling wagonette, gazing on ragged hedge and p.r.i.c.kly furze as a thirsty soul might gaze on Paradise. The fulness of his heart overflowed in little laughters, though the tears were glistening on his lashes, and in broken words of memory and joy. He kept pointing out to us, mere strangers that we were, not noting and not caring what we were, the stiles and streams and rocks a.s.sociated with special events of his boyhood and youth.

As we went clattering down into the little stone huddle of houses, we had to turn away from the rapture in his eyes. Brothers and sisters were waiting to greet him, with tall children of theirs that had been to him but names, yet the human welcome could hardly penetrate through his dream, through his ecstatic communion with the scene itself. As we were driving out of Camelford early the next morning, we caught sight of our grizzled Cornishman once again, standing in one of those humble doorways with the s.h.i.+ning still upon his face.

A man like that would make anybody homesick and, to speak impartially, we thought that Camelford was far less worthy of such emotion than two villages we severally remembered over sea. We fell out of humour with the poor old town, would not hear of it as the Arthurian Camelot,

"a city of shadowy palaces And stately,"

and disdained the tradition that the blameless king fell at Slaughter Bridge. My athletic comrade, however, to the admiration of a flock of little schoolgirls, swung herself down the riverbank to see his tombstone and reported it as reading:

_Caten hic jacit filius Marconi._

The drive to Tintagel was through a world of slate,--slate everywhere.

There were slate walls, slate houses, heaps of slate-refuse, banks of broken slate feathered with gorse and heather, yawning mouths of disused slate quarries. We pa.s.sed through defiles where slate was piled cliff-high on either side. Slate steps led up to the footpaths that ran along the top of the hedge-banks. By way of this forsaken region we came to a sleeping town. Tintagel Church lay before us, h.o.a.ry, silent. Not a soul was in the streets,--not the fierce ghosts of Gorlois and of Uther Pendragon, nor the sad ghost of Igraine, nor the loving ghosts of Tristram and Iseult. We left the carriage and climbed by slippery paths to Arthur's Castle, which is no castle, but a colossal confusion of tumbled rocks, some heaped and mortared once by human hands, some grouped in the fantastic architecture of nature.

There we sat astonished and dismayed, for the place is like a robber hold, a den of pirates fortified against the land, rather than a court of chivalry. But the scene was superbly beautiful. The ocean on which we looked was a dazzling blue, and far to north and south stood out the stern, dark outlines of the coast. The suns.h.i.+ne that filled the surf with s.h.i.+mmering tints gleamed on the white plumage of a gull enthroned on the summit rock of the castle,--most likely the spirit of Guinevere, for Arthur, when he revisits Tintagel, comes as the Cornish chough,

"Talons and beak all red with blood,"--

a bird which no true Cornishman will shoot.

The monstrous crags and huge fragments of old wall were cleft in a fas.h.i.+on strongly suggestive of

"cas.e.m.e.nts opening on the foam Of perilous seas in fairylands forlorn,"

and we shuddered to imagine with what stupendous force the terrible tides of winter must beat against that naked coast.

We realised what the fury of the sea-winds here must be as we strolled through the churchyard, whose slate slabs are b.u.t.tressed with masonry and, even so, tip and lean over those graves too old for grief. All is ancient about Tintagel church, and most of all the Norman font whose sculptured faces are worn dim and sleepy with innumerable years, each year bringing its quota of babies for the blessing of the holy water.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BOSCASTLE]