Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/130

 122 Would you linger awhile on the terraced walk of Tiverton Castle, or visit the fair ruins of Berry Pomeroy? I should much like to take you from where Dart winds beneath walls of waving trees to where its salmon peel leap joyously in that sheltered harbour at its mouth, which erst witnessed a fleet of crusaders set sail for the Holy Land. From here we might, perchance with classic Rowe or poetic Carrington, spend a happy hour on Dartmoor, and discourse of the geology of the granitic Yes Tor, the highest mountain peak in the county. This, however, will suit autumn better: the summer sun requires tempering with northern breezes and the white waves of the channel.

We cannot then do better than take the North Devon Railway. It will lead us through shady valleys, near white-washed farms with patches of yellow corn interspersed, over many a glittering trout-stream to the winding Taw, where net and rod are busily employed catching salmon. How beautiful is Crediton, in the heart of woodlands and breezy pastures, queen of the cider orchards of Devon! We cannot help recurring to long past ages at its sight, to days when St. Boniface left it to Christianise Germany, and when it was the seat of a bishopric before Cornwall and Devon were united in one see. Its antiquity lingers still in the popular rhyme:

When Exeter was a furzy down

Kerton was a market town.

Lovely though the grounds of Eggesford be at any season, they seem tenfold more lovely now that a summer sun is upon them. Excellent specimens are they of the true English park-scenery, with walks winding by the streamlet’s brink,

The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,

Or dairy—each rural sight—each rural sound,

and clumps of trees in deep light and shadow, and groups of wild flowers and ferns in profusion. But the train hurries us remorselessly along; we have only time to notice one of the finest trees in Devon, standing out proudly from its compeers in a glade near Umberleigh Station. A lime tree sends out two leaders from one root, which run straight up and intertwine their branches in magnificent clusters of deep green leaves. Its majestic symmetry is unrivalled; showing how greatly the soft Devon air helped its development. But we have now only indistinct visions of wooded hills and well-cultivated vales between, where heather and bracken invade civilisation at every corner, till dashing over the Taw, one of the great tidal rivers of North Devon, we find ourselves at Barnstaple.

Let us take our place on the top of the coach, one of the many relics of byegone days that meet us everywhere in this country. We skirt the estuary of the river to Braunton Burrows, as the region of sandhills round its mouth is called. Here summer brings to light many an interesting plant, though in other seasons the place is “wisht” enough (to use the expressive dialect of the natives). Ridges of sand, separating pools of salt water, run along the strand; the angry sea in the offing is generally chafing at the intrusion of the mingled waters of the Taw and Torridge, while a light-house stands out grey and ghastly on the mud-flats, like the grave-stone of the numberless vessels which have perished on this dangerous coast. I Now, however, it affords a lovely panorama from the sailor’s colony of Appledore on the other side, or from the hills where we are, beyond the Burrows.

Up these we mount one above another till we top the backbone of the country, and turning, see the Dartmoor peaks glimmering faintly in the distance, and many a snatch of fair plain and hill around us. Heather (just coming into bloom), Shakspeare’s “long purples,” and tall fox-glove spires writhe beneath jungles of white-flowered bramble at our side, while on the stone walls of the country, flourish masses of stone-crop and orpine, white, pink, yellow, and purple; and where the grey slate rocks pierce the soil, wild thyme and marsh bed-straw creep luxuriantly through the tender grass, closed in by picturesque clumps of bracken and golden furze. It is a very unsatisfactory country for a farmer, this; but how grateful to an eye that loves Nature in all her wildness! This kind of scenery follows us for miles, as we climb under walls of shale with hedges and rocks high over our heads, or dip into secluded valleys beneath, till at length the glitter of the sea and the calm grandeur of her surrounding Tors, tells us we are at Ilfracombe.

This is especially the place at which to enjoy August in summer. It is too hot, and I am too lazy to tell of its ancient glories; perhaps if I hint at the great names of Champernowne, Sir Philip Sidney, and the Audleys, who once possessed the manor, you may with them weave at leisure fairy romances of mediæval pageantry and heroism. Let us take our seat a while upon the Capstone, a conical cliff, 181 feet above the sea. Here there are walks made one over the other for the amusement of visitors, and an extensive view of land and sea. Far over the channel you see dimly a chain of blue mountains, and the faint column of smoke rising over them, tells where the Swansea furnaces are at work smelting copper. The outline of the Mumbles, too, is just visible. To the right the view is bounded by Hillsborough, an eminence 447 feet high, like a crouching lion watching over Ilfracombe. The pipit flits from rock to rock, alarmed at our intrusion; and further up the cliffs the shrike is on the watch from the top of a post. He would add a few more victims to the collection of beetles and small birds spitted on the thorns around his nest, to be eaten cold during this hot weather; for he is no vulgar savage to pounce upon his prey and devour it on the spot, like his kinsman, the kestrel-hawk, whom you may see hovering over yonder furze bushes. I need not describe the visitors promenading underneath us, the scientific searching for anemones near low-water mark, while the idle ones watch them from above, maliciously hoping that a chance wave may break over them—visitors are always the same at a sea-side place. Perhaps more hats and novels distinguish them here from others, for the sun is stronger and the climate softer than elsewhere. One local guide-book proves to its own satisfaction, I see, that Ilfracombe is as cool in