Marie Corelli and Combe Martin, a seven mile walk via Berrynarbor and Ilfracombe

When Marie Corelli, the best-selling Victorian novelist, visited Combe Martin for the first time, she should have gone by sea. Marie delighted in boats, keeping a genuine Venetian gondola, “The Dream”, on the Avon near her Stratford home, and a genuine Venetian gondolier to paddle her about. Marie, in one of her signature white floaty dresses, would have made a fine sight sailing into the little cove, hopefully surrounded by a flotilla of admiring fisher folk. Sadly, it is more likely that she and her “companion”, Bertha Vyvers, drove along the coast road from Ilfracombe, where they were staying in 1895.

Let us hope for the sake of this most romantic, and often ecstatic, of writers, the road was not as it is now, but more of that later. Marie and Bertha wanted to visit the church, but they found more than that in Combe Martin, and there are reports that they stayed at a house called “Waverly” in the village, and that Marie wrote some of her novel, “The Mighty Atom”, in a room at that most eccentric of pubs, “The Pack of Cards”.

“The Mighty Atom”, published in 1896, was a smash hit, selling thousands of copies, as might be expected from a writer who sold as many books as all the other popular novelists like Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard put together. “The Mighty Atom” is a truly dreadful book, combining the usual Corelli stylised description of nature in extremis with an attack on rationalist education and with a plot of repellent mawkishness. The Victorian attitude in fiction to the death of children has always made me queasy, ever since reading “The Water Babies” as a small boy, but “The Mighty Atom” is something special. Lionel Valliscourt is an eleven year old boy, living in Combe Martin, who is being privately educated according to a rationalist scheme of his atheist father. The “mighty atom” of the title is the originator of the universe.

After a three hundred word overture of storm description which regular Corelli readers know all too well - “A heavy storm had raged all day on the north coast of Devon. Summer had worn the garb of winter in freakish fit of mockery and masquerade…” - the book begins with the sacking of Lionel’s present tutor, a young man far too fond of taking Lionel, for the liking of his domineering father, rowing in the bay and on to cottage cream teas.

Wandering around the churchyard, Lionel is smitten by a little girl, Jessamine, who is the daughter of the sexton, Reuben Dale, but the poor lad is soon hauled off by his new tutor for a holiday at Clovelly. When he returns, Lionel seeks out Jessamine, only to find her father burying her after she has died of diphtheria. Here is Marie in overdrive, spraying exclamation marks and dashes with her customary gay abandon, as Lionel pours out his heart to Reuben Dale.“ No – no! – not dead! Don’t say it! – not little Jessamine! Oh, you’re not – you’re not going to put her down there in the cold earth! – not little Jessamine! Oh, hold me! – I’m frightened – I am indeed! I can’t bear it, - I can’t, I can’t – oh, Jessamine!...she isn’t dead, - not really – oh, do say she isn’t,  - it would be too wicked! – too cruel!...”

Too everything! In his distress Lionel decides that there is only one way for him to confirm the heresy of the “mighty atom”. He writes a farewell note to his tutor. “I think that it would be better for boys like me if you could teach them that the First Cause was God, and that he loved everybody, and meant to explain the universe to us some day…”

Later that evening he hangs himself. “Lionel’s grave was closed in, and a full-flowering stem of the white lilies of St John lay upon it, like an angel’s sceptre. Another similar stem adorned the grave of Jessamine; and between the two little mounds of earth, beneath which two little innocent hearts were at rest forever, a robin-redbreast sang its plaintive evening carol, while the sun flamed down into the west and night fell.”

The success of the novel brought hordes of Corelli fans to Combe Martin and made a celebrity out of James Norman, the sexton and model for Reuben James. Very sensibly, James had postcards printed of himself and sold them from the churchyard. He lived but two years to profit from his fame, and his death encouraged the “Daily Mail” to publish a totally false story that Marie would provide a memorial for the poor chap but only if it bore the name of the fictional “Reuben Dale”.

Well, nothing much has changed there then, but I doubt if Combe Martin remains as Marie knew it. Approaching the village from inland, there is a long straggle of unattractive cottages, reminders that Combe Martin was once a mining community. Eventually the little harbour is reached, which is charming as long as you keep your back turned to the gift shops and caffs which despoil any seaside resort. The caffs were packed with ladies with tight grey curls, some escorted by swains in sad anoraks, and two huge charabancs were drawn up on the quayside. They probably had travelled from Ilfracombe in Marie’s and Bertha’s footsteps but I doubt with the same sense of intense romantic discovery. After a cursory look at the view, a cup of coffee, a slice of cake, and a charity shop or two would probably satisfy their needs.

Our plan was to walk in a circle to the outskirts of Ilfracombe and back, via the village of Berrynarbor, using as much of the South West Coastal Path as possible. It was a stiff pull out of Combe Martin as we walked up the A399 but at the top we turned left into the quiet lane which led along to Berrynarbor. Berrynarbor is a charming village, sheltered by its surrounding steep hills, and we quickly spotted a pleasing weather “cock” atop the church in the shape of a fox. We walked down through the churchyard of St Peter’s with its handsome tower, and turned right, which took us past the “Globe Inn”.

 

You need to have your wits about you to turn left and right to take the Goosewell Lane out of the village, otherwise you would be in danger of finding yourself back on the main road within yards of where you left it. This hill will make you puff but perhaps not quite as much as the horse of the cheery and amply-proportioned lady who passed us, exercising her nag by cantering it up the tarmac road. He must have had lungs like the Albert Hall organ pipes and joints of cast iron.

We left the village behind us and passed under a redundant bridge whose purpose was buried by time many years ago. The hedges hung thick with blackberries as big as grapes and, suddenly, there was a clink behind one of them. It was Ilfracombe Golf Course, and soon the town and the sea appeared below us. Approaching the main road, we took a footpath to our right which led us past Hele Mill. The water wheel still survives, but at this time of year the mill and its tearoom are open only at weekends. At the foot of the path lay the main road and beyond it the beach.

And here began our struggle. At this point the coastal path is the pavement of the A399 but, as we turned east, a couple walking in the opposite direction warned us that much of the path which passes round the coast was closed for repairs. So it proved and, in fact, virtually the whole coastal path back to Combe Martin was barred to walkers. The signs cheerily advised us that we could catch the bus if we liked. We did not like, and I should have followed my lifetime instinct to ignore all signs of prohibition and to plough on until one fell into an abyss.

Experience teaches that, in this part of the world, any sign threatening closure of a path or a road should be ignored, firstly as a gesture against officialdom and, secondly, because usually the sign tells a barefaced lie. We spent a frustrating hour or more, dicing with the traffic, while being miserably aware that no repairs were being made on that sunny morning. Two hundred yards from Combe Martin, at last back on the footpath, we saw a bus passing along the road.

Even if the path had been open, it would not have followed the coast all the way, and we would have spent much time on the busy A399. We passed numbers of caravan parks and Watermouth Castle, a Victorian folly and “theme park” which challenges one to “visit the gnomes.” The only gnomes visible were busy constructing a pavement on the main road opposite the castle, the only sign of coastal path construction work between Ilfracombe and Combe Martin. Watermouth Cove, framed by its distinctive hillocks, was crowded with boats stranded by low tide.

We came back into Combe Martin along the path which led to the beach.

“Turning away from the principal street of the village they bent their steps towards a small thatched cottage, overgrown from porch to roof with climbing roses, fuchsias and jessamine, where an unobtrusive signboard might be just discerned framed in a wreath of brilliant nasturtiums, and bearing the following device, CLARINDA CLEVERLY PAYNE. NEW LAID EGGS. DEVONSHIRE CREAM. JUNKETS. TEAS PROVIDED.”

("The Mighty Atom")

 

Miss Payne’s establishment, however, which entertained Lionel and his tutor, Mr. Montrose, in Chapter I of “The Mighty Atom”, was no where to be seen.A few steps above the centre of the village, we found “Devon Fayre”, a small tea shop which looked much more pleasant than the bigger caffs, now deserted after the earlier invasion of the silver hordes. We had a warm welcome, and were served a topping cream tea with scones as light and fluffy as a Marie muslin, proper clotted cream and good jam, and lashings of strong brown tea, all for £4.25 each, the most modest price we had found all summer. The people at the adjacent table had some excellent fish and chips in front of them.

After our tea, we drove back through the village to the church, which has its own car park; although a sign rather uncharitably threatened us with clamping if we were not on church business. Fortunately no clerical gentleman appeared with the dreaded metal shoe under his cassock and we visited the church unmolested.

 

We searched for the grave of James Norman without success, but we may have been misled by the graveyard index and map we discovered in the church. Subsequent reading suggests that we were on the wrong side of the church.

There were compensations within, however, in the form of a splendid rood screen with panels painted in Tudor times with portraits of the apostles.

Our visit to Marie Corelli’s Combe Martin had not been a great success, thanks to the prohibitions of Devon County Council. A better walk would have been eastwards towards Great Hangman, but we had done this before for our “Exmoor Pubs & Walks” site.

You may find it at http://exmoorpubswalks.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=combe+martin along with more about the “Pack of Cards”.

For more about Marie Corelli and a walk at Porlock Weir see the post of October 12^th 2013 on this site.

Porlock Weir & Marie Corelli; a seven mile walk by Pittcombe Head and Hawkcombe

Marie Corelli must stand in the first rank of popular novelists who have no redeeming virtues whatsoever. George Orwell used to declare a grudging respect for what he called “good bad writing”, but Marie Corelli is a bad, bad writer, pure and simple. In her heyday, from 1886 until the First World War, she was implausibly popular. Her books outsold all her contemporaries and she was a favourite of Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill amongst many other admirers.

She was born Mary Mackay, the illegitimate daughter of the Scottish journalist, Charles Mackay, with a maidservant, Elizabeth Mills, whom he eventually married after the death of his first wife. Mary was educated abroad and first attempted to make her way as a pianist, adopting the professional name of “Marie Corelli”. She continued to use the name when she published her first novel in 1886, “A Romance of Two Worlds.”

Marie visited Exmoor at least twice, staying at Combe Martin, which is the setting for her first Exmoor novel, “The Mighty Atom”. The second, “The Treasure of Heaven”, is set in Porlock Weir and is marginally less absurd than the first.

“The Treasure of Heaven” tells the story of David Helmsley, who is said to be “one of the richest men in the world.” Disillusioned by humanity in general, and by an avaricious young lady in particular, the elderly David sets off to tramp the roads of the West Country. After buying some suitably shabby clothes in Bristol, and with a copy of Keats’s poems in his pocket, he wanders as far as the Quantocks. Between Watchet and Minehead, he witnesses a little gypsy boy being run over by a motor car. The boy’s father revenges himself by murdering the aristocratic driver of the vehicle, and Helmsley, in an ecstatic delirium of distress, only too familiar to all Corelli readers, rushes off into the countryside. Here, in the hills and woods above Porlock Weir he collapses, but he is rescued by a kindly cottager, Mary Deane. Eventually, Helmsley dies, after discovering in his simple life at “Weircombe” the treasure of heaven of the title, and leaves his worldly wealth to Mary.

A cottage for Mary Deane?

What dreadful tosh it is! Corelli’s books would not be so awful if it was not for her force-ten style of melodramatic writing which is as breathless as it is tedious. She is the mistress of hyperbolic repetition which can absorb pages and pages of the most anorexic content. Storms are a vital tool in her stock-in trade. Here is David Helmsley on the verge of collapse on the hills above Porlock Weir as he and the Exmoor elements receive the Corelli treatment.

“…he had somehow found his way to the summit of a rocky wooded height, from which he could survey the whole troubled expanse of wild sky and wilder sea, - while just below him the hills were split asunder into a huge cleft, or “coombe”, running straight down to the lip of the ocean, with rampant foliage hanging about it on either side in lavish garlands of green, and big boulders piled up about it, from whose smooth surfaces the rain swept off in sleety sheets, leaving them shining like polished silver. What a wild Paradise was here disclosed! – what a matchless picture, called into shape and colour with all the forceful ease and perfection of Nature’s handiwork! No glimpse of human habitation was anywhere visible; man seemed to have found no dwelling here; there was nothing – nothing, but Earth the Beautiful, and her Lover the Sea! Over these twain the lightnings leaped, and the thunder played in the sanctuary of heaven…”

Eventually you feel like putting your hands over your ears, (or perhaps over your eyes,) and shouting out “Stop, Marie! For God’s sake stop!” But she doesn’t. She just keeps crashing on amongst the thunder, the lightning the rain, and so on, only pausing to strike a ludicrous attitude, “What a wild Paradise was here disclosed.” Notice the unnatural placing of “here” which emphasises the pseudo-Biblical exclamation. Marie loves archaic posturing: “Split asunder” and “Over these twain…” are typical. The exclamation mark and the ubiquitous dash are her favourite punctuation, allowing her sentences to rush downhill until you fear that they will never stop.

Eventually poor David collapses under the weight of Marie’s rhetoric. “He involuntarily threw up his arms as a drowning man might do among great waves overwhelming him, - and so went down – down! – into silence and unconsciousness.” Well, the reader knows how he feels, but fortunately the saintly Mary Deane is on hand to scrape us up and carry David, and his cute dog, Charlie, off to paradise on earth in her cottage at Weircombe.

The harbour at Porlock Weir is little changed since Marie Corelli’s day. It’s a lovely spot with its huddle of picture postcard cottages fronted by the harbour and ringed by wooded hills. If you visit it, contrive to arrive when the tide is in. Anywhere on the Bristol Channel coast looks very different when the tide is out. Trust the opinion of someone who spent five years incarcerated in a preparatory school at Burnham-on-Sea and who knows the “Severn Sea” in all her moods.

Bossington Hill from Porlock Weir

We set out from the car park opposite the Ship Inn to walk through the country which had inspired Corelli’s great melodrama. We walked up the lane past the “Café”, a less than imaginative renaming of the eatery which used to be the posh nosh “Andrews on the Weir”, and turned right at the top. After a short walk along the road we took the path to the left signed “Yearnor Bridge”. The narrow path climbs steeply, and is not for the halt and the lame, as by the time you reach Pittcombe Head at the top, you will have climbed the best part of fourteen hundred feet, having started literally from sea level. The first section is the steepest, and eventually levels out when you turn right on to a broad track past hollies, oaks, and sweet chestnuts through which the sea is always with you.

We emerged on to the Worthy Toll Road above Yearnor Mill, and turned left, continuing up the road until we followed the sign to Pitt Farm. The work on restoring the old farmhouse is almost finished, and we followed the path round the back of the property before climbing very steeply again through a conifer plantation where we discovered some amazing toadstools.

With a strong northerly wind blowing, the air was crystal clear, and we could look into Wales on the other side of the channel and see three successive ridges of mountains. Sadly, we could see also three massive wind farms spinning futilely away, generating exorbitantly expensive electricity to ease the social conscience of Notting Hill Man. Our rather basic camera was unable to reproduce all of this magical view, but I promise you that it is there if you are high enough and the wind is in the right quarter.

Hawkcombe

There is no cairn or flag when you finally emerge on to the main A39 road at Pittcombe Head, only a traditional AA ‘phone box to mark the summit which is beginning to look as if it has known better days, days when the AA repaired your car rather than tried to flog you investments and life insurance. We crossed the road and walked along the track over the common until, just before it met the Porlock-Exford road, we saw on the other side of the road the post which marks the head of Hawkcombe.

Looking up Hawkcombe

We once began a walk here which is described on our “Exmoor Pubs & Walks” site. It saves paying for parking in Porlock Weir, but beware of making the climb to Pittcombe Head and the car after drinking two pints each of Otter Bitter in the Ship Inn as we did. Still, from the post it was downhill all the way, or most of it, and Hawkcombe is a lovely place. There are often wild ponies grazing here, and the path begins as just a defile between the hills before it dives into the woods and follows a stream running towards the sea.

Where you have to ford the stream, a track is signposted to Shillett Combe. We took this track but shortly afterwards turned right uphill while the more obvious route runs back up a combe parallel to the way we had come already. Our track climbed up out of the woods towards the A39 main road, and eventually we were rewarded with a marvellous view over towards Selworthy with its signature white church.

 

When we reached the road, we turned left and walked up it a short way before, just after a cattle grid, we could turn away right over the moorland below Whitstone Post where, in addition to the traditional ice cream van, the lorries and trailers of the Minehead Harriers were parked. The hunt remained invisible to us all day, practising whatever secret rites hunts observe in this post-hunting ban era.

By sticking quite closely to the right-hand margin of the heathland, we kept on the correct path which took us back down towards West Porlock. Eventually we fell into the road just outside Porlock Weir which we regained past thatched cottages, any of which might have belonged to Mary Dean in “The Treasure of Heaven”. One had a remarkable door.

We were spoilt for choice as far as our tea was concerned. “The Café” promised all-day fish and chips but not a cream tea as far as we could see, and Millers at the Anchor looked a bit posh, and so we plumped for the “Captain’s Table”. The Captain, however, had sailed next door to the Ship Inn, and it was there we went to place our order.

It would take a deliberate act of culinary vandalism to ruin a cream tea but the “Ship’s” , perhaps, is not quite la crème de la cream teas. The cream itself came in a little plastic tub off which they had peeled the top, and, as a Somerset nationalist, I found its origin in Cornwall an ethnic insult. The jam was a tiny jar of Wilkin’s strawberry, rather a meagre ration for the two excellent scones. The large pot of tea, however, was absolutely first-class, probably brewed from one of the blends of D.J. Miles, the famous Porlock tea merchant. Even if it was only PG Tips, it was marvellous. There was probably a lesson here. You shouldn’t expect to buy a nice loaf of bread in a greengrocer’s, and you shouldn’t expect a five-star cream tea in a pub.