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.