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.

A Hunt for Tarka the Otter – an eight mile walk from Hillsford Bridge

Henry Williamson is one of those writers who are a delight to read but, as with Ernest Hemingway, if he came into a pub, you might be knocked down in the general rush for the door. Eccentric, solitary, with a strong preference for animals and for the countryside to human beings, a fellow-traveller of a fascist persuasion, Williamson remains a one-hit-wonder of English literature, known exclusively for his classic animal story, “Tarka the Otter”. “Tarka the Otter” was published in 1927, and recounts the life story of an otter and his battle with the hound, Deadlock. It is set mainly in the land between the rivers of the Taw and the Torridge near Barnstaple, but at one point Tarka ventures on to Exmoor, country which Williamson knew well from childhood. Williamson, who in the years before writing the book, had kept an otter as a pet, was so determined to see life from an otter’s perspective that he would crawl on his hands and knees across country to ensure correctness of detail. The book was obsessively crafted and rewritten some seventeen times, but it possesses the stark and evocative power which distinguishes his best writing.
 

Our walk followed the path of Tarka as he journeyed from the Hoar Oak Water to Watersmeet, and then across country to the West Lyn River where he fights his first battle with the fearsome Deadlock. The direction which Tarka, and no doubt Williamson himself, took is easy to follow as Williamson obligingly heads each page with a place name. Tarka comes down the Hoar Oak Water, passing under Hillsford Bridge, until he reaches Watersmeet, where the Hoar Oak Water joins the East Lyn River coming down from Brendon and the “Doone Valley”.

We parked the car in the National Trust car park at Hillsford Bridge, where the honesty box requires a pound donation, and instead of following slavishly the otter’s path, walked a little way up the main road towards Barbrook, and then struck into the path signposted to Lynmouth.

Tarka at Watersmeet at first swims up the East Lyn River but he encounters an otter bitch, dead in a gin trap. “Tarka heard the clink of the chain as the swollen body rolled; and his bubbles blown of fear rose behind him.” He returns to Watersmeet and then sets off westward across country. Our path took us round the foot of the Myrtleberry Iron Age settlement, giving us magnificent views back over the wooded slopes which led down to Watersmeet.

Above Watersmeet

Soon afterwards the path divided, and we took the left hand fork signposted to East Lyn which led us along a grassy lane between banks of wild spring flowers and through the farms of Higher and Lower East Lyn. The way continued through fields, with Lynmouth and the sea far below us.

Looking towards Lynmouth

Eventually we came into a metalled lane at West Lyn, where we first turned right and then left, past a farm which specialises in alpacas, and thus to the main A39 road with the Beggars Roost pub away on our right. We walked straight up the road until we reached a sharp left-hand bend and here went straight on along the footpath signposted to Stockwater. Tarka crosses “stubble with lines of sheaves, stacked in sixes and tied in fours, fields of mangel and sweet turnip, where partridge crouched, and pasture given over to sheep,” but we saw only the ubiquitous sheep. We circled Stockwater Farm, and came out into the lane leading down to Barbrook and with the beginnings of Ikerton Water which flowed towards the West Lyn River. Here “Hazels grew on the bank above. Their leaves took on the golden-green of spring in the beams of the low autumn sun as Tarka crept under the rock”

Ikerton Water

 

“He was awakened by the tremendous baying of hounds”. What follows is a magnificent description of the hunt as the otter hounds pursue Tarka down the West Lyn River. Ikerton Water meets the West Lyn River just above the bridge at Barbrook where the main A39 road meets the minor road running down the Lyn Gorge.

 

Ikerton Water meets the West Lyn River

Here Tarka leaves the water and runs the road, hoping to destroy his scent, and even under a charabanc. Oddly enough trippers in the 1920’s seemed to be more untidy than the modern variety. “He ran in the shade of the ditch, among bits of newspaper, banana and orange skins, cigarette ends, and crushed chocolate boxes.” Barbrook seems a great deal tidier these days with its muddle of stone cottages.

 

 

At one point the hounds are at fault and follow a scent which leads to a duck “that beat its wings and quacked in terror before them.”  On our morning the ducks slept on undisturbed. Otter hunting ceased in England in the 1970’s, as otter numbers declined because of river pollution and well before the species became protected.

 



 

We followed the West Lyn River downstream as Tarka did. “The water was friendly to the otter” and, as he swims and turns from pool to pool, the pack of hounds flounder in his wake. Tarka’s hunt was in autumn but on this late spring morning the bluebells were still out in profusion.

 

West Lyn River

 

At Lyn Bridge Tarka continued towards the sea, but we crossed the road by a pub which promised a” belly-busting burrito”, a culinary treat which I found easy to resist, and walked along a lane which is signposted as a no-through road but which took us pedestrians above Victorian villas, built into the sheer rock of the gorge with wonderful views out over the sea, and into the town of Lynton.

 

Lynmouth

Here we found the famous Cliff Railway, which Phillip Maddison, the hero of Henry Williamson’s autobiographical novel sequence “A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight”, takes when he arrives for a holiday just before the outbreak of the First World War. “He saw steel lines with grease on them going down fearfully steep to a tiny roadway below. He saw the tiny white fringe of sea breaking on grey boulders. The sea was nearly black, like a stain, beyond a dwarf quay. He felt giddy and put down his bag…”

 

 

 

To date I have tackled only the wartime volumes, (there are fifteen in all,) but the “Chronicle” seems to me a great but sadly neglected documentary of English twentieth century life. Williamson brings his typically obsessive eye for detail to the life of his hero, and it allows the reader to appreciate just what it was like to serve in that terrible conflict. Robert Graves’s and Siegfried Sassoon’s accounts seem mere rough sketches by comparison.

At sea-level we wandered on to the shingle of the beach. The Lyn Rivers, now one, flowed along their channel to the sea. It is the story of much of my life that the tide in the Severn Sea is always out. Tarka, before breaking out into the open sea, has the last word this time in his struggle with Deadlock. “Deadlock tried to twist round and crush the otter’s skull in his jaws, but he struggled vainly. Bubbles blew out of his mouth. Soon he was choking.” Deadlock is hauled from the channel and has the water pumped out of his lungs while the triumphant Tarka makes for the open sea.

The way to the sea

 

Rhenish Tower

We passed the “Rhenish Tower”, in which a General Rawdon stored seawater for salt baths in his villa, and walked upstream to where the two Lyn Rivers meet.

East & West Lyn Rivers

 

 

At the next bridge we took the eastern bank of the East Lyn River, and started our walk back towards Watersmeet. Watersmeet is a deservedly popular beauty spot, easily accessible from the main road, and with a busy National Trust tearoom. Prejudice on our part against the National Trust, which prohibits stag hunting on Exmoor, even though their holding was given to it on the assurance that it should continue, prohibits us from using the tearoom. We continued, as Tarka did, up the magnificent stretch of Hoar Oak Water with its run of boiling falls, until we reached Hillsford Bridge and the car.

Hoar Oak Water

 

We had our eyes on a better treat than a National Trust slice of carrot cake. We were heading for the nearby Brendon House tea gardens for, according to the Country File programme, the best cream tea in England. Well, it might have been, but it evidently wasn’t the most profitable as we found the gardens closed and for sale. We withdrew to Simonsbath and to Boevey’s tearooms where we enjoyed an excellent tea. It was more expensive than Cloud Farm’s, £5.50 each rather than £4.50. I preferred the Boevey scones, which were heavier and “breadier “than the Cloud Farm ones, but my wife argued the opposite case for Cloud’s more ethereal offerings. A Boevey’s tea certainly filled one up after an energetic day’s otter hunting. The original Mr Boevey owned Exmoor in the sixteenth century when he discovered, as everyone does eventually, that Exmoor is a place to spend money, not to make it.