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.

Richard Jefferies and the River Barle – a seven mile walk from Tarr Steps

“The brown Barle River running over red rocks aslant its course is pushed aside, and races round curving slopes. The first shoot of the rapid is smooth and polished like a gem by the lapidary's art, rounded and smooth as a fragment of torso, and this convex undulation maintains a solid outline. Then the following scoop under is furrowed as if ploughed across, and the ridge of each furrow, where the particles move a little less swiftly than in the hollow of the groove, falls backwards as foam blown from a wave.”

 

Rarely has a river been so intensely realised in words as in “Summer in Somerset”, written by Richard Jefferies during his fortnight stay on Exmoor in 1882, but not published until after his death. It is no more than a fragment and much of it is devoted to a rhapsodic evocation of Exmoor’s most scenic river. It illustrates perfectly Jefferies’s method of pushing his nose flat against nature and itemising its detail, a technique which he unknowingly gifted to Henry Williamson, author of “Tarka the Otter”.

We started where Jefferies finished his walk; at Tarr Steps, up river from Dulverton. The ancient clapper bridge is one of Exmoor’s iconic landmarks, and arguments will always rage about its true antiquity. The past winter illustrated yet again how vulnerable the bridge is to the elements when in December 2012 a substantial length of the bridge was washed away by floods. West Somerset Council may be bankrupt but it found the money from somewhere to repair the damage promptly, to the relief of all who live off the tourist trade. Only Watersmeet near Lynmouth would challenge Tarr Steps as the most visited beauty spot on the Moor.

We parked the car in the National Trust car park above the steps for a reasonable fee of £2 for an all-day stay, and walked down to the river past the Tarr Farm hotel, of which more later.

 

 

We crossed the Steps to the western bank of the Barle and turned right into the bridleway which led steeply uphill towards Parsonage Farm. On our left we caught a glimpse of the roof of what used to be the Tarr Steps Hotel but is now a private house. Further up the track we could look back towards Ashway. It was the first day of the much-trailered heat wave and, as we walked through meadows thick with clover and flowers, ready to be mown, the flies clustered on our hats like grapes.

 

At the gate which led down into the yard of Parsonage Farm, we turned right and walked towards Westwater Farm across the top of the down, from which we had a panoramic view of the western moors. First came Withypool Hill.

Then the valley of the Barle topped by the sugarloaf of the stand of trees above Warren Farm which are visible from all points of the compass.

Finally, and much closer, stood Winsford Hill.

The heat thickened as we walked down the rough path towards Westwater. A suckler herd hid from the flies amongst the trees, and at the bottom a herd of sheep dozed in the shade.

 When we came into the lane below the farm, the collies that habitually lie in the entrance, and sometimes in the middle of the road itself, could hardly bother to rouse themselves to sniff us as we passed by and up the hill towards Greystone Gate.

 

The cattle grid is at the foot of the open common below Withypool Hill, but we kept on the road until it began to descend towards Withypool village itself.

Just above the village hall we turned right into the drive which leads to South Hill Farm. The bridleway used to pass through the yard, but there is now a right of way through the fields which brings one out between the house and the river. There is no bridge to take you to the path on the northern bank but a magnificent line of stepping stones.

 

For far too long the stones were blocked by a fallen tree, but eventually the Exmoor Park Authority cleared it away and the way is clear again as long as the river is not too high. Recently the weather had been comparatively dry. Sometimes one or two of the stones can be quite treacherous, and at others much of them are covered by the river.

We turned right towards Tarr Steps. It is said that Louis Armstrong never played the Ira Gershwin-Vernon Duke song “I can’t get started” after he heard Bunny Berigan’s awe-inspiring version. Similarly I leave our walk back to Tarr Steps to the words of Richard Jefferies and to my wife’s photographs.

 

“At the foot of the furrowed decline the current rises over a rock in a broad white sheet--white because as it is dashed to pieces the air mingles with it. After this furious haste the stream does but just overtake those bubbles which have been carried along on another division of the water flowing steadily but straight. Sometimes there are two streams like this between the same banks, sometimes three or even more, each running at a different rate, and each gliding above a floor differently inclined. The surface of each of these streams slopes in a separate direction, and though under the same light they reflect it at varying angles. The river is animated and alive, rushing here, gliding there, foaming yonder; its separate and yet component parallels striving together, and talking loudly in incomplete sentences.”

“Here is a pool by the bank under an ash--a deep green pool inclosed by massive rocks, which the stream has to brim over. The water is green--or is it the ferns, and the moss, and the oaks, and the pale ash reflected? This rock has a purple tint, dotted with moss spots almost black; the green water laps at the purple stone, and there is one place where a thin line of scarlet is visible, though I do not know what causes it. Another stone the spray does not touch has been dried to a bright white by the sun. Inclosed, the green water slowly swirls round till it finds crevices, and slips through. A few paces farther up there is a red rapid--reddened stones, and reddened growths beneath the water, a light that lets the red hues overcome the others--a wild rush of crowded waters rotating as they go, shrill voices calling. This next bend upwards dazzles the eyes, for every inclined surface and striving parallel, every swirl, and bubble, and eddy, and rush around a rock chances to reflect the sunlight. Not one long pathway of quiet sheen, such as stretches across a rippled lake, each wavelet throwing back its ray in just proportion, but a hundred separate mirrors vibrating, each inclined at a different angle, each casting a tremulous flash into the face.”

“The sky, which was not noticed before, now appears reaching in rich azure across the deep hollow, from the oaks on one side to the oaks on the other. These woods, which cover the steep and rocky walls of the gorge from river to summit, are filled with the June colour of oak. It is not green, nor russet, nor yellow; I think it may be called a glow of yellow under green. It is warmer than green; the glow is not on the outer leaves, but comes up beneath from the depth of the branches. The rush of the river soothes the mind, the broad descending surfaces of yellow-green oak carry the glance downwards from the blue over to the stream in the hollow. Rush! rush!--it is the river, like a mighty wind in the wood.”

 

“Every one has seen a row of stepping-stones across a shallow brook; now pile other stones on each of these, forming buttresses, and lay flat stones like unhewn planks from buttress to buttress, and you have the plan of this primitive bridge. It has a megalithic appearance, as if associated with the age of rude stone monuments. They say its origin is doubtful; there can be no doubt of the loveliness of the spot. The Barle comes with his natural rush and fierceness under the unhewn stone planking, then deepens, and there overhanging a black pool--for the shadow was so deep as to be black--grew a large bunch of marsh-marigolds in fullest flower, the broad golden cups almost resting on the black water. The bridge is not intended for wheels, and though it is as firm as the rock, foot passengers have to look at their steps, as the great planks, flecked with lichen at the edges, are not all level. The horned sheep and lambs go over it--where do they not go? Like goats they wander everywhere.”

Just above Tarr Steps there is a barrier strung across the river to prevent trees being carried down to the bridge by flood waters which would smash the ancient stones apart. Sadly, a few months ago, it proved completely inadequate.

“In a cottage some way up the hill we ate clotted cream and whortleberry jam. Through the open door came the ceaseless rush! rush! like a wind in the wood. The floor was of concrete, lime and sand; on the open hearth--pronounced 'airth'--sods of turf cut from the moor and oak branches were smouldering under the chimney crook. Turf smoke from the piled-up fires of winter had darkened the beams of the ceiling, but from that rude room there was a view of the river, and the hill, and the oaks in full June colour, which the rich would envy.”

 

When we first came here over thirty years ago, Tarr Farm had not changed much since Jefferies’s day. While our back was turned, however, the old farmhouse morphed into a luxury hotel, with a celebrated restaurant and a clientele in season of corporate tweedy shooters from the City. You can still enjoy an excellent cream tea in the garden above the river, from as early as eleven o’clock in the morning indeed. The price of £5.50 is at the top end of the range, as one would expect in so popular a spot, but look at the size of it. 

 

Three scones lay on each plate like golden hubcaps. Two of them went straight into the backpack for another day, and then we enjoyed the others in the company of a couple of chaffinches, a breed which seems particularly keen on scones. It wasn’t whortleberry jam but, judging by a pot which we bought once made from Exmoor’s signature berry, we weren’t missing much.

Ten mile walk to the birthplace of “Tarka the Otter”

The New Roadbridge

Here’s some free advice to anyone who wants to visit the birthplace of Tarka the Otter, hero of the eponymous, and deservedly famous, animal story by Henry Williamson. Hire a bike. Even dedicated walkers such as we would surrender temporarily the belief that a first-class walk is better than a first-class ride along the “Tarka Trail” between Bideford and Great Torrington. We had expected an informal path on the old railway line which follows the River Torridge upstream, but discovered instead a tarmac roadway along which mountain bikes, racing bikes, bikes drawing baby-trailers, and even tandems sped, peddled often furiously by riders in plastic helmets which made them look like extras from “Star Wars”. They were all scrupulously polite but it was a far cry from the solitary wilderness of Exmoor to which we are accustomed. We had acquired a copy of the 1970’s film of “Tarka the Otter”, which was filmed on the Torridge in the very places which Williamson had described, and we were determined to see them for ourselves.

We parked in the “long stay” car park on the quay at Bideford, and bought four hours for £2. It proved a false economy as, even at our best Somerset Light Infantry pace, we only just managed to reach Tarka’s birthplace and to return before we might have attracted some gross civic penalty. We set off down the quay, where a continental food market was in full swing, and crossed over the river by the handsome stone bridge which dates back some six hundred years.

We joined the “Tarka Trail” at the site of the old Bideford Station. No trains have run here since the line was closed in the 1960’s but there were some carriages, one of which promised, but did not deliver, “teas”, which are probably restricted to fete days, and a shunting engine, in front of the old signal box.

 

As we walked eastwards, we passed a path which led down to a cycle hire, and it wasn’t long before a steady stream of its customers began to pass us. They were never obtrusive but, like a tiny piece of grit in your boot, they irritated; better by far to join them. For most of the way, the trail is overhung by the branches of the surrounding trees, which gave welcome relief from a broiling sun but also obscured the river and the surrounding countryside.

There are, however, fine views over the estuary and the town. As usual with the Bristol Channel, the tide was out.

Bideford once was a hive of activity, including some lime kilns on the bank which were serviced directly from the water with limestone brought from South Wales.

A local grandee, Lord Rolle, had a canal constructed to import the limestone further into the hinterland to provide fertiliser for the surrounding farmland. He started his project in the 1820’s, a little late in the day for canal expansion. We passed the remains of an ingenious lock system, soon to be made obsolescent by the very railway on which we were walking.

At last we came to the iconic bridge which overshadows “Owlery Holt” where Tarka was born. This splendid structure once carried the canal over the river.

The twisted roots of the trees still look as if they might obscure the refuge of an otter. The cyclists did not pause. As we took our photographs, a man walking the other way called out cheerily, “No otters today then?”

Further on, after we had passed a summer camp for children which boasted a magnificent “death slide”, we came to Beam Weir. “Below the fish-pass the water rushed in a foamy spate. Above, it slid black and polished,” wrote Williamson.

We returned the way that we had come. The skyline of Bideford features a wonderful dome on the top of “Quay House”. Nowhere could we discover the reason for this exotic appendage. One might expect that it had once housed the Bideford cinema, probably with a name such as the “Alhambra” or “Granada”, promising Arabian nights of entertainment here in North Devon, but there was no evidence of a suitable entrance into such a magical interior.

We did visit, however, the market, buying two delicious French sausages and a bottle of nectar fit for gods, cidre bouché from Normandy. It makes a change from scrumpy.

As we neared the car, we came face to face with a suitably forbidding statue of that muscular Christian, Charles Kingsley. Kingsley’s famous fable, “The Water Babies”, was part of my very early reading. Somehow I could never bring myself to appreciate the sooty little chimney sweep Tom’s luck in being drowned and becoming a plump, naked cherub with fishy fins, as depicted in my illustrated edition. Even as an infant, I would have preferred to be dirty, exploited, but unmistakably alive.

Kingsley also wrote “Westward Ho!” a buccaneering story of privateers based on Bideford. The book was a smash-hit when published in 1855, so much so that some Victorian entrepreneurs gave its name to a hotel which they built outside Bideford on the southern tip of the Torridge estuary. Gradually a seaside resort grew up around the hotel, and it too was named “Westward Ho!” the only English town named after a novel and with an exclamation mark. I have always thought, however, the wonderfully named Durham colliery village of “Pity Me” worth the same punctuation.

We set off to Westward Ho! in search of our literary cream tea. Just as Tarka the Otter now gives his name to holiday parks and even a tennis centre, so the famous historian, novelist, and clergyman is remembered in road names, hotels, and caffs. We were not heading for the Kingsley caff, however, but to “Tea on the Green”, a celebrated and crowded teashop. We managed to sit outside with views of the waves rolling in on to the miles of sands.

For reasons that remained obscure, the set teas were named after 1950’s film stars. Remaining loyal to my Bristolian roots, we plumped for the “Cary Grant”, the original of which was born Archie Leach in Bristol in 1904. Calling a tea consisting of two huge fruit scones, a huge bowl of strawberry jam, a huge bowl of cream, and a huge pot of tea, a “Cary Grant” at least was not as eccentric as calling a version of the same, “Audrey Hepburn”. I still cannot see in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” that sylphlike, gaminesque figure, in headscarf and raincoat, dumping her cat in an alley in a torrential rainstorm without bursting into tears.

We were warned that we would not finish all the scones, and we didn’t, but they were absolutely superb. They were not too heavy, not too light, but like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right. We took one away with us in a napkin. Amidst the “adult gaming” arcades, peeling bungalows, fishnchip shops, caffs, lounging youths, girls in shortest shorts, blue blue water and sundrenched sands, this was a tea to remember.