it is, of course, up-hill out of beer. one has not been long, or far, in devonshire before recognising that almost immutable law of the west, by which you descend steeply into every town or village and climb laboriously out. here it is beer head to which you ascend. beer head is white, so exceptionally and isolatedly white on this red coast that when, far westward, down teignmouth and brixham way, you look back and see along the vaguely defined shore a misty whiteness, you will know it for none other than this headland.
beyond it and its chalky spires and pinnacles the coast becomes a mere traveller’s bag of samples for awhile; finally, coming to the opening of branscombe, deciding upon “a good line” of red sandstone, mixed with red marl.
a very serious drawback incidental to the exploration of districts that grow increasingly beautiful as you proceed is that all the available stock of admiratory adjectives is likely to be expended long before the journey’s end. they must be carefully husbanded, or you come at last[36] to a nonplus. therefore, please at this point to assume beauties that—in the early victorian phrasing—can be “more easily imagined than described.” for the rest, conceive a wedge-like opening in the cliffs, cleft to permit the egress to the sea of a little stream, at all times too tiny for such a magnificent portal, and often in summer altogether dried up. on the western side plant a coastguard station, built like a fort and walled like a defensive stockade; and there you have the seaward aspect of branscombe.
the landward look of it is entirely different. looking from the sea, and walking away from it, three valleys converging seaward are discovered; each one profound, each richly wooded and fertile, and in each little instalments of branscombe village, dropped casually, as it were, here and there. i had at first assumed the name “branscombe” (which is pronounced with a broad “a,” like “ar”) to be derived in part from the british brân, a crow, and “crowcombe” it might well be; but it seems, by the dedication of the church to ss. winifred and bradwalladr, that it is really st. brannoc’s combe, for “brannoc” is an alias of bradwalladr.
away up the valley road are little groups of the quaintest cottages, with tiny strips of gardens scarce more than two feet wide, forming, as it were, a fringe or hem to the walls, and merging directly, without fence, into the roadway. but no gardens anywhere can show greater fertility or a more pleasing variety of flowers. among[37] them are to be seen spoils of the neighbouring cliffs, in the shape of petrified vegetation from the coast between branscombe and weston mouth.
where the roadway climbs round the most impressive bend, and the great wooded hills look down on the other side of the valley, with almost equidistant notches in their skyline, like the embrasures of cyclopean fortifications, stands the ancient church of branscombe. it is oddly placed, considerably below the level of the road, and is so old and rugged, and has been so long untouched, that it looks more like some silver-grey and lichened rocky outcrop, rudely fashioned in the form of a church, than the work of builder and[38] architect. and it is in such entire accord with the rocks and trees, the ferns and grasses, the spouting rivulets and moist skies of this secluded valley, that the dedication of it should more appropriately be to the sylvan gods of the classic age. there have been those scribbling tourists who, passing by and looking upon the time-worn building, have acted the part of agent provocateur to “restoring” zealots by dwelling upon the dampness of it, and the “meanness” of the box-like deal pews of the interior; but not yet have their instigations to crime against the picturesque been acted upon, and the ferns and mosses still sprout from the time-worn tower and the interior is still, in its whitewash, its pews, and its wooden pulpit, an example of the simple sway of the churchwarden and the village carpenter of a simpler age.
one highly elaborate monument redeems the church from a charge of emptiness. it is the interesting memorial of joan tregarthin, her husbands, john kellaway and john wadham, and her twenty children; all of them duly sculptured in effigy. the wadhams were the great landowners of branscombe, away back to the fourteenth century. among those twenty children is nicholas wadham, the last of his race, who died in 1609, and with his wife dorothy founded wadham college, oxford.
the churchyard of branscombe is a well-stored repository of unusual epitaphs, ranging from the sentimental to the unconsciously humorous and[39] the terrifying. of the last sort the following is a good example:
“stay, passenger, a while and read
your doome i am
you must bee dead.”
the uncertainty as to what this malignant gentleman really intends to convey does by no means lessen his impressiveness.
the lengthiest of them all is the following, on a time-worn altar-tomb outside the porch:
“pro. x. 7. the memory of the ivst is blessed.
“an epitaph on william lee, the father, and robert lee, the son: both buryed together in one grave. october the 2: 1658.
“reader aske not who lyes here
vnlesse thou meanst to drop a tear.
father and son heere joyntly have
one life, one death, one tombe, one grave.
impartial hand that durst to slay
the root and branch both in a day.
our comfort in there death is this,
that both are gonne to joy and bliss;
the wine that in these earthen vessels lay
the hand of death hath lately drawn away,
and, as a present, served it up on high,
whilst heere the vessels with the lees doe lye.”
another records the end of a labourer accidentally shot on his returning home from work, and yet another is to an exciseman, “who fell from the cliff between beer and seaton, as he was extinguishing a fire which was a signal to a smuggling boat.” the verse on joseph braddick,[40] a farmer, who died suddenly at sheep-shearing, hesitates between flippancy and exhortation:
“strong and at labour suddenly he reels,
death came behind him and struck up his heels,
such sudden strokes, surviving mortals, bid ye
stand on your watch, and to be allso ready.”
this collection is ended with the touching record of a french sailor-lad:
sacred to the memory of
jean jacques wattez, mariner,
of boulogne-sur-mer.
drowned at torbay, 29th march, 1897.
buried here 30th june, 1897.
aged 17 years.
“the only son of his mother, and she a widow.”
st. luke vii. 12.
there is fine, rough walking up over the cliffs past the coastguard station of branscombe, or down by the sandy shingle to littlecombe shoot and weston mouth, where the landsprings well out of the marly cliff-sides and petrify everything within reach. at the cost of scaling some of the buttery slides of red mud, and becoming more or less smothered with an ochreous mess resembling anchovy paste, it is possible to find most interesting examples of petrified moss and blackberry brambles; but the weaker brethren and those “righteous men” (as defined by mrs. poyser), who are “keerful of their clothes,” purchase such specimens as they may at branscombe, and on[41] their return home, yarn about the alpine difficulties of discovering them.
on the summit to the western side of weston mouth, away back from the beetling edge of dunscombe cliff, 350 feet above the sea, stands the picturesque group of dunscombe farm and the ruined, ivy-mantled walls of what seems to have been an old manor-house. to this succeeds the valley of salcombe, with the village of salcombe regis, away a mile inland.
it is a long, long way into sidmouth, through salcombe regis, whose “regis” was added so long ago as the time of athelstan, who owned the manor and the salt-pans down in the combe by the sea. when you have come to the houses and think this is sidmouth, it is only landpart, and there is very near another mile to go; which, if you have acquired what the devon people call a “kibbed”—that is to say a rubbed—heel by dint of much walking, is a distressing thing.
