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“Through the heart of Dartmoor forest” may bring up many fascinating, even weird associations, but on our map we regarded the thin red line of our road rather dubiously. It runs almost straight from Exeter to Prince Town—the prison town of the moor—and on either side for many miles lies a waste country, apparently quite devoid of villages and even of roads. The road as shown on the map is thickly studded with arrow heads, denoting dangerous hills, and the description in the road-book is far from alluring. But we were not to be deterred from exploring Dartmoor, as we had been on a previous occasion, though indeed we found the first few miles between Exeter and Moreton Hampstead trying and almost terrifying in places. The hills offered little impediment to our motor, but for all that one has a rather eery feeling when clinging to a precipitous incline. If something should let loose! But nothing did.

Moreton Hampstead is a bleak, lonely little town set well into the western edge of the moor and surrounded by rugged tors on every hand. It is not without a bit of antiquity, for it has a sixteenth century building, called the Arcade, whose Moorish touches are decidedly picturesque. It is like a bit of Spain in the hills of Dartmoor and seems strangely out of place. Only three miles from Moreton Hampstead, lying in a secluded valley, is Chagford, famous for its quaint old inn and wild surroundings.

Once out of Moreton Hampstead and away on the yellow highway that bisects the moor, we found ourselves in a country as barren as any we had seen in England. The road, though winding and steep, is generally visible for some distance ahead, and we found little hindrance to a swift, steady flight that carried us over the long hills far more quickly than we anticipated. The day, which had begun in mist and rain, became lighter and a rapidly clearing sky gave us the opportunity of seeing the wild beauty of the moor at its best. Despite its loneliness and cheerlessness, there was a wonderful play of color: the reds and browns of the broken granite, the purple blaze of the heather, the vivid yellow of the gorse and the metallic green of the whortle, all intensified by golden sunshine, have marvelously transformed the somber tone of the moorland of scarce an hour before. But where is the “forest”? Only stunted trees appear here and there, or a fringe of woods along the clear streams; we learn that “forest” once meant a waste, uncultivated tract of land, and in later days has been applied to woodlands alone. We run for miles with no human habitation in sight save an occasional cottage in a small, barren field surrounded by stone walls. We come upon a large, attractive-looking inn unexpectedly—though it ought not to be unexpected to find an inn anywhere in England—the Two Bridges, situated near the head waters of the Dart, here no more than a brawling streamlet. We leave the car by the roadside and enter the homelike hall, where an array of fishing-tackle makes clear the excuse for this pleasant hotel in the moor. The day has been chilly and, strange to say, a fire flickers in the grate. We are just in time for luncheon and a goodly number of guests respond to the vigorous beating of the gong—that almost universal abomination of the provincial English hotel. It appears that the quiet and seclusion of Dartmoor is not without its attractions to many people. We ourselves leave the pleasant inn with regret; we should have liked a day’s rest in the cozy ingle-nook.

IN SUNNY DEVON.

A view of the old town of Totnes from the upland road. Original Painting by George Bowman, 1908 Royal Academy.

The walls and battlements of Prince Town Prison soon loom in sight. This was established in 1800 as a military prison for French soldiers, and a few Americans were confined here in 1812. It then fell into disuse until 1850, but for the half-century since it has served its present purpose as a penal institution and has been greatly added to from time to time.

An English writer says: “Dartmoor is so huge that one must be born and spend a lifetime near it to really know it, and the visitor can merely endeavour to see typical examples of its granite tors, its peaty streams, its great stretches of boulder-strewn heather, and its isolated villages.” Evidently he must mean that it is huge in its mysteries and its moods, for it is really only fourteen by twenty-two miles—perhaps half as large as the average county in the United States.

At Tavistock we are well beyond the confines of the moor and follow a fine road to Launceston, where we glance at the huge circular keep of the castle and look longingly at the White Hart, which recalls only pleasant memories. But we are bound for an enchanted land and, like many a gallant knight of yore, we would hasten past “many-towered Camelot” to the castle of the blameless king. The declining sun, toward which we rapidly course, seems to flash across the Cornish hills the roselight of the old Arthurian romance, and the stately measures of the “Idyls of the King” come unbidden to our minds. But we soon have something less romantic to think of, for in attempting a short cut to Tintagel without going to Camelford, we run into a series of the crookedest, roughest lanes we found in all England. These appear to have been quite abandoned; in places mere ravines with myriads of sharp loose stones and many long steep hills. But we push on and almost ere we are aware, find ourselves in Tintagel village, which with its long rows of boarding-houses hardly accords with one’s preconceived romantic notions. Then we catch a glimpse of the ocean out beyond the headland, upon which is perched a huge, square-towered building—King Arthur’s Castle Hotel, they tell us—and thither we hasten. This hotel, only recently completed, is built on a most liberal scale, though it can hardly accommodate many guests at a time. The public rooms are most elaborately furnished and of enormous size. The great round table in the reading room is a replica of the original at Shrewsbury, at which, declares tradition, King Arthur sat with his fifty knights. The guest rooms are on an equally generous scale and so arranged that every one fronts on the sea. The rates are not low by any means, yet it is hard to conceive how such a hotel can be a paying investment.

After we reached the hotel, the long twilight still gave time to contemplate the weird beauty of the surroundings and to explore the ruins of the castle so famed in song and story. We scrambled down the high headland, upon which the hotel stands, to the level of the blue inlet of the sea, depicted in such a masterly manner in the painting by Mr. Moran, the towering cliffs crowned by the fragmentary ruins looming far above us. A path cut in the edge of the cliff leads to a precarious-looking foot-bridge across the chasm and a still narrower and steeper path hugs the face of the precipice on the opposite side until a heavy oaken door is reached. This door, to which the old caretaker in the cottage below had given me the key, opens into the supposed site of King Arthur’s castle. Only a few scattered bits of masonry remain and these are probably of a later time than that of the early Briton.

KING ARTHUR’S CASTLE, OFF TINTAGEL HEAD, CORNWALL.

From Original Painting by Thos. Moran, N. A.

The spot is lonely and quite barren save a few patches of greensward upon which were peacefully grazing a flock of sheep—one finds them everywhere in Britain. I was quite alone—there were no other visitors at that late hour and my companions had given up the dizzy ascent before it was fairly begun—and I strove to reconstruct in imagination the castle as it stood in the days of the blameless king. How the wild old stories crowded upon me in that lonely twilight hour! Here, legend declares—and I care not if it be dim indeed and questioned by the wiseacres—was once the court of the wise and faultless Arthur, who gathered to himself the flower of knighthood of Christendom and was invincible to all attacks from without, but whose dominion crumbled away before the faithlessness and dishonor of his own followers. Here, perchance, the faithless Guinevere pined and sighed for her forsworn lover and gazed on the sea, calm and radiant as it is even now, or saw it lash itself into unspeakable fury upon the frowning bastions of the coast. But, alas! how dim and uncertain is all that is left, and how the tales vary save that they all center in the king! Little remains in local tradition of all the vanished splendors of those ancient days save that the king did not die; that in the form of a chough he haunts the scenes of his glory and his downfall, and that he will come again—

But I am quite forgetting the flight of time, and with a lingering look at the storied spot, I slowly descend. Then I climb to the more extensive ruin on the landward side, much shattered but grim and massive in decay. There must have been a connection between the castles on either side of the great ravine, though it is hardly apparent how this could have been. Perhaps the gap has widened much in the long course of time. It is dusk when we return to the hotel and sit long on the open terrace fronting the sea, contemplating the beauty of the scene.

Never have I beheld a more glorious sunset than that which lightened the wild Cornish coast and ocean on that particular evening. A dark band of cloud lay low along the western horizon, with a clear, opalescent sky above, and below a thin strip of lucent gold with silvery clouds floating in it like fairy ships. Suddenly the sun dropped from behind the cloud, which had obscured his full splendor, into the resplendent zone beneath, flooding the sea, into which he slowly sank, with a marvelous though evanescent glory. Then followed all the indescribable color changes and combinations, which varied momentarily until they faded into the dusky hues of a moonlit night. It marked the close of a perfect day—clear and cool, with sky of untainted blue and ocean as still and glassy as a quiet inland lake.

Not less inspiring was the scene that greeted us through our open lattices in the morning—a sea steely blue in the distance, rippling into bars of frosted silver near the shore, while the stern outlines of the headlands were softened by a clinging blue haze. We lingered on the legend-haunted ground until nearly noon and it was with keen regret that we glided away from the pleasant hostelry back to the village and past the old church on the headland, whose bells tolled without mortal hands on the far-off day when the body of King Arthur was borne away to sepulture in Glastonbury Abbey.

A fine upland road led us nearly due north from Camelford through long stretches of moorland—or country almost as sterile as the moors—diversified with great patches of gorse and scattered groups of stunted trees. We encountered scarcely a village for a distance of twenty-five miles, for we did not turn aside for Bude or for Stratton, just opposite on each side of the road. The latter is said to be one of the most unspoiled and genuinely ancient of the smaller Cornish villages. At times we were within a mile or two of the ocean and caught fugitive glimpses of blue expanses of quiet sea. Then the road sweeps farther inland and the country improves in appearance, though it is still Cornwall and Devon and far different from the sleek, prosperous beauty of the Midlands.

OFF THE COAST OF DEVON.

From Original Painting by A. J. Warne-Browne.

“The most exquisite town in England,” writes an enthusiast of Clovelly, but Clovelly’s very quaintness has made it so widely known that it hardly has a place in a chronicle that seeks rather the untrodden ways. It is not possible for a motor or any other vehicle to descend the steep, stone-paved streets, and about a quarter of a mile above the town we left the car in an exceedingly prosperous-looking stable-yard filled to overflowing with motors, carriages and chars-a-bancs.

Clovelly well deserves its reputation for the picturesque qualities that have transformed it from an unpretentious fishing village, lost among the clifflike hills, into a thronged tourist resort. Fortunately, as yet there has been no attempt to modernize; no stucco-and-timber hotel detracts from the antique flavor; the people who come to Clovelly do not as a rule stay long. Large excursion steamers, usually crowded, ply from Ilfracombe, and coaches and chars-a-bancs from Hartland and Barnstaple bring troops of visitors. Coaching parties come from Tintagel (round trip eighty miles) and one is sure to find Clovelly crowded in season, especially if the day is fine. And so we found it, literally thronged, a huge excursion steamer lying at anchor in the harbor. There was a little disarray and confusion at the pleasant New Inn—new in name only—evidently due to more patronage than could easily be taken care of. As we waited for luncheon we looked about at the collection of antique brass, copper, china and pottery that almost covered the walls and crowded the mantelpieces and odd corners about the inn. We were told that the landlady is a famous collector and that many of the pieces are rare and valuable. A more amusing if not less interesting feature of the house is the sentiment expressed in halting doggerel, emblazoned in large red letters on the walls and ceiling of the dining-room. It is good only from the standpoint of exceeding badness, and its general tenor is to flatter Americans, who no doubt constitute a large proportion of the guests.

The old, time-worn churches of England are past numbering and they came to have an almost weird fascination for us. The tombs, ranging from the artistic to the ghastly or grotesque, the old stones with their often queer or even ridiculous epitaphs, the sculptures, the bosses, the frescoes, the stained windows, the gargoyles and the oftentimes strange history or still stranger legends connected with nearly every one—but why prolong the list of curious attractions of these ancient fanes, often quite peculiar in each case? Just before we entered Barnstaple we turned into a byroad, and dropping down a hill of appalling steepness and length, came to Tawstock Church, famed as the finest country church in Devon—the “Westminster of the West Country,” some enthusiast has styled it. Though hardly deserving such a dignified characterization as this, Tawstock Church is well worth a visit. Besides some remarkable tombs and fine Elizabethan pews, it has a peculiar gallery curiously wrought in vine and leaf pattern from black oak, and now used by the bell-ringers to reach the tower. Tawstock Mansion, near by, appears rather modern—a large building shining in a fresh coat of yellow paint that gave it much the appearance of a summer hotel. The house and church are located in a deep wooded valley and the towers of the ancient gateway lend a touch of much-needed antiquity to the scene.

TAWSTOCK CHURCH, DEVONSHIRE.

Barnstaple, like Bideford, while a very old town, has few old-time relics now left. It has become a manufacturing town, its chief product being Barum ware, an inexpensive grade of pottery. The Golden Lion Inn, once a residence of the Earl of Bath, is famed as a place of solid comfort, and still retains much of the gorgeous decorations done by its former occupant. The poet Shelley had an odd association with Barnstaple. When living at Lynton, after his marriage with Harriet Westbrook, he came to Barnstaple and spent some time in bringing out a pamphlet scurrilously attacking the chief justice who had sentenced to prison the publisher of the works of Thomas Paine. One of the poet’s associates, who distributed the pamphlets, was sentenced to six months in jail, and Shelley narrowly escaped by hastily leaving the town.

The road from Bideford through Barnstaple and Ilfracombe is rather uninteresting, save the last few miles, which pass through wooded hills and along deep verdant valleys. Ilfracombe is a resort town, pure and simple, and we found few hotels on a grander scale than the Ilfracombe, standing in beautiful grounds facing the sea, which murmured almost directly beneath our open windows. It was a beautiful evening; the tide was just receding from the jutting rocks scattered along the coast, whereon the sea, even in its mildest moods, chafes into foam; and one can easily imagine a most awe-inspiring scene when the angry ocean, driven by a westerly wind, assails these bold, angular rocks. After having visited every resort town of note in England, our recollection is that of all, Ilfracombe is the most strikingly situated; nor do any of them command views of a coast line more rugged and picturesque.

The rain was falling heavily when we came to Dunster on the following day and the abbey church was gloomy indeed. And what can be gloomier than an old church on a gray day, when the rain pours from the low-hung clouds and sweeps in fitful gusts against the mossy gravestones and crumbling, ivy-clad walls? A scene that renders one solemn and thoughtful on almost any occasion becomes positively depressing under such conditions. And though we recall Dunster Church with associations not unpleasing in perspective, the surroundings were not altogether pleasing at the time. We found the caretaker, a bent old woman, in the church, but she informed us that there were really two churches and that she had jurisdiction over only one of them. However, she conducted us about the dimly lighted building, gloomy indeed from the lowering skies without, and our recollection of her story of the quarrel that resulted in the partition of the church has faded quite away. But we do remember the rood screen which has fourteen separate openings, no two wrought in the same pattern and altogether as marvelous a piece of black-oak carving as we saw in England.

Aside from the abbey church, there are other things of interest in Dunster, especially the market cross and the castle. The latter overlooks the town from a neighboring hill and is one of the lordliest fortresses in the West Country. The town lies in one of the loveliest vales in Somersetshire and is famed for its beautiful surroundings. This section of Somerset and Devon is rich in literary associations; at Nether Stowey we pass the square, uncomfortable-looking house, close to the roadside, where Coleridge lived for three years, beginning in 1797. Indeed, it was in the autumn of that year that he made the excursion with Wordsworth and Dorothy, during which the plan of the “Ancient Mariner” was conceived. A few months before, while in a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Lynton, he had the dream which he started to record in “Kubla Khan.” This poem he had composed in his dream, but while writing it down on awakening, a “person from Porlock” interrupted, and when the poet essayed to write, not only the words but the images of the vision had faded away, and the fragment of “Kubla Khan” remains like a shattered gem. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came a little later to Alfoxden House, standing in a pleasant park in the parish of Halford, and here the literary association between Coleridge and Wordsworth became intimate and the little volume of “Lyrical Ballads” was published jointly by them in 1798. Southey, while storm-stayed by “an unwelcome summer rain” at the Ship Inn in Porlock, wrote a sonnet in praise of the hills and glens. Hazlitt and Charles Lamb at times joined their friends here for pedestrian excursions among the hills. Nor can we forget Blackmore, whose “Lorna Doone” turned the eyes of the English-speaking world toward the Exmoor wastes. Shelley’s escapade at Barnstaple we have already mentioned and the cottage he occupied at Lynton still stands. No doubt much of the weird beauty that pervades his work entered his soul amidst the glorious surroundings—the sea, the hills and the vales—of the West Country.

EVENING ON THE CORNISH COAST.

From Original Painting by A. J. Warne-Browne.

A pause at Cleeve Abbey near at hand gave us perhaps a better idea of the life of monastic days than any other we visited—and we saw all the greater abbeys of Britain. In the majority of cases the abbey proper had been destroyed, but the church escaped, often through purchase by the citizens. At Cleeve the reverse has happened; the church has totally disappeared, but the abbey buildings are nearly intact. As a well-informed writer puts it:

“The whole life of the society can be lived over again with but little demands on the imagination. We can see the dormitories in which they slept, the refectory where they fed, the abbot’s particular parlour and the room for accounts, the kitchen, and even the archway through which their bodies went out to the grave. The church suffered from despoilers more than any other part of the abbey, and great is the loss to architecture. Otherwise we get a community of the Middle Ages preserved in all its essential surroundings, the refectory being in particular a grand fifteenth-century hall.” The ceiling of this great apartment is of the hammer-beam pattern, the beams richly carved, and, springing from oaken corbels, figures of angels with expanded wings.

It brings one near indeed to the spirit of monastic days—this gray old ruin, through which sweep the wind and rain and where under foot the grass grows lush and green as it grows only in England—the spirit which the Latin legend over the gatehouse so vividly expresses, quaintly rendered thus:

“Gate Open be

To honest folk as free.”

And the gray-whiskered custodian, so rheumatic and feeble that his daughter, a husky peasant woman, guides visitors about the abbey, warmed up to us as we were about to leave and opened his heart about the ruin in which he dwelt and which he seemed to love. He told us its story in the broad West Country dialect and pointed out to us many things of curious interest that we otherwise should have overlooked.

The sky is clearing; the low sun flashes along the hill-crests and floods the Somerset landscape with ethereal beauty, which we drink in as we skim swiftly along the smooth, wet road. We catch a final gleam of the ocean at Weston-super-Mare and pass a long row of imposing hotels. Then we are away for Bristol, the Queen City of the West Country.