Cornwall, is a land unto itself, and, as already noted, commonly alluded to by Devonshire farmers, cattle buyers, hunting men and such like as “the West country.” It is watered by the Upper Torridge flowing southwards through it, and covers some two or three hundred square miles. In appearance it is normal Devonian; a succession of high red ridges of tillage and pasture, heavily fenced to their round summits, and traversed by narrow precipitous roads hemmed in between lofty, flower-spangled banks. Cold grey church towers stand out here and there above some small, clustering, slate-roofed village on a windy hill-top, and at intervals some deep, wooded glen bearing a noisy runlet to the Torridge throws a redeeming ray of beauty through a country otherwise open to criticism for a certain monotony of outline and detail, like many other parts of Devonshire.
But this “West country” or land of the Upper Torridge has the merit, one may almost say the charm, of unconventionality. For within its whole wide bounds there is scarcely a gentleman’s residence but the indispensable vicarage, and even scattered cottages are rare, there being few labourers. The entire country, in fact, hereabouts is occupied by yeomen farmers, many of whom have lately bought their farms, and who mostly do their own work. It is the most sequestered and unknown part of habitable Devonshire. Scarcely any one but its occupants know anything about it, except such few as may penetrate it behind a hunted fox or as purchasers of stock. There is nothing, indeed, to bring any one in here, while the labours of locomotion except on horseback are prodigious. No social functions occur within it; no railroads disturb its calm; while the motor, nay, even the cycle, give it a wide berth. The farmers ride ponies, and, fifty years hence, will probably be riding ponies still. If it were a wild pastoral country, this land of the Upper Torridge, there would, of course, be nothing worthy of remark in all this. But, on the contrary, it is a quite normal district. The land is not very good, nor its occupants very progressive, so the formality of the country is delightfully broken by stretches of golden gorse, by moorish, ill-drained fields where snipe are numerous, by whole hillsides that Nature has clothed after her own fashion with birch and alder, blackthorn, or ash, straggling about waist deep in open brakes of fern or broom, and these are the haunt in winter of great numbers of woodcock – a country, indeed, full of birds, those of
prey or otherwise, for there is no one to molest them. The keeper and the form of sporting he now represents is as non-extant as the garden-party. Throughout this west country of the West country the sportsman still follows a brace of setters in arduous but pleasant quest of the indigenous partridge after the fashion of bygone days. And if, while standing in the bosky shallows of the Torridge, one hears the call of a cock-pheasant, it will be the voice of no coop-raised, grain-fed sybarite, but a bird and the descendant of birds well able to take care of themselves and quite experienced travellers. And the Torridge itself, which wanders in and out of woodland and thicket, running upon a gravelly bed and scooping out the red crumbly banks of narrow meadows, where lively red yearlings caper with justifiable amazement at the apparition of the rare stranger, calls for no further comment here. It is in its northward-flowing lower reaches that it acquires distinction, swelled, moreover, with the considerable streams of the Okement.
It is a far cry from the Taw and Torridge estuary to Lynmouth and Lynton – that gem of Devonian, nay of English, coast scenery. But though many small streams cleave their way through that iron coast into the Severn Sea, at Watermouth, at Combe Martin, and, most beautiful of all, at Headons Mouth, there are none approaching the dignity of a river till you come to the outpouring of the recently united waters of the East and West Lynn on the very borders of Somerset. Here, indeed, looking out through a great open gateway as it were in the most imposing stretch of cliff scenery in England, Cornwall not excepted, is a vision of a tumbling stream and hanging woodland that as a mere picture, and having regard to its composition, is not surpassed, I think, even upon the Upper Dart. Then, again, the near presence of the sea in the prospect seems to place Lynton on a pinnacle to itself. From Bristol to Berwick there is surely nothing quite like it upon our coast – this really noble curtain of woodland hung from so great a height and folding away inland, out of whose green recesses the white waters come spouting on to the very shore. Both the East and the West Lynn come down from Exmoor, leaving the comparative plateau of the moor at a distance of some four miles from the sea, and in that brief space falling about a thousand feet through continuously wooded gorges. The East Lynn, however, is the more noteworthy, dividing again at that famous sylvan spot known
as “Waters meet.” Up the western of the two forks cut high up the steep hillside, commanding beautiful views of the winding gorge beneath, runs the road to Brendon, climbing the steepest hill in Devonshire, if such a thing is conceivable, on any known highway. At Brendon, emerging from the woods, the moor opens wide before you, the land of the red deer and the Exmoor pony, and, what with many persons is even more to the point, the land of Blackmore’s celebrated novel
Lorna Doone
. The eastern fork of the little river, known on the moor as the Badgworthy (Badgery) water, soon reached from Brendon, is more immediately concerned with this, leading immediately up as it does to the famous Doone valley. Hundreds of pilgrims, both in frivolous and pious fashion, journey up here nowadays, literal persons sometimes, looking for cataracts where are only the normal gambols of an ordinary moorland stream, and inveighing against poor Mr. Blackmore who, sublimely unconscious that he was creating classic ground, took quite legitimate liberties with the little waters of the infant Lynn. Lynton and Lynmouth had acquired even before this some outside fame for their extraordinary beauty, and had their modest share of summer visitors. But of literary or historical associations no valley in Devonshire could have been more absolutely bereft than that of the Badgworthy water. No book that ever was published, not any one even of Scott’s novels, gave a hitherto obscure spot such permanent fame as did
Lorna Doone
in the matter of the head-waters of the Lynn. I can state with the confidence of personal knowledge and recollection that before that delightful book was written these upper waters, and what is now known as the Doone valley, had no more significance for local people than any other obscure glen on Exmoor, and by strangers were never seen, for stag-hunting then attracted comparatively few outsiders.
Now from the Upper Lynn to the sources of the Barle and Exe there is a carriage road pursuing a wild course over the moor to Simonsbath, some dozen or so miles distant. Long before arriving there, however, it crosses the infant Exe, a peaty brook piping in feeble strains amid the silence of the hills. Not far to the southward rises its sister and later partner, the Barle, in a high bog to merge immediately in the deep and desolate tarn of Pinkerry – in truth a reservoir made nearly a century ago by a visionary landowner for impracticable purposes of no consequence here.
Dripping out of this black eerie pool, which in my youth had stimulated the then lively imaginations of the turf-cutters from Challacombe, who almost alone ever set eyes on it, to some racy superstitions, the Barle in a few miles becomes a stream of consequence, and during its passage through the moor has all the wild charm of a moorland river still struggling in its cradling hills. Within the writer’s memory, which goes back to the time before Exmoor was discovered by the tourist and the up-country stag hunter, great changes have come over this country of the Upper Barle and Exe. The heather, which once held the black game in considerable numbers, has sensibly diminished before draining and increased sheep-grazing. Bank enclosures have eaten deep into the once wild fringes of the moor; but the solitude and the silence still remain. The curlew still calls in the breeding season upon the long ridges above the Barle; the ponies and the little horned sheep of the moor, and the black-faced Highlander still have the waste to themselves.
Simonsbath, the little metropolis of Exmoor forest, with its church, vicarage, manor-house, and shepherd’s cottages, at one time occupied mainly by Scotsmen, sits upon the Barle. All this country and that about the Upper Exe is now familiar, in fact, to the great numbers of persons who in one way or another follow the chase of the stag, and, in name, to far more who read the voluminous literature on the subject. It is curious to recall Exmoor before it became the fashion, when its very name conveyed no meaning in ordinary company, when a strange face on the banks of the Upper Barle was a cause of astonishment, when the villages on the moor edge were rich in original characters, content with a tri-weekly post, and quite independent of newspapers. Most of the moor, including the Exe and Barle, is just within the county of Somerset. Just below Dulverton, on the Barnstaple and Taunton line, noted now as a stag-hunting quarter, the Barle and Exe join, passing at the same moment into the county of Devon. Thence through a pleasant pastoral and agricultural country with less hurry and commotion than the majority of Devonshire rivers under the name of the Exe, the river flows by Tiverton to Exeter. Beneath that ancient cathedral city it winds with broad and slow current, and, meeting the tide, becomes a navigable river; while its wide estuary, as it flows into the sea between Exmouth and Dawlish, is familiar to every traveller on the Great Western main line which skirts its shores.
South-east Devon, that block of country between the Exe and Dorsetshire, is watered through its very heart by the Otter and on its extremity by the Axe. There can be little question but that, of all the west country which lies aloof from the moor, this south-east corner of Devon, watered mainly by the Otter and familiar to many strangers who visit the watering-places of Seaton, Sidmouth, or Budleigh, is the most beautiful in general landscape. The contour of the hills is more varied and effective, nor have they been denuded of timber about their more conspicuous portions as in most other parts of the county. The bank-fences too are more umbrageous, and the bright red soil has here an uncommon fertility, which gives an even added verdure to the grass and a brighter glow to the fallows. This gracious region has all the hill qualities of Devonshire, with a general look of luxuriance and abundance which is absent from the chess-board bareness that is the characteristic of such large tracts of the county.
The Otter, though bright and clear, is not a moor-bred river. But as it sweeps and swirls free of timber upon a pebbly bed, amid open meadows of extraordinary verdure and between banks of a most brilliant ruddy hue, it always seems, in company with its immediate neighbour the Axe, to claim a place of its own among Devon streams. Here too the Devonshire village of the alien idealist, the novelist, and the play-wright is more in evidence, for the simple fact that East Devon approximates in some respects – cottage architecture among them – with the neighbouring counties where the old-fashioned picturesque thatched village is still much more of an every-day reality.
CHAPTER VII
THE RIVERS OF THE SOUTH-EAST
THE physical attractions of the three south-eastern counties – Surrey, Sussex, and Kent – owe little in comparison with the regions hitherto treated of to their rivers. But use and custom are all powerful even in the appeal which Nature and landscape make to persons genuinely susceptible to their influences. It is tolerably certain that to the great numbers of such for whom these counties and others, practically of the same class, represent the rural England with which they have any sort of intimacy, this want of water, or at any rate waters of an inspiring kind, ceases to be felt. One might almost say it becomes a lost sense, from lack of familiarity; and that the standards of perfection in landscape from this point of view arrange themselves, regardless of what to another temperament is an irreparable blemish.
No alien, for instance, from the north or west, who has the spirit of these things within him at all, ever gets over the loss of the rapid stream. The stir of clear and moving waters, though automatically, of course, the invariable note of the highest expressions of British scenery, can never be dispensed with by those reared among them. The sluggish and turgid river consoles them scarcely more than the entire absence of any kind of water. Sometimes it is almost an irritant from the contrast it suggests. Natives of what for brevity we may call the dry counties, can admire a Welsh or Yorkshire stream as sincerely as a Welshman or a Yorkshireman, but they would not often be able to understand how great is the effect of their absence in landscape on the northern or western temperament.
The rivers of Sussex have at least some marked peculiarities. For though none of them are chalk streams, yet all but one cut their way through a high chalk range to the sea. It is only, indeed, as they come within the influence of salt water and begin to feel its tides, that they have any distinction at all; since above this they dwindle either into insignificant brooks or into straight-cut, canal-like waterways, into which
many of them indeed were fashioned in the canal era. The rivers of Sussex worthy of mention can be numbered precisely on the fingers of one hand, and run into the sea at fairly regular intervals. They have considerable character of a kind, shared, with one exception, by them all, and are unlike any other rivers in England. They are of small service to the inland scenery of the county and little account in it, but they add immensely to the interest of the sea-coast strip. The noteworthy rivers counting from west to east are the Arun, at Littlehampton and Arundel; the Adur, at Shoreham; the Ouse, at Lewes and Newhaven; the Cuckmere near Seaford; and the Eastern Rother, at Rye. All but the last break through the coast range and are Sussex rivers from their birth. The Eastern Rother – thus distinguished since the Arun has a considerable tributary of that name – rises in Sussex near Robertsbridge, and flowing eastward forms the boundary against Kent for some distance, and in the days of old wound through the heart of Romney Marsh into the sea at Lydd. One of those great storms, however, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which so greatly changed the coast, turned the Rother into the present Sussex channel past Rye and so into the sea. Every one of these rivers makes up in some way for the deficiencies of its earlier and fresh-water period by the manner of its approach to the sea. In the case of the Rother, for instance, though the inland valleys it flows through are in themselves not unpleasing, it is difficult to warm towards a river that has every characteristic of a canal, contracting eventually into a respectable ditch. At Rye, however, the Rother becomes part of one of the most picturesque and most painted scenes in the south of England. Beneath the rock on which the most striking by far of south coast towns clusters, the Rother abandons its canal-like habit and at high tide coils gleaming seaward for its last two miles through the Sussex end of Romney Marsh, the worthy centre of probably the most curious and striking outlook between Pool harbour and the Humber. Two other lesser streams, the Brede and the Tillingham, come into it through the meadows. But as late as Tudor times all these rivers formed together a large estuary serving the then ports of Rye and Winchelsea. These are typical Sussex rivers, flowing down valleys whose least pleasing feature might almost be said to be the actual streams that made them. The rich meadows in the flat, the old
homesteads, the hop-fields upon the slopes, the charming villages, and the still surviving windmills surmounting the ridges are of the best that tranquil southern England has to offer. But the dyked-in waters themselves, flowing sullenly and monotonously over their muddy bottoms between raised turf banks, with rare exceptions contribute nothing and are powerless to charm.
The most easterly of the four chief rivers cutting through the coast range is the Cuckmere. As one drops down the long westward slope from Beachy Head into a sequestered and far-spreading Down country this little river, cleaving a narrow way into the sea below, without port or harbour or village or anything but an isolated homestead or two within apparent touch of it, seizes one’s fancy not a little. For this reason the Cuckmere as a replica in miniature of the Ouse and Arun, but of curiously sequestered habit on this otherwise rather populous coast, has a place of its own somewhat apart from its fellows.
The Ouse, the next, going westward, to cut through the Downs, is a very much larger stream. It breaks through the here narrow but lofty chalk range some five miles from the sea at Lewes, and then winds through the meadows as a tidal river to Newhaven – a stretch of country familiar enough to every one using this route to the Continent. The cleft in the Downs made by the Ouse below the ancient and picturesque town of Lewes is one of the boldest and most precipitous scenes of its kind in the whole chalk system. Looking down from the top of the prodigiously steep streets of Lewes, or from the summit of the castle, the opposite Down rises like an inaccessible green wall for five or six hundred feet, and one might fancy there was scarcely room for the slow running river to push its way through what one is almost tempted to call the defile below. The Ouse rises in many feeders about the edges of Ashdown forest but is quite insignificant till, after the manner of Sussex rivers, it makes this fine effort at Lewes. Hence strong tides rush up and down the seven miles or so of channel which winds through the banked-in meadows to Newhaven.
The Adur, which joins the sea at Shoreham, between Brighton and Worthing, follows the same tactics, and is a still more insignificant stream up the country, but winds for some way through the chalk range, from Bramber, where it has some claim to be a river to the two Shorehams, the old and the new. But the Arun, the most westerly of all the Sussex
rivers, is the best known and the most important. It, too, draws near the sea by Amberley and Arundel to Littlehampton with a rapid transformation from comparative insignificance to scenes that always compel one’s interest and sometimes one’s admiration. Meeting the Western Rother at the old Roman station, now covered by Pulborough, which lifts itself above the flat, the two little streams make together one of a reasonable size that, flowing on through wide water meadows, enters the gap in the Downs at Amberley, and there, under the influence of the tide, begins to rise and fall upon a muddy bed. Arundel Castle, raised above the town with its wooded park swelling up the face of the Down behind, makes a really noble background to the reaches of the Arun, both above and below. It is an awkward river for boating on account of the pace with which the tide rushes up its reedy, muddy bed, and the distance over which it makes its force felt. But it is perfectly feasible, if forethought be taken, to ascend with the tide for many miles above Arundel, and return with it to great advantage. The swell of the Downs, clad above Arundel with beech-woods approaching at places close to the bank, and the rich scented meadows, through which the river winds for miles, aloof from dwellings or villages, more than compensate for the slightly deterrent qualities of the turgid and muddy waters. Even these blemishes, however, are obscured when the tide is high. But it is not well, when it has begun to turn, to tie the bow of your boat to a tree trunk and take an unwary siesta beneath its shade in the stern, or, as once happened to the present writer, you may peradventure be awakened by the water running over your shoulders and the nose of the boat pointing heavenward at an angle of forty-five degrees.
From Arundel bridge the river runs a navigable course through salt meadows for some seven miles to its mouth at Littlehampton with no appreciable widening of its channels. The Arun above Arundel and all the way up past Amberley is a noted haunt of the humbler class of London anglers, whom the railroad, for a quite trifling sum, brings down here by hundreds. At intervals along the banks for miles you find the patient bream-fisher from the East End, having spent the night often beneath the sky, watching his float throughout the day with unremitting concentration.
The only two Surrey rivers of any consequence, the Wey and the Mole, rise in the Weald country and cut through the chalk ranges of the Northern
Downs on their journey to the Thames, precisely as the Sussex rivers cut through the South Downs on their passage to the sea. The Mole is a little river of character and considerable beauty. Rising in the neighbourhood of Redhill it burrows under the chalky heights of Box and so by Leatherhead, Cobham, and Esher to the Thames at Moulsey. Through so ornate a residential region, too, its streams are made the most of in many a pleasant lawn and grove, and by many a country mansion and villa. It runs quite a pace too, here and there over yellow gravel, and sometimes, as between Cobham and Esher, abandons the trammels of civilisation, and slips, in quite wanton fashion, through wild and tangled woodland. But this would bring us within the orbit of the great river-haunting public of the Metropolis, and the ever-widening circles which are part of it. As all mention of the Thames is eliminated from these pages as a subject at once too voluminous, too familiar in fact and in descriptive literature, its Surrey tributaries may fairly be left here to the accomplished brush of the artist.
Kent is less rich in rivers even than Sussex, though happier in the quality; of the only three of recognisable name it possesses the Medway, the Stour, and the Darenth. The latter, which rises at Westerham and flows through the chalk Downs northward to meet the Thames at Dartford, is a small stream with a sometimes swift current, more noted perhaps as a natural trout stream among anglers than on any other account, Farningham having been a well-known tryst of many famous fly-fishermen in days when locomotion was less easy than now. But the Medway is the most important of Kentish rivers, both for the length and quiet beauty of its inland reaches and the world-wide fame of its anchorage as it spreads out to meet the Thames. Rising on the borders of Sussex about Penshurst it flows north by three of the most important Kentish towns – Tonbridge, Maidstone, and Rochester – the last, of course, virtually including its straggling and busy neighbour of Chatham. A slow-running river always, the most representative and typical portion of the Upper Medway is the twelve miles or so between Tonbridge and Maidstone. For much of the distance it flows in a valley sufficiently narrow to display to singular advantage the richness of the steep slopes on either side, the country seats, the upstanding villages, the hop-fields, and the orchards. It runs, too, in sufficient volume to make a fine
broad trail in the valley, and be the occasion for several ancient stone bridges of many arches, such as complete the measure of a river’s beauty. From Yalding, where the little streams of the Teise and Beult – strange names for so homely a locality – come in, to Maidstone is the cream of the river. Indeed, till these three unite the Medway can hardly be said in the matter of size to challenge much attention. For a few miles below Maidstone it maintains somewhat the same characteristics till, broadening out under the influence of the tide at Aylesford, it begins its passage through the high walls of the North Downs. A curious passage it is, too: a struggle as it were between frequent groups of the tall chimneys of cement works belching out smoke, and scenery that before the modern industrial period arrived to smirch it, must have been singularly fine. For some half-dozen miles the river continues to roll through an ever-widening but necessarily contracted channel in a quite deep gorge, the Downs rising on either side to a height of five or six hundred feet. The last bridge is at Rochester, still around its Cathedral a quaint old town redolent of Dickens, with the contrasting clangour and pitiless prose of Chatham spreading, unsightly but significant, far over the heights, and looking down on the broad harbour into which the Medway, having achieved its passage through the range, now expands itself towards the Thames. The whole north fringe of Kent, as every one knows who has travelled the road from Canterbury to Rochester, or in other words the line of Watling Street, is a bleak, cheerless country to look upon; the more so, if the suggestion of paradox be permitted, because so highly cultivated. But looking northward from the high ground about Faversham or Sittingbourne one may forget this in the fine views over the Swale, and Sheppey Island, and the mouth of the Thames that are everywhere disclosed, and finest of all is that of the wide, island-studded estuary of the Medway in all its memorable significance.
What the Medway is to West Kent the Stour is to East Kent, though in most respects a very different type of river. From its source near Ashford to its mouth near Sandwich its characteristics are entirely and absolutely rural; a quality rather emphasised than otherwise by its picturesque progress through the famous old town of Canterbury. From Ashford to Canterbury is the pick of the Stour which makes the best of company for the traveller, who, whatever his method
of progress, must of necessity go with it. The village of Wye, clustering around its ancient church amid the fields through which the river runs, is a most prepossessing spot, and calls for notice as having acquired much deserved reputation of recent years as an active centre of agricultural science. Still but of modest size and running clear though slow, the Stour skirts the foot of Godmersham Park and the high hills that to the northward are clothed with forests still covering many thousands of acres. By meadowy and woodland ways, hurrying a little here and there as if to remind one that, unlike the Medway, it is a trout stream of old renown, the Stour runs onwards to Chilham where a little village rests on its banks that from an artistic point of view would do credit to Shakespeare’s Avon. Thence by Chartham, with its ancient church and less engaging paper-mill, the stream pursues an even course through narrow meadows, washing the lawn of Harton Manor, with its fourteenth-century chapel in the yard, and the grounds of Milton just below, with a similar interesting and curious survival attached to them; while in the woods high above Chartham the “Pilgrims’ way” to Canterbury can still be traced with ease between its well-defined banks.
The Stour has certainly a high distinction in watering the earliest shrine of English Christianity, and being at its mouth the landing-place of St. Augustine, the creator of it. It traverses in two channels, made picturesque either by carefully tended foliage or fortuitous rows of old ho