A Book of the West. Volume I Devon

Wolborough has a good church occupying a site that was once a camp, and contains an excellent screen, well restored and glittering with gold and colour. East Ogwell has also a screen, and the old manor mill is a picturesque object for the pencil. Denbury is a strong camp.

Torbrian, situated in a lovely spot, has fine screenwork and monuments of the Petres. The three Wells, Coffinswell, Kingskerswell, and Abbotskerswell, lie together. At Kingskerswell are some old monumental effigies of the Prowse family. At Abbotskerswell are a screen, and a large statue of the Blessed Virgin in a niche of the window splay. This latter had been plastered over into one great bulk; when the plaster was removed the statue was revealed. The very fine Jacobean altar-rails were removed at the "restoration," to make place for something utterly uninteresting. Here there is an early and interesting church-house. The church-house was the building in which the parishioners from a distance spent a rainy time between morning service and vespers. The house was divided by a floor into two storeys, that above for women, that below for the men. Here were also held the church ales, that is to say, the ale brewed by the wardens and sold to defray church expenses. The ale was also supplied on Sundays by the clerk to those who tarried for evensong, and so, little by little, most of these old church-houses degenerated into taverns.

Abbotskerswell is the seat of the Aller pottery art manufacture, started by the late Mr. John Phillips, with the object of providing the village young men with remunerative work at their own homes. But about this presently. The story of the inception of the work is interesting.

Coffinswell still possesses its holy well, that is called the "Lady Well," used by young girls for fortune-telling.

At some little distance from this spring lies a nameless grave in unconsecrated ground, where is buried a lady banished holy ground for her sins. Every New Year's morn, after the stroke of midnight, she rises and takes "one cock's stride" towards the churchyard, which, when she reaches, she will find rest, and her hope is to be found therein – at the crack of doom.

The three well-parishes lie about the stream of the Aller (W. allwy, to pour forth, to stream), that flows into the Teign below Newton Abbot. But it was not always so. At some remote period, when the great Dartmoor peaks "stood up and took the morning," far higher than they do now, the mountain torrents that swept the detritus of quartz from Hey Tor and Rippon Tor not only filled the lake of Bovey with pure white china clay, till they had converted a basin into a plain, but they also poured between red sandstone and limestone cliffs into the sea at Torbay. Then came a convulsion of nature; these latter formations rose as a wall across the bed of the torrent, and the spill of the granite upland passed down the Teign valley. Then the little Aller was formed of the drainage of the combes of the upraised barrier, and, blushing at its insignificance, it stole through the ancient bottom, cutting its modest way through the beds of quartz clay left by the former occupant of the valley, and, of course, flowing in a direction precisely the reverse of the former flood. The deposits of the earlier stream remain in all the laps of the hills and folds of the valley. They consist of quartz clay, somewhat coloured by admixture of the later rocks that have been fretted by lateral streams.

The first to discover these beds were the gipsies. They were our early potters. These wandering people were wont to camp wherever there was clay, and wood suitable for baking the clay. They set their rude wheels to work, and erected their equally primitive kilns, and spent one half the year in making pots, and the other half in vending them from place to place. When the wood supply was exhausted, then the Bohemians set up their potteries on another spot that commended itself to them, to be again deserted when the wood supplies failed once more.

The reason why the potteries at Burslem and elsewhere in Staffordshire have become permanent is, that there the coal is ready at hand, and that there the native population has taken the trade out of the desultory hands of the gipsies, and has worked at it persistently, instead of intermittently. The old stations, the rude kilns, the heaps of broken and imperfectly baked crocks of the ancient potters, are often come upon in the woods of Aller vale, and among the heather and gorse brakes of Bovey Heathfield.

The Aller vale opens into the Teign, as already said, below Newton Abbot, and extends about four miles south to the village of Kingskerswell, that stands on the crest of the red rocky barrier which diverted the course of the flood from Dartmoor. A branch of the valley to the west terminates at a distance of two miles at the picturesque village of Abbotskerswell, and another branch to the east leads up to the village of Coffinswell. The deepest deposit of clay is at the point where the three parishes converge.

Just nineteen years ago the idea of an art school was mooted in the district. It was enthusiastically taken up by the village doctor at Kingskerswell, in association with an institute for the labourers and young men of the parish, and after a little difficulty he succeeded in getting hold of some premises for the purpose. This earnest-hearted and energetic man, Dr. Symons, did not live to see more than the initiation of his scheme. By many the idea of an art school among village bumpkins was viewed with mistrust, even with disfavour. It was argued, and with truth, that art schools had been started in country towns, and had failed to reach a class below the middle order. Sons and daughters of artisans and labourers would have none of it. Such had been the experience in Newton, such in Torquay. If the intelligent artisan of the town turned his back on the art school, was it likely that Hodge would favour it? When people have satisfied their minds that a certain venture is doomed to failure, they are very careful not to lend their names to it, nor to put out their finger-tips to help it in any way. It was so in this case.

The managers of the Board School, when asked to lend the room for the purpose, refused it. The promoters, failing in every other direction, turned to a poor widow left with two sons, struggling hard to keep soul and body together in a modest "cob" (clay-walled) cottage with thatched roof. She was asked the loan of her kitchen, a room measuring 21 feet by 18 feet, lighted by two small latticed windows, with low open-boarded and raftered ceiling of unhewn timber. Glad to earn a few pence, she consented, and the art classes were started on a career of unexpected success.

The school of art began with a few pupils. A Sunday-school teacher persuaded his class to go to the art school, and perhaps to humour him, rather than with any anticipation of profit, the boys accepted the invitation. The widow's kitchen was whitewashed and clean. On the hearth a log fire blazed. A few simple pictures hung on the walls, and a scarlet geranium glowed in a pot in the window. A couple of trestles supported a plank for a table, and a pair of forms served to seat the pupils. The ploughboy, with his stiff fingers, was set to draw straight lines, and wonderful were his productions. The lines danced, trembled, wriggled, halted, then rushed off the page. They were crackers in their gyrations at first, and then rockets. By degrees the lines became less random, more subdued and purposeful, and finally a crow of delight proclaimed to the whole class that the curly-headed ploughboy had succeeded in producing a musical bar of five fairly parallel lines. Then, with both hands plunged into his pockets, young Hodge leaned back and went off into a roar of laughter. It had dawned on his mind that he could draw a line with a pencil on paper as true as he could with a ploughshare in a field. He had come to the school for a lark, and had found that the self-satisfaction acquired by the discovery of his powers was a lark better than he had expected. The question presented itself from the outset – How was the art school to be maintained? The fires must be kept in full glow, the lamps must be supplied with oil, the widow must be paid to clean her floor after the boys had brought over it the red mud from the lanes. As so much mistrust as to the advantage and prospect of success of the classes was entertained, it was from the first resolved by the promoters not to solicit subscriptions. The whole thing was to be self-supporting. This was represented to the pupils, and they readily accepted the situation. They undertook to organise and keep going through the winter a series of fortnightly entertainments; they would invite some outsiders, but for the most part they would do their best themselves to entertain. The evenings would be made lively with recitations, readings, and songs. Doubtful whether such performance would deserve a fixed charge for admission, the young fellows on putting their heads together determined to make none, but to hold a cap at the door when the "pleasant evening" was over, and let those who had been entertained show their appreciation as they chose.

These fortnightly cottage entertainments became a recognised institution and a source of profit, besides serving as a means of interesting and occupying the pupils. A thing that begins in a small way on right principles, a thing that "hath the seed in itself," is bound to succeed.

Adjoining the widow's cottage was another untenanted, like it consisting of a single apartment on the ground floor. It became necessary to rent this, knock a door through the wall, and combine the cottages. The second room was turned into a workshop, with a carpenter's bench and a chest of tools.

Out of the first art school in the one well-parish grew two others, one in each of the other well-parishes. Coffinswell has but a population of a hundred souls, nevertheless its art school has been frequented by as many as twelve pupils. Sixty is the highest number reached by the three together, which are now combined to maintain an efficient art instructor.

It fell out that a stoneware pottery in the Aller vale was burnt down in 1881, and when reconstructed the proprietor, who had cordially promoted the art classes, resolved on converting what had been a factory of drain and ridge tiles into a terra-cotta manufactory, in which some of the more promising pupils might find employ, and in which the knowledge and dexterity acquired in the class might be turned to practical uses. A single experienced potter was engaged, a gipsy, to start the affair, as there was no local tradition as to the manufacture of crocks upon which to go.

The classes were from the outset for boys and girls together, and though recently there has been a change in this arrangement, the young women coming in the afternoon, and the young men in the evening, this alteration has been made owing to increase of numbers, not in consequence of any rudeness or impropriety, for such there had not been in the ten years of the career of the school. In this case the experience has been precisely the same as that of the mixed schools and colleges of the United States.

There is one thing that a visitor to Torquay is certain to carry away with him if he has made excursions on foot about it – some of its red soil. The roads, in spite of the County Council, are bad, for the material of which they are made is soft. But what a soil it is for flowers and for fruit! Anything and everything will grow there and run wild. Stick a twig into the earth, and it is bound to grow. As for roses and violets, they run riot there. And, taken on the whole, the visitor who has been to Torquay is almost sure to carry away with him something beside the red mud, something quite as adhesive – pleasant memories of the place and its balmy air.

CHAPTER XVII.

TOTNES

The legend of Brutus – Derivation of the name – Castle – The charter – Old houses – Piazzas – The church – The screen – Dartington Hall – Little Hempston Rectory – Old gate – Priory – Berry Pomeroy.

What a pity it is that the dear old legends that lie at the root of history have been dissipated! That we can no longer believe in Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf – no, not even when the Lupercale remains on the side of the Palatine Hill, after the palaces of Augustus, of Tiberius, of Caligula, of Septimius Severus, have been levelled with the dust.

How cruel, too, that the delightful story of Alfred and the cakes, that also of Edwin and Elgiva, are relegated to the region of fables; that we are told there never was such a person as King Arthur, and that S. George for Merry England never was a gallant knight, and certainly slew no dragon, nor delivered fair maid!

Dust we are, but is it absolutely necessary that all human history, and the history of nature, should spring out of dust? that the events of the childhood of our race should have been all orderly and unromantic, as if every nationality had been bred in trimness as a Board School scholar? Now, what if we could believe that old gossiping – I am afraid I must add lying – historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth! Why, the transformation scene at a pantomime would be nothing to the blaze of wonders and romance in the midst of which the England of history steps on to the stage.

Ah! if we could but believe old Geoffrey, or the British book which he saw and translated, why, then, Totnes would be the most revered spot in England, as that where the first man set his foot when he landed in an uncultivated, unpeopled island. Is there not on the Palatine the Lupercale, the very den in which the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, to prove the tale? Are there not Arthur's Seats enough in Cornwall, Wales, Cumberland, Scotland, to show that there must have been an Arthur to sit in them? And is there not the stone in the high street of Totnes on which Brut, when he landed, set his foot to establish against all doubters the existence of Brut and the fact of his landing there?

The story is this.

As it fell upon a day there was a certain king called Sylvius in Italy, and when he was about to become a father he consulted a magician, who by the stars could tell all that was to be. Now this magician read that the child that was to be born to Sylvius would be the death of his father and mother.

In course of time the child was born, and at his birth his mother died. "He's a Brute," said King Sylvius, and so that was his name.

But King Sylvius did not have his child exposed to wild beasts; he gave it to be nursed by a good woman, who reared the "Brute" till he was fifteen.

Now it fell out that one day King Sylvius went a-hunting in the merry greenwood with horn and hounds, and the little "Brute," hearing the winding of the horn and the music of the hounds, picked up the bow he himself had made, and with the arrows he himself also had winged, forth he went to the chase. Alas! it so fell out that the first arrow he shot pierced his father's heart.

On this account Brute had to fly the country.

"And away he fared to the Grecian land,
With a hey! with a ho! and a nonny O!
And there he gathered a stalwart band,
And the ships they sail on the blue sea O!"

Now the mother of Brute had been a Trojan, so all the refugees, after the destruction of Troy, gathered about the young prince, and formed a large body of men. Brute took to wife Ignogne, daughter of Pandrasos, King of the Greeks, and resolved to sail away in quest of a new country. So the king, his father-in-law, gave him ships and lading, and he started. A fair wind swelled his sails, and he sailed over the deep blue sea till he reached a certain island called Loegria, which was all solitary, for it had been wasted by pirates. But Brute went on shore, and found an old deserted and ruinous temple, and there he lit three fires, and he sacrificed a white hart, and poured the blood mingled with wine on the broken altar, and he sang: —

"Sweet goddess above, in the light of love,
That high through the blue doth sail,
O tell me who rove in the woodland grove,
O tell me, and do not fail,
Where I shall rest – and thine altar dressed,
Shall finish this wandering tale."

These words he repeated nine times, after which he took four turns round the altar, and laid himself down on the skin of the white hart and fell asleep. About the third hour of the night he saw a beautiful form appear with the new moon in her hair, and a sceptre with the morning star shining on its point, and she said to him: —

"Far, far away in the ocean blue,
There lieth an island fair,
Which giants possessed, but of them are few
That linger to haunt it there.
O there shalt thou reign, in a pleasant plain
Shalt found thee a city rare,
From thee shall a line of heroes divine
Carry triumph everywhere."

When Brute woke he was much encouraged by the vision, and he returned to his ship, hoisted the mainsail, and away, away, before the wind the ship flew, throwing up foam from her bows, and leaving a track as milk in the sea behind. He passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and coasted up Aquitaine, and rounded the Cape of Finisterre, and at length, with a fair wind, crossed the sea, and came to the marble cliffs of Dunan Dyffnaint, the land of deep vales, and in the cliffs opened a great rift, down which flowed a beautiful river, and he sailed up it. And lo! on either side were green pastures spangled with buttercups, and forests of mighty oaks and beech, and over his head the white gulls screamed, and in the water the broad-winged herons dipped; and so he sailed, and before him rose a red cliff; and now the tide began to fall. So he ran his ship up against the cliff and leapt ashore, and where he leaped there his foot made its impress on the red rock, which remains even unto this day. Then, when Brute had landed, he sat himself down and said: —

"Here I sit, and here I rest,
And this town shall be called Totnes."

Which shows that Brute had not much idea of rhyme, nor of measure in his rhyme.

It must be told that the very spot where Brute sprang ashore is half-way up the hill from the river Dart, up which he sailed; but then the river was much fuller in those days, or men's legs were longer.

Totnes, in fact, occupies a promontory of red sandstone rock, round which the river not only winds, but anciently swept up a creek that ran for two miles. In fact there was a labyrinth of creeks there; one between Totnes and the sea, another between Totnes and the mainland, so that the town was accessible on one side only, and that side was strongly fortified by castle and earthworks. The creek to the south still fills with water; its mouth is below Sharpham, and the tide now rises only as far as Bow Bridge. Formerly it ran quite a mile further up. The town of Totnes, in fact, occupies one point alone in a ness or promontory that was formerly, when the tide rose, flushed with water on the three sides. It has, however, been supposed that the term Totnes applies to the whole of that portion of South Devon to the coast; some even assert to the whole peninsula of Devon and Cornwall. The creeks have silted up with the rich red mud, and with the washings from the tin mines on Dartmoor, to such an extent that the true ness character of the little district of Totnes and the villages of Ashprington and Harberton has not been recognised. It is a hilly district, and the clefts which formerly filled with water are natural dykes fortifying it.

The Ikenild Street, which was a British trackway, passed through Totnes, which is the old Durium of the Itineraries. The river Dart is the Dour, that comes out as Durium in Latin, and is simply the Celtic word for water. We have it again in Dorovernia, Dover, and in Dorchester, the castle or camp on the water.