(8 May-26 June 1856)
Eliot and Lewes set off for a holiday in Ilfracombe on 8 May 1856. One reason for the trip was Lewes’s persistent ill-health, ‘that terrible singing in the ears which has never left him since the commencement of his illness two years ago’ (Letters, Vol. II, p. 253). But Lewes was perhaps more concerned to observe specimens of marine life at first hand, thus disproving T. H. Huxley’s criticism that he was merely a ‘book-scientist’ (Life, pp. 195–7). According to Haight, he wanted, through ‘the observation and dissection of marine animals, to try to discover some of the “complex facts of life” ’.
For Lewes, the fruit of the visit was his Seaside Studies (1858). For Eliot, it afforded an opportunity to work on articles for the Westminster (including ‘The Natural History of German Life’) and the Leader. More importantly, she had time to consider John Ruskin’s ideas about ‘realism’, which she had recently encountered in his Modern Painters, Vol. III, and which permeate her account of the visit. As she wrote, ‘I never before longed so much to know the names of things as during this visit to Ilfracombe. The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas.’
RECOLLECTIONS OF ILFRACOMBE, 1856
It was a cold unfriendly day – the eighth of May on which we set out for Ilfracombe, with our hamper of tall glass jars, which we meant for our sea-side Vivarium. We had to get down at Windsor, and were not sorry that the interval was long enough to let us walk round the Castle, which I had never seen before, except from a distance. The famous ‘slopes’, the avenues in the Park and the distant landscape looked very lovely in the fresh and delicate greens of Spring, and the Castle is surely the most delightful royal residence in the world. We took our places from Windsor all the way to Exeter, having bravely made up our minds to do the greatest part of our journey in one day. At Bristol, where we had to wait three hours, the misery of my terrible headache was mitigated by the interest we felt in seeing the grand old church of St Mary Redcliffe, for ever associated with the memory of Chatterton –
It stands the maestrie of a human hand
The pride of Bristowe and the western land.1
For the rest, Bristol looked dismal enough to us: a compound of dingy streets, bad smells, and dreary waiting at a dirty Railway Station.
At last the time came for the train to set off and after a short journey we reached Exeter Station where we were delighted to find that we could get beds, and so save the drive into the town. The next morning before the hour of starting for Barnstaple, we had time for a stroll in the sunshine as far as the town. The country round looked lovely. A fine hilly road bordered by tall trees led us towards the higher part of the town, which commenced, like a cathedral town, with a row of gothic almshouses on one side and park-like grounds, probably belonging to the episcopal residence, on the other. Our object was to get to the Cathedral; and after inquiring our way for a little while along clean, cheerful-looking streets, we found a narrow, flagged side-street which led us into the pleasant square, shaded by tall trees and surrounded by quaintish houses, where stands the fine old temple with its two great square towers. The façade is extremely elaborate and the arch of the doorway especially beautiful; but the rest of the exterior is heavy, and even the façade is spoiled by the gable being so low as to hide part of the rosace window and give the whole roof the appearance of having been cut down from below. However, the two towers, though rather heavy in shape, are very exquisite in the grace and moderation of their ornamental detail. As we passed the door it was ajar and we peeped in across the locked gate which shut out free entrance. The interior seemed very fine, but our glimpse was interrupted by the approach of the hard, dry-looking woman that alternates as key-keeper with the oily sexton in English cathedrals. ‘Can we see the Cathedral?’ I said. ‘Yes, I can show you the Cathedral.’ We declined to be ‘shown’ and walked on, taking a few more glances at the pleasant streets. One interesting object we passed on our way was a very old bit of building, apparently Saxon, which appeared to be used as a Police Station. Back again to the Railway in the sunshine, with the birds singing about the hedges. The journey to Barnstaple lay through a charming country; – gently sloping hills, roads winding by the side of hanging woods, little streams, and here and there patches of grey houses.
At Barnstaple we said good bye to the Railway and took to the good old-fashioned stage coach. A great fuss, of course, in getting all the luggage on the top, and all the people settled inside and out. I foolishly chose to go inside, being headachy, and had for my companions, a pale, thin, affected lady, and a reddish, stout, affected lady. G. had a pleasanter journey outside, and won golden opinions from the thin lady’s husband and daughter, whose name turned out to be Webster. I was not sorry when our coach rattled and swung up the hilly street of Ilfracombe and stopped at the door of the ‘Clarence Hotel’.
Our next task was to find lodgings, and we went forthwith to look for Mrs Williams of Northfield, whom Gosse recommends in his Devonshire Coast.2 The reasons for his recommendation were not very patent to us when we saw the shabby ill-furnished parlour and bedroom, so we determined to go a little farther and fare better, if possible. At this spot, called Northfield, the beauty of Ilfracombe burst upon us, though we had as yet no glimpse of the sea and no idea – at least I had none – in which direction it lay.
On our left were gracefully sloping green hills, on our right the clustering houses, and beyond, hills with bold, rocky sides. Walking on a few yards to the right, we came to a pretty house with a veranda, surrounded by a nice garden, with a carriage road up to the door. A notice at the gate told us it was Runnymede Villa and moreover that it was ‘to let’, but we thought it was far too smart and expensive a dwelling for us. However there could be no harm in asking, so we knocked at the door, and were shown by a pleasant-looking young woman into a drawing-room, where we remained to admire and long while she went to ask her mother the rent. The mother came, and we found to our great satisfaction that we could have this large double drawing-room for a guinea a week during May and a guinea and a half in June. Before we had decided, another knock came at the door – it was our travelling companion Mr Webster, who had also been attracted by the pretty outside of the house. The end was, that we took the drawing-room with the bedroom and dressing room above, and the Websters – that is, the wife and daughter, for the husband was to be always away on business except on short fly away visits – took the dining-room on the other side. Having deposited our luggage,3 and ordered our thé dinatoire, we set out in search of the sea, and were directed to the ‘Tunnels’ – three long passages cut in the rock. At the end of the first we turned down. We passed through them all and came upon the most striking bit of coast I had ever beheld – steep, precipitous rocks behind and on each side of us, and before us sharply-cut fragments of dark rock jutting out of the sea for some distance beyond the land, for the tide was now approaching its height. We were in raptures with this first look, but could only stay long enough to pick up a few bits of coralline, which, novices as we were, we supposed to be polyps.
It was cheering the next morning to get up with a head rather less aching, and to walk up and down the little garden after breakfast in the bright sunshine. I had a great deal of work before me – the writing of an article on Riehl’s books,4 which I had not half read, as well as the article on belles lettres – but my head was still dizzy and it seemed impossible to sit down to writing at once in these new scenes, so we determined to spend the day in explorations.
There can hardly be an uglier town – an uglier cluster of human nests lying in the midst of beautiful hills, than Ilfracombe. The colour of the houses is the palest dingiest grey, and the lines are all rectangular and mean. Overtopping the whole town in ugliness as well as height are two ‘Terraces’, which make two factory-like lines of building on the slope of the green hill. From our windows we had a view of the higher part of the town, and generally it looked uninteresting enough; but what is it that light cannot transfigure into beauty? One evening, after a shower, as the sun was setting over the sea behind us, some peculiar arrangement of clouds threw a delicious evening light on the irregular cluster of houses and merged the ugliness of their forms in an exquisite flood of colour – as a stupid person is made glorious by a noble deed. A perfect rainbow arched over the picture.
Walking on from our gate towards Wildersmouth – a little opening in the hills which allows one to wet one’s feet in the sea without descending a precipice or groping through a tunnel – we got a view of the lower part of the town, and turning up a pleasant foot-path to our right we were led on past a dissenting chapel, and then past a new church which is being built, into the streets that lead immediately to the quay, where we see the physical-geographical reason why Ilfracombe was built here and nowhere else. Returning from the quay, we entered the promenade round the Capstone, which has been made at great expense since Ilfracombe became a place for visitors. From this end of the Capstone we have an admirable bit for a picture. In the background rises old Hillsborough jutting out far into the sea – rugged and rocky as it fronts the waves, green and accessible landward; in front of this stands Lantern Hill, a picturesque mass of green and grey surmounted by an old bit of building that looks as if it were the habitation of some mollusc that had secreted its shell from the material of the rock; and quite in the foreground, contrasting finely in colour with the rest are some lower perpendicular rocks, of dark brown tints patched here and there with vivid green. In hilly districts, where houses and clusters of houses look so tiny against the huge limbs of Mother Earth one cannot help thinking of man as a parasitic animal – an epizoon making his abode on the skin of the planetary organism. In a flat country a house or a town looks imposing – there is nothing to rival it in height, and we may imagine the earth a mere pedestal for us. But when one sees a house stuck on the side of a great hill, and still more a number of houses looking like a few barnacles clustered on the side of a great rock, we begin to think of the strong family likeness between ourselves and all other building, burrowing house-appropriating and shell-secreting animals. The difference between a man with his house and a mollusc with its shell lies in the number of steps or phenomena interposed between the fact of individual existence and the completion of the building. Whatever other advantages we may have over molluscs and insects in our habitations, it is clear that their architecture has the advantage of ours in beauty – at least considered as the architecture of the species. Look at man in the light of a shellfish and it must be admitted that his shell is generally ugly, and it is only after a great many more ‘steps or phenomena’ that he secretes here and there a wonderful shell in the shape of a temple or a palace.
But it is time to walk on round the Capstone and return home by Wildersmouth. On clear days, I could see the Welsh Coast with the smoke of its towns very distinctly, and a good way southward the outline of Lundy Island. Mounting the Capstone, we had the best view of the whole town – the Quay, the High Street, and the old Church standing high up on the hill and looking very handsome with its three-gabled end. Our narrow path from Wildersmouth to Runnymede Villa led us by the side of a miniature river, the Wilder, which of course empties itself at Wildersmouth into the sea. It was always a fresh pleasure to me to look at this clear little stream, fringed with Veronica and Stellaria.
About five o’clock, the tide being then low, we went out on our first zoophyte hunt. The littoral zone at Ilfracombe is nothing but huge boulders and jutting rocks of granwacke or clay slate, which when not made slippery by sea-weed are not very difficult to scramble over. It is characteristic enough of the wide difference there is between having eyes and seeing, that in this region of sea-anemones, where the Mesembryanthemum especially is as ‘plenty as blackberries’, we climbed about for two hours without seeing one anemone, and went in again with scarcely anything but a few stones and weeds to put into our deep well-like jars, which we had taken the trouble to carry in a hamper from London, and which we had afterwards the satisfaction of discovering to be quite unfit for our purpose. On our next hunt, however, after we had been out some time, G. exclaimed, ‘I see an anemone!’ and we were immensely excited by the discovery of this little red Mesembryanthemum, which we afterwards disdained to gather as much as if it had been a nettle. It was a crescendo of delight when we found a ‘Strawberry’, and a fortissimo when I for the first time saw the pale fawn-coloured tentacles of an Anthea cereus viciously waving like little serpents, in a low tide pool. But not a polyp for a long, long while could even G. detect after all his reading; so necessary is it for the eye to be educated by objects as well as ideas. When we put our anemones into our glass wells, they floated topsy-turvy in the water and looked utterly uncomfortable; and I was constantly called upon to turn up my sleeve and plunge in my arm up to the elbow to set things right. But after a few days, G. adventurously made a call on the Curate Mr Tugwell,5 of whom we had heard as a collector of anemones and he returned to me not only with the announcement that Mr Tugwell was a very ‘nice little fellow’, and with three treasures – an Eolis pellucida, a Doris billomellata, and an Aplysia, the first of each genus I had ever seen – but also with new light as to glass jars. So we determined to dismiss our deep wells, and buy some moderately-sized jars with shoulders to them. We had before this found out that yellow pie-dishes were the best artificial habitat for Actiniæ.
It was a considerable stretch to my knowledge of animal forms to pay a visit to Hele’s shop, which lies in a quiet pleasant little nook at the back of the dissenting chapel opposite Wildersmouth. Hele gets his bread now by collecting marine animals and sending them to Lloyd6 in London, and he has a sweet-faced intelligent daughter who goes out with him collecting and manages the stock on hand. The first time we went there, they had a fine show of the Actinia crassicornis and a Gemacea, some Holothuriæ (the first I had ever seen) and the green Anthea cereus, which was new to me. But I had a still greater addition to my knowledge when G. went to Mort Stone with Mr Tugwell and Mr Broderie and brought home several varieties of polyps, which I had gathered a very imperfect conception of from books – Tubularian, Plumularian and Sertularian – exquisite little Eolides, and some compound Ascidians. Indeed, every day I gleaned some little bit of naturalistic experience, either through G.’s calling on me to look through the microscope or from hunting on the rocks; and thus in spite of my preoccupation with my article, which I worked at considerably à contre-cœur, despairing of its ever being worth anything.
When at last, by the seventeenth of June both my articles were dispatched, I felt delightfully at liberty and determined to pay some attention to sea-weeds which I had never seen in such beauty as at Ilfracombe. For hitherto I had been chiefly on chalky and sandy shores where there were no rock-pools to show off the lovely colours and forms of the Algæ. There are tide-pools to be seen almost at every other step on the littoral zone at Ilfracombe, and I shall never forget their appearance when we first arrived there. The Corallina officinalis was then in its greatest perfection, and with its purple pink fronds threw into relief the dark olive fronds of the Laminariæ on one side and the vivid green of the Ulva and Enteromorpha on the other. After we had been there a few weeks the Corallina was faded and I noticed the Mesogloia vermicularis and the M. virescens, which look very lovely in the water from the white cilia which make the most delicate fringe to their yellow-brown whip like fronds, and some of the commoner Polysiphoniæ. But I had not yet learned to look for the rarer Rhodospermiæ under the olive and green weeds at the surface. These tide-pools made one quite in love with sea-weeds, in spite of the disagreeable importunity with which they are made to ask us from shop-windows – ‘Call us not weeds’, so I took up Landsborough’s book7 and tried to get a little more light on their structure and history.
Our zoological expeditions alternated with delicious inland walks. I think the country looked its best when we arrived. It was just that moment in Spring when the trees are in full leaf, but still keep their delicate varieties of colouring and that transparency which belongs only to this season. And the furze was in all its golden glory! I never saw it in such abundance as here; over some hills the air is laden with its scent, and the gorgeous masses of blossom perpetually invited me to gather them as the largest possible specimens. It was almost like the fading away of the evening red when the furze blossoms died off from the hills, and the only contrast left was that of the marly soil with the green crops and woods. The primroses were the contemporaries of the furze and sprinkled the sides of the hills with their pale stars almost as plentifully as daisies or buttercups elsewhere. Perhaps the most enchanting of all our walks was that to Lee, because we had the double beauties of rocky coast and wooded inland hill. Lee is a tiny hamlet which has lodged itself, like a little colony of Aurora actiniœ, in the nick between two ranges of hills, where the sea runs in and makes a miniature bay. From the hills we have to pass over in reaching it, there is an exquisite view on looking back towards Ilfracombe: first the green slopes forming the inland aspect of the Tors, which always reminded me of some noble animal that has reared itself on its fore-legs to look at something, powerfully arresting its attention – as if the land had lifted itself up in amazed contemplation of the glorious sea; then Ilfracombe, at the meeting of many hills, with the graceful green Capstone Hill, surmounted by its Flag staff, and beyond it Hillsborough with its crag of rich, violet-veiled brown, standing like a rugged grand old warrior being played with by that capricious beauty the sea; while in the farther distance the sombre Hangman lifts its round, blackened shoulder, softened too with a violet veil, but of a different tone from that of Hillsborough. Another picture of a smaller kind was a single crag sloping in a very obtuse angle towards the sea and sheltering a little sandy bay where the gulls are fond of resting. We saw it once in the bright Sunday evening light, when there was a nice platform of sand for the gulls, and the colour of the cliff was a blue violet.
Turning again towards Lee and pursuing our walk, we come at last in sight of the dip or valley in which the hamlet lies. The wooded hills that slope down towards it on the farther side were not yet of a monotonous summer green when we first saw them, and their sister hills were glowing with furze blossoms. Down and down we go until we get into the narrow road or lane that winds through the valley. Here we see an ornamental cottage or two as well as genuine cottages, and close by the side of the road a tiny gothic chapel where our nice Mr Tugwell preaches every Sunday. But the great charm of this road, as of all Devonshire lanes, is the springs that you detect gushing in shady recesses covered with liverwort, with here and there waving tufts of fern and other broad leaved plants that love obscurity and moisture. Springs are sacred places still for those who love and reverence Nature. The first time we went to Lee we thought of varying our walk by returning through Slade, but we somehow lost our way and found ourselves after a long journey at a parting of the road where we were in utter uncertainty which way to turn for Ilfracombe. There was no fingerpost, no men near enough to shout to, so we could only adopt Corporal Nym’s philosophy8 – say ‘Things must be as they may’, and prove the existence of free will by making a choice without a motive. At last we came in sight of a lone farm-house, and I waited at the gate while G. went to inquire. After considerable knocking, a woman put her head reluctantly out of an upper window and after some parleying conveyed the half-comforting, half-distracting information that we were on the right way for Ilfracombe, but were still tu mile away from it. It requires some desperate courage to make these interrogatory visits to lone farm-houses, for you are likely to get a prompt but not categorical answer to your questions from a great dog who protects the premises in the absence of the males.
Our next long walk was to Chambercombe – a name apparently belonging to some woods and a solitary farmhouse, for we could see nothing else except fields. G. found out this walk one day and then took me there one lovely, sunshiny day. The chief beauties of the walk began when we arrived at a gate leading into a farm-yard which forms a sort of ganglion to two lanes branching from it. Close to this gate there is a spring which is a perfect miniature of some Swiss ‘Falls’. It spreads itself like a crystal fan on successive ledges of the hedge-bank until it reaches a much broader ledge where it forms a little lake on a bed of brown pebbles; then down it goes again till it reaches the level of the road and runs along as a tiny river. What a picture this farm-yard remains in my memory! The cows staring at us with formidable timidity, such as I have sometimes seen in a human being who frightens others while he is frightened himself; and the cow-man who pointed out our way to us through the next gate. Just beyond this gate there was a little widening in the lane – several gateways occurring together and here the wild verdure and flowers of the hedgerow and the roadside seemed to take the opportunity of becoming more luxuriant than usual. A few rough trunks lying against the tufts of fern and a quiet donkey made the bit perfect as a foreground, and close behind it rose a steep hill half orchard and half grass. The first time we took this walk the primroses were still abundant, but they were beginning to be eclipsed by the other flowers of the hedgerow. As we advanced along this lane chatting happily and gathering flowers we could see before us the overlapping hills covered by the Chambercombe woods. At length we came to a spot where a brook runs across the lane and a little wooden bridge is provided for foot-passengers. A rough hurdle is fixed up where the brook gushes from the field into the lane over brown stones that the water polishes into agate; against the little bridge there is a tree, and all round its roots by the side of the brook there are tufts of varied leafage. Over the bridge and through a little gate and you approach another farm-yard – if it is large enough for so dignified a name. There is a small shabby house, with broken windows mended with rags, called the Haunted House, and from the yard there suddenly rises a rough hill clothed with trees and brushwood. A great awkward puppy which came flopping after us was always an incident at this yard as we passed it. On and on, looking at the fields and woods, until we came to a shady spot which tempted us to sit down. G. smoked a cigar and we looked at the sunlight living like a spirit among the branches of the hanging woods – looked too at a caterpillar which happened to be spending its transitional life, happily knowing nothing of transitions, on the bush beside us. Then we walked on towards the wood and threaded our way under its low branches, listening to the birds and the dash and ripple of water, until we came to the water itself – a streamlet running between the hills, and winding its way among the trees while the sunlight made its way between the leaves and flashed on the braided ripples. Here and everywhere about Ilfracombe the base of the trees and the banks of the lanes are made peculiarly lovely by a delicate trefoil. As we came home again the sea, stretching beyond the massive hills towards the horizon, looked all the finer to us because we had been turning our backs upon it, and contemplating another sort of beauty.
Of other walks by and by, when I have said something of our evenings, and other Ilfracombe experience. We seemed to make less of our evenings here than we have ever done elsewhere. We used often to be tired with our hunting or walking and we were reading books which did not make us take them up very eagerly – Gosse’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast,9 for example; Trench’s Calderon;10 and other volumes taken up in a desultory way. One bit of reading we had there, however, which interested me deeply. It was Masson’s Life of Chatterton, which happily linked itself with the impressions I had received from the sight of the old church at Bristol. An hour of the evening light used often to slip away in attention to our animals. This helped to make our reading time scanty; and another distraction was an occasional visit to Mrs and Miss Webster – a visit always made agreeable by music. I enjoyed playing to them, because G. seemed to like it as well as they.
On the twenty-ninth of May, of course, Ilfracombe set itself to work to rejoice by royal command, at the ratification of the Peace,11 and we expected to be considerably amused by the spectacle of the Ilfracombe festivities. Pretty, bright little Mrs Ashwell, our hostess’s daughter, helped her brother to make a grand maypole of coloured streamers floating among boughs of laburnum, which was hoisted on the roof of the house, and at 4 o’clock, she told us, she was to go and help make tea which was to be given in the High Street to the working people. So at 4 o’clock, we walked to the High Street, which seemed a chaos of people and tables. Here and there tea was really going on: pretty children were seated with their mug in one hand and their piece of cake in the other, and near them we saw Mrs Ashwell looking red hot in a primrose-coloured bonnet. Passing along the High Street, we met a cavalcade mounting the hill, which, I suppose, was intended to symbolize the Allied Armies – four or five men in miscellaneous uniforms mounted on Rosinantes.12 After a turn or two on the Capstone we came back again to the High Street to see the festivities in a more advanced stage. The melancholy foot-races of the boys suggested the idea that they were conducted on the principle of the donkey races – the slowest boy winning. At all events at Ilfracombe ‘the race is not to the swift’.13 In the evening there were some feeble fire-works on the Capstone, and, what was better, bonfires on Hillsborough and the highest of the Tors. It was fine to see these bonfires flashing upwards and then gradually dying out, and made one think of the times when such fires were lighted as signals to arm – the symbol of a common cause and a common feeling.
Another bit of primitive provincial life which used to amuse us were the announcements of the Town crier. On one occasion, for example, he came to inform us, with supererogatory aspirates, that ‘Hironsides, the American Wonder’ would start from the London Inn, and walk so many miles in so many minutes, carrying tremendous weights during the last mile. A graver announcement was the fact of two burglaries having been committed, and we never heard that the offenders had been discovered during our stay.
Mr Tugwell’s acquaintance was a real acquisition to us, not only because he was a companion and helper in zoological pursuits, but because to know him was to know of another sweet nature in the world. It is always good to know, if only in passing, a charming human being – it refreshes one like flowers, and woods and clear brooks. One Sunday evening we walked up to his pretty house to carry back some proofs of his, and he induced us to go in and have coffee with him. He played on his Harmonium and we chatted pleasantly. The last evening of our stay at Ilfracombe he came to see us in Mrs Webster’s drawing-room, and we had music until nearly 11 o’clock. A pleasant recollection!
We only twice took the walk beyond Watermouth towards Berry Narbor. The road lies through what are called the ‘Meadows’, which look like a magnificent park. A stream fringed with wild flowers and willows runs along the valley, two or three yards from the side of the road. This stream is clear as crystal, and about every twenty yards it falls over a little artificial precipice of stones. The long grass was waving in all the glory of June before the mower has come to make it suffer a ‘love-change’ from beauties into sweet odours; and the slopes on each side of us were crowned or clothed with fine trees. Little Gyp, Mrs Webster’s dog, whom we had made our pet, was our companion in this walk, exciting, as usual, a sensation among the sheep and lambs with his small person, and giving us strong hints to move on when we rested a little too long for his taste. The last time we went through these meadows was on our last day at Ilfracombe. Such sunlight and such deep peace on the hills and by the stream! Coming back we rested on a gate under the trees, and a blind man came up to rest also. He told us in his slow way what a fine ‘healthy spot’ this was – yes a very healthy spot – a healthy spot. And then we went on our way and saw his face no more.
More frequently we walked only as far as Watermouth – and this was a grand walk – over the edges of tall cliffs, revealing to us one inlet after another, each differing in its shades of colour. The limit of our walk was usually somewhere near a handsome castellated house belonging to Mr Basset, and standing near the little arm of the sea which I suppose is properly ‘Watermouth’, so that he has two very different kinds of beauty from his windows – the sea and the bold rocks, and the charming valley of Meadows, with their rippling stream.
One more favourite walk I must record. It was along the Braunton Road for a little way; then we turned up a lane which led us by the cemetery and here just where a clear brook (where is there not a clear brook in Devonshire?) the lane brought us to a gateway leading into a wood. And now we could either take a steep road leading up the hill among the trees until we came out where this same road formed a belt below the furze covered summit of the hill; or we could go right on along the lane that skirted the wood until we came to another gateway leading into another wood, which clothed another hill. Skirting this second wood, we had a ravine below us on our right hand, and could hear the music of the brook at the bottom. The sides of this ravine were feathered with the light, graceful boughs of the ash occasionally thrown into relief by the darker oak. On and on, till we came to a turn on our left, and mounted a very steep road where the wood ceases and we had on one side a wall starred with the delicate pink flowers of a lovely rock plant and on the other some picturesque broken ground. From the breezy field at the top we had a fine view, and G. took advantage of the freedom from the criticism of neighbouring ears to have a lusty shout.
One day we carried out our project of approaching the ravine from the Braunton road, and attempting to walk along it close by the stream. Just about the spot where this ravine begins there is a cottage which seems to be a tributary to a rather important looking farm-house standing near. As we approached this cottage, we were descried by a black pig, probably of an amiable and sociable disposition. But as unfortunately our initiation in porcine physiognomy was not deep enough to allow any decisive inferences, we felt it an equivocal pleasure to perceive that piggie had made up his mind to join us in our walk without the formality of an introduction. So G. put himself in my rear and made intimations to piggie that his society was not desired, and though very slow to take a hint, he at last turned back and we entered the path by the stream among the brushwood, not without some anxiety on my part lest our self-elected companion should return. Presently a grunt assured us that he was on our traces; G. resorted in vain to hishes, and, at last, instigated as he says by me, threw a stone and hit piggie on the chop. This was final. He trotted away, squealing, as fast as his legs would carry him; but my imagination had become so fully possessed with fierce pigs and the malignity of their bite, that I had no more peace of mind until we were fairly outside the gate that took us out of piggie’s haunts. G.’s peace of mind was disturbed for another reason: he was remorseful that he had bruised the cheek of a probably affectionate beast, and the sense of this crime hung about him for several days. I satisfied my conscience by thinking of the addition to the pig’s savoir-vivre that might be expected from the blow; he would in future wait to be introduced.
I have talked of the Ilfracombe lanes without describing them, for to describe them one ought to know the names of all the lovely wild flowers that cluster on their banks. Almost every yard of these banks is a ‘Hunt’14 picture – a delicious crowding of mosses and delicate trefoil, and wild strawberries, and ferns great and small. But the crowning beauty of the lanes is the springs, that gush out in little recesses by the side of the road – recesses glossy with liverwort and feathery with fern. Sometimes you have the spring when it has grown into a brook, either rushing down a miniature cataract by the lane side, or flowing gently, as a ‘braided streamlet’ across your path. I never before longed so much to know the names of things as during this visit to Ilfracombe. The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas. The mere fact of naming an object tends to give definiteness to our conception of it – we have then a sign that at once calls up in our minds the distinctive qualities which mark out for us that particular object from all others.
We ascended the Tors only twice; for a tax of 3d. per head was demanded on this luxury, and we could not afford a sixpenny walk very frequently. On both occasions Mr Webster was with us – on the second, Mr Tugwell and Alice Webster, so that I associate the walk rather with conversation than with scenery. Yet the view from the Tors is perhaps the very finest to be had at Ilfracombe. Bay behind bay fringed with foam, and promontory behind promontory each with its peculiar shades of purple light – the sweep of the Welsh Coast faintly visible in the distance, and the endless expanse of sea flecked with ships stretching on our left.
One evening we went down to the shore through the Tunnels to see the sunset. Standing in the ‘Ladies’ Cove’ we had before us the sharp fragments of rock jutting out of the waves and standing black against the orange and crimson sky. How lovely to look into that brilliant distance and see the ship on the horizon seeming to sail away from the cold and dim world behind it right into the golden glory! I have always that sort of feeling when I look at sunset; it always seems to me that there, in the west, lies a land of light and warmth and love.
On the twenty-sixth of June it was that we said good bye to Ilfracombe and started by the steamer at 9 o’clock for Swansea, where we had to wait three hours before going on by railway to Narberth Road, on our way to Tenby. Swansea looked dismal and smelt detestably, but we had one sight there quite worth the annoyance of waiting. It was the sight of two ‘cockle women’, who would make a fine subject for a painter. One of them was the grandest woman I ever saw – six feet high, carrying herself like a Greek Warrior, and treading the earth with unconscious majesty. They wore large woollen shawls of a rich brown, doubled lengthwise, with the end thrown back again over the left shoulder so as to fall behind in graceful folds. The grander of the two carried a great pitcher in her hand, and wore a quaint little bonnet set upright on her head. Her face was weather beaten and wizened, but her eyes were bright and piercing and the lines of her face, with its high cheek-bones, strong and characteristic. The other carried her pitcher on her head, and was also a fine old woman, but less majestic in her port than her companion. The guard at the railway told us that one of the porters had been insolent the other day to a cockle woman, and that she immediately pitched him off the platform into the road below!
Tenby, 22 July 1856.