The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

8. The Branch Line to Barnstaple

AMONG THE QUIET HILLS and meadows in the middle of Devon, this small train of three spruce coaches was the only moving object, and its harmless racket the only sound. It was one hour from end to end of the branch line, Exeter to Barnstaple, much of it along a stream called the River Taw, which the train crossed and recrossed. It was the last rural branch line in the shire.

Because it was a remnant, soon to be swept away, it was greatly favored by railway buffs. Their interest always seemed to me worse than indecent and their joy-riding a mild form of necrophilia. They were on board getting their last looks at the old stations, photographing the fluting and floriation, the pediments and bargeboards and pilasters, the valencing on the wooden awnings, the strapwork, and — in architecture every brick has a different name — the quoins. They knew that when the line was closed, like the four others that had once been joined to it, every beautiful station would be sold to anyone who could raise a mortgage to turn it into a bungalow for a boasting family.

It seemed odd to be inland after so much coast. I missed the drenching light, the sea boiling under the cliffs, the sound of surf on sand, which was like the sound of grieving. Here the landscape was motionless and silent, long low hills and withered villages — some were half-dead, like Copplestone, with its shut-down station and grass knee-deep on the platform. This branch line was old — finished in 1854—and it had always been useful. But it was faintly comic, as all country trains seemed as they jerked across the meadows and made the cows stare. This one was full of Bertie Wooster touches, especially in the names. It went through the Creedy Valley and on to Yeoford, Lapford, Eggesford, and Kings Nympton; Portsmouth Arms Station was actually a public house with a funereal saloon bar, and Umberleigh was probably the setting of Jeeves Lays an Egg. Now we were in the valley of the Taw. We rattled into Barnstaple, which was a slightly frumpish, down-at-heels town on both banks of the muddy river.

It was raining. The train passengers looked bored. But it was not boredom — it was the habitual patience that stiffened the English like a kind of hard glaze.

Our arrival made them talkative. Few risked the subject of the Falklands War; it was only after the most violent incidents that people discussed it. They talked cautiously about the weather, their children, their health. "It's the bugloss that gets me this time of year," Mrs. Badgworthy said. And her friend Joan said, "I do hope they have a dry fortnight in Majorca" — worrying about someone else's weather.

Barnstaple had become a sorry town. Once it had been a large railway junction, with three stations. Now it had only one station, and the line stopped dead, miles from the coast, leaving Barnstaple nowhere. It had a damp, haunted look that was partly dereliction and partly the result of the demolishing or conversion of its best buildings. Queen Anne's Walk, an elegant colonnade and building that had served as a riverside quay and bustling office for merchants and seamen for three hundred years, was now the Barnstaple Old People's Rest Centre — a worthy but melancholy end. It was a silted-up seaport at the end of a withering railway line.

For the first time in weeks I saw crowds of hikers. They were young, they looked healthy, they had orange rucksacks, many were Americans. They had no intention of lingering in Barnstaple; they were setting out for Clovelly and Hartland Point, and their numbers discouraged me from doing the same. I felt somewhat inhibited: I imagined many of them to be travel-writers, with knapsacks full of notes. They asked me intelligent probing questions. I ran into the hikers all over town — I was fair game: I had a knapsack, too, and oily shoes and a rain-spattered map. Where was I going? What was I doing? They asked for details I could not supply. I escaped to Ilfracombe, on the north coast.

The point about Ilfracombe, surely, was that it had not been designed for cars. It was a classic railway resort, with tall hotels and sloping streets. It had been built on a very steep hillside and was full of shifting perspectives of the Bristol Channel. There was a VACANCIES sign in every window. I could imagine people pouring out of the now-defunct Ilfracombe Station and heading for all those boardinghouses. In the twenties and thirties, Welshmen came by the thousands on the steam packets from across the water, and roistered up and down Ilfracombe, squandering their return fare on beer. It was a town for the stroller, not the driver. It was hard for cars to negotiate the streets, which were very steep and narrow; there was nowhere to park; and these hills made cars dangerous. Motor traffic had just about destroyed this dramatic seaside antique.

The dark clouds over Ilfracombe turned the grass on the great swollen headlands very green. Henry James had tiptoed around the town in 1872 and found it overplanned and a little gimcrack. He usually objected to the settled and bricked-up look of the English watering places, but in Ilfracombe he sighed when he saw the handrails and signboards and the old ladies and sheep, and he wished with all his heart for "something more pathless, more idle, more unreclaimed from… deep-bosomed nature." Of course, Ilfracombe now looked much more used and worn-out than it had then; but not far from it, and on many parts of the North Devon coast, it was easy to find deep-bosomed nature — just that, in fact, because the headlands were magnificent and bosomy and between them was always a steepness that the locals called a cleave.

I walked to Hele Bay and Watermouth Cove. They were wooded and full of pink and blue wildflowers. There were pale spring flowers everywhere. No one could tell me their names. I came to Big Meadow and saw a sign:

Welcome to Big Meadow!

Sorry: No Motorcycles

No Groups of Men

No Dogs

Combe Martin, farther on, was a small village on a rocky bay, in the shadow of two tall hills, the Little Hangman and the Great Hangman. As I walked into it, I could see the whole of it at the head of the bay — the houses, the bars, the hotels, the church — and then I was on its only street, strolling past the cottages. Their windows were open. At one I heard, "… seven more Argentine aircraft have been shot down" from a radio, and farther on, another radio saying that so far four hundred and fifty men had been killed in the Falklands' fighting.

I found a place to sleep, by traipsing through the town in my usual fashion and sizing up the likely places. I had a shower and dinner — a pollock caught a few hours ago off this coast, and apple and bilberry pie. There were English people in the dining room, talking in whispers about food in a shy hungry way as they ate.

It was in little country villages like Combe Martin that I saw the wildest and scruffiest youths, motorcyclists mostly — the sort banned from Big Meadow — who modeled themselves on Hell's Angels. I could not explain why they were most numerous in the prettiest villages in the countryside. They played pool in pubs with names like the Old Haymow and the Ploughman's Inn (these places now had jukeboxes and video machines), and they had tattoos and leather trousers and chains. They were the last people I expected to see in the depths of this countryfied coast, and it was oddest of all to see them, as I did in Combe Martin, drinking the local ale beside grizzled shepherds and fishermen. The commonest nighttime sound in the English coastal village, apart from the endlessly grieving surf, was that of the motorcycles farting down the main road at midnight.

The hotel people in Ilfracombe and Combe Martin said business was terrible this year. Last year was terrible too. They had never known it to be so bad. They had very few firm reservations.

Mr. Deedy at the Bull said, "See, no one wants to make plans ahead. They go on working. It's not only the money. They don't like to go away, because they don't know whether they'll have jobs to go back to."

Then "Falklands Special" was on television, and we dutifully trooped toward Mrs. Deedy's shout of "It's the news!" The news was very bad: more deaths, more ships sunk. But there was always great bewilderment among people watching the news, because there was never enough of it and it was sometimes contradictory. Why were there so few photographs of fighting? Usually it was reporters speaking of disasters over crackly telephones. The English seemed — in private — ashamed and confused, and regarded Argentina as pathetic, ramshackle, and unlucky, with a conscript army of very young boys. They hated discussing it, but they could talk all night on the subject of how business was bad.

"You just reminded me," Mrs. Deedy said. "The Smiths have canceled. They had that September booking. Mr. Smith rang this morning."

"Knickers," Mr. Deedy said.

"His wife died," Mrs. Deedy said.

"Oh?" Mr. Deedy was doubtful — sorry he had said knickers.

"She wasn't poorly," Mrs. Deedy said. "It was a heart attack."

Mr. Deedy relaxed at the news of the heart attack. It was no one's fault, really — not like a sickness or a crime. This was more a kind of removal.

"That's another returned deposit," Mrs. Deedy said. She was cross.

"That makes two so far," Mr. Deedy said. "Let's hope there aren't any more."

The next day I heard two tattling ladies talking about the Falklands. It was being said that the British had become jingoistic because of the war, and that a certain swagger was now evident. It was true of the writing in many newspapers, but it was seldom true of the talk I heard. Most people were like Mrs. Mullion and Miss Custis at the Britannia in Combe Martin, who, after some decent platitudes, wandered from talk of the Falklands to extensive reminiscing about the Second World War.

"After all, the Germans were occupying France, but life went 011 as normal," Mrs. Mullion said.

"Well, this is just it," Miss Custis said. "You've got to carry on. No sense packing up."

"We were in Taunton then."

"Were you? We were Cullompton," Miss Custis said. "Mutterton, actually."

"Rationing seemed to go on for ages!" Mrs. Mullion said.

"I still remember when chocolate went off the ration. And then people bought it all. And then it went on the ration again!"

They had begun to cheer themselves up in this way.

"More tea?" Mrs. Mullion said.

"Lovely," Miss Custis said.

That was the day I left Combe Martin. I walked out of the village and climbed a thousand feet to the top of the Great Hangman. Down below I could see a headland that looked like a dog crouching with his snout in a puddle — the puddle being the Bristol Channel. Across the water, South Wales was a faint foreign blue.

There were steep cleaves, beautiful and exhausting, all the way to Lynton. The hills rose plumply from the water's edge, and the path circled the hollows, treeless here and with such a pitch that, descending them, I usually slid and lost my balance, and, climbing, I found myself taking rapid stabbing steps that made my ankles sore. There was nothing to grasp, nothing to break my fall. In the middle of the cleave, way down and flowing from the head of the long valley, there was always a creek or a river, looking sometimes like a snail track and sometimes like a snake. It was this way for fifteen miles.

At the bottom of one winding path was the village of Trentishoe. In 1891 it had a population of ninety-seven; now it had been reduced to forty-five. The church ("the second smallest in Devon") was the size of a one-car garage. I had said I was not going to do any sightseeing, but the village was nowhere and the church was insignificant and very pretty, so I went in. It smelled of Bible bindings and brass polish. Its list of rectors went back to the year 1260, seven hundred years accounted for. A notice said that a number of the graves in the churchyard were unknown people whose bodies had washed up on the shore in Elwill Bay, below this church, St. Peter's.

I left the path near Heddon's Mouth and took the steepest way across the cut, on stony patches between the clumps of heather, and tugged back by thorns, and on all fours through the wildflowers, and skidding on loose chippings of shale. I found it slow going, but I was in no particular hurry. After that high hill I came to Martinhoe and then to a headland full of trees. These woods were wrecked and looked wonderful. It was called Woody Bay and was littered with fallen trees. They had blown down in the winter's hurricane-force winds and blocked most of the paths, making this part of the coast tangled and wild, with great splintered tree trunks. It was a marvelous ruin — still-alive trees fractured all over the floor of the woods.

There was a motor road to the Valley of Rocks. I had seen very few people all day; but this place, on every map, because Shelley had praised it and because it had a parking lot, had a hundred people clambering over the rocks and yelling. The rock piles had good names, such as Mother Meldrum's Cave and the White Lady and the Devil's Cheese Ring, but I skipped on to Lynton just the same.

There was once a railway to Lynton. It was not open long, about sixty years. There was still a club in the village called the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway Association. Normally I had no interest in railway clubs and I avoided the company of railway buffs; but I liked the motto of this railway association in Lynton: "Perchance it is not dead, but sleepeth…"

***

At about five-thirty in the afternoon, just after tea, everyone left Lynton. It became a deserted village and seemed to slumber there on the crest of the hill until the next morning, when it woke again with the hullaballoo of people. I thought the people went to Lynmouth, four hundred feet down the cliff on a small harbor. Old guidebooks called Lynmouth "one of the loveliest villages in England." But the people did not go to Lynmouth — that village was empty, too, full of VACANCIES signs and very quiet saloon bars and dim whispers; the only full-throated sound was that of the tide battering the seawall. The light was strange in these sister villages above and below the pinnacles of cliff; facing north and tucked into a cove, they lost the sun in the afternoon, so they were lit by the gleaming Channel and the near-mirage of Wales. But Lynmouth remained a cool glade, rather damp and sheltered on the banks of the two rivers that rose in Exmoor and converged among a battered and rather scoured-looking water course.

Lynmouth had a rearranged, half-put-away appearance, because thirty years ago much of it had been demolished by a torrent of water. Even now, people visited the village to examine the damage done by the Great Lynmouth Flood Disaster. But where did they go after tea?

A street-sweeper named Mr. Bedge told me the people were from Butlin's Holiday Camp in Minehead, eighteen miles away.

I said, "But there are thousands of people!"

"It's a big camp," Mr. Bedge said.

I liked the liquid evening light in Lynmouth, but the village was clammy and full of shadows. Lynton had a whiter light, more sky, and a breeze; and even deserted, it looked rather dignified and old-fashioned on its clifftop.

Next month there would be a movie one day a week in Lynton.

"But if there are thirty people at that film show the owner will be pleased, and if there's fifty it'll be a bloody miracle," Sid Henry told me.

Mrs. Henry said, "We're dying on our feet."

There was a great deal of talk at the Henrys' and all over the village of Lorna Doone, which was set just down the road toward Porlock. But it was another example of literature giving an area an importance that in time had displaced the book. No one here had read Lorna Doone, but that didn't matter, because the district had already been hallowed by it, and now it was seen in a kind of blurred and respectful way. How could you possibly disparage a place that had inspired a famous novel?

But there was a greater source of interest at the Henrys'. This was the honeymoon couple, a frail young man and a big laughing woman who was about five years older than her new husband. A silence fell over the dining room when the couple came down to breakfast: the Campbells stared into their porridge (they were Australian — nervous and uncritical); the Hibberts, from London, became small and watchful; and I pretended to read the newspaper. B. and G. Chandler (that was how it went in the Guests' Register, always one of my favorite books at any overnight stop) were the honeymoon couple. They took their seats at breakfast, and she talked and he squinted. Mr. Chandler looked terrible — pale, squinting, rather beaten; and Mrs. Chandler was robust, rosy-cheeked, full of talk, as if perhaps she fed off him at night. She made the plans—"Let's go to Clovelly today" — and he just sat there, grimacing.

We wanted to hear him say something. We wanted to know what he was thinking. Most of all we wanted him to assert himself ("I can't take much more of this!"), but in two days he never spoke. He listened, he squinted, he grew a bit smaller; but that was all. And then the Just Married signs that had been stuck to their bumper and the Honeymooners! that had been scrawled in soap on the car doors vanished, and by the time they left Lynton, the Chandlers looked as though they had been married for twenty years.

I left Lynton on the Cliff Railway, a cable car that descended to Lynmouth. I took a bus to Porlock, ten miles away. The road cut across the north of Exmoor, a rather brown forbidding place, and down the long Porlock Hill. The roads were so steep, there were signs on ramps saying, "Danger — Escape for Runaway Vehicles — No Parking" and "Warning to Pedestrians — Do Not Loiter Near This Bend — Danger from Vehicles Out of Control."

Porlock, the home of the man who interrupted the writing of "Kubla Khan," was one street of small cottages, with a continuous line of cars trailing through it. Below it, on the west side of the bay, was Porlock Weir, and there were hills on all sides that were partly wooded.

A hundred and seventy years ago a man came to Porlock and found it quiet. But he did not find fault. He wrote: "There are periods of comparative stagnation, when we say, even in London, that there is nothing stirring; it is therefore not surprising that there should be some seasons of the year when things are rather quiet in West Porlock."

I walked toward Allerford, and on the way fell into conversation with a woman feeding birds in her garden. She told me the way to Minehead — not the shortest way, but the prettiest way, she said. She had light hair and dark eyes. I said her house was beautiful. She said it was a guest house; then she laughed. "Why don't you stay tonight?" She meant it and seemed eager, and then I was not sure what she was offering. I stood there and smiled back at her. The sun was shining gold on the grass and the birds were taking the crumbs in a frenzied way. It was not even one o'clock, and I had never stopped at a place this early in the day.

I said, "Maybe I'll come back some time."

"I'll still be here," she said, laughing a bit sadly.

There was an ancient bridge at Allerford. I by-passed it and cut into the woods, climbing toward the hill called Selworthy Beacon. The woods were full of singing birds, warblers and thrushes; and then I heard the unmistakable sound of a cuckoo, which was as clear as a clock, striking fifteen. The sun was strong, the gradient was easy, the bees were buzzing, there was a soft breeze; and I thought: This was what I was looking for when I set out this morning — though I had no idea I would find it here.

All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself was a sort of optimism in action. I always went along thinking: I'll be all right, I'll be interested, I'll discover something, I won't break a leg or get robbed, and at the end of the day I'll find a nice old place to sleep. Everything is going to be fine, and even if it isn't, it will be worthy of note — worth leaving home for. Sometimes the weather, even the thin rain of Devon, made it worth it. Or else the birdsong in sunlight, or the sound of my shoe soles on the pebbles of the downward path — here, for example, walking down North Hill through glades full of azaleas, which were bright purple. I continued over the humpy hills to Minehead.