LITMIR.BIZ

      BRANSCOMBE.

      Where the roadway climbs round the most impressive bend, and the great wooded hills look down on the other side of the valley, with almost equidistant notches in their skyline, like the embrasures of cyclopean fortifications, stands the ancient church of Branscombe. It is oddly placed, considerably below the level of the road, and is so old and rugged, and has been so long untouched, that it looks more like some silver-grey and lichened rocky outcrop, rudely fashioned in the form of a church, than the work of builder and architect. And it is in such entire accord with the rocks and trees, the ferns and grasses, the spouting rivulets and moist skies of this secluded valley, that the dedication of it should more appropriately be to the sylvan gods of the classic age. There have been those scribbling tourists who, passing by and looking upon the time-worn building, have acted the part of agent provocateur to “restoring” zealots by dwelling upon the dampness of it, and the “meanness” of the box-like deal pews of the interior; but not yet have their instigations to crime against the picturesque been acted upon, and the ferns and mosses still sprout from the time-worn tower and the interior is still, in its whitewash, its pews, and its wooden pulpit, an example of the simple sway of the churchwarden and the village carpenter of a simpler age.

      One highly elaborate monument redeems the church from a charge of emptiness. It is the interesting memorial of Joan Tregarthin, her husbands, John Kellaway and John Wadham, and her twenty children; all of them duly sculptured in effigy. The Wadhams were the great landowners of Branscombe, away back to the fourteenth century. Among those twenty children is Nicholas Wadham, the last of his race, who died in 1609, and with his wife Dorothy founded Wadham College, Oxford.

      The churchyard of Branscombe is a well-stored repository of unusual epitaphs, ranging from the sentimental to the unconsciously humorous and the terrifying. Of the last sort the following is a good example:

      “Stay, passenger, a while and read

      Your doome I am

      You must bee dead.”

      The uncertainty as to what this malignant gentleman really intends to convey does by no means lessen his impressiveness.

      The lengthiest of them all is the following, on a time-worn altar-tomb outside the porch:

      “Pro. x. 7. The memory of the ivst is blessed.

      “An epitaph on William Lee, the Father, and Robert Lee, the son: both buryed together in one grave. October the 2: 1658.

      “Reader aske not who lyes here

      Vnlesse thou meanst to drop a tear.

      Father and son heere joyntly have

      One life, one death, one tombe, one grave.

      Impartial hand that durst to slay

      The root and branch both in a day.

      Our comfort in there death is this,

      That both are gonne to joy and bliss;

      The wine that in these earthen vessels lay

      The hand of death hath lately drawn away,

      And, as a present, served it up on high,

      Whilst heere the vessels with the lees doe lye.”

      Another records the end of a labourer accidentally shot on his returning home from work, and yet another is to an exciseman, “who fell from the cliff between Beer and Seaton, as he was extinguishing a fire which was a signal to a smuggling boat.” The verse on Joseph Braddick, a farmer, who died suddenly at sheep-shearing, hesitates between flippancy and exhortation:

      “Strong and at labour suddenly he reels,

      Death came behind him and struck up his heels,

      Such sudden strokes, surviving mortals, bid ye

      Stand on your watch, and to be allso ready.”

      This collection is ended with the touching record of a French sailor-lad:

      Sacred to the Memory of

       Jean Jacques Wattez, Mariner,

       of Boulogne-sur-Mer.

       Drowned at Torbay, 29th March, 1897.

       Buried here 30th June, 1897.

       Aged 17 years.

      “The only son of his mother, and she a widow.”

      St. Luke vii. 12.

      There is fine, rough walking up over the cliffs past the coastguard station of Branscombe, or down by the sandy shingle to Littlecombe Shoot and Weston Mouth, where the landsprings well out of the marly cliff-sides and petrify everything within reach. At the cost of scaling some of the buttery slides of red mud, and becoming more or less smothered with an ochreous mess resembling anchovy paste, it is possible to find most interesting examples of petrified moss and blackberry brambles; but the weaker brethren and those “righteous men” (as defined by Mrs. Poyser), who are “keerful of their clothes,” purchase such specimens as they may at Branscombe, and on their return home, yarn about the Alpine difficulties of discovering them.

      On the summit to the western side of Weston Mouth, away back from the beetling edge of Dunscombe Cliff, 350 feet above the sea, stands the picturesque group of Dunscombe Farm and the ruined, ivy-mantled walls of what seems to have been an old manor-house. To this succeeds the valley of Salcombe, with the village of Salcombe Regis, away a mile inland.

      It is a long, long way into Sidmouth, through Salcombe Regis, whose “Regis” was added so long ago as the time of Athelstan, who owned the manor and the salt-pans down in the combe by the sea. When you have come to the houses and think this is Sidmouth, it is only Landpart, and there is very near another mile to go; which, if you have acquired what the Devon people call a “kibbed”—that is to say a rubbed—heel by dint of much walking, is a distressing thing.

CHAPTER VI

       SIDMOUTH

       Table of Contents

      Coming into Sidmouth, you see at once that you are arrived in a Superior Place, and, before you are perceived, make haste to brush the dust off your boots, put your headgear straight, and, in general making yourself look as respectable as may be possible to a rambler in the byways, step forth with a jaunty air; just as the postboys in the old days, driving my lord home, although their horses might be exhausted, always “kept a gallop for the avenue.”

      Sidmouth was the first of Devonshire seaside resorts, and had arrived at that condition long before Thackeray wrote of it as “Baymouth,” in Pendennis. Do you remember how “Pen flung stones into the sea, but it still kept coming on”? It seems hardly worth while to have

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