From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.Bates, Katharine Lee
General
From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England.
Bates, Katharine Lee
England -- Description and travel
Every mile of Devonshire has its charm, not to be mapped out in
advance, but freshly discovered by each new lover of the moorland and
the sea, of soft air and the play of shadows, of folklore and
tradition, of the memory of heroes. Those who cannot know fair Devon
in actual presence may find her at her best in the romances of
Kingsley and Blackmore and Phillpotts. The shire abounds in sea-magic.
The south coast, with its wealth of sheltered bays and tempting
inlets, has so mild and equable a climate that its dreamy windings
have become dotted with winter resorts as well as watering-places.
Lyme Regis, on the edge of Dorset, Sidmouth and Exmouth and Dawlish,
Teignmouth, whence Keats dated his "Endymion," and fashionable Torquay
are perhaps the most in favour, but all the shore is warm and
wonderful in colour, set as it is with wave-washed cliffs that
glisten ruddy and white and rose-pink in the sun. These shining
headlands, about which beat the wild white wings of seagulls, are
haunted by legends wilder yet. Half-way between Dawlish and Teignmouth
are two red sandstone pillars, the statelier with its top suggestive
of a tumbled wig, the lower standing at a deferential tilt. In these
are shut the sinful souls of an East Devon clergyman and his clerk,
who longed too eagerly, in the hope of their own preferment, for the
death of a Bishop of Exeter.
Further down the coast the health seekers and holiday folk are
somewhat less in evidence. The old, cliff-climbing town of Brixham,
where William of Orange landed, goes fishing for a livelihood.
Dartmouth, not so joyous to-day as when Coeur de Lion gathered there
the fleet that was to win for Christendom the Holy Sepulchre, not so
turbulent as when Chaucer suspected his wild-bearded seaman, little
better than a pirate, of hailing from that port, not so adventurous as
when one John Davis, of Sandridge on the Dart, sailed out from her
blue harbour with his two small vessels, the Sunneshine and the
Moonshine, to seek a passage to China by way of the Polar sea, is
mainly occupied in the training of midshipmen. A steamer trip up the
Dart, that sudden and dangerous stream of neighbourhood dread
--"River of Dart, river of Dart,
Every year thou claimest a heart"--
brings us to Totnes, where, on the high authority of Geoffrey of
Monmouth, the first king of the Britons, Brutus, grandson of the pious
Æneas, made his landing.
"Here I am, and here I res',
And this town shall be called Totnes."
The Brutus Stone, on which the Trojan first set foot, is shown in
irrefutable proof of this event. In the course of the trip, the
steamer passes Greenway House, where Sir Humphrey Gilbert was born and
where, it is claimed, the potato first sprouted in English soil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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