But, leaving this digression, we proceed on our way, past Berrynarbor and
the old farm of Bowden, where Bishop Jewel was born, and the beautiful
church where he was baptized, with its great Perpendicular tower, built
of red and grey sandstone, rising above the wooded combe, and its old
lich-gate, set in the thickness of the churchyard wall, and almost hidden
by the luxuriant summer foliage; past Combe Martin, famous for its
ancient silver-mines rather than its beauty, yet with a very beautiful
church, with a Perpendicular tower even higher than that of Berrynarbor,
soaring above the sheltering elms, and throwing its long shadow across
the stream which curves round the church-yard among the old yew-bushes--a
church worth stepping aside to see, with a fine carved oak screen in the
interior, of the fifteenth century, the doors of the screen made in such
a way that they will not entirely close, in order to show plainly forth
to all sinners that the gates of heaven are always open; past Martinhoe
village, which was the scene of one of the most cruel and cold-blooded of
all the Doone murders, when they carried off the wife of Christopher
Badcock, a small tenant farmer, and, in rage at finding nothing in the
poor home but a little bacon and cheese, murdered her baby in a fit of
senseless brutality, reciting over it this couplet:
"If any man asketh who killed thee,
Say 'twas the Doones of Bagworthy."
And so we come to Heddon's Mouth, and of the seven miles from there to
Lynton I shall speak in the next chapter.
[Illustration: The Shepherd's Cottage, Doone Valley]
But the twenty miles of hilly road may prove too much even for good
walkers, and as the coach service between Ilfracombe and Lynton is
suspended at present, owing to the war, it is best to take the little
narrow-gauge railway that runs from Barnstaple to Lynton. There might be
many more unfavourable ways, too, of seeing this stretch of country. The
narrow line twists and winds across the hills, seeming to hang,
sometimes, on a tiny viaduct, while many feet below a mountain stream
pours down its rocky bed, and, owing to the narrowness of the gauge and
the steepness of the gradients, the train progresses hardly quicker than
a horse-drawn carriage, and one has leisure and opportunity to observe
all that one is passing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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