The South Devon CoastHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The South Devon Coast
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Devon (England) -- Description and travel
The other memorial in the church is to “Edward Good, late an Industrious
fisherman, who left to the Vicar and Churchwardens for the time being and
their successors for ever TWENTY POUNDS in TRUST for the Poor of this
Parish. The interest to be Distributed at Christmas in the proportion
of two thirds at BEER and one at SEATON. He died November 7, 1804, in
sixty-seventh year of his Age.”
Of the four industries of Beer—stone-quarrying smuggling, fishing, and
lace-making—the shy business of smuggling has alone disappeared. Those
who do not carry their explorations beyond the village street will see
nothing of the stone-getting, for the quarries lie away off the road
between Beer and Branscombe, where, in a cliff-like scar in the hillside
they are still busily being worked.
It must be close upon two thousand years since building-stone was first
won from this hillside, for the quarries originated in Roman times. Since
then they have been more or less continually worked, and although the
ancient caves formed by the old quarrymen in their industry have long
been abandoned for the open working, they exist, dark and damp, and not
altogether safe for a stranger, running hundreds of yards in labyrinthine
passages into the earth. It is of Beer stone that the vaulting and the
arches of the nave in Exeter Cathedral were built, 600 years ago; it was
used, even earlier in the crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster;
in Winchester Cathedral, and many other places; and to-day is as well
appreciated as ever, huge eight and ten-ton blocks being a feature in
the trucks on the railway sidings down at Seaton. It greatly resembles
Bath stone in its fine texture, but is of a more creamy colour and, while
softer and more easily worked when newly quarried, dries harder.
In ancient times the stone was shipped from the little cove of Beer,
which was thus no inconsiderable place. To improve it, in the words of
Leland: “Ther was begon a fair pere for socour of shippelettes, but ther
cam such a tempest a three years sins as never in mynd of man had before
bene seene in that shore”; and so the pier was washed away, and the
fragments of it are all that is to be seen in the unsheltered cove at
this day.
The fishermen of Beer are a swarthy race, descended, according to
tradition, from the crew of a shipwrecked Spanish vessel, who found the
place almost depopulated by that plague of which John Starr was a victim.
They and their trawlers, which you see laboriously hauled up on the
beach, are in the jurisdiction of the port of Exeter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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