The South Devon CoastHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The South Devon Coast
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Devon (England) -- Description and travel
The first part of the name of Hayes Barton derives from the Anglo-Saxon
_haga_, a hedge, or cultivated enclosure from surrounding wastes, and
there are, to this day, “hayes,” and “hays,” in abundance in this shire
of Devon. Even in the urban circumstances of Exeter we find them, in
the enclosed public pleasure-ground of Northernhay, and the square
of Southernhay. “Barton” has a variety of meanings, from granary,
rickyard, farmyard, and cattle-shed, to a large farm; a small farm
being generally, in Devon, styled a “living.” In the time of Sir Walter
Raleigh’s father, Hayes Barton was sold to the Duke family, of Otterton,
and from its old name of Poerhayes, or Power’s Heys, it became known as
Dukesheyes. In the eighteenth century, as we have already seen, it passed
to the Rolles, whose paws have comprehended so much of the land between
Seaton and Exmouth.
The old farm-house, smartened up with a facing of that stucco which is
so beloved by Devon folk that it is almost a wonder they don’t make it
an article of diet, stands now as ever in a hollow of the hills, remote;
for although Budleigh Salterton has expanded into a townlet, I do not
suppose the village of East Budleigh has grown appreciably in all these
centuries. Bating that stucco, and the sixty-year-old brick outhouses,
the farm must be much the same, and you may still see the old woodwork
and the old stone flags of the lower rooms, and may even, by courtesy,
peep into the bedroom—that is the window of it, the upper window in the
left-hand gable—where that gallant soul first saw the light of day.
Here, in this modest farmstead, that great Elizabethan was born, in 1552,
son of Walter Raleigh and his wife Katherine, who came of that old Devon
family, the Champernownes of Modbury. She had first married Otto Gilbert,
who died leaving her with two sons, themselves to grow up explorers and
colonists. She would seem, therefore, to have been a woman of remarkable
character.
[Illustration: HAYES BARTON: BIRTHPLACE OF SIR WALTER RALEIGH.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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