A CORNER OF ENGLAND

FOREVER FOREIGN

     On 28^th November 1941, a German JU88 bomber, returning from a visit to Coventry, landed at Barnstaple.  The crew explained that they had mistaken north Devon and Cornwall  for France and were surprised to find that this was still England.  I share their surprise. Although  this coast is not particularly French, I realised as I tramped the 80 miles towards Padstow, that it wasn’t really England either.

         Barnstaple itself all seemed familiar enough.  I arrived, with some friends, on a train decorated with otters.  At old Pannier Market, the locals were selling knitted hoover covers,  “Naughty Nomes” and some useful occult items.  I preferred the Penrose Almshouses, chiselled from granite in 1624, and re-worked by gunfire in the Civil War.  Mrs Reuben Richards showed me around in apron and slippers.  We went out to inspect her garden, its black soil enriched by centuries of chimneysweeps, and the chapel pews, made from the wreckage of the Armada.  She paid £31 per week for her little Puritan haven - and £2 a year for the garden.

         Barnstaple Museum gave warning of the coast to come.  There would be ragged, blasted cliffs, bounced from the sea in the Ice Age and folded and chewed by magma.  They would be unkind to the human foot.  In Room 2 was the desiccated body of a drowned sailor.  Then, most thrillingly of all, there were the bones of the English elephant.   Until only 100,000 years ago, this was Big Game Country.

 

         Our safari moved on to Bideford.  With its leafy quayside and magnificent 24-arched bridge it affected a mild, continental air.  The Nazis still thought it worth a bomb and, on the Night of the Blitz, their device killed two cows, a calf and two bullocks.  Bideford then settled down again. The Royal Hotel was full of Genteel Ladies, spooning up soup, but we found wholesome crabs and ale at The Swan.  The town churchyard, after 600 years of packing, now bulged like a green souffle.

 

         They still made fighting ships in Appledore, a few miles on.  At tea-time, shipbuilders swaggered out of the yard towards their brightly-coloured cottages, strung out like fresh washing along the estuary.  It was an enchanting, luminous place with a lime-green Gaiety Theatre and pubs that billed The Tarka Morris Men and the Ladies Clog-dancing Team.  I wanted to stay and make merry with cloudy ales and green-lipped mussels but we had to press on, westward to the last truly English town on this coast.

         Westward Ho! was named after Charles Kingsley’s novel and, like The Water Babies, it had become wincingly unfashionable.  Despite its breezy, exclamatory name, the town had a weary look and was tormented by its slot machines.  Our landlady apologised for everything but she needn’t have done; her turreted mansion overlooked the mothy town, towards a magnificently broody sea and the giant-pebbled spit of Northam Burrows.  In 1863, a storm threw up a Stone Age midden heap here, revealing that the locals had dined out on limpets, wolves and hedgehogs.  Westward Ho! cannot boast as good today.

 

         Next morning, we climbed onto the hiker-breaking cliffs.  This was no longer England.  These cliffs had once had proper, Roman names like The Promontory of Hercules, instead of ‘Hartland Point’.  The sea was turquoise and the culm grasslands raced towards it, heady with saw-wort, Devils Bit scabious and Marsh Plum thistles.  There were exotic herbs too; Coltsfoot for coughs and scurvy grass for sailors.  Their survival was admirable; every year the sea lavishes a hundredweight of salt over each crackled acre. We found ourselves suddenly alone except for the disconcerting company of the stonechats, cracking rocks and hiding in the gorse.

         It was not, of course, an uninhabited world.  Occasionally, we hobbled into narrow, wooded valleys, outlets to the sea, and found ourselves steeped in the sixteenth century.  Clovelly’s cobbled street cascaded so steeply down the cliffs that groceries had to be delivered by sledge.  Everyone sold either pies or lobsters and the only signpost said “No stone throwing”.  I spotted some Indians, in gorgeous saris and jewellery, speechless with astonishment, lost in time and place.

         Of all these villages, my favourite was Morwenstowe, which owed itself to its old vicar, Parson Hawker (1804-75).  He built the outlandish rectory and the driftwood hut on the cliffs where, in the company of his pet pig and his opium, he wrote salty poems.  He plucked drowned sailors of his beach, cleansed them in gin and buried them in his churchyard.  In 1843, he interred the entire crew of The Caledonia beneath her salvaged figurehead, which was still as white and spectral as ever.

 

         Beyond Morwenstowe, even the English language faltered slightly.  Shop notices were written in an impenetrable, extinct language (“Our pies may contain hedgehogs”) and the assistants often managed transactions without any language at all. The black Cornish flag usually identified the worst communication hot-spots and, fortunately, our landladies were invariably enthusiastic outsiders.

         “We do miss a sense of humour”, confided one, recalling her old life, back east.

         Although the Cornish were clever with their songs about wrecking ships and railway disasters, they needed help with the lighter stuff.  Bude was having an International Jazz Festival.  Between Morwenstowe and Bude we had passed 150 shipwreck sites; Bude needed all the Dixie it had coming to it.  In the heat and razzmatazz, the traffic gridlocked and ensnared a team of Chinese cyclists.  We met up with more friends, bolted eight plates of Cornish lasagne (a sort of soup with chips) and clambered back onto the cliffs.

 

         All afternoon, we tottered through toadflax and tansy, fleabane and dodder, towards Crackington Haven.  Way below us, stiff-winged fulmars dived and looped around the folds of magma, intent on nothing in particular.  I suppose that, if I had wings, I would have done the same.  At teatime, a sonic boom announced the return of Concorde to Britain and, at sundown, we arrived at the village kiddleywink, to be restored with claret and slabs of beef.

 

         Over the next twenty miles, our little booted, babbling Luncheon Club had the cliffs to itself.  We scrambled up the highest cliff in England, known modestly as High Cliff, and watched a helicopter skimming the water below us like an angry gnat.  From Strangles to the Beeny Sisters, he’d have found nothing but two nudes and a family of  grey seals.  The puffins were away but a peregrine falcon dropped like a dagger from the sky and, with a perceptible click, snatched the life of a pipit.  We hobbled on, past stacks, cauldrons and waterfalls and, in one tiny crevice, we found the miniature harbour of Boscastle.  It sat at the confluence of three rivers - the Jordan, Valency and Paradise.

 

         I was not surprised that this fantastical landscape had let great imaginations run a little wild.  Turner had etched little, crumbling Willapark as an impregnable Iron Age fortress and Betjeman and Priestly had both unleashed their prose up here.  Hardy was intoxicated by it, married a local girl and was forever afterwards miserable with her and miserable without her.  Even the military became a little giddy and, in 1945, the army was ordered to regard the hamlet of Treligga as a hostile, Japanese island.  But the worst excesses - for which we must blame Tennyson, Thackeray and old Parson Hawker - occurred at Tintagel.

         Tintagel Castle is undeniably the most improbable, romantic fortification in the Celtic world.  But, when the English poets heard of it, they endowed it with the equally improble Arthur and, suddenly, the English public were on the road to Trevena, now also called “Tintagel”.  We found ourselves in a little colony of Englishness, of Artex and bikers and bare-bottom loo signs.  Between the wars, a Mr Glasscock, who made his fortune in custard, built the gothic Hall of Chivalry, but everything else seemed rather transitory, like the remnants of a festival whose revellers simply refuse to go home.  We ate lamb koftas and, in the morning, were back on the cliffs at first light.

        

         As we walked our last, achingly beautiful miles, it occurred to me that I had been uncharitable.  Cornishmen had once depended on these salted fields for sustenance and had dangled over these cliffs, on crude poppet heads and blondins, to quarry slate.  We could see where, in their quaint clothes, they had hammered and where, quite possibly, they had been dashed to bits.  Messrs Tennyson and Glasscock and the other Englishmen had offered them fresh hope and a new vision of themselves, an invitation that has never been unconditionally accepted.

 

 

 

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Trains run regularly from Paddington to Bodmin, via Exeter (Return £….).  From Exeter there are nine trains a day to Barnstaple (£9.60 single).

 

Recommended reading: “The Southwest Coast Path”, by Roland Tarr (Ordnance Survey £7.95), “The Vicar of Morwenstowe”, by Sabine Baring Gould and “A Pair of Blue Eyes”, by Thomas Hardy.