The South Devon Coast. Charles G. HarperЧитать онлайн книгу.

      BEER.

      But the old Beer of this picture has vanished, and a new and smart village has arisen in its stead, with just two or three of these characteristic survivals, to make us the more bitterly regret that which we have lost. The place that was so inspiring for the artist has become an impossibility for him, except, at the cost of veracity, he dodges the Philistine surroundings of those surviving “bits.” One little circumstance shall show you how artificial this sometime unconventional and simple village has become. When it was the haunt of painters, there was none who loved Beer so much as, or visited it more constantly than, Hamilton Macallum, who died here, aged fifty-five, in 1896. He had endeared himself to the people, and they and some of his brother artists combined to set up the bronze tablet to his memory that stands in the tiny pleasure-ground or public garden in the village street. And here is the sorry humour of it, that shows the damnable artificiality of the times, which has spoiled so much of Old England. The “public garden” is kept locked through the winter and the spring, lest the children go in and spoil it; and only thrown open when the brief visitors’ season begins. There could be no more bitter indictment.

      There was once a humble little church in this same street of Beer. A very humble church, but in keeping with the place. And now? Why a large and highly ornate building, infinitely pretentious and big enough for a cathedral, has arisen on the site of it. It is, however, still in keeping with Beer, for as deep calls unto deep, so across this narrow street pretentiousness bids “how d’ye do” to pretence.

      There are polished marble pillars in this new church of Beer, where there should be rough-axed masonry, and a suburban high finish in place of a rustic rudeness; and the sole relics of what had once been are the two memorial tablets, themselves sufficiently rural. One is to “John, the fifth sonn of William Starr of Bere, Gent., and Dorothy his wife, which died in the plauge was here Bvried 1646.” John Starr was one of a family which, about a century earlier, had become owners of a moiety of the manor. The house he built in Beer street bears on one chimney the initials “J. S.” and on another a star, in punning allusion to his name.

      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.

      Here, in the semicircular cove, the summer sea laps softly among the white pebbles, as innocently as though it had never drowned a poor fisherman; and the white of the chalk cliffs, the equal whiteness of the sea-floor and the clearness of the water itself give deep glimpses down to where the seaweed unfurls its banners from rock and cranny, where the crabs are seen walking about, hesitatingly, like octogenarians, and jelly-fish float midway, lumps of transparency, like marine ghosts. The sea is green here: a light translucent ghostly green, very beautiful and at the same time, back of one’s consciousness—if you examine your feelings—a little mysterious and repellent, suggesting not merely crabs and jelly-fish, but inimical unknown things and infinite perils of the deep, sly, malignant, patiently biding their time. The green sea has not the bluff heartiness of the joyous blue.

      The little cove, enclosed as it is by steep cliffs, looks for all the world like a little scene in a little theatre. You almost expect a chorus of fishermen to enter and hold forth musically on the delights of seine-fishing, but they only suggest to the contemplative stranger that it is “a fine day for a row,” and ask, in their rich Devonian tones, if you want a “bwoat.”

      The white cliffs of Beer are crannied with honeycombings and fissures, banded with black flints, and here and there patterned with ochreous pockets of earth, where the wild flowers grow as though Dame Nature had been making the workaday place gay with bedding-out plants for the delight of the summer visitors. The visitors are just that second string to their old one-stringed bow of fishing the deep blue sea, which the fishermen sorely need to carry them through the twelve months that—although most things that existed in the nineteenth century have been changed—still make a year; and the visitors who are taken out boating beyond the cove to see the smugglers’ caves are never tired of hearing of Jack Rattenbury, whose tale I have already told.

CHAPTER V

       BRANSCOMBE

       Table of Contents

      It is, of course, up-hill out of Beer. One has not been long, or far, in Devonshire before recognising that almost immutable law of the West, by which you descend steeply into every town or village and climb laboriously out. Here it is Beer Head to which you ascend. Beer Head is white, so exceptionally and isolatedly white on this red coast that when, far westward, down Teignmouth and Brixham way, you look back and see along the vaguely defined shore a misty whiteness, you will know it for none other than this headland.

      Beyond it and its chalky spires and pinnacles the coast becomes a mere traveller’s bag of samples for awhile; finally, coming to the opening of Branscombe, deciding upon “a good line” of red sandstone, mixed with red marl.

      A very serious drawback incidental to the exploration of districts that grow increasingly beautiful as you proceed is that all the available stock of admiratory adjectives is likely to be expended long before the journey’s end. They must be carefully husbanded, or you come at last to a nonplus. Therefore, please at this point to assume beauties that—in the Early Victorian phrasing—can be “more easily imagined than described.” For the rest, conceive a wedge-like opening in the cliffs, cleft to permit the egress to the sea of a little stream, at all times too tiny for such a magnificent portal, and often in summer altogether dried up. On the western side plant a coastguard station, built like a fort and walled like a