chambercombe and its “haunted house”—berrynarbor

the modern suburban extensions of ’combe are devouring the rustic lanes far in the rear, and the natural wildness of devonian landscape, that seems so untamable, is being pitifully bridled. new terraces of cheap houses climbing unimaginable steeps, deploy their battalions of “desirable residences” over the hills: each house with its pretentious name—“hatfield,” “blenheim,” “burghley,” maybe—their sponsors, without humour themselves, the cause of much satiric humour in others who chance by them. you must pass many such on the way to chambercombe (originally champernowne’s combe), one of the places no visitor to ilfracombe is bidden to miss seeing; chambercombe being a still rustic valley where there even yet nestles an ancient farmhouse, formerly a manor-house of a branch of the champernowne family, and long enjoying a rather vague and ineffectual reputation as a “haunted house.”

suddenly, passing “champernowne terrace,” the uttermost outpost of ’combe, and a bankrupted mineral-water factory, you come to the opening of124 chambercombe; a road steeply descending, hollow, rutty, with tall hedgerow elms—in a word, devonian. down at the bottom, the eye rests gratefully upon a steep-roofed old whitewashed building, enclosed within high and thick courtyard walls, and approached through a gateway: the old home of those north devon champernownes, extinct, equally with their south devon namesakes of modbury, long generations ago. for many years it has been a farmhouse, and in all this time its uncertain legendary fame has grown, so that now, by dint of its nearness to the town, and of the constant stream of curious visitors who plagued the very life out of the farming folk, the present occupants have taken opportunity by both hands and exploit the legend to commercial ends; as the notice, with a generous profusion of capital letters displayed at the gateway, discloses. tea and refreshments may, you read, be obtained, and even lodgings had, at chambercombe farm, “with its haunted room and coat of arms shown to visitors.”

chambercombe.

it is the only instance in which this explorer has observed ghostly associations so thoroughly exploited; but, truth to tell, they are of the vaguest. when a “ghost story” has many and diverse variants, you instinctively discredit every one, and here the versions are many. most of them, also, are irreconcilable with the hard, uncompromising, indisputable facts of building construction. for example, the most popular variant, that which tells how, at some period unnamed,125 the farmer discovered by accident the “haunted room,” is wildly wrong in describing the appearance the house now wears, and has always worn. according to this precious effort of a disordered imagination, the farmer was seated one summer evening in the courtyard, lazily smoking his pipe and thinking, with the typical farmer’s usual dissatisfaction upon matters agricultural, while his wife was down at ilfracombe (or rather, “down tu’ cume,” as we say in these parts) selling her poultry, butter, and eggs. while thus occupied, he suddenly bethought him of a hole in the roof, through which the rain leaked into his wife’s store-room. he had promised her he would see to it, and, as he went rather in fear126 of his “missus,” faced his chair round suddenly and contemplated seeing to the business before her return. now the store-room window was the only one with a parapet in front, and therefore easily distinguishable from the other four that looked down from the roof on to the courtyard. but now (he had never before thought of counting them) he totted up five windows. this was odd! he reckoned up: “our sal’s bedroom—window lighting passage—store-room—our bedroom: total four windows accounted for. what unsuspected chamber did the fifth light? he settled that by calling some half-dozen of his farm-hands. together, with pick and spade, they entered the house and ascended the stairs, and commenced operations on the staircase wall, at a likely spot, where blows resounded hollow. soon the cob wall went down before the onslaught, and presently the farmer and his men found themselves in a long, low room, hung with moth-eaten, mouldering tapestry, whose every thread exhaled the moist rank odour of forgotten years; black festoons of ancient cobwebs in the rattling casement and round the carved work of the open cornice; carved oak chairs, wardrobe, and round table, black too, and rickety, dust-covered, and worm-eaten; the white ashes of a wood fire on a cracked hearthstone, and a bed, whose embroidered hangings were drawn closely around the oaken posts.”

the farmer’s wife had by this time returned home, and was seen and heard in the choking dust, urging her astonished husband, “if he were a127 man,” to “dra’ them cuttens.” thus impelled, he drew them—with a trembling hand, be sure of that—and there, resting on the bed, was disclosed an ancient skeleton. the woman fainted and her husband carried her out. that night he saw to it that the mysterious room was again securely walled up.

the “haunted house” of chambercombe

this is all very well, as an effort of the imagination, but it does not, by any means, bear relation to the facts of the case. as the accompanying illustrations of the old farmhouse show, there is not, nor could there have been, a parapet, and there are but three windows in the roof. moreover, the “haunted room”—so to style it—is really only an ancient hiding-hole (and a not very cleverly constructed hiding-hole either) at the head of the staircase; a dark and cramped128 cranny without a window, and too small ever to have contained a bed. the next most popular story is to the effect that the skeleton of some unhappy foreigner, murdered in long past years by wreckers, was found here; but the two most plausible theories are that this was either a smugglers’ store, or the hiding-place, in an era of religious persecution, of roman catholic recusants.

near by, but not in any way connected with this hole, is the so-styled banqueting room, anciently the principal apartment, now a bedroom; with coved ceiling, a plaster pendant, and a band of plaster renaissance ornament. the shield of arms of the champernownes, a lion rampant within an engrailed bordure, is seen, carved in stone, over the fireplace. the lower rooms are stone-flagged, and in one of them they show you the corner where, according to legend, was the entrance to an underground passage leading to hele strand, a mile distant!—the usual preposterous legend. there was possibly a secret way into the valley at the back, just as there is a defensible gateway in the front; for just as the old lords of chambercombe felt the necessity for defence, they also provided for stealthy retreat when defence should become at last hopeless.

berrynarbor is one of those easily accessible places that no visitor to ilfracombe who claims to have done his duty can afford to neglect. the village lies in a valley, three miles away, and, except for a long stretch of allotment gardens, making a streak of squalor on the hillside above,129 is a very pretty place. its church, more imposing than that of ’combe itself, has been zealously stripped of much old carving; but the family pew of the bassets of watermouth, with its fireplace and comfortable seats, remains to show with what a degree of comfort the squires, at any rate, took their devotions.

westcote, so long ago as 1630, recorded the curious epitaph on one nicholas harper, with its inevitable play upon the name:

harper, the musique of thy life,

so sweet, so free from jarr or strife,

to crowne thy skill hath raysed thee higher,

and placéd thee in angels’ quier:

for though that death hath throwen thee down,

in heaven thou hast thy harp and crowne.

in the chancel is a tablet to the memory of mary westcott, who died in 1648. some curious verses compare her to a marigold:

this mary-gold lo here doth shew

marie worth gold lies neer below

cut downe by death, the fair’st gilt flow’r

flourish and fade doth in an hour.

the marygold in sunshine spread

(when cloudie) clos’d doth bow the head

this orient plant retains the guise

with splendid sol to set and rise

even so, this virgin marie rose

in life soon nipt, in death fresh growes

with christ her lord shall rise againe

when shee shall shine more bright by farre

than any twinkling radiant starre

for be assur’d that by death’s dart

mary enjoys the better part.

130 an anagram follows, in this wise:

marie westcott

mors evicta tuta,

and the representation of a yellow marigold concludes the curious monument. not the least curious part of it is the fact that these verses do not commemorate a girl who died untimely, but a spinster aged seventy.

the old farmhouse of bowden, where bishop jewell, the apologist of the anglican church, was born in 1522, remains. his defence of the newly established church was at the time thought so admirable that it was directed by the government of queen elizabeth to be chained in the parish churches of the kingdom.