abbotsham—“woolsery”—buck’s mill

a steep road leads up out of bideford on the way to clovelly, and goes, quite shy of the sea, and altogether out of sight of it, all the way. it is a quite unremarkable road. here and there, subsidiary roads lead off to the right, giving access to entirely unsuspected habitations of men, lying variously from a quarter to half a mile distant on the seashore, or neighbouring it. first comes the village of abbotsham, in its pretty valley, with a small church, chiefly remarkable for a little unpretending monument, dated 1639, to one anthony honey. he died aged nineteen; and some one, who loved him much, wrote the following epitaph upon him, in which humour and sorrowing affection peep out, really most plainly to be seen, you know, like the mingled sunshine and showers of an april day:

hoc parvo in tumulo situs est

antonius hony. melleus ille suo nomine,

more fuit. obiit june 1639, ?tati, su? 19.

“his manners were as sweet as his name”; it is a pretty fancy.

another bye-road leads down to the old mansion of portledge, seat of the coffin family, who206 rather intensified the gruesome suggestions of their name by adding that of pine to it. the pine-coffins have been seated here for generations. half a mile along the cliffs, peppercombe is found; a few cottages seated in a hollow.

the main road passes at intervals, fairy cross, horns cross, and the hoops inn, and presently comes to buck’s cross; where one of many signposts continues a long series of pointing arms to “woolsery.” i have successfully resisted that repeated invitation inland, and do not know what woolsery is like: only this, that the village of woolfardisworthy is indicated. but even in north devon, where time goes something slowly, life is not long enough to always pronounce the word as spelt of old, and certainly the arm of no signpost is long enough to contain the whole of it; and so the district has cast away, like so much useless lumber, half its length.

down on the right hand goes the road, staggeringly steep, to buck’s mill, a little cranny in the towering wooded cliffs, where a huge limekiln and a few white cottages hang crazily over the water.

turner has made a pretty picture of “bucks,” as it is called for short—or more properly, “bucksh”—with a distant glimpse of the houses of clovelly, pouring like a cataract down the face of the cliffs, and a still more distant peep of lundy. the old, old tale of the original inhabitants of buck’s mill having been wrecked spaniards is still told. you hear that story of many seaside hamlets in the west; but i, for one, fail to see207 the swarthiness, the obvious foreign origin, of the present men, women, and children of bucks, so dwelt upon in guide-books.

when i found myself down at the bottom of that profound descent and at buck’s mill, it began to rain: the hopeless dogged rain that comes down out of a leaden sky, deliberately, as though it were determined to rain all night. i sat in a leaky shed on a heap of sand and waited....

still waiting! some one has written, somewhere, that ignorance is the parent of wonder, and all this while i had been wondering many things—wondering if it were going to rain all night; wondering if it were not better to push on to clovelly; wondering if one would get very wet if a start were made now; wondering why it should be a law of nature that hopeless rain should set in when one was in an exposed situation and with a considerable distance yet to go.... better chance it.

and so, pushing the bicycle up that long, steep ascent, which in descending had seemed only a quarter the length, i slithered through a sea of mud along the lonely road and in a dense white fog. it had ceased raining, on the way, but the fog exuded almost as much moisture.

and so, cautiously, from clovelly cross down to the court and the head of that precipitous staircase called clovelly “street.” the promised lingering approach, as the sun went down by the famed hobby drive, had to be abandoned for the while, and reserved for a more favourable day.