summer as any other English town, and in winter actually half a degree warmer than Torquay!
Below us white houses, often hiding in trellised-work and roses, are scattered up and down, with here and there a terrace in the back-ground, while the old parish church closes the view on one side, as a light-house—built on the ruined chapel of St. Nicholas, the fisherman’s saint,—does on the other. All is very quiet; a light haze is swimming overhead, and fine mists curl round the breezy tops of the Tors. What a wild scene of grey rocks and immense blue sea is beneath! Shadowy masses of foliage on the hills seeming imperceptibly to melt into the rocks, while vistas of light open up between them, stream down to the valleys, and lose themselves amongst the waving corn or the hay-fields in the tenderest verdure of a second crop. Notice, too, the many-coloured vegetation on the hills that has replaced the “drifts of anemones” and “sheets of hyacinth,” in which poets dress our Devon spring; and how totally it differs from the sandworts, buck-horn plantains, scurvy-grass, and other characteristic littoral plants beside us on the Capstone. Truly no other watering-place of England has such varied charms; town and country and seaside seem here to blend in one delightful whole, in which the most pleasant features of each are alone prominent. The natives, too, are so simple and open-hearted. Watch the housewives coming to; market with the strawberries from their cottage gardens, or the whortle-berries gathered by the children in the neighbouring thickets. See how they drop a curtsey to every well-dressed person, while the goodman who follows with the donkey-cart touches his hat with the air of Nature’s gentleman. Their innocent life and the pure air of the hills around must doubtless do much to produce those centenarians, of which a curious list is here preserved on the east wall of the church.
Such is Ilfracombe in summer. Let us pass up one of the quaint old-world entries, that might have been well-suited for warriors in chain-mail proceeding to embark in the six ships which this town furnished Edward the Third for the siege of Calais, but which sorely embarrass the ample skirts of the fine lady of Victoria’s time descending to more peaceful conquests on the Capstone. The waves are surging round, but we may look into the gloom of Crewkhorne Cave, supposed to have been a hiding-place of Tracy, one of Thomas à Becket’s murderers. Or better still, a few miles over the cliffs, let us visit Morthoe Church, where a flat stone, on which is cut the effigy of a priest bearing a chalice, surrounded by a half-effaced Norman inscription, is shown as his tomb. Certainly the escutcheons round the stone point to the vermilion bends of the Tracy family, if the chalice disprove the notion of the repentant warrior resting below. After the outside heat it is very grateful to linger in this little church, and to note the curious carvings on the bench-ends.
But now that we are diverging to the romantic, we cannot better end our summer tour than by visiting the Haunted House of Chambercombe. It is just the place for a ghost, hidden among trees, and smothered by the foliage of narrow lanes, and withdrawn from the haunts of men. A babbling stream breaks the silence of the valley as we force our way through bowers—
The violets ofBeneath whose leaves
The violets of five seasons reappear
And fade, unseen by any human eye;
Where fairy water-breaks do murmur on
For ever.
But as it is only some two miles out of Ilfracombe, we soon reach the farm-house. The name seems a corruption of Champernowne’s Combe; and it may have been one of the nineteen manors of that house which Queen Elizabeth caused to be sold, thus effectually ruining their owner, when (aware of the small likelihood of ever seeing his fine band of singers back again) he refused to lend them to her Majesty. A ghost-story is told in connection with it, but there is little probability of a visitor being able to raise the veil of mystery which at present shrouds it. Most likely he will find even the ghost of civility fled if he inquires where the ghost-room is, and the old dame who at present inhabits the place will tell him, as she told our party, that “The ghost-room is where the ghost is, she supposes; it isn’t open now, and it never will be” (for it is a fearsome thing to raise a ghost, even in this nineteenth century, in a Devonshire house). From the manner, however, in which she afterwards pointed out to another old lady the little dark window between the ladder and the end of the house, we gathered it was there her worst fears resided. The legend is, that in past years the farmer noticed a window on the outside more than was apparent within. Breaking through an inner partition, he came upon a room lighted by this window, and hung with moth-eaten tapestry.
The chamber was dispainted all within
With sondry colours, in the which were writ
Infinite shapes of thinges dispersed thin;
Some such as in the world were never yit,
Ne can devised be of mortall wit;
Infernall hages, centaurs, feendes, hippodames,
Apes, lyons, aegles, owles, fooles, lovers, children, dames.
Surrounded by quaintly carved chairs and a wardrobe was an old oaken bed, and on tearing down the hangings, he saw a whitened scull grinning from the hollowed pillow, and one polished arm-bone lying on the crimson quilt with a firm grasp of it between its crooked fingers. Of course he fled, walled up the room directly, and thus gave rise to the notion of a ghost still haunting its old habitation.
No conjectures can be formed respecting the dead lady; each one may fill up for himself the particulars of her death or murder, and deem her riches or her beauty the cause of her untimely end.
Most likely she was an old hag, who clung to her ill-gotten gains to the last; resisting the slow approach of death or the club of the midnight robber, till the final convulsion found her still clinging to the quilt with the greedy grasp of the miser. Whatever we may think about her fate, no one will regret his visit to the leafy seclusion round the Haunted House.
