Read Ebook: Devonshire by Dutton Louie M Knight Knight Francis A Francis Arnold

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Ebook has 568 lines and 61370 words, and 12 pages

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Tavy Cleave, showing disintegrated granite 14

On Lundy 17

Geological Section across England 32

Logan Stone, Dartmoor. Phot. Frith 34

Clovelly Harbour 64

Red Devon Cow 107

Gathering Cider Apples 109

Devonshire Lace 113

Devonshire Pottery from the Watcombe Works 115

Cider-making in the 17th Century 116

A Modern Cider Press 117

Teignmouth. Phot. Coates & Co., Bristol 133

Signatures of Drake and Hawkyns 143

Flagon taken by Drake from the "Capitana" of the Armada. From a photograph taken by the Queen's command 144

Drake's Drum. From a photograph presented by Lady Eliott Drake 145

Palaeolithic Implement from Kent's Cavern 152

Saxon Sword-hilt 164

Buckland Abbey from a photograph presented by Lady Eliott Drake 184

Sydenham House 199

Sir Francis Drake 214

Diagrams 243

MAPS

England and Wales, showing Annual Rainfall 92

The authors are indebted to Mr John S. Amery for leave to reproduce the pictures on pp. 154, 157 and 158.

The word "shire," which is probably derived, like "shear" and "share," from an Anglo-Saxon root meaning "to cut," was at one time used in a wider sense than it is at present, and was formerly applied to a division of a county or even of a town. Thus, there were once six small "shires" in Cornwall.

The word shire was in use at the time of King Ina, and occurs in the code of laws which that monarch drew up about the year 709; but the actual division of England into shires was a gradual process, and was not complete at the Norman Conquest. Lancashire, for example, was not constituted a shire until the twelfth century. Alterations in the extent and limits of some of the counties are, indeed, still being made; and in the case of Devonshire the boundaries have been changed several times within the memory of persons still living.

The object of thus dividing up the country was partly military and partly financial. Every shire was bound to provide a certain number of armed men to fight the king's battles, and was also bound to contribute a certain sum of money towards his income and the expenses of the state; and in each district a "shire-reeve"--or sheriff, as we call the officer now--was appointed by the Crown to see that the people did their duty in both respects. The shire was a Saxon institution. County is a Norman word, which came into use after the Conquest, when the government of each shire was entrusted to some powerful noble, often a count, a title which originally meant a companion of the King.

It has been suggested that the reason why the names of some counties end or may end in "shire," while in other cases this syllable is never used, is that the former were "shorn off" from some larger district, while the latter represent entire ancient kingdoms or tribal divisions. According to this theory, Yorkshire is a "shire" because it originally formed part of the kingdom of Northumbria; and Kent is not a "shire" because it practically represents the ancient kingdom of the Cantii. The form "Kent-shire" is, however, found in a record of the time of Athelstan.

It is believed that it was Alfred the Great who marked out the border-line between Devon and Somerset; and it was undoubtedly Athelstan who, after his victory over the West Welsh, made the Tamar the boundary between Devon and Cornwall.

Devonshire is a county in the extreme south-west of England, occupying the greater part of the peninsula between the English and Bristol Channels, and having a coast-line both on the south and on the north. Situated thus, on two seas, and possessing, especially on its southern sea-board, a remarkable number of bays and estuaries, it has always been noted as a maritime county. And although many of its harbours have, in the lapse of ages, become silted up with sand or shingle, and are now of comparatively slight importance, it has one great sea-port, which, while only thirtieth in rank among British commercial ports, is the greatest naval station in the Empire.

The county has in the past been famous for its cloth-weaving and for its tin and copper-mining, but these industries are now greatly decayed, and the main occupation of the people is agriculture, to which both the soil and the climate are particularly favourable.

A special characteristic of Devonshire is its scenery, which is so striking that it is very generally considered the most beautiful county in England; while there are probably very many who regard its mild and genial, equable and health-giving climate as more noteworthy still. It is a remarkably hilly country, and it also possesses not only many rivers, but a great number of broad river estuaries. Another characteristic with which every visitor to the district is struck is the redness which distinguishes its soil, its southern cliffs, and its famous breed of cattle, which is not less noticeable than the soft and pleasant dialect, with its close sound of the letter "u" so typical both of Devon and of West Somerset.

Another characteristic of the people has always been their loyalty to their sovereign, to their county, and to each other. Devon is proverbial, like Cornwall and Yorkshire, for the clannishness of its inhabitants. It is a land, too, where superstition dies hard. Belief in pixies--fairies, as they are called elsewhere--in witches and witch-craft, in whisht-hounds and other weird and uncanny creatures, and in portents and omens, still lingers, especially on Dartmoor.

Dartmoor itself, with its wild and picturesque scenery, its unrivalled wealth of prehistoric antiquities, and its singular geological structure, forms one of the most striking features of the county, and one to which there is no parallel in England. The marine zoology of Devonshire is more interesting than that of any other English county, and nowhere else in the island has there been discovered clearer evidence of the great antiquity of man than was found in Kent's Cavern and other Devonshire caves.

Above all things, its position has made Devonshire a native land of heroes. Very few other counties have produced so many men of mark, so many men of enterprise and daring. Certainly no other has played a greater part in the expansion of England. From Devonshire came not only some of the most distinguished seamen of the Golden Age of Elizabeth, some of the most skilful and daring of her naval captains, but some of the earliest and most famous of our explorers; the founder of the first English colony, the first Englishman to sail the polar sea, the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe.

Devonshire, which occupies rather more than one-twenty-second of the whole area of England and Wales, is one of the largest counties in the British Islands, being exceeded in size only by Yorkshire and Lincoln in England, by Inverness and Argyll in Scotland, and by Cork in Ireland. Its extreme length from east to west, measured along a horizontal line drawn through the middle of the county, starting at the Dorsetshire border half-way between Lyme Cobb and the Seven Rocks Point, passing close to the city of Exeter, and reaching to the point where the river Ottery enters the county, is 67 miles; exactly the same as that of the county of Somerset. Its greatest breadth, from Countisbury Foreland on the north coast to Prawle Point on the south, is 71 miles. It may be added that a longer east and west line can be drawn only in Yorkshire and Sussex, and a longer meridional line only in Yorkshire and Lincoln. The area of the "Ancient" or "Geographical" county of Devonshire, according to the revised return furnished by the Ordnance Department, is 1,667,154 acres, or 2605 square miles. Compared with the counties that adjoin it, it is two-and-a-half times the size of Dorset, it is roughly twice as large as Cornwall, and it is more than half as large again as Somerset. It is fifteen times as large as Rutland, it is about half the size of Yorkshire, and its area is less than that of Lincolnshire by only 48 square miles.

Although usually said to be irregular in form, the outline of the county has a certain degree of symmetry, being roughly shaped like a life-guardsman's cuirass, with nearly equal sides, with a small hollow at the top or north coast, and a much larger one at the bottom or south coast.

Devonshire, like Kent and Cornwall, is bounded on two sides by the sea, having the Bristol Channel on the north and north-west, and the English Channel on the south. On its western side the river Tamar, with its tributary the Ottery, forms almost the whole of the frontier between it and Cornwall. The eastern and north-eastern border is less definite, but is roughly marked by Exmoor and the Blackdown Hills, which partly separate Devonshire from Somerset. The short length of frontier between Devonshire and Dorsetshire is marked by no natural feature.

No part of Devonshire is now, as was formerly the case, wholly surrounded by any other county. Three of its parishes, however, are partly in Dorset, one is partly in Cornwall, and one, a district of Exmoor containing no houses or inhabitants, is partly in Somerset. Culmstock, which before 1842 was considered to belong to Somerset, although completely islanded in Devon, and Stockland and Dalwood, which were reckoned with Dorset, although they were entirely inside the Devonshire border, have now been formally transferred to this county. On the other hand, Thornecombe and Ford Abbey, which belonged to Devonshire although they were situate in the adjoining county, have been handed over to Dorset. Still later alterations were the transfer of Hawkchurch and Churchstanton from Dorset to Devon in 1896.

Devonshire is characterised by such great irregularity and unevenness of surface that practically the only level land in it is along the shores of its estuaries; with the almost inevitable result that it is one of the most picturesque and beautiful counties in England. Its scenery has been very greatly affected by subterranean movements, which have not only roughly shaped its hills and valleys, partly by upheaval and partly by the shrinkage of the earth's crust, but have been the principal cause of the breadth of the river estuaries which are so marked a feature of its coasts, especially of the south. At many points along the shore of Devonshire there is evidence, in raised sea-beaches, and, near Torquay, in the borings of marine mollusca at a great height above the present tide-line, of upheavals that must have raised the whole coast, even if they did not materially change the contour of the country. On the other hand, the existence of submerged forests at many places near the shore proves that the land has sunk at least forty feet, thus allowing the sea to flow further inland; thereby greatly widening the already existing valleys, which had been formed in part by the shrinkage of the earth's crust, and in part by the action of the rivers.

The chief physical feature of Devonshire, a feature without parallel in any other part of England, is the Forest of Dartmoor, the great upland, some twenty miles long and eighteen miles broad, which occupies so large a part of the southern half of the county. It is all granite, the largest mass of granite in England, and forms part of a chain of outcrops of that formation extending from Devonshire to the Scilly Isles. The word "forest," it should be remembered, originally meant, not a wood, but a hunting-ground. No part of the open moor is now covered with trees, nor is it likely, considering the poorness of the soil, that it ever was so covered, although roots and other remains of trees have been found in various parts of it. In early days it was a royal hunting-ground, and most of it is still Crown property, forming part of the Duchy of Cornwall.

The most prominent feature of the moor, which contains the highest ground in England south of Ingleborough in Yorkshire, are the isolated rocky heights called tors, some 170 in number, many of which have been weathered, not only into very rugged and highly picturesque, but even into most strange and fantastic shapes; in many cases having their steep slopes strewn with fallen fragments of rock, some of them tons in weight, forming what are known on the moor as "clitters" or "clatters." The highest points are High Willhays, 2039 feet; Yes Tor, 2029 feet, only half a mile away from its rival, Newlake, 1983 feet; Cuthill, 1980 feet; and Great Lynx Tor, 1908 feet above sea-level; and among the most striking and picturesque are Great Lynx Tor, Staple Tor, Mis Tor, and Vixen Tor, although many others are remarkable for their strange and time-worn outlines.

The moor is seamed by many valleys and ravines, not a few of which are, in parts, well-wooded, each with its swiftly-flowing stream or river, and many of them most picturesque and beautiful. Such, in particular, are the Valley of the Dart, especially including Holne Chase and above; of the Teign near Fingle Bridge; of the Tavy at Tavy Cleave; of the Lyd at Lydford, and of the Plym at the Dewerstone.

Dartmoor is distinguished in being the coldest and rainiest part of Devonshire, and to these two features of its climate are no doubt largely due the fogs which so frequently envelope it. Its great extent and its heavy rainfall make the moor the main watershed of the county. Most of its rivers have their sources in the bogs, which are a well-known and somewhat dangerous feature of the district, and of which the most remarkable are Fox Tor Mire, Cranmere Bog, and Cuthill Bog.

Its varied and peculiar features, its vast expanses of wild and desolate moorland, now aglow with golden gorse, and now still more splendid with the magnificent purple of its broad sheets of heather or with the warm hues of dying bracken, and beautiful, as the seasons change, with the varying tints of grass and sedge, of ferns and rushes, of moss and bog-myrtle and bilberry, of cotton-grass and asphodel; the almost unrivalled beauty of its river-valleys, its multitudinous streams, its wild life, its extraordinary wealth of prehistoric antiquities, its lingering superstitions of pixies, of witch-craft, of night-flying whisht-hounds and ghostly huntsmen, its very solitude and silence, combine to make Dartmoor, to the antiquary and the artist, the naturalist and the angler, one of the most attractive spots in England, and one whose charm poets, painters, and authors have striven from earliest days to immortalise.

The greater part of Exmoor, and all its principal heights, are in Somerset, but it extends into the north-eastern corner of Devon, and detached portions of it, which appear to be really parts of the same upland, reach to the hills above Combe Martin. Part of Span Head, whose summit is 1619 feet above the sea, is in our county; and the outlying spurs of Bratton Down, Kentisbury Down, and the Great Hangman are all over 1000 feet high. There is very beautiful scenery on Exmoor, especially on the Somerset side of the border, somewhat resembling that on Dartmoor, although less wild and picturesque, and without any of the tors which are so characteristic of the greater upland. Exmoor is the only part of England where red deer still run wild; and the district is visited every year by stag-hunters from all parts of the island and especially from Ireland. Both it and Dartmoor are famous for a breed of sturdy little ponies, originally, no doubt, of the same stock. In the Badgeworthy Valley, which is in Somerset, although not far from Lynton, may be seen what are said to be the ruined huts of the Doones, a community of freebooters immortalised by Blackmore, who represents them as having been the terror of the country-side towards the close of the seventeenth century.

Other Devonshire hills are the Black Downs, along the border of Somerset, in which the highest point is 860 feet above the sea; another Black Down, six miles due south, reaching 930 feet; the Great Haldons, south-west of Exeter, 817 feet high; and Dumpdon Hill, about two miles north by east of Honiton, 856 feet above sea-level.

Devonshire is in parts extremely fertile, especially towards the south, and it has been called the Garden of England. Two very large and specially productive areas are the Vale of Exeter, and the South Hams,--the latter a name somewhat indefinitely applied to the district south of Dartmoor and occupying a large part of the region between the Teign and the Plym, with Kingsbridge as its chief centre. The great fertility of this famous district is due partly to the nature of the soil, partly to the mildness of the climate and the shelter afforded by the heights of Dartmoor, and partly to its nearness to the sea.

A very remarkable and interesting feature of Devonshire is Lundy--an island three miles long by one mile broad, lying out in the Bristol Channel, opposite Barnstaple Bay, and twelve miles north-north-west of Hartland Point. Its name, it is believed, is derived from two Norse words meaning Puffin Isle.

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