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Read Ebook: The Islets of the Channel by Dendy Walter Cooper
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Ebook has 81 lines and 17866 words, and 2 pages
HERM AND JEDTHOU
Are lying along in a lake of molten gold, for so smiles the Channel in a calm evening of July. We are rowed across with sketch-book and wallet and hammer.
Herm is two miles in length, and is deeply quarried. Rabbits are burrowing among its rocks, and very small crustacea lie profusely around its shore. But there to the north is spread its carpet of sand and its shell beach, on which we may chance to gather very choice specimens: for instance, chiton, lepas, pholas, solen, tellen, chama, cypraea, voluta, haliotis, murex, and sponge and coral. It is a treasury of wrecked shells; probably among the granite there is a lack of lime for the construction of shell, so as to yield a profusion of living shell-fish.
On such a night, and the currents calm, we may row across the Channel by moonlight to Port St. Pierre, as safely as we may float in a gondola across a lagune in Venice. The moon has lighted on our slumber, and at the earliest sunbeam we start from our couch, and we are looking on a long amethystine ridge just coming out of the morning haze, and thither are we bound.
SARK:
SERK--SERQUE--GERS--L'ISLE DU CERS--SARNICA.
Our first walk is by the church and the scattered ville of Roselle and the Seigneury to the northern cape. This house of the lord is in the Tudor style, and boasts a lake, a boat, a bowling-green, a flagstaff, and a belvidere, and parterres and greenhouses of choice and beautiful flowers; and it is near the head of a ravine leading down to the most exquisite cave of the islet.
Adieu! beautiful Sark, we shall not soon forget your perfection; adieu! for yonder lies the "Lady" of the islet, in whose bosom we are to be wafted off to Guernsey with the market-people who wend to St. Peter's Port to replenish the exhausted stores of the islet. Romance itself must be fed, it cannot live on flowers: and so, at five in the morning, in bright moonlight, amid a bevy of visitors and a group of Serquois peasants, we have passed the portal of the rocks, and wait on the beach to be rowed to the cutter in the cove--wind, tide, and currents dead against us; so, to gain an offing, we make the tour of the island, and by a long tack of three miles run up the Great Russell and round Castle Cornet into the haven of Sarnia.
And now, still further southward, we are nearing the fairest islet of the Channel, and after the circuitous struggles of our voyage from Serque, with all the charm of contrast, we overcome time and space with almost a certainty of progression. We chuckle at this triumph of vapour over the gales, yet with time to spare, and with wind and tide and current in our favour--a very rare coincidence in the Channel seas--we would yet prefer to hoist our canvas, and skim leisurely over the glittering waves to Jersey.
JERSEY:
WE have rounded the south-western point of the islet, and are floating into the wide bright bay of St. Aubin's, steering by the western passage through the narrows between the bold fortress of Elizabeth Castle and the pier, and we wend at once to our hostelry at St. Helier's.
The area of the islet is about 40,000 acres; its population about 37,000. It is divided into twelve parishes--St. Helier's, St. Lawrence, St. Peter's, St. Brelade, St. Ouen, St. John, St. Mary, Trinity, St. Martin, St. Saviour, St. Clement, Grouville--and subdivided into about forty vintaines, an area containing twenty houses.
And these are the chief officers of the islet:--The military lieutenant-governor, the baillie, and the dean, appointed by the sovereign; the advocate, selected by the baillie, and the twelve judges, by the people.
The public library was erected by Falle, the historian of Jersey, and contains a very fair batch of literature, and also the drawings of Capelin, a native artist.
There is a new prison, and a hospital, and a poorhouse.
St. Helier's is prolific of temples of worship. Amidst French Protestant and Catholic fanes and conventicles, stands pre-eminent in the royal square the mother Church, 500 years old, and of pure Norman style,--a new aisle, in perfect harmony, being lately added. Very grotesque gargouilles and a profusion of ivy mark it as a very eccentric pile. The government stall and pulpit are ancient, and there are monuments and slabs to the memory of Carterets in 1767--Durel, Dauvergues, Gordon, and Pierson, the defender. The gallery stairs are outside the walls. The evening is devoted to the French service.
The several market-places, especially on Saturdays, are scenes of very lively interest. The produce of the Jersey gardens is most prolific, and sold at a moderate price. The grapes are pre-eminent, and the Chaumontelle pear has nearly attained the weight of one pound, and is often sold at five guineas per hundred. In the afternoon the market is a sort of fashion; but the grouping of the buyers and the loungers is not picturesque, the costume being chiefly the formal cut of England, or the sombre colours of Normandy. The colloquial language is a mingling of French and English: the children are taught both, but, whether in truth or in courtesy, several assured us that they preferred the English.
High and low water display contrasted aspects, both equally perfect. At high tide, the full bays and havens, like gigantic mirrors, are resplendent with the reflection of their beautiful shores.
To the botanist, the geologist, and even the artist, low water is far more propitious, for the beach, cliffs, and rocks are profuse in weed and sea-flowers and pebbles and shells, and they thus give up their treasures for the seeking; the outlines and colours present a perfect charm for the pencil.
Let us be off in pursuit of these temptations, scramble among the rocks, creep round the bays, or into the caves; for, like the violet, much of the more enduring beauty of the creation lies hid in the deep shades of the earth.
The tempest was raging as we were driving down a wooded dingle. A flash and a crash in quick succession--the lightning has struck the rock: a huge block, several tons in weight, rolls thundering down the precipice, crushing trees to atoms in its downward course.
The driver of our carriage is scared from under the boughs and dashes down the valley like a madman. Poor fellow, he was neither a Franklin nor a Faraday; and not reflecting that the storm-cloud travels swiftly, he did not know that this very dingle was now the safest place in Jersey.
The villes of St. Mary and St. John are near us; their churches of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries.
"Sweet Mistress Douce, fair Margaret, Prime flower of the house of Carteret."
Then there is another large rock, once a stumbling-block of contention between St. Magloire and the Druids. The priests engaged the Devil to roll a block from the shore to proselyte the people; but when they tried to roll it back again, St. Magloire laid his holy book on it and it was immovable; he then set the cross on the rock, and the demon fled, the Druids succumbed, and the immortal safety of the people was insured.
A blind boy is our guide, who from habit points out correctly the very richly-wooded panorama from the summit. The islet resembles one expanded grove, spire and turret peeping up just where the imagination of a consummate artist would have placed it.
And so we may wander back to St. Helier's by the elegant ville of St. Saviour's, the living of the Dean of Jersey, and the largest church in the islet; among richly cultivated grounds and gardens teeming with myrtles and verbenas and fuchsias and amarillidae, or we may wander yet further afield amidst yet more beautiful nature--lanes fringed with blushing hedges, and knolls of woody luxuriance, and banks and meadows gemmed with floral wildings, and here and there a blossom most rare in England; and we may perchance meet little groups of juveniles on their way to drink warm milk at a dairy farm, and all this at an equable temperature between 50? and 60?, purified by the occasional sprinkling of a genial summer shower.
Transcriber's note:
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in punctuation and the use of hyphenated words have been maintained.
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