Afoot in England: Chapter 18

Chapter 18

Branscombe

Health and pleasure resorts and all parasitic towns in fact,
inland or on the sea, have no attractions for me and I was
more than satisfied with a day or two of Sidmouth. Then one
evening I heard for the first time of a place called
Branscomb--a village near the sea, over by Beer and Seaton,
near the mouth of the Axe, and the account my old host gave me
seemed so attractive that on the following day I set out to
find it. Further information about the unknown village came
to me in a very agreeable way in the course of my tramp. A
hotter walk I never walked--no, not even when travelling
across a flat sunburnt treeless plain, nearer than Devon by
many degrees to the equator. One wonders why that part of
Devon which lies between the Exe and the Axe seems actually
hotter than other regions which undoubtedly have a higher
temperature. After some hours of walking with not a little of
uphill and downhill, I began to find the heat well-nigh
intolerable. I was on a hard dusty glaring road, shut in by
dusty hedges on either side. Not a breath of air was
stirring; not a bird sang; on the vast sky not a cloud
appeared. If the vertical sun had poured down water instead
of light and heat on me my clothing could not have clung to me
more uncomfortably. Coming at length to a group of two or
three small cottages at the roadside, I went into one and
asked for something to quench my thirst--cider or milk. There
was only water to be had, but it was good to drink, and the
woman of the cottage was so pretty and pleasant that I was
glad to rest an hour and talk with her in her cool kitchen.
There are English counties where it would perhaps be said of
such a woman that she was one in a thousand; but the Devonians
are a comely race. In that blessed county the prettiest
peasants are not all diligently gathered with the dew on them
and sent away to supply the London flower-market. Among the
best-looking women of the peasant class there are two distinct
types--the rich in colour and the colourless. A majority are
perhaps intermediate, but the two extreme types may be found
in any village or hamlet; and when seen side by side--the lily
and the rose, not to say the peony--they offer a strange and
beautiful contrast.

This woman, in spite of the burning climate, was white as any
pale town lady; and although she was the mother of several
children, the face was extremely youthful in appearance; it
seemed indeed almost girlish in its delicacy and innocent
expression when she looked up at me with her blue eyes shaded
by her white sun-bonnet. The children were five or six in
number, ranging from a boy of ten to a baby in her arms--all
clean and healthy looking, with bright, fun-loving faces.

I mentioned that I was on my way to Branscombe, and inquired
the distance.

"Branscomb--are you going there? Oh, I wonder what you will
think of Branscombe!" she exclaimed, her white cheeks
flushing, her innocent eyes sparkling with excitement.

What was Branscombe to her, I returned with indifference; and
what did it matter what any stranger thought of it?

"But it is my home!" she answered, looking hurt at my careless
words. "I was born there, and married there, and have always
lived at Branscombe with my people until my husband got work
in this place; then we had to leave home and come and live in
this cottage."

And as I began to show interest she went on to tell me that
Branscombe was, oh, such a dear, queer, funny old place! That
she had been to other villages and towns--Axmouth, and Seaton,
and Beer, and to Salcombe Regis and Sidmouth, and once to
Exeter; but never, never had she seen a place like Branscombe
--not one that she liked half so well. How strange that I had
never been there--had never even heard of it! People that
went there sometimes laughed at it at first, because it was
such a funny, tumbledown old place; but they always said
afterwards that there was no sweeter spot on the earth.

Her enthusiasm was very delightful; and, when baby cried, in
the excitement of talk she opened her breast and fed it before
me. A pretty sight! But for the pure white, blue-veined skin
she might have been taken for a woman of Spain--the most
natural, perhaps the most lovable, of the daughters of earth.
But all at once she remembered that I was a stranger, and with
a blush turned aside and covered her fair skin. Her shame,
too, like her first simple unconscious action, was natural;
for we live in a cooler climate, and are accustomed to more
clothing than the Spanish; and our closer covering "has
entered the soul," as the late Professor Kitchen Parker would
have said; and that which was only becoming modesty in the
English woman would in the Spanish seem rank prudishness.

In the afternoon I came to a slender stream, clear and swift,
running between the hills that rose, round and large and high,
on either hand, like vast downs, some grassy, others wooded.
This was the Branscombe, and, following it, I came to the
village; then, for a short mile my way ran by a winding path
with the babbling stream below me on one side, and on the
other the widely separated groups and little rows of thatched
cottages.

Finally, I came to the last and largest group of all, the end
of the village nearest to the sea, within ten minutes' walk of
the shingly beach. Here I was glad to rest. Above, on the
giant downs, were stony waste places, and heather and gorse,
where the rabbits live, and had for neighbours the adder,
linnet, and wheatear, and the small grey titlark that soared
up and dropped back to earth all day to his tinkling little
tune. On the summit of the cliff I had everything I wanted
and had come to seek--the wildness and freedom of untilled
earth; an unobstructed prospect, hills beyond hills of
malachite, stretching away along the coast into infinitude,
long leagues of red sea-wall and the wide expanse and
everlasting freshness of ocean. And the village itself, the
little old straggling place that had so grand a setting, I
quickly found that the woman in the cottage had not succeeded
in giving me a false impression of her dear home. It was just
such a quaint unimproved, old-world, restful place as she had
painted. It was surprising to find that there were many
visitors, and one wondered where they could all stow
themselves. The explanation was that those who visited
Branscombe knew it, and preferred its hovels to the palaces
of the fashionable seaside town. No cottage was too mean to
have its guest. I saw a lady push open the cracked and
warped door of an old barn and go in, pulling the door to
after her--it was her bed-sitting-room. I watched a party of
pretty merry girls marching, single file, down a narrow path
past a pig-sty, then climb up a ladder to the window of a loft
at the back of a stone cottage and disappear within. It was
their bedroom. The relations between the villagers and their
visitors were more intimate and kind than is usual. They
lived more together, and were more free and easy in company.
The men were mostly farm labourers, and after their day's work
they would sit out-of-doors on the ground to smoke their
pipes; and where the narrow crooked little street was
narrowest--at my end of the village--when two men would sit
opposite each other, each at his own door, with legs stretched
out before them, their boots would very nearly touch in the
middle of the road. When walking one had to step over their
legs; or, if socially inclined, one could stand by and join in
the conversation. When daylight faded the village was very
dark--no lamp for the visitors--and very silent, only the low
murmur of the sea on the shingle was audible, and the gurgling
sound of a swift streamlet flowing from the hill above and
hurrying through the village to mingle with the Branscombe
lower down in the meadows. Such a profound darkness and quiet
one expects in an inland agricultural village; here, where
there were visitors from many distant towns, it was novel and
infinitely refreshing.

No sooner was it dark than all were in bed and asleep; not one
square path of yellow light was visible. To enjoy the
sensation I went out and sat down, and listened alone to the
liquid rippling, warbling sound of the swift-flowing
streamlet--that sweet low music of running water to which the
reed-warbler had listened thousands of years ago, striving to
imitate it, until his running rippling song was perfect.

A fresh surprise and pleasure awaited me when I explored the
coast east of the village; it was bold and precipitous in
places, and from the summit of the cliff a very fine view of
the coast-line on either hand could be obtained. Best of all,
the face of the cliff itself was the breeding-place of some
hundreds of herring-gulls. The eggs at the period of my visit
were not yet hatched, but highly incubated, and at that stage
both parents are almost constantly at home, as if in a state
of anxious suspense. I had seen a good many colonies of this
gull before at various breeding stations on the coast--south,
west, and east--but never in conditions so singularly favourable
as at this spot. From the vale where the Branscombe pours its
clear waters through rough masses of shingle into the sea the
ground to the east rises steeply to a height of nearly five
hundred feet; the cliff is thus not nearly so high as many
another, but it has features of peculiar interest. Here, in
some former time, there has been a landslip, a large portion
of the cliff at its highest part falling below and forming a
sloping mass a chalky soil mingled with huge fragments of rock,
which lies like a buttress against the vertical precipice and
seems to lend it support. The fall must have occurred a very
long time back, as the vegetation that overspreads the rude
slope--hawthorn, furze, and ivy--has an ancient look. Here
are huge masses of rock standing isolated, that resemble in
their forms ruined castles, towers, and churches, some of them
completely overgrown with ivy. On this rough slope, under the
shelter of the cliff, with the sea at its feet, the villagers
have formed their cultivated patches. The patches, wildly
irregular in form, some on such steeply sloping ground as to
suggest the idea that they must have been cultivated on all
fours, are divided from each other by ridges and by masses of
rock, deep fissures in the earth, strips of bramble and thorn
and furze bushes. Altogether the effect was very singular
the huge rough mass of jumbled rock and soil, the ruin wrought
by Nature in one of her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered
irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of
cultivated smoothness--potato rows, green parallel lines
ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant
cabbage-globes--each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion
leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs. Here the
villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult path they had
made, to dig in their plots; while, overhead, the gulls,
careless of their presence, pass and repass wholly occupied
with their own affairs.

I spent hours of rare happiness at this spot in watching the
birds. I could not have seen and heard them to such advantage
if their breeding-place had been shared with other species.
Here the herring-gulls had the rock to themselves, and looked
their best in their foam-white and pearl-grey plumage and
yellow legs and beaks. While I watched them they watched me;
not gathered in groups, but singly or in pairs, scattered up
and down all over the face of the precipice above me, perched
on ledges and on jutting pieces of rock. Standing motionless
thus, beautiful in form and colour, they looked like
sculptured figures of gulls, set up on the projections against
the rough dark wall of rock, just as sculptured figures of
angels and saintly men and women are placed in niches on a
cathedral front. At first they appeared quite indifferent to
my presence, although in some instances near enough for their
yellow irides to be visible. While unalarmed they were very
silent, standing in that clear sunshine that gave their
whiteness something of a crystalline appearance; or flying to
and fro along the face of the cliff, purely for the delight of
bathing in the warm lucent air. Gradually a change came over
them. One by one those that were on the wing dropped on to
some projection, until they had all settled down, and, letting
my eyes range up and down over the huge wall of rock, it was
plain to see that all the birds were watching me. They had
made the discovery that I was a stranger. In my rough old
travel-stained clothes and tweed hat I might have passed for a
Branscombe villager, but I did no hoeing and digging in one of
the cultivated patches; and when I deliberately sat down on a
rock to watch them, they noticed it and became suspicious; and
as time went on and I still remained immovable, with my eyes
fixed on them, the suspicion and anxiety increased and turned
to fear; and those that were sitting on their nests got up and
came close to the edge of the rock, to gaze with the others
and join in the loud chorus of alarm. It was a wonderful
sound. Not like the tempest of noise that may be heard at the
breeding-season at Lundy Island, and at many other stations
where birds of several species mix their various voices--the
yammeris and the yowlis, and skrykking, screeking, skrymming
scowlis, and meickle moyes and shoutes, of old Dunbar's
wonderful onomatopoetic lines. Here there was only one
species, with a clear resonant cry, and as every bird uttered
that one cry, and no other, a totally different effect was
produced. The herring-gull and lesser black-backed gull
resemble each other in language as they do in general
appearance; both have very powerful and clear voices unlike
the guttural black-headed and common gull. But the
herring-gull has a shriller, more piercing voice, and
resembles the black-backed species just as, in human voices, a
boy's clear treble resembles a baritone. Both birds have a
variety of notes; and both, when the nest is threatened with
danger, utter one powerful importunate cry, which is repeated
incessantly until the danger is over. And as the birds breed
in communities, often very populous, and all clamour together,
the effect of so many powerful and unisonant voices is very
grand; but it differs in the two species, owing to the quality
of their voices being different; the storm of sound produced
by the black-backs is deep and solemn, while that of the
herring-gulls has a ringing sharpness almost metallic.

It is probable that in the case I am describing the effect of
sharpness and resonance was heightened by the position of the
birds, perched motionless, scattered about on the face of the
perpendicular wall of rock, all with their beaks turned in
my direction, raining their cries upon me. It was not a
monotonous storm of cries, but rose and fell; for after two or
three minutes the excitement would abate somewhat and the
cries grow fewer and fewer; then the infection would spread
again, bird after bird joining the outcry; and after a while
there would be another lull, and so on, wave following wave of
sound. I could have spent hours, and the hours would have
seemed like minutes, listening to that strange chorus of
ringing chiming cries, so novel was its effect, and unlike
that of any other tempest of sound produced by birds which
I had ever heard. When by way of a parting caress and
benediction (given and received) I dipped my hands in
Branscombe's clear streamlet it was with a feeling of tender
regret that was almost a pain. For who does not make a little
inward moan, an Eve's Lamentation, an unworded, "Must I leave
thee, Paradise?" on quitting any such sweet restful spot,
however brief his stay in it may have been? But when I had
climbed to the summit of the great down on the east side of
the valley and looked on the wide land and wider sea flashed
with the early sunlight I rejoiced full of glory at my
freedom. For invariably when the peculiar character and charm
of a place steals over and takes possession of me I begin to
fear it, knowing from long experience that it will be a
painful wrench to get away and that get away sooner or later I
must. Now I was free once more, a wanderer with no ties, no
business to transact in any town, no worries to make me
miserable like others, nothing to gain and nothing to lose.

Pausing on the summit to consider which way I should go,
inland, towards Axminister, or along the coast by Beer, Seton,
Axmouth, and so on to Lyme Regis, I turned to have a last look
and say a last good-bye to Branscombe and could hardly help
waving my hand to it.

Why, I asked myself, am I not a poet, or verse-maker, so as to
say my farewell in numbers? My answer was, Because I am too
much occupied in seeing. There is no room and time for
'tranquillity,' since I want to go on to see something else.
As Blake has it: "Natural objects always did and do, weaken,
deaden and obliterate imagination in me."

We know however that they didn't quite quench it in him.

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