FullReads

‘Where have you been wandering to-day?’ I asked. ‘Have you yet been as far as the park, which, as I told you, would supply such endless subjects for your pencil?’

‘Not I. I have been roaming up and down this same “New Road” above us; and find there materials for a good week’s more work, if I could afford it. Indeed, it was only to-day, for the first time, that I got as far as the lodge at the end of it, and then was glad enough to turn back shuddering at the first glimpse of the flat, dreary moorland beyond,–as Adam may have turned back into Eden after a peep out of the gates of Paradise.’

He should have taken courage and gone a half-mile further,–to the furze-grown ruins of a great Roman camp, which gives its name to the place, ‘Clovelly,’–Vallum Clausum, or Vallis Clausa, as antiquarians derive it; perhaps, ‘the hidden camp,’ or glen,–perhaps something else. Who cares? The old Romans were there, at least 10,000 strong: and some sentimental tribune or other of them had taste enough to perch his summer-house out on a conical point of the Hartland Cliffs, now tumbling into the sea, tesselated pavement, baths and all. And strange work, no doubt, went on in that lonely nook, looking out over the Atlantic swell,–nights and days fit for Petronius’s own pen, among a seraglio of dark Celtic beauties. Perhaps it could not be otherwise. An ugly state of things–as heathen conquests always must have been; yet even in it there was a use and meaning. But they are past like a dream, those 10,000 stalwart men, who looked far and wide over the Damnonian moors from a station which would be, even in these days, a first-rate military position. Gone, too, are the old Saxon Franklins who succeeded. Old Wrengils, or some such name, whoever he was, at last found some one’s bill too hard for his brain-pan; and there he lies on the hill above, in his ‘barrow’ of Wrinklebury. And gone, too, the gay Norman squire, who, as tradition says, kept his fair lady in the old watch-tower, on the highest point of the White Cliff–‘Gallantry Bower,’ as they call it to this day–now a mere ring of turf-covered stones, and a few low stunted oaks, shorn by the Atlantic blasts into the shape of two huge cannon, which form a favourite landmark for the fisherman of the bay. Gone they all are, Cymry and Roman, Saxon and Norman; and upon the ruins of their accumulated labour we stand here. Each of them had his use,–planted a few more trees or cleared a few more, tilled a fresh scrap of down, organized a scrap more of chaos. Who dare wish the tide of improvement, which has been flowing for nineteen centuries, swifter and swifter still as it goes on, to stop, just because it is not convenient to us just now to move on? It will not take another nineteen hundred years, be sure, to make even this lovely nook as superior to what it is now as it is now to the little knot of fishing huts where naked Britons peeped out, trembling at the iron tramp of each insolent legionary from the camp above. It will not take another nineteen hundred years to develope the capabilities of this place,–to make it the finest fishery in England, next to Torbay,– the only safe harbour of refuge for West Indiamen, along sixty miles of ruthless coast,–and a commercial centre for a vast tract of half- tilled land within, which only requires means of conveyance to be as fertile and valuable as nine-tenths of England. Meanwhile Claude ought to have seen the deer-park. The panorama from that old ruined ‘bower’ of cliff and woodland, down and sea, is really unique in its way.