The Rivers and Streams of England

“They’d sooner I lost all the money I have put in here, and threw a hundred men on the rates, than that three or four salmon a year should be stopped coming up by my dam.”

His random selection of a confidant was not in this case a happy one; but that was nothing, for it is instructive at least to hear both sides of a question. The Tavy is not a good salmon river, but not quite so indifferent a one as the hyperbolic statistics of my rather sore-headed mineralogist would suggest. But it is about the best peal river in Devonshire, the larger ones running up in April or May and the smaller coming up in greater numbers in July and later. The Tavy and Tamar unite in their estuary just above Plymouth, and it is a singular natural phenomenon that the ascending salmon in a vast majority select the Tamar, while practically the whole bulk of the peal turn up the Tavy. Another curious fact is, that neither the trout nor the salmon species take apparent hurt from even the permanent discoloration of a river, provided certain poisonous ingredients are kept out. The Tavy, to be sure, clears itself below Tavistock, and is not an extreme case. But in many known to the writer, that fastidious lover of clear water, the trout, has accommodated himself without apparent inconvenience to the most untoward transformation of his once pellucid haunts. The beautiful Mawddach, familiar to every one who knows Dolgelly, coming down through its glorious mountain glens the colour of milk is a case in point. Another equally familiar is the Glenridding beck, which pours into the crystal depths of Ullswater a ceaseless volume of lead “hush”; and though it soon sinks in the deep lake, collects the trout from all parts to feed at the inpouring of its milky waves. The fish again of the Upper Wear, in County Durham, seem to thrive amid the stained waters, while the sea-trout still run up the once beautiful rapids of the Ogmare in Glamorganshire, which are, I think, the foulest of them all. But in any case it is a piteous sight to see a mountain stream, perhaps the most beautiful of all Nature’s works, flowing befouled through the fair scenes of which it should be the centre and the chief adornment. The Tavy, however, as already stated, runs virtually clear again, when, with the added waters of a strong brook just below Tavistock, and those of the still larger Walkham, pursues its devious way through deep-wooded vales, only severed from the Tamar by a single lofty ridge. The junction of the Walkham and the Tavy, known as “Double Waters,” is a spot that abides in the memory, so does the romantic scenery just below and around the Virtuous Lady Mine, which has in its day produced much copper and other treasure, and derives its name from the Great Elizabeth, who, as we know, imported German miners freely, and always took good care to get her full share and often a good deal more out of every enterprise she encouraged. No one, indeed, knew that better than Tavy’s great son, Francis Drake, though his enterprises were of a more adventurous kind. One remembers the occasion on which he lay in Plymouth harbour with a ship full of Spanish gold, waiting to hear from the illustrious lady, who was actually his business partner in the venture, whether she intended to disown him and cut his head off as a pirate or amicably divide the spoils. We know at any rate which she did. Nowhere in Devonshire would the stranger be able to command so much that is beautiful and interesting in this county, and make a wider acquaintance with Devonshire streams than at Tavistock, since this town is not merely on the South Western main line from Exeter to Plymouth, but is also served by its rival the Great Western. Not only the moor itself, whose swelling tors, each capped with their mysterious cluster of upstanding crags, but the district, is richer than any part of Devon in prehistoric remains, in “round huts,” Cytiau Gwaeddeold, as the Welsh call them, in crosses and inscribed stones. The churches, though ancient and interesting, are not often ornate, owing, it is supposed, to the difficulty of carving the hard granite of which they are composed. But high above all, on the sharp summit of Brent Tor, between the Tavy and the Lydd, is the most wonderfully situated church in Devonshire, nay in England. A couple of ruined castles in Wales, that of Dinas Bran above the Dee at Llangollen, and Cerrig Cennen near the Towy at Llandilo, alone within my knowledge have such pride of pose. But no church in which service is still held in the whole kingdom approaches this “cloud compelling” shrine of North Brent.

The main line to Exeter passes beneath it, and space limits me here to a mere passing mention of the gorgeous view which may be had even from the train window of the Okement, as fresh from the wild foot of Yes Tor, the highest peak of Dartmoor, it glitters down the rich luxuriant vale to Okehampton, with the towers of a ruined castle, in real Welsh fashion, perched high above its streams.

The Okement, and its greater neighbour and cradle companion the Taw, are the only Dartmoor rivers that flow north into the “Severn Sea,” that euphonious term which Kingsley substituted whenever possible for the infelicitous and unpoetic designation of “Bristol Channel.” This is natural, for North Devon offers the shorter course; much more natural, indeed, than the forsaking of Exmoor itself upon the north coast for southern seas, as do the Exe and Barle. Many a time, in days now unhappily remote, both in winter and summer have I looked down from the high bogs, where the Barle rises over the whole sweep of the Channel and the shadowy mountains of South Wales beyond it, and fancied these united rivers as rejecting the brief inglorious career which seemed their destiny, and facing southwards into strange lands to win a foremost place in volume and importance among the rivers of the West. Fancy too might credit the Tamar, born within sound of the Severn Sea, with the same vaulting ambition.

The Tamar, by the way, is almost certainly Taw-Mawr (the great Taw), and the Tavy most likely is Taw-vach or bach (the Welsh diminutives for Vechyn, little). Then, again, there are in North Devon the rivers Taw and Torridge (Taw-ridge), while South Wales has two notable rivers of the same etymological origin, Towy and Tawe, both pronounced as the former is spelt. It is natural enough that Celtic names should prevail in a corner abutting on Cornwall, the old West Wales, that obviously shared in those dim Irish invasions which so complicate the story of the Cymry.

Our thoughts can then follow no better course than that of the railway from Okehampton to Yeoford Junction, and there abandoning the Exeter train take the one coming up for Barnstaple and North Devon. For then in a very short time you will be upon the banks of the Taw, the chief river of North Devon, where it is yet a modest stream, and keep it quite intimate company till it spreads, a shining estuary, laden with historic memories, into Barnstaple bay. Still sticking to your seat by the window you will see Instow and Appledore rising, significantly if you know your west country lore, out of the broad glistening tide. You will round the corner into Bideford and behold the Taw’s twin sister, the Torridge, sweeping under the many-arched and ancient bridge. On yet, with delightful glimpses of that fine river, shrunk from

an estuary into a bold salmon water sweeping along the meadowy vale, till beneath the high-perched little town of Torrington the railway comes to a peaceful end, and dumps you out on the eastern fringe of that unknown rugged block of Devonshire which Devonian farmers, hunting men, and true provincials often speak of as “the West country.” But this is anticipating a little. Nor do I make any sort of apology for taking the train for this brief interlude. No one shall say that there is no poetry in the corner-seat of a railway carriage! Such a man would be a dull, unimaginative soul indeed. Rhapsodies are being daily written on motoring, as a revelation of the glories of England by persons who have apparently lacked the enterprise or inclination to discover them before, accessible as they have been for all time to the cyclist, the horse keeper, or the pedestrian. The cyclist with an eye to the landscape can go easily along as slowly as he chooses with scarcely a glance at the road; the keen motorist, who nearly always drives himself, can scarcely take his eyes off it. Indeed, whether as his neighbour beside him or a stranger upon the road before him, Heaven forbid that he should take to admiring the scenery! It seems practically impossible to travel at dog-cart pace – the organism of the machine seems to resent it. At any rate, no motorist ever does. So whatever measure of enjoyment in the landscape may belong to the process is the privilege only of the passengers. But what I should like to know is why the poetry of rapid motion through rural England has never been associated with the corner-seat of a railway carriage. You are free from wind, from noise, and the spasmodic motions incidental to meeting traffic. The rhythmical beat of a train is notoriously stimulating to the brain and the imagination. There is nothing corresponding to it in the motion of an automobile, whatever the comparison may be worth in the mere question of luxury. It is surprising, too, what long stretches of some of our most beautiful rivers and streams can be seen to real advantage as passing acquaintances from a train window. I have lived long enough to have cursed in my heart, like many others, the making of a line up many a well-known and familiar stream, cherished for its sequestered beauties. I have lived to discover how little, how extraordinary little, difference to the charms of the river-side the terrible thing has actually made. For one thing, it is only at long intervals that your local line gives any sign of life at all, and then but for a few brief seconds. For the rest, foliage wraps it in kind embrace, and flower-spangled turf soon clothes its once ragged edges. The very birds of the air and the beasts of the field show a confidence in the single track, with its prolonged periods of certain repose, its immunity from restless, prying individuals, that they never give to a highway. And now when this last has become in varying degrees a place of noise and rush and betimes of danger, its echoes strike far more frequent discords in your ear down by the stream than the rumble of the rarely passing train. But to that corner-seat again. How finely it commands the stream in the valley, lifted, as it often is, much higher than the road, and striding the river, for the most part of necessity, far oftener than the other which is apt to creep behind fences along the hill-foot. What glorious vistas of foaming water gleaming between avenues of bordering foliage disclose themselves at this bend or at that, and if the vision is fleeting it is at least frequent. And if the stream is an old friend; if its pools and eddies, its bridges, its bordering homesteads, its water-mills, its moments of frenzy, and its periods of calm have remained among many others engraven on the page of memory, how delightful to thus snatch a fortuitous half-hour with them again in a long succession of fleeting, but no less significant and suggestive, glimpses in that they are momentary. It would be preposterous to deny that there is both poetry and sentiment in the corner-seat of a railway carriage – every one with a spark of sensibility must have felt it.

The Taw is a thought more leisurely than most Devon rivers after passing Eggesford, where the late Lord Portsmouth a generation or two ago maintained so great a name among the gentry of the West. It swishes fast round gravelly bends into large eddying pools where in their season the salmon and peal lie. It runs in smoother fashion along broad reaches between red crumbly banks comparatively free from timber, and fringed by verdant meadows where the red cattle of North Devon supply the inevitable complement to every Devon landscape. At Portsmouth Arms comes pouring in with strong and lusty current the first contribution from Exmoor, to wit, the Mole, or Bray, whichever you like at this point, but the Bray where it rises far away in a deep Exmoor gorge behind the village of Challacombe. And still the Bray as it burrows for miles along the skirts of the moor through hanging woods of oak, and under ivy-covered bridges hugging the base of rounded hills on whose summits pony-riding farmers dwell in slate-roofed, windy homesteads, with one eye on the Exmoor slopes where their sheep graze, and the other on the narrow ribbon-like meadows where they cut their hay: men knowing in the ways of stag or fox or hare, and ready to mount their little shaggy cobs at the first note of the horn which sounded so often, and still, no doubt, sounds upon the banks of the Bray. Such at least was this beautiful valley in the days of my youth, that golden period in which Heaven knows one needs no poet to tell one a glory shone upon wood and stream of a kind that shines no more. Scores of my readers will have abiding with them some such river:

“That ran to soothe their youthful dreams,Whose banks and streams appear more brightThan other banks and other streams.”

So of the Bray, and there is nothing more to be said unless to record that it flows through Castle Hill, where the noble House of Fortescue represents probably the widest possessions and the most abiding influence in North Devon, and that it spends its last hours among the pleasant woods and meadows of Kings Nympton.

Of Barnstaple and Bideford, lying at the mouth of the Torr and Torridge respectively, it is impossible to say anything worth having in a paragraph. They belong to the sea-rovers and their story, which the reader of Westward Ho! at any rate – and who has not read it? – knows something of.

Æsthetically, however, you must look at these famous towns in detail with the eye of faith – not of an artist nor an archæologist. But they will pass, being neither unsightly nor in serious conflict with their traditions, which are great.

Now the Torridge, like the Tamar, rises in no moorland. In fact their infant springs are close together hard by the north coast. For this reason, though both are clear and rapid rivers, they have scarcely anywhere the turmoil of the Dart, the Tavy, or the Avon. The Torridge, as mentioned earlier, after running a heady, youthful course far southward, would seem to change its mind as if loth on second thoughts to leave the country of its birth; for, doubling back again, it hurries northward, and with a course parallel to its upper reaches rolls in fine broad sweeps of alternate deep and rapid beneath Torrington perched on its high hills, to Bideford and the sea. Now the region between the lower or northward-flowing half of the Torridge, extending west to the Tamar and

Cornwall, is a land unto itself, and, as already noted, commonly alluded to by Devonshire farmers, cattle buyers, hunting men and such like as “the West country.” It is watered by the Upper Torridge flowing southwards through it, and covers some two or three hundred square miles. In appearance it is normal Devonian; a succession of high red ridges of tillage and pasture, heavily fenced to their round summits, and traversed by narrow precipitous roads hemmed in between lofty, flower-spangled banks. Cold grey church towers stand out here and there above some small, clustering, slate-roofed village on a windy hill-top, and at intervals some deep, wooded glen bearing a noisy runlet to the Torridge throws a redeeming ray of beauty through a country otherwise open to criticism for a certain monotony of outline and detail, like many other parts of Devonshire.

But this “West country” or land of the Upper Torridge has the merit, one may almost say the charm, of unconventionality. For within its whole wide bounds there is scarcely a gentleman’s residence but the indispensable vicarage, and even scattered cottages are rare, there being few labourers. The entire country, in fact, hereabouts is occupied by yeomen farmers, many of whom have lately bought their farms, and who mostly do their own work. It is the most sequestered and unknown part of habitable Devonshire. Scarcely any one but its occupants know anything about it, except such few as may penetrate it behind a hunted fox or as purchasers of stock. There is nothing, indeed, to bring any one in here, while the labours of locomotion except on horseback are prodigious. No social functions occur within it; no railroads disturb its calm; while the motor, nay, even the cycle, give it a wide berth. The farmers ride ponies, and, fifty years hence, will probably be riding ponies still. If it were a wild pastoral country, this land of the Upper Torridge, there would, of course, be nothing worthy of remark in all this. But, on the contrary, it is a quite normal district. The land is not very good, nor its occupants very progressive, so the formality of the country is delightfully broken by stretches of golden gorse, by moorish, ill-drained fields where snipe are numerous, by whole hillsides that Nature has clothed after her own fashion with birch and alder, blackthorn, or ash, straggling about waist deep in open brakes of fern or broom, and these are the haunt in winter of great numbers of woodcock – a country, indeed, full of birds, those of

prey or otherwise, for there is no one to molest them. The keeper and the form of sporting he now represents is as non-extant as the garden-party. Throughout this west country of the West country the sportsman still follows a brace of setters in arduous but pleasant quest of the indigenous partridge after the fashion of bygone days. And if, while standing in the bosky shallows of the Torridge, one hears the call of a cock-pheasant, it will be the voice of no coop-raised, grain-fed sybarite, but a bird and the descendant of birds well able to take care of themselves and quite experienced travellers. And the Torridge itself, which wanders in and out of woodland and thicket, running upon a gravelly bed and scooping out the red crumbly banks of narrow meadows, where lively red yearlings caper with justifiable amazement at the apparition of the rare stranger, calls for no further comment here. It is in its northward-flowing lower reaches that it acquires distinction, swelled, moreover, with the considerable streams of the Okement.

It is a far cry from the Taw and Torridge estuary to Lynmouth and Lynton – that gem of Devonian, nay of English, coast scenery. But though many small streams cleave their way through that iron coast into the Severn Sea, at Watermouth, at Combe Martin, and, most beautiful of all, at Headons Mouth, there are none approaching the dignity of a river till you come to the outpouring of the recently united waters of the East and West Lynn on the very borders of Somerset. Here, indeed, looking out through a great open gateway as it were in the most imposing stretch of cliff scenery in England, Cornwall not excepted, is a vision of a tumbling stream and hanging woodland that as a mere picture, and having regard to its composition, is not surpassed, I think, even upon the Upper Dart. Then, again, the near presence of the sea in the prospect seems to place Lynton on a pinnacle to itself. From Bristol to Berwick there is surely nothing quite like it upon our coast – this really noble curtain of woodland hung from so great a height and folding away inland, out of whose green recesses the white waters come spouting on to the very shore. Both the East and the West Lynn come down from Exmoor, leaving the comparative plateau of the moor at a distance of some four miles from the sea, and in that brief space falling about a thousand feet through continuously wooded gorges. The East Lynn, however, is the more noteworthy, dividing again at that famous sylvan spot known

as “Waters meet.” Up the western of the two forks cut high up the steep hillside, commanding beautiful views of the winding gorge beneath, runs the road to Brendon, climbing the steepest hill in Devonshire, if such a thing is conceivable, on any known highway. At Brendon, emerging from the woods, the moor opens wide before you, the land of the red deer and the Exmoor pony, and, what with many persons is even more to the point, the land of Blackmore’s celebrated novel Lorna Doone. The eastern fork of the little river, known on the moor as the Badgworthy (Badgery) water, soon reached from Brendon, is more immediately concerned with this, leading immediately up as it does to the famous Doone valley. Hundreds of pilgrims, both in frivolous and pious fashion, journey up here nowadays, literal persons sometimes, looking for cataracts where are only the normal gambols of an ordinary moorland stream, and inveighing against poor Mr. Blackmore who, sublimely unconscious that he was creating classic ground, took quite legitimate liberties with the little waters of the infant Lynn. Lynton and Lynmouth had acquired even before this some outside fame for their extraordinary beauty, and had their modest share of summer visitors. But of literary or historical associations no valley in Devonshire could have been more absolutely bereft than that of the Badgworthy water. No book that ever was published, not any one even of Scott’s novels, gave a hitherto obscure spot such permanent fame as did Lorna Doone in the matter of the head-waters of the Lynn. I can state with the confidence of personal knowledge and recollection that before that delightful book was written these upper waters, and what is now known as the Doone valley, had no more significance for local people than any other obscure glen on Exmoor, and by strangers were never seen, for stag-hunting then attracted comparatively few outsiders.

Now from the Upper Lynn to the sources of the Barle and Exe there is a carriage road pursuing a wild course over the moor to Simonsbath, some dozen or so miles distant. Long before arriving there, however, it crosses the infant Exe, a peaty brook piping in feeble strains amid the silence of the hills. Not far to the southward rises its sister and later partner, the Barle, in a high bog to merge immediately in the deep and desolate tarn of Pinkerry – in truth a reservoir made nearly a century ago by a visionary landowner for impracticable purposes of no consequence here.

Dripping out of this black eerie pool, which in my youth had stimulated the then lively imaginations of the turf-cutters from Challacombe, who almost alone ever set eyes on it, to some racy superstitions, the Barle in a few miles becomes a stream of consequence, and during its passage through the moor has all the wild charm of a moorland river still struggling in its cradling hills. Within the writer’s memory, which goes back to the time before Exmoor was discovered by the tourist and the up-country stag hunter, great changes have come over this country of the Upper Barle and Exe. The heather, which once held the black game in considerable numbers, has sensibly diminished before draining and increased sheep-grazing. Bank enclosures have eaten deep into the once wild fringes of the moor; but the solitude and the silence still remain. The curlew still calls in the breeding season upon the long ridges above the Barle; the ponies and the little horned sheep of the moor, and the black-faced Highlander still have the waste to themselves.

Simonsbath, the little metropolis of Exmoor forest, with its church, vicarage, manor-house, and shepherd’s cottages, at one time occupied mainly by Scotsmen, sits upon the Barle. All this country and that about the Upper Exe is now familiar, in fact, to the great numbers of persons who in one way or another follow the chase of the stag, and, in name, to far more who read the voluminous literature on the subject. It is curious to recall Exmoor before it became the fashion, when its very name conveyed no meaning in ordinary company, when a strange face on the banks of the Upper Barle was a cause of astonishment, when the villages on the moor edge were rich in original characters, content with a tri-weekly post, and quite independent of newspapers. Most of the moor, including the Exe and Barle, is just within the county of Somerset. Just below Dulverton, on the Barnstaple and Taunton line, noted now as a stag-hunting quarter, the Barle and Exe join, passing at the same moment into the county of Devon. Thence through a pleasant pastoral and agricultural country with less hurry and commotion than the majority of Devonshire rivers under the name of the Exe, the river flows by Tiverton to Exeter. Beneath that ancient cathedral city it winds with broad and slow current, and, meeting the tide, becomes a navigable river; while its wide estuary, as it flows into the sea between Exmouth and Dawlish, is familiar to every traveller on the Great Western main line which skirts its shores.