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The Rivers and Streams of England
South-east Devon, that block of country between the Exe and Dorsetshire, is watered through its very heart by the Otter and on its extremity by the Axe. There can be little question but that, of all the west country which lies aloof from the moor, this south-east corner of Devon, watered mainly by the Otter and familiar to many strangers who visit the watering-places of Seaton, Sidmouth, or Budleigh, is the most beautiful in general landscape. The contour of the hills is more varied and effective, nor have they been denuded of timber about their more conspicuous portions as in most other parts of the county. The bank-fences too are more umbrageous, and the bright red soil has here an uncommon fertility, which gives an even added verdure to the grass and a brighter glow to the fallows. This gracious region has all the hill qualities of Devonshire, with a general look of luxuriance and abundance which is absent from the chess-board bareness that is the characteristic of such large tracts of the county.
The Otter, though bright and clear, is not a moor-bred river. But as it sweeps and swirls free of timber upon a pebbly bed, amid open meadows of extraordinary verdure and between banks of a most brilliant ruddy hue, it always seems, in company with its immediate neighbour the Axe, to claim a place of its own among Devon streams. Here too the Devonshire village of the alien idealist, the novelist, and the play-wright is more in evidence, for the simple fact that East Devon approximates in some respects – cottage architecture among them – with the neighbouring counties where the old-fashioned picturesque thatched village is still much more of an every-day reality.
CHAPTER VII
THE RIVERS OF THE SOUTH-EAST
THE physical attractions of the three south-eastern counties – Surrey, Sussex, and Kent – owe little in comparison with the regions hitherto treated of to their rivers. But use and custom are all powerful even in the appeal which Nature and landscape make to persons genuinely susceptible to their influences. It is tolerably certain that to the great numbers of such for whom these counties and others, practically of the same class, represent the rural England with which they have any sort of intimacy, this want of water, or at any rate waters of an inspiring kind, ceases to be felt. One might almost say it becomes a lost sense, from lack of familiarity; and that the standards of perfection in landscape from this point of view arrange themselves, regardless of what to another temperament is an irreparable blemish.
No alien, for instance, from the north or west, who has the spirit of these things within him at all, ever gets over the loss of the rapid stream. The stir of clear and moving waters, though automatically, of course, the invariable note of the highest expressions of British scenery, can never be dispensed with by those reared among them. The sluggish and turgid river consoles them scarcely more than the entire absence of any kind of water. Sometimes it is almost an irritant from the contrast it suggests. Natives of what for brevity we may call the dry counties, can admire a Welsh or Yorkshire stream as sincerely as a Welshman or a Yorkshireman, but they would not often be able to understand how great is the effect of their absence in landscape on the northern or western temperament.
The rivers of Sussex have at least some marked peculiarities. For though none of them are chalk streams, yet all but one cut their way through a high chalk range to the sea. It is only, indeed, as they come within the influence of salt water and begin to feel its tides, that they have any distinction at all; since above this they dwindle either into insignificant brooks or into straight-cut, canal-like waterways, into which
many of them indeed were fashioned in the canal era. The rivers of Sussex worthy of mention can be numbered precisely on the fingers of one hand, and run into the sea at fairly regular intervals. They have considerable character of a kind, shared, with one exception, by them all, and are unlike any other rivers in England. They are of small service to the inland scenery of the county and little account in it, but they add immensely to the interest of the sea-coast strip. The noteworthy rivers counting from west to east are the Arun, at Littlehampton and Arundel; the Adur, at Shoreham; the Ouse, at Lewes and Newhaven; the Cuckmere near Seaford; and the Eastern Rother, at Rye. All but the last break through the coast range and are Sussex rivers from their birth. The Eastern Rother – thus distinguished since the Arun has a considerable tributary of that name – rises in Sussex near Robertsbridge, and flowing eastward forms the boundary against Kent for some distance, and in the days of old wound through the heart of Romney Marsh into the sea at Lydd. One of those great storms, however, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which so greatly changed the coast, turned the Rother into the present Sussex channel past Rye and so into the sea. Every one of these rivers makes up in some way for the deficiencies of its earlier and fresh-water period by the manner of its approach to the sea. In the case of the Rother, for instance, though the inland valleys it flows through are in themselves not unpleasing, it is difficult to warm towards a river that has every characteristic of a canal, contracting eventually into a respectable ditch. At Rye, however, the Rother becomes part of one of the most picturesque and most painted scenes in the south of England. Beneath the rock on which the most striking by far of south coast towns clusters, the Rother abandons its canal-like habit and at high tide coils gleaming seaward for its last two miles through the Sussex end of Romney Marsh, the worthy centre of probably the most curious and striking outlook between Pool harbour and the Humber. Two other lesser streams, the Brede and the Tillingham, come into it through the meadows. But as late as Tudor times all these rivers formed together a large estuary serving the then ports of Rye and Winchelsea. These are typical Sussex rivers, flowing down valleys whose least pleasing feature might almost be said to be the actual streams that made them. The rich meadows in the flat, the old
homesteads, the hop-fields upon the slopes, the charming villages, and the still surviving windmills surmounting the ridges are of the best that tranquil southern England has to offer. But the dyked-in waters themselves, flowing sullenly and monotonously over their muddy bottoms between raised turf banks, with rare exceptions contribute nothing and are powerless to charm.
The most easterly of the four chief rivers cutting through the coast range is the Cuckmere. As one drops down the long westward slope from Beachy Head into a sequestered and far-spreading Down country this little river, cleaving a narrow way into the sea below, without port or harbour or village or anything but an isolated homestead or two within apparent touch of it, seizes one’s fancy not a little. For this reason the Cuckmere as a replica in miniature of the Ouse and Arun, but of curiously sequestered habit on this otherwise rather populous coast, has a place of its own somewhat apart from its fellows.
The Ouse, the next, going westward, to cut through the Downs, is a very much larger stream. It breaks through the here narrow but lofty chalk range some five miles from the sea at Lewes, and then winds through the meadows as a tidal river to Newhaven – a stretch of country familiar enough to every one using this route to the Continent. The cleft in the Downs made by the Ouse below the ancient and picturesque town of Lewes is one of the boldest and most precipitous scenes of its kind in the whole chalk system. Looking down from the top of the prodigiously steep streets of Lewes, or from the summit of the castle, the opposite Down rises like an inaccessible green wall for five or six hundred feet, and one might fancy there was scarcely room for the slow running river to push its way through what one is almost tempted to call the defile below. The Ouse rises in many feeders about the edges of Ashdown forest but is quite insignificant till, after the manner of Sussex rivers, it makes this fine effort at Lewes. Hence strong tides rush up and down the seven miles or so of channel which winds through the banked-in meadows to Newhaven.
The Adur, which joins the sea at Shoreham, between Brighton and Worthing, follows the same tactics, and is a still more insignificant stream up the country, but winds for some way through the chalk range, from Bramber, where it has some claim to be a river to the two Shorehams, the old and the new. But the Arun, the most westerly of all the Sussex
rivers, is the best known and the most important. It, too, draws near the sea by Amberley and Arundel to Littlehampton with a rapid transformation from comparative insignificance to scenes that always compel one’s interest and sometimes one’s admiration. Meeting the Western Rother at the old Roman station, now covered by Pulborough, which lifts itself above the flat, the two little streams make together one of a reasonable size that, flowing on through wide water meadows, enters the gap in the Downs at Amberley, and there, under the influence of the tide, begins to rise and fall upon a muddy bed. Arundel Castle, raised above the town with its wooded park swelling up the face of the Down behind, makes a really noble background to the reaches of the Arun, both above and below. It is an awkward river for boating on account of the pace with which the tide rushes up its reedy, muddy bed, and the distance over which it makes its force felt. But it is perfectly feasible, if forethought be taken, to ascend with the tide for many miles above Arundel, and return with it to great advantage. The swell of the Downs, clad above Arundel with beech-woods approaching at places close to the bank, and the rich scented meadows, through which the river winds for miles, aloof from dwellings or villages, more than compensate for the slightly deterrent qualities of the turgid and muddy waters. Even these blemishes, however, are obscured when the tide is high. But it is not well, when it has begun to turn, to tie the bow of your boat to a tree trunk and take an unwary siesta beneath its shade in the stern, or, as once happened to the present writer, you may peradventure be awakened by the water running over your shoulders and the nose of the boat pointing heavenward at an angle of forty-five degrees.
From Arundel bridge the river runs a navigable course through salt meadows for some seven miles to its mouth at Littlehampton with no appreciable widening of its channels. The Arun above Arundel and all the way up past Amberley is a noted haunt of the humbler class of London anglers, whom the railroad, for a quite trifling sum, brings down here by hundreds. At intervals along the banks for miles you find the patient bream-fisher from the East End, having spent the night often beneath the sky, watching his float throughout the day with unremitting concentration.
The only two Surrey rivers of any consequence, the Wey and the Mole, rise in the Weald country and cut through the chalk ranges of the Northern
Downs on their journey to the Thames, precisely as the Sussex rivers cut through the South Downs on their passage to the sea. The Mole is a little river of character and considerable beauty. Rising in the neighbourhood of Redhill it burrows under the chalky heights of Box and so by Leatherhead, Cobham, and Esher to the Thames at Moulsey. Through so ornate a residential region, too, its streams are made the most of in many a pleasant lawn and grove, and by many a country mansion and villa. It runs quite a pace too, here and there over yellow gravel, and sometimes, as between Cobham and Esher, abandons the trammels of civilisation, and slips, in quite wanton fashion, through wild and tangled woodland. But this would bring us within the orbit of the great river-haunting public of the Metropolis, and the ever-widening circles which are part of it. As all mention of the Thames is eliminated from these pages as a subject at once too voluminous, too familiar in fact and in descriptive literature, its Surrey tributaries may fairly be left here to the accomplished brush of the artist.
Kent is less rich in rivers even than Sussex, though happier in the quality; of the only three of recognisable name it possesses the Medway, the Stour, and the Darenth. The latter, which rises at Westerham and flows through the chalk Downs northward to meet the Thames at Dartford, is a small stream with a sometimes swift current, more noted perhaps as a natural trout stream among anglers than on any other account, Farningham having been a well-known tryst of many famous fly-fishermen in days when locomotion was less easy than now. But the Medway is the most important of Kentish rivers, both for the length and quiet beauty of its inland reaches and the world-wide fame of its anchorage as it spreads out to meet the Thames. Rising on the borders of Sussex about Penshurst it flows north by three of the most important Kentish towns – Tonbridge, Maidstone, and Rochester – the last, of course, virtually including its straggling and busy neighbour of Chatham. A slow-running river always, the most representative and typical portion of the Upper Medway is the twelve miles or so between Tonbridge and Maidstone. For much of the distance it flows in a valley sufficiently narrow to display to singular advantage the richness of the steep slopes on either side, the country seats, the upstanding villages, the hop-fields, and the orchards. It runs, too, in sufficient volume to make a fine
broad trail in the valley, and be the occasion for several ancient stone bridges of many arches, such as complete the measure of a river’s beauty. From Yalding, where the little streams of the Teise and Beult – strange names for so homely a locality – come in, to Maidstone is the cream of the river. Indeed, till these three unite the Medway can hardly be said in the matter of size to challenge much attention. For a few miles below Maidstone it maintains somewhat the same characteristics till, broadening out under the influence of the tide at Aylesford, it begins its passage through the high walls of the North Downs. A curious passage it is, too: a struggle as it were between frequent groups of the tall chimneys of cement works belching out smoke, and scenery that before the modern industrial period arrived to smirch it, must have been singularly fine. For some half-dozen miles the river continues to roll through an ever-widening but necessarily contracted channel in a quite deep gorge, the Downs rising on either side to a height of five or six hundred feet. The last bridge is at Rochester, still around its Cathedral a quaint old town redolent of Dickens, with the contrasting clangour and pitiless prose of Chatham spreading, unsightly but significant, far over the heights, and looking down on the broad harbour into which the Medway, having achieved its passage through the range, now expands itself towards the Thames. The whole north fringe of Kent, as every one knows who has travelled the road from Canterbury to Rochester, or in other words the line of Watling Street, is a bleak, cheerless country to look upon; the more so, if the suggestion of paradox be permitted, because so highly cultivated. But looking northward from the high ground about Faversham or Sittingbourne one may forget this in the fine views over the Swale, and Sheppey Island, and the mouth of the Thames that are everywhere disclosed, and finest of all is that of the wide, island-studded estuary of the Medway in all its memorable significance.
What the Medway is to West Kent the Stour is to East Kent, though in most respects a very different type of river. From its source near Ashford to its mouth near Sandwich its characteristics are entirely and absolutely rural; a quality rather emphasised than otherwise by its picturesque progress through the famous old town of Canterbury. From Ashford to Canterbury is the pick of the Stour which makes the best of company for the traveller, who, whatever his method
of progress, must of necessity go with it. The village of Wye, clustering around its ancient church amid the fields through which the river runs, is a most prepossessing spot, and calls for notice as having acquired much deserved reputation of recent years as an active centre of agricultural science. Still but of modest size and running clear though slow, the Stour skirts the foot of Godmersham Park and the high hills that to the northward are clothed with forests still covering many thousands of acres. By meadowy and woodland ways, hurrying a little here and there as if to remind one that, unlike the Medway, it is a trout stream of old renown, the Stour runs onwards to Chilham where a little village rests on its banks that from an artistic point of view would do credit to Shakespeare’s Avon. Thence by Chartham, with its ancient church and less engaging paper-mill, the stream pursues an even course through narrow meadows, washing the lawn of Harton Manor, with its fourteenth-century chapel in the yard, and the grounds of Milton just below, with a similar interesting and curious survival attached to them; while in the woods high above Chartham the “Pilgrims’ way” to Canterbury can still be traced with ease between its well-defined banks.
The Stour has certainly a high distinction in watering the earliest shrine of English Christianity, and being at its mouth the landing-place of St. Augustine, the creator of it. It traverses in two channels, made picturesque either by carefully tended foliage or fortuitous rows of old houses, the clean and ancient city of Canterbury. The stranger to this corner of England is apt to forget how comparatively remote and countrified a place this famous town still is. Such a considerable slice of West Kent is now involved in the residential districts tributary to London, and the busy shore of the Thames, the county as a whole is apt to take the colouring of these prominent and populous districts in the imagination both of those familiar with them and of others who do not know Kent at all. The whole course of the Stour from its source to its mouth is as continuously and genuinely rural, with as little flavour but that of the soil and its accessories, as any river in Somerset or Shropshire. It is out of reach of all those influences which either disfigure at intervals or give an over-prosperous, artificial, and too decorative touch to so many of the rivers within fifty miles of London. The old families to be sure, as elsewhere in Kent, have practically vanished, but there is
little surface evidence of this, nor of a new plutocracy of various grades with or without acres being in possession. There is nothing, for instance, of the atmosphere of Surrey or Hertfordshire or North Sussex or East Berks. All along the Stour it is quite obvious that people are wholly concerned with wheat and grass, with hops and fruit and cattle. One is out of range of the season-ticket, and in this sense in more of a true Arcadia than even in the upper valley of the Medway. And so as regards Canterbury. With the mind impressed from childhood by its outstanding ecclesiastical importance, one is apt to forget that it is only a clean country town, though a large one, lying remote from any place of importance, and as far from London by rail as Salisbury! Yet its importance in history is overwhelming, its interest as a place of pilgrimage in the modern sense prodigious. Its Cathedral, associated with such a trio as St. Augustine, Lanfranc, and Becket, with several unique features and possessions, is probably the most complete illustration of the procession of English ecclesiastical architecture that we have. There are large sections, too, of the city walls still standing at a considerable elevation, and on foundations, at any rate, dating back to Roman times. The finest embattled entrance gate of any surviving in English towns greets the approaching visitor, and quite a good display of ancient houses is still preserved in one that takes a proper pride in itself; though from the vandalism of two or three generations ago even Canterbury has not escaped. Soon after leaving the city, the Stour runs out in its easterly course towards the sea through wide, marshy meadows that are more interesting than picturesque from the knowledge that they lead to the ancient town of Sandwich, which, like its younger but more conspicuously striking rival at the mouth of the Rother, occupies a place to itself, resembling nothing else in England. As Rye, till the sea receded and left it virtually high and dry, was one of the chief seaports of England, the object of assault, and the seat of counter-strokes continually with our hereditary foes, the French, so at an earlier period was Sandwich the oldest of the Cinque Ports, which was finally shut off from the sea about four hundred years ago. Sandwich, though on the flat and not raised high upon a rock, savours even more of the remote past than Rye, which is a place of business and residence and still lives and moves in a small way far more within the
world’s orbit than the other; for the famous golf links with which Sandwich has again, in widely different fashion, made its name familiar throughout England, affect the old town itself but little. A walk now runs along the old walls within which the beautiful Norman tower of St. Clement’s Church rises above the low roofs. Open spaces and gardens lie easily about in the little town which, as an unchanged survival from Tudor or Mediæval times, has no equal in England. Before the Norman Conquest it was the chief port of the nation. As late as 1446 its harbour, now dry land, is described by a German ambassador as “wonderful, the resort of ships of all sizes from all parts of Europe.”
By the water-gate at the entrance to the old bridge over the Stour is the Barbican. But the behaviour of the Stour as it draws towards the sea under present conditions is the most remarkable; for when within half a mile of the south end of Pegwell Bay opposite Ramsgate it bends suddenly southward, runs for 3 or 4 miles parallel with the east coast to Sandwich, and then doubles back upon the same course to meet the sea at the spot where its original intention of ending its career seems obviously to have been. Close to its mouth upon the other side is the shingle spit of Ebbsfleet, where not merely St. Augustine, but more than a century earlier Hengist and Horsa, first planted their pagan feet upon British soil.
On the very banks of the river are the long embankments still strewn with tiles and pottery, marking the site of the Roman Rutupium, a station of sufficient importance to be the headquarters of the Second Legion in the third century, or, in other words, of a garrison of about 8000 men. And in scarcely any part of England has such a mass of coins been recovered, while on the rising ground the graves of the early Saxon settlers and invaders lie thick amid the chalk. But the mouth of the Stour, where the action of the sea alone during the long centuries since Roman times affords in itself a fascinating subject, is so rich besides in human memories that I should be in danger of slipping too deeply into the maritime aspect of English rivers, which I have described as having no immediate concern with the nature of this book. Still, it must be admitted, though less with the Kentish than the Sussex rivers, that their real interests and their physical attractions only begin with the first breath of the sea.
CHAPTER VIII
THE YORKSHIRE DALES
THE Rivers of Yorkshire present to the writer of these pages much the same embarrassment of riches and problems of compression on an only lesser scale than those presented by the general title of this work. One thing, however, reduces the rather bewildering amplitude of the subject as expressed upon the map by not a little, and that is the natural reluctance in a work like this to linger by rivers after they have lost their purity from the refuse of mines and factories, and most certainly after they have actually entered the industrial districts. Another thing which tends to further simplification is that the country generally known as the “Yorkshire dales,” comprising the Upper and most beautiful portion of the best of the rivers, is the district that is associated in the minds of most people with the typical river scenery of this great county. And this region may be roughly described as covering the north-west quarter of Yorkshire, and including the Upper and cleaner portions of nearly all its important rivers. From hence come the Tees, the Swale, the Ure, the Nidd, the Wharfe, and the Ribble, with their many tributaries. It is a curious fact, too, that with the exception of the first and last, every one of them takes a south-east course, and every one eventually pours its waters into the Ouse near the Humber estuary. The Tees, whose northern bank is Durham territory for nearly the whole of its course, flows into the North Sea, having its own ample and busy estuary at Middlesborough. Through the centre of Yorkshire, running north and south, is the great plain, or by comparison a plain with which the traveller on the Great Northern railroad to Scotland is so familiar, and whence thousands of persons no doubt derive their impressions of this distinguished county. But at intervals any such traveller with an eye to the country may see rising far away in the east as on the west, those lofty hills and moors that in the minds of as many others represent the Yorkshire which their memory turns to. I have spoken of the north-western highlands, usually known as the Yorkshire