The Rivers and Streams of England

Buckfastleigh is not a dream of wood and stone, but it does no great violence to the charm of its site, and has an old Benedictine Abbey, which has been recently restored and occupied by French

ecclesiastics of that order. High above the streams of the Dart, too, in Holne Vicarage, Charles Kingsley was born nearly a century ago. After passing through the village of Staverton the Dart spends the last mile or two of its fresh-water career before tumbling over the Totnes weir in the slower tree-shaded waters that bound the grounds of Dartington Hall. This is the ancient and present seat of the Champernownes, whose ancestor was a quite distinguished member of that group of enterprising Devonian squires who shed such unforgettable lustre on the county in the Elizabethan age. Though the present house at Dartington is more or less of that period, what more particularly constitutes it one of the memorable houses of Devonshire is the still ample ivy-clad shell of the noble fourteenth-century banqueting hall, the great clock tower, and many subsidiary buildings of an extremely early date. Not very far across the river, too, are the splendid ruins of Berry Pomeroy Castle, one of the best existing mediæval monuments of the kind in the county.

The little town of Totnes, where those celebrated tidal reaches, to which the Dart owes perhaps a somewhat disproportionate measure of its fame, begin, is about the most picturesque inland town in a county by no means architecturally rich in this particular. With its castle, its quaint and steep narrow High Street climbing from the river level through an embattled gateway, its penthouses and fine church, Totnes has something to show on its own account to the great numbers of people who come here for the sole purpose of making the beautiful trip by steamer to Dartmouth. There are still, moreover, in Totnes, some fine old houses where its merchants dwelt when Devon did such a roaring trade with the Newfoundland fisheries and the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century, to say nothing of a little profitable buccaneering, when the Spaniards were so well worth robbing, and the beard of their king requiring to be so frequently singed.

In due accordance with the nonsensical habit of labelling the natural beauties of England after stock scenes on the Continent, this tidal stretch of the Dart has been advertised ever since most of us can remember as the “English Rhine.” Anything more utterly different from the banks and waters of the Rhine than the banks and waters of the Dart it would be difficult to conceive. One is reminded of the gushing lady who, while walking upon one occasion with the venerable Bishop Philpotts of Exeter above the cliffs near Torquay, asked the Bishop if he did not think the prospect was very Swiss like.

“Very, ma’am,” snapped the bored prelate, “only here there are no mountains and in Switzerland there is no sea.”

Britons of average powers of observation, with an intelligent knowledge of their own country and a sufficient one of others, know very well that Great Britain, whether in its wilder or its tamer aspects, resembles no other country in the least little bit, but is absolutely unique in almost every detail, natural and artificial, that goes to make a landscape. The very atmosphere that many of us abuse for its moisture and lack of clarity is no small factor in wrapping this favoured isle in that mantle of velvet, which the graces of English rural life have perfected into a land without equal in mellow finished beauty. Only Britons who have never experienced banishment seem to be unconscious of what kind of a land they live in. Let them ask an intelligent foreigner or an American how it strikes them on first seeing it! The Dart is no more like the Rhine than Torquay is like Switzerland or Cornwall like the Riviera, or North Wales like the Alleghanies or the Grampians like the mountains of the moon.

It is absolutely English. The woodlands that mantle so richly about Sharpham could not possibly be anything else, still less the brilliant pastures that cling like velvet to the slopes of the folding hills, nor yet the cottages that lie amid the orchards of Dittisham, nor the homesteads sprinkling the high slopes, nor the tracery of the fields that enclose their groups of red Devon cattle or the long-wooled sheep of the South Hams. Nobody with sense could imagine this looked like anything but England. As one nears Dartmouth the spirit of British seamanship, ancient and modern, dominates everything and seizes the imagination. The old Britannia, lying where she has lain ever since we can remember, and the new naval college standing out upon the hillside above, speak loudly enough of the present, while the home of Hawkins, whose brave parting words as his ship foundered off the coast of Newfoundland are historic, greets us from the opposing heights. Of Raleigh, too, and his first pipe of tobacco smoked on a rocky islet in the river, Dartmouth has much to say. But if Devonshire rivers lead us to discuss Devonshire harbours and all that they mean, we shall become involved in the heroic west country age of the Great Eliza, and of the protracted epoch of the Newfoundland fisheries, which so profoundly affected Devonshire life to its inmost recesses for two centuries afterwards. And this will not do. It will be enough to say that the mouth of the Dart is worthy of the river’s deserved reputation; a fine deep, winding harbour, channelled between lofty hills and embellished at its narrow mouth with the keep of an ancient castle. Dartmouth town is, in its different way, as picturesque as Totnes, and if it were not, its great memories would hallow the homeliest walls. But in treating of Devonshire villages and country houses one has hardly in mind the abodes of sea-goers and fishermen. They belong to another type altogether, and one regards them with different eyes. When you get to the mouth of a river, for instance, you no longer look for thatched cottages or half-timbered houses or Tudor homesteads. You expect hard-featured, storm-smitten tenements of stone, and seek the picturesque with probable success in narrow tortuous streets, in steep stairway wynds, in low-browed taverns soaked in mariners’ tales. We have nothing to do with these things here. It may be said that rivers whose storm-sheltered mouths are so intimately concerned with sea-going have much to do with them. But it is not with that side of a river’s influence at any rate which in the main this book aspires to deal.

Between the Dart and Plymouth, or, to be more precise, between the Dart and that beautiful little stream, the Erme, a glimpse of which adorns these pages: between Dartmoor again on the north and the sea to the south, lies that block of Devon known as the South Hams. As I have said, it is not precisely a part of the county which a patriotic Devonian, not obsessed by his patriotism, would select for taking, let us say, a Herefordshire friend up on to a high place and asking his opinion of Devonshire. But furrowing its way southward from Dartmoor to the sea, hidden from the eye till you are right down beside it, runs one of the most entrancing little rivers in Devonshire. Larger and longer than the Erme, which at Ivybridge has some outside notoriety, the Avon is quite as beautiful, with the advantage of comparative obscurity. This is an inversion, too, of what one might look for, since from South Brent Junction on the Great Western main line, where the Avon breaks from the fringes of the moor, a little railway follows down its woody mazes, hugging it closely for most of its journey to the sea, and culminating at Kingsbridge, whence travellers go by road or water to

Salcombe, another harbour on the Dartmouth pattern, but even more beautiful.

The Avon, like all its sisters, starts life as a peaty burn prattling for many miles through the silence of the moors. Then comes the beautiful fringe country, where it plunges in many a cascade through woods and ravines, and thence emerging sparkles down through the meadows beneath the village of Brent into what might be called the low country, if the phrase in Devonshire were not absurd. A country “all ’ills and ’oles,” as a venerable Suffolk cook within my knowledge curtly and pithily summed up Devonshire to East Anglian friends, after visiting her old mistress, who had migrated westward. If the hills of the South Hams are mostly a bare patchwork of cultivation, the “holes” through which the Avon flows are a long delight. Leaving villages, such as Huish, Dipford, Woodleigh, and Loddiswell, to face the south-west storms on windy brows, away upon either hand the Avon urges its bright impetuous streams for a dozen or so miles beneath an almost unbroken canopy of foliage; churning here over mossy rocks, rolling there over gravelly beds, or lingering in some deep and broad pool shadowed by fern-tufted, mossy crags or by some giant trees of the woods, waxed mightier than common, as if conscious that long arms were needed to join hands across the expanded stream. Green strips of meadow spread now and again along one bank or the other. But even then the foliage bristles upon the river’s immediate edge and screens its waters from every attempt at undue familiarity on the part of the casual wanderer. Betimes, too, some old stone bridge festooned with trailing ivy gives a more perfect finish to the vista of water that dances through flickering bands of sun and shade beneath the swaying boughs. But after all, it is only the angler down in the water who penetrates these inner sanctuaries of Devon streams, and others like them, and gathers of their best.

Occasionally some little farm with an orchard abuts upon the bank, or a water-mill where in a big kitchen the miller’s wife will serve the angler, wearied with battling knee deep in the rocky rapid stream – for no other strangers come this way – with a grateful confection in which clotted cream and honey play a treasured part. But for much of the way wild woods towering to the skyline several hundred feet above, often, too, pathless, trackless woods, hold hill and stream alike in their sylvan grip. And what a spangled carpet it is that Nature stretches here upon the cool mossy ground, above all, perhaps, in the season when April wanes and the shy leaves of May have as yet shut out but half the sunshine. What a continual blaze is here of primroses and violets and wild geranium, of star of Bethlehem, of celandine, which in these moist cool shades all linger on till the kingcup and the bluebell have burst upon the mossy floor with something more than the promise of their coming splendour. The oak is the staple tree of these Devon valleys, and, as the latest to put forth its leaves, the bloom of spring flowers in which these vales are equalled by few and surpassed by none, shows upon the woodland banks in all the more bewitching brilliancy. Though the oak is the groundwork of woodland colouring in Devon valleys, the ash and the alder, the willow, the birch, the rowan, and the larch all play their part in the riotous foliage of the stream. One misses the opulent sycamore, that precocious harbinger of summer by the streams of Wales and the north country, for they are much scarcer in Devon. One misses, too, with thankfulness the stiff and sombre pine wood beloved by economists and afforestation enthusiasts, from which the streams and hills of this county are, as a rule, singularly and happily free. An inspiring sight, beyond doubt, is a well-grown ruddy-barked Scottish fir, standing out alone or one of a small group, but a poor thing as a forest; acceptable enough in a common-place country, but intolerably superfluous in those of shapely outline and strong characteristics. Most of us will agree with Wordsworth, who bitterly resented the growing practice of obscuring the heather and crag and diversified mountain colouring of the Lake District with the dull, stiff monotone of the pine wood. Devonshire, at any rate, may be thankful that her valley slopes are the natural home of the oak.

But I should not have ventured to spend so much time on the banks of a comparatively obscure west country river if it had not always seemed to me about the most complete example of an ideal Devon stream within my knowledge. On a less exalted scale than the Dart in the south or the Lynn in the north of the county, and little known outside its own district, it is the better qualified to be the river of one’s fancy, and the typical stream of the west country. As a trouting stream, so far as regards the dozen miles or so here lingered upon, it is perhaps the best in Devonshire; the size of its fish, for some inscrutable reason, considerably excelling as an average the over modest weight that distinguishes most of the rivers of the county. A moderate payment to the Association who preserve the water from below Brent to the sea will make the stranger free of it. But to hope for any substantial success he must be thoroughly familiar with the art of upstream wet-fly fishing in clear water, and that too among almost continuously overarching foliage. Furthermore, he must be physically strong, for wading all day upon a rocky bottom against strong currents is a labour compared to which an ordinary day’s partridge-shooting under modern conditions is an easy lounge. Both salmon and peal (the west country term for sea-trout) run up the Avon to spawn, but they take the fly so sparingly as scarcely to be worth mentioning among the attractions of the river.

The Tamar, which for nearly all its course divides Devon and Cornwall, is a river that, in the matter of size, ranks with the Dart and Exe. But as regards its estuary, being the principal affluent of Plymouth harbour, acquires by this a distinction far above these other streams of purely local fame. It rises within five miles of the Bristol Channel, but turning its face at once away from this northern coast, runs southward by a course that, reckoned as the crow flies, is over fifty miles, and by the bends of the river must be at least half as much again. For the whole of this distance, with the exception of a short-cut through an intrusive arm that Devon flings into Cornwall, it forms the boundary between the two counties. Its fountain springs are close to those of the Torridge, which would seem to start with some intention of running a race against the other in its long journey towards southern seas, and then changing its mind, comes northward again, almost upon its own tracks, to rival the Elizabethan glories, at any rate of Plymouth, in forming the once famous harbour of Bideford. By the time it arrives at the nearest point to Launceston, a mile or so, the Tamar has achieved that measure of importance which marks the somewhat subtle and capricious border-line between the mere stream and the full-grown river, as we count such things in England.

Launceston, locally pronounced “Larnston,” is so near its banks as to count for a Tamar town, and is well worth a visit. It is beautifully situated in a fair country, with the softness of detail common to the better parts of Devonshire, and looking out towards that block of Cornish moorland

which appears like an outline of Dartmoor, and in the person of Brown Willy rises to something like its height. This north-east corner is the choicest part of inland Cornwall, and is practically undisfigured by the havoc of abandoned mines. It suggests nothing less than a continuation of Devonshire, with another Dartmoor on a smaller scale for a background, and a like profusion of mountain streams, which spout down pleasant valleys to the Tamar or the sea. Launceston too, in spite of a lack of those more pronounced architectural notes of antiquity which mark the ancient towns east of Devonshire, has the look of one nevertheless, if viewed through west country spectacles. Indeed, it has a mediæval gateway still actually in situ, the ruins of a castle, and a most beautiful church, the outside walls of which are entirely faced with carved stone in a manner calculated to make the wandering ecclesiologist rub his eyes at a spectacle so singular, if not quite unique, in England.

At Greystone bridge, where the high-road from Tavistock to Launceston crosses it, the Tamar will have run more than half its course, and already achieved the size of the largest Devonshire rivers in their fresh-water stages, such as the Dart, the Exe, the Torridge, and the Taw. Like these, though not in this particular case rising in the moors, the water of the Tamar is clear in texture, and tumbles along over a gravelly or rocky bed from rapid shallow – or stickle, as the west country term has it – to swirling pools, and so far it remains unpolluted with the mine refuse that is the scourge of some of its lower tributaries. The scenery of the upper half of the Tamar is that of a normal Devonshire stream away from the moors. From Greystone bridge downwards the great height of the country on both banks gives a distinction of environment to the Tamar above most of its fellows. On looking over the landscape through which it flows, from any high point, it gives the impression of a mighty gorge wriggling tortuously through an upheaved country. Not that you can actually see the Tamar till you get to quite close quarters with it. It is a most difficult river for the casual stranger to acquire an intimacy with, from the fact that it flows in so deep a trench. Few roads or lanes follow its banks, and all the ordinary arteries of travel lie back on the ridges above. Here and there, as at Newbridge and again at Calstock, steep ways descend in perpendicular fashion for a mile or so to the valley, but no assistance from wheels of any kind either up or down it could much benefit the less robust adventurer. The tide runs a long way up the Tamar from Plymouth harbour, even to the weir below Morwell crags in the Tavistock neighbourhood. The scenery is, beyond question, imposing; the Cornish bank rising in these middle reaches to over a thousand feet of altitude and terminating in wild moorish summits, each, however, unfortunately surmounted by the unmistakable signs of the mining industry which, alive or dead, to a sensible extent smirches the beauty of this otherwise striking outlook. The villages too, both those on the river-bank, like Calstock, or on the hill-top, like Bere Alston, are mainly the abode of miners, or those who would like to be such if work were active, and have all the forbidding qualities of their kind, or most of them. There is a fine old Tudor manor-house of the Edgcumbe family, with picturesque grounds, at Cotehele near Calstock, and a few miles higher up, in the fresh-water reaches of the river, is Endsleigh, a box of the Duke of Bedford’s, with delightful surroundings. In ancient times, before mining and other obstructions discouraged the salmon, the river seems to have had a great reputation, as one can well believe. Of late years efforts have been made, by means of ladders on the weirs, to attract that noble fish once more. But the Upper Tamar is something better than a second or third rate salmon river, since it is a really first-class trout stream, equal to the Avon in the average weight of its fish, with a much greater length as well as breadth of water. It is rigidly preserved, however, the Duke of Bedford being the largest riparian owner. The mention of this powerful house turns one’s thoughts to Tavistock, whose broad Abbey lands fell to the Russells at the Dissolution.

Now Tavistock is the centre of a perfect network of small rivers, and is in itself the most ornate, cheerful, and in some respect picturesquely situated country-town in Devonshire. The influence of the House of Bedford has, no doubt, much to do with the quite distinguished appearance of the little borough as regards its most conspicuous quarters, while Nature has done much by means of the impetuous waters of the Tavy, which wash its lawns and pleasure-grounds. What with its Townhall, Guildhall, Library, and its great hotel, once a ducal residence, with other pleasant buildings set in an ample umbrageous square around the stately Perpendicular church, the native town of Drake is calculated to give quite a shock of pleasant surprise to the stranger expecting

the somewhat undistinguished atmosphere of an average west country town. There are just sufficient remnants of the once famous Abbey visible here and there, amid other buildings, to remind the visitor both of the origin of the town and of the Bedford influence. As for the rest of Tavistock, it is quite pleasing in the older streets, and still more in the many attractive residences in and about it, though scarcely any ancient houses now remain. The site of that of Tavistock’s great son, Francis Drake, is just outside the town, though covered by a later house, while a bronze statue to the hero, a replica of the one on Plymouth Hoe, greets the visitor approaching by the Plymouth road. Another honoured native of Tavistock should be mentioned, namely, William Browne, the poet and friend of Drayton, if only for the fact that in his Britannia’s Pastorals he celebrates the streams and rivers around his native place with obviously intense affection – as well he may.

For when we come to these same streams the difficulty of the Devonshire river, as the subject of a single chapter, bursts on us with fresh force. A perfect network of bright waters dance in the numerous valleys that they have furrowed so deep in the neighbourhood of Tavistock. Most of them, to be sure, are tributaries of the Tavy, though some, like the Lydd and the Lew, break westward to the Tamar. These last come down from the sequestered groves near the edge of the moor, where that venerable oracle of Devonian lore, that “Vates Sacer” of the West, Mr. Baring-Gould, is so felicitously seated in the home of his fathers. The Plym, least in size of the three fair rivers which meet at the great seaport, but compensated by the greater glory of its name, runs an independent course. Indeed, the very traveller on the railroad to Tavistock from Plymouth makes such acquaintance with the quite remarkable beauties of this little river, as is not often vouchsafed even to those who do not read picture magazines or tit-bits, like the average Briton when going through the choicest portions of his own country for the first time. For many miles up the enchanting vale to Bickleigh, the fortunate wight who has the right-hand window seat can look down upon the little river churning its way far below through a deep trough between a continuous maze of oak forests, till at length he may see its course break away towards the moor, where it has its birth, and into the wilds of the eternal granite-crested hills. The Meavy, the Plym’s weaker half, will still be left beside the railroad in the meadows playing hide-and-seek amid the alders and the orchards, with all the normal humours of a Devon stream, till we leave it and cross the Walkham on its way to join the Tavy. But it is the Tavy, of course, with which Tavistock, and we too, perhaps, should be chiefly concerned. For the Tavy is a very assertive stream, and its friends hold it as second to none in the county for natural beauty, to say nothing of its repute as a peal river.

The first claim I am quite prepared to endorse, for the simple reason that I do not know any stream of importance in Devonshire that I would deliberately place in the second rank. The Dart stands out as prima inter pares at least, because it adds tidal distinctions to its other charms. Nor do I honestly think there is any coup d’œil in Devonshire quite equal to that presented by the uniting valleys of the East and West Lynn above Lynmouth. But these are mere details. The Tavy, at any rate, has not a dull mile. Its early career in the moor is a long one, and that portion of it known as Tavy Cleeve is one of the wildest ravines on Dartmoor. It enters civilisation about four miles above Tavistock, near the village of Mary Tavy, a name of ill-omen, from the fact that mining has been more or less always carried on here for a very long time, and the truth must be told that the waters of the Tavy assume henceforward for a very long way down the colour of milk. This matter has been the source of continual disputes between those interested in the fishing, or merely in the purity of the Tavy, and those concerned in delving for copper and arsenic. Many years ago a sudden inflow of mine refuse destroyed every fish in the river, a void which time and re-stocking, however, have long rectified. But though the more poisonous matters are no longer let into the stream, there are occasional difficulties with weirs erected for mining purposes, which, unless fitted with ladders, obstruct the run of salmon and peal in the breeding season. The law settles these matters nowadays, though not always so satisfactorily as to clear the air between the conflicting interests, and allays the perennial friction between the angling community and the less concerned but still sympathetic public on the one hand, and the mine-owners with some local labour following on the other. A mine-owner on the river expressed his point of view to me recently, as one stranger to another with characteristic frankness.