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| Driving In The West Country continues on page 173 |
DRIVING IN THE WEST COUNTRY
by A. G. Street
by A. G. Street
The real England is not to be found in towns but in the countryside; and the best way to make its acquaintance is to travel by car. For instance, here is a suggested week's tour round the West Country,
With a good breakfast inside you, start early on Monday morning by waving good-by to Eros, Then set off down Piccadilly, a woman with the West in her eyes and a man with his back to the East. Follow your leader patiently to Chiswick roundabout; there take A 4, and follow this until you can fork left for Staines on A 30. Go very slowly through Staines. because half its population spend all their waking hours crossing the main street; and cautiously thereafter until you have by-passed Basingstoke and a few miles farther on see an old inn, the Wheatsheaf, on the right-hand side of the road.
Unless you have been guilty of taking all sorts of chances on a very twisty road, you will find these fifty miles will have taken you a full hour and a half; so elevenses at the Wheatsheaf are recommended. Thus fortified, a few hundred yards farther west, fork right, and the next thirty-five miles to Salisbury will be a fast road for England.
Long before you reach the city you will see the needle of its famous spire like a gray finger in the sky, marking for you the beginning of the West Country. As you will have a good hour before lunch, park your car in the peace of the green close, and visit the cathedral. There you will marvel at two things, the daring of the steeple jacks who are busy repairing the tip of the spire and the achievement of those thirteenth century craftsmen, So, and especially if you come from a country of high wages, before you seek your lunch, ask the way to Penny-farthing Street. It is so named because the workmen who built the cathedral were dissatisfied with their wages of one penny per day and struck for and obtained a twenty-five per cent increase,
Park your car in the market place and go to the Haunch of Venison for lunch. It is neither residential hotel nor pub, but just Salisbury's Haunch of Venison, In prewar days it boasted a silver grill and steaks and chops of tender memory. You will find it just outside the market, opposite the ancient Poultry Cross. The only entrance is through a crowded bar and up a crazy staircase; and the boards of the dinning-room floor slope all ways at once. But the lunch will be the best the times can offer; and, I must say I hate giving this away, there is also a claret that should not be ignored.
Thus fortified you will be able to take a roundabout route to your bed in Exeter. Leave Salisbury on A 354 and drive southwest some forty miles to Dorchester. This, too, is a fast open road, but my advice is to travel slowly with frequent stops. Not because you are traveling through the Hardy country, but just because you are traveling through real chalk country, a land of ups and downs, where the ups are known as downs and the downs are small green valleys.
According to William Cowper, "God made the country, and man made the town"; but with all due reverence I submit that God did not make this chalk countryside as you will see it. He made the friendly sweep of the down’s the silver twinkle of the stream; but the design, the pattern and the up-keep are the work of man's hands. Man planted those beech clumps on the hill- sides, the tall elms that guard the villages and the willows by the river. Man used the flints his ploughs brought to the surface to build his houses and the straw from his bread corn to roof them. Man placed a cozy village every few miles, each with church and school and inn. And today man sows wheat in this field, barley in that, clover in the other and roots just where they should be.
Man is also responsible for the loveliest feature of the English chalk country, its irrigated water meadows. So stop in one of villages and ask permission to explore the water meadows by the little river. Leave your car and walk, or rather meander, for no other pace is fitting,
Here you will find the perfect sanctuary from this workaday world. No road, no telephone exchange, no ice cream and above all no crowd. Instead, just high untidy hedges, rushes and comfrey by the river's brim, tall sentinel poplars, pollarded willows, yellow crazybets and lush green grass. Trout and grayling; moor hens, dabchicks and wild duck of all ages and sizes; here a blue kingfisher, there a lordly heron, and sometimes an otter. With these for companions you will be able to lose yourselves in a soft-scented green peace; over you and all the world will be a blue haze and a benign hush.
Which, of course, will make you late for dinner in Exeter, but it will be worth it. Besides, after this you can push on more quickly. For at any time you can read about Blandford where Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge held sway; and Dorchester where Judge Jeffreys held his "Bloody Assizes"; but you can obtain the real flavor of the West Country only by actual sight and scent and touch.
Stay the night in Exeter at the Royal Clarence which you will find practically in the Cathedral Close, After dinner a stroll round the close and the streets leading to it will make you resolve to breakfast early, for you will discover that Exeter is full of antique shops, In fact, only the fear of finding yourselves penniless will force you to leave them on the following day in time to drive forty miles to Plymouth by one o'clock.
On your way, pull up on top of a hill, get out of your car and sniff, That will tell you why Plymouth is the most famous of all English seaports. Although Devonshire is a large country, there seems to be no spot in it where you cannot smell the sea. Years ago the plowboy as he turned his horses on the headland caught a whiff of salt water; and in less than a week he was serving with Drake and sleeping in a hammock. Today the Devonshire tractor driver suffers a like fate, A whiff of salt water conquers the reek of petrol; and before he has time to change his mind, he finds himself sleeping in a submarine, In short, Devonshire has always bred sailors, still does breed sailors and always will breed sailors.
After lunch you may decide to strike north to Launceston and Bideford and there turn eastward on your way back to London; but if you take my advice, you will continue westward for another fifty-odd miles and stay the night at Truro. Not just because Truro is yet another cathedral city, but because in Truro there is a real country hotel that should never he missed if possible.
This is the Red Lion. It isn't very beautiful, it isn't at all pretentious, but it does know how to look after its guests. Every member of the staff is so obviously glad to serve you, the food and wine are excellent, the beds are comfortable, and the conversation between locals and visitors in the small bar upstairs or in the large public one downstairs is worth traveling many miles to share.
But if this round trip is to be for only one week, farther west cannot be managed; so you must reluctantly forego the delights of Penzance with its open air Shakespeare, St. Ives and its artists, Land's End with its Atlantic rollers and all the lovely coves of far west Cornwall.
Instead, next morning drive northward to Wadebridge and Camelford, there turning off the main road for three or four miles to King Arthur's Castle Hotel at Tintagel. I can only give you time for elevenses here, for I must get you to Hoops Inn at _ Horn's Cross just short of Bideford in time for lunch. This was probably an old smugglers' haunt but is now an inn of character. The food is good, the service excellent and mine host has both a palate and a well-stocked cellar. Do take his advice concerning your prelunch sherry.
After lunch drive into Bideford, a little white seaport originally "By-the-ford," and you will find yourselves bang in the middle of Kingsley's Westward Ho! Moreover, someone there will be certain to tell you that Bideford was the port from which Sir Richard Grenville sailed on his last voyage.
Then as a change from literature and history I suggest you turn south to Torrington and there left to South Molton. This will give you a taste of real Devon, narrow, absurdly narrow, roads with steep, almost precipitous, approaches to each village on your route. You will be compelled to drive very slowly, which will give you time to think; and if you think as I do about that time in the afternoon and in those surroundings, you will think of Devonshire cream.
Think of it! A courteous approach to the old lady in that small farmhouse or this minute cottage, and who knows? New bread, homemade strawberry jam and real Devonshire cream, lashings of it! Think of it, and to hell with your dyspepsia!
After that tea you will be in such a beatific mood that you will not mind going almost back on your tracks for a few miles. At South Molton turn sharp left on to A 361; a few miles farther on take the right fork on A 326 to Blackmoor Gate and here turn sharp right for Lynmouth. This is one of the cosiest little seaside villages in all Devonshire, where sea gulls will eat from your fingers as they fly past the windows of a restaurant and where the finest railway in the world still operates up and down the cliff between this village and the little town of Lynton high above it. No smoke, no smell and no noise, just gravitation's artful aid plus some water taps, and up and down you go, ho so smoothly.
Stay the night at the Tors or Lyndale and on Thursday morning set off southeastward to Simonsbath. As you drive in low gear up the steep hill out of Lynmouth, on one side of the road will be a towering cliff and on the other you will look down on the “greenery-yellow” tops of oak trees on the slope to the river Lyn far below. At the top of this hill you will be on Exmoor, a wild country that will show you beech green as a change from oak. Not tall trees as one usually thinks of beech, but hedgerows of beech on either side of the narrow road.
Carry on along these beech-embroidered lanes through Simonsbath almost to Exford and then southward to Dulverton. Here you will get a view of the wooded slopes on either side of the valleys of the Exe and the Barle. From a distance they will appear quite smooth, as though the tops of the trees have been hand-trimmed with shears. In fact, they look so level that it seems as though it would be possible to toboggan down a green slope on the tops of oak trees all the way until one reached the river with a fine splosh.
At the Carnarvon Arms outside Dulverton the first thing that will greet you in the main lobby will most probably be a whacking great salmon on a large white dish; and I defy you to avoid being told by some triumphant angler every detail of its capture.
After dinner, one course will be fresh salmon from the river Exe, stroll down a long passage until you reach the public bar. There aren't many houses of any kind near the Carnarvon Arms, but that bar will be full of natives, farm workers, timber men, lorry drivers and all sorts, each man knowing some curious method of extracting a salmon from the Exe when occasion offers. If as a stranger you show due humility, you will be invited to take part in their favorite game of shove-halfpenny; at which you will meet your masters.
You can make a late start on Friday morning, for this day's mileage will be easy. Wait until you have seen thick male middle age struggle into waders and set off for the river with his feminine Puss in Boots in close attendance. Then after paying your bill and finding out the first weekend that this friendly hotel can fit you in for some first-class fishing, drive slowly eastward to Taunton, some twenty-five mile's. The Carnarvon Arms is in Somerset, but as soon as you cross the Exe Bridge a mile or so away you will be in Devon once again. About ten miles farther east you say good-by to Devon and enter Somerset.
Lunch at Taunton, either at the Castle or the Country, and buy whatever fruit happens to be in season, for the best of everything is grown in this district. Then drive out of the town to the east and take A 61 to Glastonbury and then A 39 to Wells. There will be no need to hurry, for the distance is only twenty-eight miles, and a leisurely speed will enable you to notice one of Somerset's principal claims to fame. All the way westward from London to Truro and then eastward to Taunton you will have been traveling through greenery, green of all shades, especially the green of England's grass. But in Somerset the grass is a richer green than anywhere else in the world, a green that shows in such vivid contrast with the red soil of a ploughed field.
Sleep that night at the Star Hotel in Wells, a truly lovely old town. Its cathedral is one of the smallest, yet, perhaps the most beautiful, in England. Its principal glory is the west front, with six hundred sculptured figures, of which one hundred and fifty-one are life-size.
On Saturday morning leave Wells along A 371 and explore. Anyway, explore Cheddar Gorge and the Caves; then after lunching at the Bath Arms set your course for Bath proper, the loveliest city in all the West Country.
Its houses are built wholly of white, or rather cream, freestone from the neighboring quarries and are set in a natural amphitheatre, so that the view of the city from the hills around, especially from Lansdown Hill to the north, is so magnificent it must be seen to be believed.
Your route home is A 4 all the way, through Chippenham, Calne, Marlborough, Newbury and Reading to London. The whole trip will come to about six hundred miles; but if you cut out Truro and Tintagel and strike north from Plymouth to Bideford, you will reduce it by a full hundred. And this I will wager, that having once toured the West Country, you will want to do it again at the first opportunity.
With a good breakfast inside you, start early on Monday morning by waving good-by to Eros, Then set off down Piccadilly, a woman with the West in her eyes and a man with his back to the East. Follow your leader patiently to Chiswick roundabout; there take A 4, and follow this until you can fork left for Staines on A 30. Go very slowly through Staines. because half its population spend all their waking hours crossing the main street; and cautiously thereafter until you have by-passed Basingstoke and a few miles farther on see an old inn, the Wheatsheaf, on the right-hand side of the road.
Unless you have been guilty of taking all sorts of chances on a very twisty road, you will find these fifty miles will have taken you a full hour and a half; so elevenses at the Wheatsheaf are recommended. Thus fortified, a few hundred yards farther west, fork right, and the next thirty-five miles to Salisbury will be a fast road for England.
Long before you reach the city you will see the needle of its famous spire like a gray finger in the sky, marking for you the beginning of the West Country. As you will have a good hour before lunch, park your car in the peace of the green close, and visit the cathedral. There you will marvel at two things, the daring of the steeple jacks who are busy repairing the tip of the spire and the achievement of those thirteenth century craftsmen, So, and especially if you come from a country of high wages, before you seek your lunch, ask the way to Penny-farthing Street. It is so named because the workmen who built the cathedral were dissatisfied with their wages of one penny per day and struck for and obtained a twenty-five per cent increase,
Park your car in the market place and go to the Haunch of Venison for lunch. It is neither residential hotel nor pub, but just Salisbury's Haunch of Venison, In prewar days it boasted a silver grill and steaks and chops of tender memory. You will find it just outside the market, opposite the ancient Poultry Cross. The only entrance is through a crowded bar and up a crazy staircase; and the boards of the dinning-room floor slope all ways at once. But the lunch will be the best the times can offer; and, I must say I hate giving this away, there is also a claret that should not be ignored.
Thus fortified you will be able to take a roundabout route to your bed in Exeter. Leave Salisbury on A 354 and drive southwest some forty miles to Dorchester. This, too, is a fast open road, but my advice is to travel slowly with frequent stops. Not because you are traveling through the Hardy country, but just because you are traveling through real chalk country, a land of ups and downs, where the ups are known as downs and the downs are small green valleys.
According to William Cowper, "God made the country, and man made the town"; but with all due reverence I submit that God did not make this chalk countryside as you will see it. He made the friendly sweep of the down’s the silver twinkle of the stream; but the design, the pattern and the up-keep are the work of man's hands. Man planted those beech clumps on the hill- sides, the tall elms that guard the villages and the willows by the river. Man used the flints his ploughs brought to the surface to build his houses and the straw from his bread corn to roof them. Man placed a cozy village every few miles, each with church and school and inn. And today man sows wheat in this field, barley in that, clover in the other and roots just where they should be.
Man is also responsible for the loveliest feature of the English chalk country, its irrigated water meadows. So stop in one of villages and ask permission to explore the water meadows by the little river. Leave your car and walk, or rather meander, for no other pace is fitting,
Here you will find the perfect sanctuary from this workaday world. No road, no telephone exchange, no ice cream and above all no crowd. Instead, just high untidy hedges, rushes and comfrey by the river's brim, tall sentinel poplars, pollarded willows, yellow crazybets and lush green grass. Trout and grayling; moor hens, dabchicks and wild duck of all ages and sizes; here a blue kingfisher, there a lordly heron, and sometimes an otter. With these for companions you will be able to lose yourselves in a soft-scented green peace; over you and all the world will be a blue haze and a benign hush.
Which, of course, will make you late for dinner in Exeter, but it will be worth it. Besides, after this you can push on more quickly. For at any time you can read about Blandford where Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge held sway; and Dorchester where Judge Jeffreys held his "Bloody Assizes"; but you can obtain the real flavor of the West Country only by actual sight and scent and touch.
Stay the night in Exeter at the Royal Clarence which you will find practically in the Cathedral Close, After dinner a stroll round the close and the streets leading to it will make you resolve to breakfast early, for you will discover that Exeter is full of antique shops, In fact, only the fear of finding yourselves penniless will force you to leave them on the following day in time to drive forty miles to Plymouth by one o'clock.
On your way, pull up on top of a hill, get out of your car and sniff, That will tell you why Plymouth is the most famous of all English seaports. Although Devonshire is a large country, there seems to be no spot in it where you cannot smell the sea. Years ago the plowboy as he turned his horses on the headland caught a whiff of salt water; and in less than a week he was serving with Drake and sleeping in a hammock. Today the Devonshire tractor driver suffers a like fate, A whiff of salt water conquers the reek of petrol; and before he has time to change his mind, he finds himself sleeping in a submarine, In short, Devonshire has always bred sailors, still does breed sailors and always will breed sailors.
After lunch you may decide to strike north to Launceston and Bideford and there turn eastward on your way back to London; but if you take my advice, you will continue westward for another fifty-odd miles and stay the night at Truro. Not just because Truro is yet another cathedral city, but because in Truro there is a real country hotel that should never he missed if possible.
This is the Red Lion. It isn't very beautiful, it isn't at all pretentious, but it does know how to look after its guests. Every member of the staff is so obviously glad to serve you, the food and wine are excellent, the beds are comfortable, and the conversation between locals and visitors in the small bar upstairs or in the large public one downstairs is worth traveling many miles to share.
But if this round trip is to be for only one week, farther west cannot be managed; so you must reluctantly forego the delights of Penzance with its open air Shakespeare, St. Ives and its artists, Land's End with its Atlantic rollers and all the lovely coves of far west Cornwall.
Instead, next morning drive northward to Wadebridge and Camelford, there turning off the main road for three or four miles to King Arthur's Castle Hotel at Tintagel. I can only give you time for elevenses here, for I must get you to Hoops Inn at _ Horn's Cross just short of Bideford in time for lunch. This was probably an old smugglers' haunt but is now an inn of character. The food is good, the service excellent and mine host has both a palate and a well-stocked cellar. Do take his advice concerning your prelunch sherry.
After lunch drive into Bideford, a little white seaport originally "By-the-ford," and you will find yourselves bang in the middle of Kingsley's Westward Ho! Moreover, someone there will be certain to tell you that Bideford was the port from which Sir Richard Grenville sailed on his last voyage.
Then as a change from literature and history I suggest you turn south to Torrington and there left to South Molton. This will give you a taste of real Devon, narrow, absurdly narrow, roads with steep, almost precipitous, approaches to each village on your route. You will be compelled to drive very slowly, which will give you time to think; and if you think as I do about that time in the afternoon and in those surroundings, you will think of Devonshire cream.
Think of it! A courteous approach to the old lady in that small farmhouse or this minute cottage, and who knows? New bread, homemade strawberry jam and real Devonshire cream, lashings of it! Think of it, and to hell with your dyspepsia!
After that tea you will be in such a beatific mood that you will not mind going almost back on your tracks for a few miles. At South Molton turn sharp left on to A 361; a few miles farther on take the right fork on A 326 to Blackmoor Gate and here turn sharp right for Lynmouth. This is one of the cosiest little seaside villages in all Devonshire, where sea gulls will eat from your fingers as they fly past the windows of a restaurant and where the finest railway in the world still operates up and down the cliff between this village and the little town of Lynton high above it. No smoke, no smell and no noise, just gravitation's artful aid plus some water taps, and up and down you go, ho so smoothly.
Stay the night at the Tors or Lyndale and on Thursday morning set off southeastward to Simonsbath. As you drive in low gear up the steep hill out of Lynmouth, on one side of the road will be a towering cliff and on the other you will look down on the “greenery-yellow” tops of oak trees on the slope to the river Lyn far below. At the top of this hill you will be on Exmoor, a wild country that will show you beech green as a change from oak. Not tall trees as one usually thinks of beech, but hedgerows of beech on either side of the narrow road.
Carry on along these beech-embroidered lanes through Simonsbath almost to Exford and then southward to Dulverton. Here you will get a view of the wooded slopes on either side of the valleys of the Exe and the Barle. From a distance they will appear quite smooth, as though the tops of the trees have been hand-trimmed with shears. In fact, they look so level that it seems as though it would be possible to toboggan down a green slope on the tops of oak trees all the way until one reached the river with a fine splosh.
At the Carnarvon Arms outside Dulverton the first thing that will greet you in the main lobby will most probably be a whacking great salmon on a large white dish; and I defy you to avoid being told by some triumphant angler every detail of its capture.
After dinner, one course will be fresh salmon from the river Exe, stroll down a long passage until you reach the public bar. There aren't many houses of any kind near the Carnarvon Arms, but that bar will be full of natives, farm workers, timber men, lorry drivers and all sorts, each man knowing some curious method of extracting a salmon from the Exe when occasion offers. If as a stranger you show due humility, you will be invited to take part in their favorite game of shove-halfpenny; at which you will meet your masters.
You can make a late start on Friday morning, for this day's mileage will be easy. Wait until you have seen thick male middle age struggle into waders and set off for the river with his feminine Puss in Boots in close attendance. Then after paying your bill and finding out the first weekend that this friendly hotel can fit you in for some first-class fishing, drive slowly eastward to Taunton, some twenty-five mile's. The Carnarvon Arms is in Somerset, but as soon as you cross the Exe Bridge a mile or so away you will be in Devon once again. About ten miles farther east you say good-by to Devon and enter Somerset.
Lunch at Taunton, either at the Castle or the Country, and buy whatever fruit happens to be in season, for the best of everything is grown in this district. Then drive out of the town to the east and take A 61 to Glastonbury and then A 39 to Wells. There will be no need to hurry, for the distance is only twenty-eight miles, and a leisurely speed will enable you to notice one of Somerset's principal claims to fame. All the way westward from London to Truro and then eastward to Taunton you will have been traveling through greenery, green of all shades, especially the green of England's grass. But in Somerset the grass is a richer green than anywhere else in the world, a green that shows in such vivid contrast with the red soil of a ploughed field.
Sleep that night at the Star Hotel in Wells, a truly lovely old town. Its cathedral is one of the smallest, yet, perhaps the most beautiful, in England. Its principal glory is the west front, with six hundred sculptured figures, of which one hundred and fifty-one are life-size.
On Saturday morning leave Wells along A 371 and explore. Anyway, explore Cheddar Gorge and the Caves; then after lunching at the Bath Arms set your course for Bath proper, the loveliest city in all the West Country.
Its houses are built wholly of white, or rather cream, freestone from the neighboring quarries and are set in a natural amphitheatre, so that the view of the city from the hills around, especially from Lansdown Hill to the north, is so magnificent it must be seen to be believed.
Your route home is A 4 all the way, through Chippenham, Calne, Marlborough, Newbury and Reading to London. The whole trip will come to about six hundred miles; but if you cut out Truro and Tintagel and strike north from Plymouth to Bideford, you will reduce it by a full hundred. And this I will wager, that having once toured the West Country, you will want to do it again at the first opportunity.
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