Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  Below Bolt Head to the west is Soar Mill Cove, a little bowl of sand in the cliffs which at low tide in fine weather is the most delightful place to lounge and swim. There is a rather swish hotel up the path, discreetly built into the hillside. The tract of countryside behind the hotel, between Salcombe and Hope, is remarkably deserted except for a few cottages and farms. The western portion, towards the sea, is known as Bolberry Down, and somewhere there is, or was – I never found it – a chalybeate spring.

  Chalybeate springs were once centres of healing. The waters contained a cocktail of minerals recommended to treat colic, melancholy and the vapours, to kill worms and dry the overmoist brain, to combat hysteria, to make the fat lean and the lean a bit fatter. Some of the springs, such as those at Tunbridge Wells in Kent, became medical centres of considerable economic importance for their localities – which is what John Cranch of Kingsbridge hoped for the chalybeate spring on Bolberry Down.

  ‘In combination with the advantage of marine air and water, sea bathing, the fisheries etc.,’ Cranch wrote, ‘I consider this spring as inestimable and that it will one day be the means of drawing to the vicinity a great resort of wealthy invalids and others and make the neighbourhood rich and prosperous.’ These words were quoted in a sweet little volume, Kingsbridge and its Surroundings, by Sarah Prideaux Fox, who added: ‘This expectation, however, has not yet been realised.’ Not by 1874, when her book appeared, nor by 2013. The unfortunate John Cranch volunteered in his early thirties to serve as the zoologist on Captain James Tuckey’s 1816 voyage up the Congo River in Africa, on which he and all the other members of the expedition died of fever.

  The dark schist cliffs between Bolt Head and Bolt Tail are menacing enough on a decent summer’s day, and must present a terrifying sight from the sea in a storm. The Ramillies was the oldest ship in the King’s navy when, in February 1760, she was sent from Plymouth to join the blockade of French ports organised to stop yet another projected invasion. She wallowed down the Channel and ran into a south-westerly storm which drove her back to the north-east. Her master, deceived into believing that Bolt Tail was Rame Head and that he was back off Plymouth Sound, steered towards the cliffs. Realising his blunder he tried to turn her. The main mast and the mizzen crashed down, and when they tried to hold her with anchors, the anchors pulled and the Ramillies struck stern first against a cave at the foot of the sheer cliffs of Bolt Tail.

  In terms of loss of life, this was the worst disaster in the history of Channel seafaring. Of the 734 men on board, just twenty-six survived. Part of the hull of the ship still lies just off the mouth of the cave, while three of her cannon and her rudder are said to be lodged in the sand inside. I did not feel inclined to descend the cliff to check the accuracy of these reports.

  I did, however, drop in at the Cottage Hotel in Hope and took liquid refreshment in a little cabin next to the bar which is lined in timbers from another victim of this ship-hungry shore. She was the Herzogin Cecilie, one of the last of that most romantic breed of trading vessel, the grain ships. With her steel hull and four masts, she carried thirty-five sails under full sail and averaged under 100 days on the run from Australia.

  On her final voyage, in 1936, she reached Falmouth from Port Lancaster in South Australia in eighty-six days. From Falmouth she set sail for Ipswich, but in dense mist she ran onto Ham Stone, just off Soar Mill Cove. Without auxiliary engines she was helpless, and eventually drifted onto the rocks below Bolt Head. She was stuck there for seven weeks while her cargo swelled and fermented, straining and finally bursting the timber deck and releasing an atrocious stench for the benefit of the crowds of visitors who turned out to gawp at her.

  Eventually enough of her evil-smelling cargo was taken off for her to be refloated. Her skipper asked Salcombe for a safe berth but the harbour authorities there refused on the grounds that she might threaten public health, so she was beached at Stair Hole Bay. A month later a gale blew up and pounded her until her back broke and she sank.

  The story of the dashing life and lingering death of the Herzogin Cecilie is enough to stir even a convinced landsman like me. The many photographs of her under sail reveal a thoroughbred of surpassing beauty: a slender blade of a ship slicing through the seas under a soaring cloud of canvas. Her remains – some decking, iron plates, part of the bow, pulleys – are still scattered about the seabed, melancholy reminders of the startlingly recent passing of the age of sail.

  The Cottage Hotel at Hope Cove is a most respectable establishment. It is difficult to imagine anything untoward happening there, except possibly a highly discreet exercise in adultery. The restaurant, the lounges, the oak-panelled corridor, the carpets and curtains are suffused with genteel good taste. The bedrooms murmur pastel pedigree, the puddings come on a trolley, the scampi in breadcrumbs, the cream-cheese sandwiches with slivers of cucumber.

  ‘Our regulars do not like change,’ one of the owners said to me. ‘The biggest revolution we’ve had was changing from willow-pattern china to modern white.’ She laughed. ‘People come here for a certain thing, made up of the sea, the air, the view, the quiet and the hotel. We are old-fashioned and proud of it.’

  Hope is a pretty place and the hotel has a lovely position, and speaking for myself, I would be very happy to spend a few days and nights there wandering the cliffs, stuffing myself with cream teas and slumbering in a bed made up by someone else. Like all these coastal villages, it once depended on fishing and now depends on tourism. A century ago it supplied crabs and lobsters all around, and the smell of the pots stacked to dry along the sea wall was the cause of adverse comment among visitors. But even then Charles Harper noted that ‘villas and bungalows are putting the old cottages of cob and rock to shame.’

  The path west from the cove threads its way along the top of the cliffs. Thurlestone shows itself ahead, a bigger settlement but similarly composed of an old village swamped by later accretions of housing (though it is the opinion in Hope that Thurlestone considers itself a distinct cut above its neighbour). The most select properties in Thurlestone border the eastern arm of the golf course, which separates the village from the sea.

  I stopped for a while to chat to a fit, white-haired chap walking with his dog. He was on holiday with his wife and friends as he had been every summer for forty years. They had been to Thurlestone before children, with children, after children and now in retirement, and his affection for it was undimmed. What was it? I asked. The air, walking, swimming in the sea, tennis, golf, nothing changing much, the comfort of the familiar – those were the elements of his answer.

  Thurlestone’s severe grey stone church stands on the northern edge of the village, the top of its lofty tower looking across to the arched rock – or ‘thirled stone’ – on the shore. One of its stained-glass windows honours the memory of the Reverend Peregrine Ilbert ‘who for fifty-five years lived among and for his parishioners’. Miss Sarah Prideaux Fox commended him warmly for his ‘determination to prevent the opening of any place for the sale of strong drink, knowing full well its demoralizing effect on the rural population’; although whether the rural population – without a pub for miles around – shared her admiration may be open to question.

  It would not be surprising if strong drink played a part in the most shameful episode in Thurlestone’s history, which followed the wrecking of the brig Chanteloupe in September 1772. She was bound for London from the West Indies with a cargo of coffee, sugar, rum and Madeira wine when she was driven onto the rocks. Among the passengers were a John Burke and his wife, on their way home after selling their plantation in Jamaica for a handsome sum, and the rumour soon spread that there had been gold and booty aboard.

  A great crowd gathered on the beach and went to work. According to an eyewitness, twelve of the bodies of the drowned were stripped naked and abandoned on the sand. The wretched Mrs Burke was seen alive, clinging to a rock, but no one would go to her aid. She had put on an array of rings and other jewellery in the hope of saving them, and when
she was finally washed ashore, still alive, her fingers were cut off and her ears mutilated to get the precious stones off her. She was then finished off and buried in the sand, only to be dug up a few days later by a dog, which at least made it possible for her to have a Christian burial.

  20

  HUE AND CRY

  Thurlestone is separated from Bigbury by the mouth of the Avon. There is a foot ferry across, operated by the master of Bantham Harbour, Bantham being the little village of thatched stone cottages tucked into a steep, protected haven on the south side of the estuary. I asked him what the headaches were for the harbour master in such an idyllic spot. Idiots, he said forcibly, specifically rich idiots with smart boats but no idea what to do with them. And illegal netting for bass. I wanted to know more but the journey took less than five minutes and there were walkers on the far side waiting to be whisked back to Bantham.

  This Avon is one of many Avons (it is the Celtic word for ‘river’) and a fairly insignificant one once the long estuary peters out a few miles inland. But the mouth is still deep enough not to be wadeable even at low tide, which does not stop other idiots trying it. A young female lifeguard at Bigbury said I wouldn’t believe how stupid people could be. Try me, I replied. What about trying to push a buggy with an infant across? I believed her.

  The life-savers are stationed on the shore at Bigbury, which is another shapeless blotch of bungalows, villas and holiday apartments around a few old cottages. The tide was out but on the turn and the distant breakers were spotted with the black forms of surfers and bodyboarders. Transit vans were lined up in the car park disgorging squads of youngsters clutching their boards and wetsuits.

  Under a clearing sky, with waves creaming out of the blue sea against the fringe of a wide expanse of golden sand, Bigbury Bay made a fine sight. In the middle is Burgh Island, with its well-known 1930s art deco hotel. The island is steep and rugged where it faces the sea, but the landward side is a smoothly sloping sward of grass. There was once a monastery roughly where the hotel now stands, with a little chapel on the summit above. The monastery went the way of others under the direction of Thomas Cromwell, and the chapel was put to a more immediately practical use than worship.

  Burgh Island

  Nowadays pilchards are marketed as Cornish sardines and their soft, oily flesh is prized by chefs and lauded by dieticians. But for centuries they were food for poor people, and the lifeblood and economic mainstay of every fishing village up the Channel from Land’s End to Bigbury Bay, as well as along the north Cornish coast to Padstow.

  Generally the first great shoals appeared in July, far out beyond the Isles of Scilly, after wintering in the depths of the western Channel. The shoals moved steadily inshore, turning the sea dark and oily. Each village had a lookout perched at a clifftop vantage point; this was the use to which the old chapel on Burgh Island was turned. He was known as the huer, and when he sighted the shoals he would cry out the alert.

  At the signal the entire village bar infants and the infirm would converge on the shore. The open boats were launched, two boats to each seine net, seven men or good strong lads to each boat, four rowing, three working the net. There was a master of the fishery, charged with commanding where the nets should be shot. The aim was to circle the shoal with nets from the seaward side and draw it towards the shore, while a smaller boat known as the lurker positioned itself at the opening, dashing its oars at the surface to deter the fish from escaping. Come evening the whole trap was pulled inshore until it was possible to turn out the catch onto the fringe of the beach in stages, to prevent the pilchards being injured and dying prematurely.

  At the sea’s edge the villagers waited with hand nets and shovels and barrows. Part of the catch was taken away by cart to be sold fresh in the locality. But the main business was conducted in the salting-houses, the stone cellars built into the sea walls of every village. Here the women stacked the fish, layered with salt, until they reached the ceiling and all the space was filled. There were runnels along the floor leading to wells; as the fish dried and shrank in the salt, the oil ran away to be collected and used or sold to light lamps and for cooking.

  After thirty days the pilchards were ready. They were thoroughly washed to rid them of the dirty salt and packed into hogsheads and re-salted. The contents of each cask were progressively compressed by boards, and more fish added, until the overall weight reached 476 pounds. The cask was then sealed and marked ready for export. The principal markets were Spain and Italy, where salted pilchards formed a staple of the Lenten diet. The poorest Italian families used them throughout the year, crumbled in small quantities onto the eternal pasta. Thus it was that Cornish and Devonian fishermen, most of them Methodists or Protestant dissenters, supplied the needs of faraway Papists.

  In good years the exports from the Cornish fishery alone reached fifty thousand hogsheads. With an average of 2500 to 3000 pilchards per hogshead, the numbers of fish taken were enormous. Sometimes the abundance was such that a proportion of the fish were simply spread on the fields as fertiliser. The irreplaceable value of the pilchard harvest, the almost ritualistic regularity with which the shoals arrived and the communal endeavour required, meant the fishery occupied a uniquely important place in the life of those isolated, self-reliant communities. Wilkie Collins, of The Moonstone and The Woman in White fame, captured its flavour in an entertaining travelogue called Rambles Beyond Railways:

  Boys shout, dogs bark madly, every little boat in the place puts off crammed with spectators, old men and women hobble down to the beach. The noise, the bustle, the agitation increase with every moment. Soon the shrill cheering of the boys is joined by the deep voices of the seiners. There they stand, six or eight stalwart sunburned fellows ranged in a row, hauling with all their might and roaring the regular nautical Yo-Heave-Ho in chorus . . . the water boils and eddies, the net rises to the surface and one teeming, convulsed mass of shining, glancing silver scales . . . the noise before was as nothing compared with the noise now . . .

  Some observers found an inevitable concomitant of the pilchard fishery difficult to stomach. ‘There is but one odour,’ one wrote, ‘and that is the reeking odour of pilchards. We ordered roast beef but fancied we dined off pilchards. We ordered brandy and water but the pilchards had polluted the brandy. We went to bed at nine to avoid the pilchards but they seemed to be over and under the bed, in the walls and the bed-curtains, in the cupboards and the pillows.’

  Inevitably there were poor years as well as years of plenty. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the shoals diminished sharply, almost certainly as a result of overfishing. They no longer came inshore, and bigger boats had to go further out to find them. The fishery survived into the twentieth century in a much reduced form, and after 1945 the demand from southern Europe began to slacken. The last factory still pressing the pilchards in casks – at Newlyn in Cornwall – closed in 2005. By then pilchards were no longer pilchards but Cornish sardines, and in that form – fresh under the grill or on the barbecue – they continue to sustain a small-scale but valuable fishery, which also supplies fish for upmarket canning.

  It is a very long time since the huer’s cry has been heard, and the shoals of pilchards no longer darken the sea. The stone-built cellars where women sang and gossiped and cursed as they stacked the fish are gone, or have been converted into characterful holiday homes.

  * * *

  A succession of deep clefts enclosing river estuaries fractures the western part of Devon’s Channel shore. The rivers – the Avon, the Erme and the Yealm – are insignificant inland but considerable obstacles to the coastal traveller. There are seasonal ferries across the mouths of the Avon and the Yealm, if you get your timings right and can summon the ferryman. But the Erme is a damn nuisance.

  Charles Harper helped himself to someone’s boat and rowed himself across, which is something I would not have the balls to do. According to various authorities the estuary is no more than knee deep at low tide, but I did not fanc
y trying it with my bike held overhead, particularly as a heavy blanket of fine, drenching rain had settled, restricting visibility to about fifty yards even after wiping my specs. So I was forced inland, and eventually found myself in a small town called Modbury, by which time I was as wet as if I had swum the Erme at full flow. I also had a puncture.

  The consequence of all this was that I did not get back to the sea until I was beyond Mothecombe, the famously lovely house and estate on the Erme estuary. It was acquired in the 1870s by Henry Bingham Mildmay, a partner in Barings Bank. Mildmay’s wife was Georgiana Bulteel, whose sister Louisa was married to Edward Baring, senior partner in the bank and owner of the neighbouring Revelstoke estate with its great mansion, Membland. It was Baring who was largely responsible for the South American investment strategy that precipitated the collapse of the famous firm in 1890, triggering a global banking crisis.

  By then ‘Ned’ Baring had been raised to the peerage as Lord Revelstoke and had aggrandised his Devon property in a manner correspondent to his position and enormous wealth. Membland Hall was expanded with a new east wing and tower – ‘a very prominent example’, Charles Harper judged, ‘of great cost, much pretension and very little art.’ Baring bought the village of Noss Mayo, which looks down on the estuary of the Yealm from the south side, and all the land east to the Mildmay estate. He had a carriageway nine miles long laid along the clifftop for his guests to enjoy views of the Channel and Plymouth Hoe. There was a steam launch, a schooner, a cricket ground and pavilion, and a host of new buildings in the approved William Morris cottage ornée style with paintwork in Revelstoke blue.

  And all this pride came crashing down. By the time of Baring’s death in 1895 his fiefdom by the sea was gone. Although the bank was kept afloat as a result of a Bank of England rescue, the directors were made personally responsible for the debts. The Revelstoke estate was broken up and Membland Hall was sold (it was demolished in 1927). Henry Mildmay, very much less to blame for the crash than Baring, managed to cling on to Mothecombe, which remains in the family today.