Lynmouth and Selworthy, October 2003

Dwight Peck's personal website

Late summer 2003 -- A few weeks in Devon and Cornwall

Lynmouth and Selworthy

Sounds like mid-19th century solicitors from a Dickens novel, or a maker of sweets, but they're two north Devon venues well worth a visit. And here we are in the autumn drizzle.

You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

Lynmouth

Kristin goes shopping on the Lynmouth high street on a rainy day in late October 2003. (Bought gloves. Then lost one of them.) -- This place must be a madhouse in summer, but now all the boutiques are staying open just for Kristin.

The fishing fleet of Lynmouth: times have changed -- they knew the fish stocks were nearly gone but couldn't have guessed that the ocean would depart as well.

Lynmouth on a drizzly autumn day. This town took a bad hit in 1962 when a flash flood came down one of the ravines above the town and washed the inhabitants out to sea, but lots of charming architecture remains and the people stocks have been re-established.

The breakwater and little tower on it

Little boats queue up, as only British boats can do so politely, and wait for the tide.

Selworthy

Wonderful Selworthy church, cared for by the National Trust. In fact, the National Trust apparently owns the whole town. Including the tea room.

Advantageous views of the Selworthy church, and the graveyard, where the dead folks gather

15th century Selworthy church, with its 14th century tower. They've got a 12th century baptismal font in there.

Part of the National Trust properties, which include a cute little tea room which conceives of the phrase "ham sandwich" in hors d'oeuvre terms, with a toothpick in it, but at ham sandwich prices.

Selworthy Beacon, the local high point at 308m altitude, heart of the Exmoor Forest coastline in Somerset not far west of Minehead.

Hurtstone Point near Porlock, with vicious little rain squalls hurtling down the Bristol Channel from the north, soon to join our hiking party.

Traveling companion Kristin above Hurtstone Point

Down from Hurtstone Point

Rain squall arriving

Rain squall upon us. Now for a drippy sort of march back through the forest above Allerford to Selworthy. And then a nice pub dinner with the Tims.

Ohmigod that was fun. Goodbye to the Tims of Berrynarbor, who were headed to Switzerland for holidays even as we vacated their guest room and wended southwestward along the coast of Devon.

Past Barnstaple, still on the wrong side of the road, and past Bideford, a resonant name in naval history.

And here we are, still on the wrong side of the road, in the West Country, bound for Golden Park, with a stop at vertical Clovelly, where Charles Kingsley irritated people as a lad.

Clovelly

Charles Kingsley slept here!

Clovelly is a vertical town, built right the way from the pastures on top down about 200m to the water's edge. It's so quaint and charming that it's probably a living hell at midsummer! But on a rainy day in October, the place is OURS.

There's the Clovelly breakwater down there, with the hotel on the left. This won't be good for the knees but it's got to be done.

By the way, though you may frequently have had to pay big entrance fees to visit DisneyWorld, the Regents Park Zoo, and the Nude Art exhibition in Berlin, you may still be surprised to find that Clovelly is one of the few towns in the world that requires you to post a certain sum just to walk down the street.

It's true, however, that Charles Kingsley slept here, and apparently came here as a child or something like that. There's a Charles Kingsley House, too, but we couldn't find it, though we weren't really trying too hard.

Well, who's Charles Kingsley then? Well you may ask. He was an under-rated middle linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings in the late 1960s. No, he wasn't; he was a Victorian clergyman and novelist who's probably best known for the execrable Water Babies, a perennial sentimental favorite with people we don't want to know. He also wrote the jingoistic adventure novel Westward Ho! about the local 16th Century Devon and Cornwall seamen who explored the New World and whupped the Spanish Armada, etc., etc., full of rousing action and local color and extremely mean-spirited portraits of some very fine people who happened to be Catholics at the time. But so popular a novel was it that just north of Bideford there is now a holiday town filled with tacky vacation accommodations (and a few fine old buildings now in terminal disrepair) which is named -- Westward Ho!.

The hotel in Clovelly, on a rainy day in October 2003, lobster traps piled high on the left

The Clovelly pier and the boats, and its little bit of beach. Where Charles Kingsley once skipped stones as a mean-spirited lad.

Clovelly on a grey day, looking up from the pier. Charles Kingsley used to roam all over these vertical little streets as a boy, at the weekends, and then go back to Oxford to study his mean-spirited theology.

Let's have lunch in the hotel there. Good soup (turnips!). And then we'll motor on, on the wrong side of the road, to Golden Park.

What a nice week that's been! and now we're going farther along down the north Devon coast to the Cornwall border, to study whether the rest of the pubs down this way are as wonderful as the ones we've seen so far, visit a pig farm and Sir Walter Raleigh's quay and the birthplace/final resting place of King Arthur, and sleep in a bed with a big canopy over it. This way and no crowding please.