MORE SOUVENIRS OE DEVON.

Otago Witness, Issue 3619, 24 July 1923, Page 61

MORE SOUVENIRS OE DEVON.

By

Edith Searle Grossmans, M.A.

PARRACOMBE: THE HOME OF R D BLACKMORE. Not a show village like Lvnton and Lynmouth, is little Parracombe! Not like them so lovely that the memory haunts the wanderer for the rest of life. Not mediaeval and quite unlike all our modern world, but with a sober prettiness in its village streets of grey-white walled houses and snops set neatly in garden walls of grey stone or garden hedges over which rose blooms and leaves trail freely, all sloping upward sedately, as good English villages should do, to the “new” stone church, which we in our new world should think of quite respectable age, set in a space of greensward out of" which the gravestones rise soberly, as it were, but not tragically'. All around is open country, apt to be described conventionally as “gently undulating,” as it were first attempts at downs—a sweep of open country ly'ing just below the wild, broken peaks of Exmoor—(which, nevertheless, are themselves but adventurous baby mountains compared to the giants of the eartn) and just away from the broken coast. Only five miles away is that lovely coast of rocks, rock harbours, cliffs, woods, and hidden streams, near which Parracoinbe looks tame, and its pleasantness is mere comeliness beside beauty. But just outside the village, perhaps half a mile away or more, stands one ancient relic which has set the seal of antiquity on the whole place—a grey' old church of the twelfth or thirteenth century, half covered with ivy, but all its outer walls intact. Local tradition says that this was one of the churches founded by Sir William de Tracy, one of those Norman knights who murdered Archbishop Becket before the altar at Canterbury, and who seems (if legends be true) to have afterwards wandered about Devon founding churches and chapels in expiation of his crime. It is a strong, simple building, set quite apart even from the quiet, drowsy life of the village streets, a massive steeple tower of stone crowned with something like the battlement of Norman castles, and with the typical nave and the porch of pointed Gothic shape. Behind it is a widespread tree of many vears, perhaps centuries’ growth, and” lighter growth wild and untrimmed clusters around one side, and an untrimmed hedge surrounds it with stone-pillared gate. But everywhere, from all points in that landscape of long, low land billows, the old church stands, but conspicuously, so that the traveller is likely for some time quite to ignore the village and to regard all the surrounding country merely as a background. It stands on a piece of wild, neglected common where gorse and furze and brambles and Devon wildflowers flourish among grass. It is almost within the shadow of Exmoor, if. indeed, the shadow of the mountain moor did fall that way. but, in fact, the sunlight pours upon it all da.v long, or the rains of the showery west beat on it without a check. Before the war it was still used once a year by the villages—at the Harvest Festival, if I remember righly—for old time’s sake and ancient custom. Just a little lower down the gentle slope is a Devonshire farm—rather old-fashioned, but not remarkably so: a little house with a strip of garden where flowers grow in front and orchard trees behind, and there are fields of green trimly'-cropped grass beyond the garden gate, and in the fields cows wander and fowls and ducks. And here there lived a sturdy old dame, the “grannv” of the family', a true old woman of Devon, slim, a little bent, but ready still with her staff to take the paying guest up Exmoor and to point out the beacon hills which were kindled on the night of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. But her brain held memories long, long before the Diamond Jubilee, and she knew in her early days or had seen or heard of the Doones of Bagwortliy, immortalised in “Lorna Doone.” It was in this little village of Parracoinbe that- Blackmore first saw the light, and there are Blackmores in it to this day—or there were before the war. At this farm one could get real Devonshire cream, and at the light season strawberries, which last, however, came from the weekly market in the picturesque stone market building of Barnstaple. But if by any' chance you expected the lavish fare of Mrs Povser’s farm or of “grit Jan Ridd’s” home, well, you were no more likely to get it in Devon in the days of England’s agricultural eclipse than you would be in 3 suburb of London. Only the Devonshire cream survived of those days in I’arracomhe just before the war—the cream and the twelfth century church and the last of the Bla-ckmores.