A House Unlocked

  The attractions of Exmoor and west Somerset for those turn-of-the-century young people were sternly physical. They would pursue their favourite activities – riding, walking, cycling. Walking, above all – punishing long-distance walks across the moor, the ritual morning ramble. My grandmother considered a daily walk an essential part of civilized existence – she continued the regime into her eighties and lived to the age of ninety-seven. In the Golsoncott cloakroom was a stack of walking-sticks, their handles burnished with use, the necessary props for swiping nettles, lifting gate latches, hooking down a high spray of blackberries. The family took walking seriously, and in that sense they were eerie descendants of those great walkers, the Romantic poets, and also precursors of the early twentieth-century passion for hiking and rambling, when striding out into the landscape ceased to be a middle-class preserve and became a leisure occupation for the masses. Type the keyword ‘rambles’ into the British Library on-line catalogue for publications before 1975 and up come a dizzying 969 entries, some indication of the spread and intensity of interest. In the twenties and thirties the urban young and fit poured out into the countryside, on cycles and on foot, perfectly enshrined by those Shell posters of the period in which rosy-cheeked figures in shorts, shirts and hiking boots pause to consult the map on a five-barred gate.

  But that particular revolution was a long way off in the 1890s. Walking for pleasure was a socially restricted activity. Furthermore, Exmoor itself was a relatively recent discovery, opened up by the railway in much the same way as the Rocky Mountains or the Sierra Nevada. People had not realized it was there – except of course those who had been living and working in those parts for centuries. But from the moment Isambard Kingdom Brunel's line snaked west towards the toe of the country, and in due course threw out tentacles to net the whole of the peninsula, nothing would be the same again.

  My great-grandparents were West Country holiday pioneers, beneficiaries of the Great Western Railway. At the turn of the century they started to remove there with their brood, renting a house and settling in for a season of determined activity. Exmoor was ideal – it had overtones of Scotland but was now more accessible and was furnished with equivalent fauna, some of which you could slaughter on horseback rather than with a gun, thus combining two favoured activities, riding and blood sports. The men shot, rode and walked. The women walked and sketched. They were after all late Victorians and knew what was expected of them – my grandmother indeed went briefly to art college in London (where she attended classes given by Gilbert Tonks) and had a talent which was later expressed in superb needlework. But, most importantly, they were celebrating the scenic glories of the place – the great curves of the moor, the melting colours, the green tapestry of the combes. West Somerset had arrived as somewhere you visited for aesthetic enjoyment.

  It had not always been so. For centuries discriminating travellers seldom set foot further west than Bristol and Bath and those who did steered well clear of the barren wastes of Exmoor and Dartmoor. The ecstatic discovery of the Quantocks by Coleridge and the Wordsworths was the beginning of the gathering perception through the nineteenth century that there was much to be said for points west, but initially this was a revelation restricted to a small number of cognoscenti. Philip Gosse trawled for seashore specimens on the north Devon coast. The Tennysons visited Lynton on their honeymoon and explored the Valley of the Rocks. Large-scale visitation of the area was still a long way off; the three counties, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, got on with what they had been doing for centuries, agriculture and local industry – a world apart. The moorland was simply there, the soft grey ridge on the horizon – rising from green distances and crowned with a fleece of cloud along its length – that one sees from the train today.

  Early topographical travel writers steered clear of the moor. Celia Fiennes, indomitably riding west in 1698, ignores it entirely as she travels from Taunton to Wellington and Cullompton and thence deeper into Devon. The charms of Exeter merit several pages (‘spacious noble streets and a vast trade is carried on’) and the plunging Devon hills are noted in passing but the distantly looming moor is of no apparent interest. Daniel Defoe was also inclined to focus on town descriptions but with a distinctly wider range and depth; and he did at least notice the moor, travelling north-west from Taunton to take a look at the coast and thus, by the way, ‘Exmore [which] gives, indeed, but a melancholy view, being a vast tract of barren, and desolate lands; yet on the coast, there are some very good sea-ports.’ He also nails the perceived otherness of the west with his comments on local speech in Somerset:

  It cannot pass my observation here, that when we are come this length from London, the dialect of the English tongue, or the country way of expressing themselves is not easily understood, it is so strangely altered; it is true that it is so in many parts of England besides, but in none so gross a degree as in this part.

  Later eighteenth-century travellers paid hardly any attention to areas off the beaten track. Dr Richard Pococke was a clergyman whose duties were sufficiently undemanding to allow for frequent and extended travels. Indeed, he cut his teeth as a travel writer with the grandly titled A Description of the East and Some Other Countries, an account of a journey to Egypt and the Levant. But in later life he concentrated on home territory with Travels through England, a busy and informative survey which included a tour right down through the West Country into Cornwall. He sticks to the south coast of Devon, sternly (or wisely) avoiding the interior and is mainly interested in cathedrals, castles, the seats of the aristocracy and country gentry. He was writing with an eye to his readership, presumably, and was well aware that they would be no more inclined than he himself was to risk a foray into the wastes of the moor.

  But there is also the crucial matter of aesthetic taste and fashion. Neither Exmoor nor the Quantocks had achieved the essential qualifying factor of the time for serious inspection. They were not classified as ‘picturesque’. The Revd William Gilpin, whose writings were so influential in focusing the interest of discerning late eighteenth-century tourists, concentrated on the Lake District and the Wye Valley. Those were the chosen perfect places, where the visitor might examine landscape ‘by the rules of picturesque beauty: that of not merely describing; but of adapting the description of natural scenery to the principles of artificial landscape; and of opening the sources of those pleasures, which are derived from the comparison.’ The philosophy of the picturesque emphasized the search for scenes of natural beauty that rose to the requirements of artistic composition and indeed in Gilpin's more robust interpretations warranted definite interference. The obstinately rigid lines of some parts of Tintern Abbey annoyed him: ‘A mallet judiciously used… might be of service in fracturing some of them…’ Ruins could be more easily manipulated than those other stalwarts of the picturesque scene – mountains, lakes, cascades, the play of light and shade, the glow of sunset. The sensitive traveller thus sought out views in which such factors met their most ideal combination. A flood of publications gave guidance in the last half of the century and conditioned the vision and the opinions of commentators, amongst them Arthur Young. He himself ventured no further west than Bristol and Bath in his tour of southern England, though he dutifully visited Monmouth and Chepstow to marvel at the Severn and the Wye valleys and registered all the correct responses: ‘what makes the whole picture perfect, is its being entirely surrounded by vast rocks and precipices, covered thick with wood… nothing has so glorious an effect, as breaking unexpectedly upon a cascade, gushing from the rocks, and overhung with wood’. He goes a step further with stern criticisms of the artificially created picturesque walk at Persfield, on the Wye, which in his view falls short of the received requirements at some points – this from a man whose main concern and reason for travel is agricultural practice, crop rotation and breeds of cattle. If you saw with a late eighteenth-century eye and wanted to rate as a person with taste, you could see in one way only.

  For most earlier travellers, the per
fect landscape was manmade. Celia Fiennes disliked the Pennines and the Lake District. Dr Johnson deplored the ‘hopeless sterility’ of the Scottish Highlands. Ordered fertility was the ideal – cornfields, fat cattle and the symmetry imposed by the Enclosure Acts. This attitude remained widespread throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, but alongside it grew a more specialist taste for nature and wilderness, encouraged by the cult of the picturesque and fed by a familiarity with European art – including the paintings of Claude, Salvator Rosa, Poussin. The Lake District and the Wye Valley became Meccas for the sophisticated traveller, along with the Scottish Highlands and the mountains of Wales. And in due course the conviction of many eighteenth-century commentators that manipulation of nature was essential in order to achieve picturesque perfection gave way to the romantic idealization of the untouched natural scene. But the remorseless spread of agriculture meant that uncontaminated nature was increasingly hard to find. Wild and romantic scenery had been all but obliterated by the neat fields and browsing cattle that were once the ideal landscape. Those ultimate connoisseurs, the Romantic poets, looked west and saw the Quantocks and Exmoor rising from the agricultural order and fertility of Somerset like symbols of the apposition between nature and human intervention.

  Exmoor was not picturesque – its rolling skyline being short on peaks and gradients, devoid of lakes, its cascades not up to Lake District standards. The eighteenth century ignored the place, to all intents and purposes. It took the pioneer enthusiasm of Coleridge to put it on the map – or at least on the highly select map of the nineteenth century littérateur – bouncing into Nether Stowey in 1797 and then dragging the Wordsworths there to share with him the delights of the Quantocks. But literary vision is capable of wide and potent dissemination over time and space. Poetry above all becomes so interwoven with place that a landscape can take on an enhanced identity for ever after. My grandmother had no great literary inclinations but she knew what was appropriate. ‘ “Where Alph, the sacred river, ran…” ’ she would declaim, stumping along the cliff path through the woods from Porlock to Culbone, ‘ “Through caverns measureless to man…” Over to you!’ That was as far as she could get, and anyway I was supposed to be the bookish one. The Romantic poets did not directly take my grandmother's contemporaries to west Somerset but they created the climate of mind that would eventually send them in that direction. Coleridge's opium-ridden night at Ash Farm above Culbone was to resonate in curious ways. A poem was fuelled by his vision of those woods and cliffs, but the place subsequently claimed the poet. For generations of visitors the area would be mysteriously incandescent with some hidden code of reference – half-remembered, half-known. In the summer of 1997 a white hoarding marched bold black letters along the side of a warehouse on Watchet's docks: ‘The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, the furrow followed free.’

  Poets expand our vision. Specific landscapes seem to require the endorsement of literary recognition. West Somerset had the good fortune to lure that unique group in the dying years of the eighteenth century; a hundred years later the poets' fleeting passage and its enduring legacy had lent depth and resonance to those hills and woods, that coast. Another century on, and it is the same.

  According to Dorothy Wordsworth, the idea for ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was born on a winter walk from Quantoxhead by way of Watchet to Dulverton. Some seventeen miles, that must have been. Nothing exceptional by Romantic poet hiking standards. Coleridge walked from Nether Stowey south through the Vale of Taunton and over the Blackdown Hills to visit the Wordsworths at Racedown in Dorset. The coastal walk from the Quantocks to Lynton was a particular favourite – a ninety-mile round-trip made by Coleridge with the Wordsworths, with Hazlitt and on his own (on one occasion completing the trip in two consecutive days). He walked to Bristol, to Cheddar. Cross-country journeys that ignored the inconvenience of inadequate turnpikes, about which travellers such as Arthur Young and William Cobbett grumble so bitterly, and that kept the walker in intimate contact with the landscape – with its gradients, its vegetation, its waterways, and of course with all the refinements of natural splendour which were essential inspirational material. The topographical writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were on horseback (hence the turnpike problem); the poets chose to walk – taking the immemorial way of moving around the country, engaging with it mile by mile as a medieval pedlar would have done, or a Saxon arrival, or a Bronze Age trader. And in so doing they gave to walking a new validity – the Romantic touch. It would cease to be a purely functional activity and take on overtones of something else, uplifting, reviving. You didn't have to be a poet for walking to enlarge the spirit – you prospered just as much from it as late Victorian gentry or twentieth-century urban workers.

  The young Hewetts holidayed on Exmoor year after year, with occasional forays to Scotland. And, in the case of my grandmother and her sister, across the Channel. The Grand Tour was at its last gasp by 1900 but their trips to France and Italy, both then and later in my grandmother's life, exactly reflected the Tour's purpose and aspirations. You went abroad to look at art and architecture; such travel was essential education and improvement. I caught a last whiff of it myself in the late 1940s, towed round the Romanesque churches of central and southern France, my aunt determinedly seeking out every remote crumbling edifice, and my grandmother equipped with a supply of Ryvita, sandwich spread, Marmite and Ovaltine for the point when she could no longer endure unremitting French cuisine.

  But the intervening forty years had brought a revolution to the concept of travel and above all to the concept of ‘abroad’. One aspect of it has been aptly called the solar revolution. The Victorian and Edwardian traveller avoided the sun. A tan had unacceptable connotations, both social and racial; the sun was a menace and accordingly you kept out of it or protected yourself with hats and parasols. Equally, there was nothing wrong with grey English skies – a spot of rain did no one any harm. By 1940 this outlook had been turned on its head. The twenties and thirties saw the surge of sun culture, filtering down from the hedonistic writing of the day – by Norman Douglas, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and others – and creating an obsession with heat, beaches, blue skies, the Mediterranean. By the time I was a schoolgirl the cult of abroad and the parallel dismissal of England was at its height. ‘No lovely abroad for us this year…’ sighs the woman strapped for cash in Angus Wilson's Hemlock and After. It is an attitude I remember keenly – the ferocious competition for discovery of uncontaminated Greek islands, Spanish fishing villages, charming French backwaters. If you were reduced one year to slinking off to Cornwall or the Suffolk coast, you kept quiet about it. Abroad was more scenic, richer in aesthetic experience, and the weather was much better. Abroad, the rural working class became a colourful peasantry and the urban crowds a stimulating spectacle. Abroad, you yourself blossomed and expanded. The travel writing of the day was a cult – no self-respecting coffee-table was complete without a copy of Bitter Lemons or the latest Patrick Leigh Fermor.

  I had grown up in Egypt. Abroad was the norm for me and I didn't quite see what the fuss was about, looking at England with the eyes of a newcomer and the appreciative vision of youth. What I saw seemed both beautiful and interesting, as I moved through my adolescence. There were rural landscapes and medieval churches here too – why were those on the other side of the Channel so necessarily superior? But I was out of step with the times. It has been edifying to live on into an age when Sunday newspapers can run travel pieces on Norfolk or Wales and still hold up their heads in polite society – let alone to see a hefty suntan eyed with misgivings, albeit for a rather different reason.

  There is also the question of what constitutes travel. The word itself has mutated. Today travel suggests distance, it implies leaving these shores – the notion of ‘abroad’ is implicit. In the late nineteenth century that was not necessarily so. The promotional literature of the Great Western Railway makes this clear. A gazetteer of 1906 – serving as a kind of pione
er West Country AA / RAC / Good Hotel / Farm Holiday Guide rolled into one and clearly aimed at a wide market – subtly lures the reader by advocating the annual holiday as an essential palliative to the stress of modern living:

  What was once a question of caprice and luxury is now a necessity if the danger of a breakdown is to be avoided… A century ago holiday-making as we now understand it was practically the monopoly of the rich. ‘The Grand Tour of Europe’ (performed either in lumbering diligences or little less cumbersome coaches) was, like a yearly visit to Bath, looked upon as part and parcel of fashionable life. The former, at any rate, was a condition precedent to the completion of a polite education. With very few exceptions… the whole of rural England (though possessing natural, historical and climatic attractions of the highest order) was one vast and neglected terra incognita. A pilgrimage to Rome could be accomplished with greater ease than a visit to St David's; it was less expensive to go to Paris than to journey to Penzance… The storm and stress of life have increased commensurately with the rapid evolution of travelling facilities, and it is indeed fortunate that at the beginning of the twentieth century the indispensable modicum of quiet, rest, change and recreation can be obtained at all seasons of the year without either going abroad or spending a fortune.