HYDRAULIC SALADS. I left behind the famously whitish cliffs along the Channel for the less lauded red bluffs around Sidmouth, the watering place neglected by virtually no nineteenth-century traveling pooh-bah, including William Makepeace Thackeray—author of The Book of Snobs—who in his following work, Pendennis, calls the place Baymouth. As a giver of wide berth to pooh-bahs, I was there only to enable informed comparison with neglected places noteworthy for ordinariness. Sidmouth lies in a wide valley of the River Sid where it enters the sea, but, unlike some Channel settlements, it doesn’t attempt to protect itself by hiding in an estuary; instead, it confronts the Atlantic openly with a long esplanade for the display of poobahs ostensibly taking in the broad marine view. Likened to the Riviera, Sidmouth for years has been a spot for moneyed visitors, so much so that at the turn of the century novelist W. H. Hudson called it “parasitic” and boasted he stayed there only “a day or two.” I didn’t make it beyond a single evening. When in England I want England—even on the real Riviera I want England.
With morning light, I moved on due westward to get across the River Exe and avoid areas I’d traveled a few years earlier. Leaving the hedgy and trenched lanes, I found something remarkably like an actual highway, although given the British use of painted center-lines for passing, I wasn’t always certain, but it did get me past the sprawl of Torquay and on to the narrow estuary of the River Dart. One of the ferries was down, creating a long queue of automobiles up the hill from the slip. By good luck, I got stopped in front of the Steam Packet Inn, and there fell into a conversation about river names with a fellow of more opinions than wit. He noted how Yanks preferred multisyllables. Take rivers: Mississippi, Chattahoochee, Atchafalaya. But the English, with greater purity, want single syllables: Dart, Sid, Brans, Taw, Nidd, Cock. I agreed by offering that had the English with their love of elision (Auchinleck comes out something like “Afleck”) stayed longer in America, the Atchafalaya would today be the Chuff and the Chattahoochee the Chooch.
Then came a There’ll-Always-Be-an-England conversation. The man was drinking lovage, a spirit made from an aromatic plant. “Helps regain your pecker,” he said. “Of course, there’s also shrub. Oh, and dandelion and burdock.” He raised his lovage, pausing to ask, “Have you tried one of our country wines? The flavors are decidedly good—cowslip, parsnip, birch, gooseberry. I can’t remember them all.” I asked if he might be a botanist or perhaps a gardener, and he said, “No indeed, sir! An apothecary, retired.” I explained I avoided beverages that might need weeding or pruning or those that could turn into a hydraulic salad.
The ferry opened again, the queue cleared, and I crossed to Dartmouth and its narrow streets twisting among aged buildings, a few having second floors leaning over the pavement like layer cakes, the top one slipping sideways and headed for the ground.
Only a year earlier in Dartmouth, I had a conversation with a man of considerable seniority, a slender disconsolate who appeared somehow broken—not in spirit but in a bodily way, like a toy soldier missing half its rifle and lower left leg. I remember his name: Chadwick Anvel. At my hello, he revived to ramble us into a conversation eventually leading to the D-Day ships that sailed from the Dartmouth harbor, a place I’d have thought too tiny to help launch the most massive sea and air invasion in history. Mister Anvel said, “We had to stretch out the fleet, you see, to disguise our intentions of invasion so Jerry couldn’t be sure what was coming. Along the Channel, these old smuggling villages were good for keeping plans rather concealed, although Jerry bombed us anyway. You might know of the bombing he put on Plymouth.” Pointing to the coastal villages on the map I had been studying, he said, “Scarcely a one, I daresay, that didn’t get a hammering. But, to be sure, Hitler was no Caesar. The Führer was afraid to step ashore.”
Mister Anvel became animated as he spoke of the War and the special bond it forged between America and Britain. When I first traveled in England, the Second World War frequently came up in conversation, often as a means of establishing shared ground. But of late, with people having sharp memories of that time thinning fast, pub topics became trickier: government failures, influxes of darker-skinned people, Eastern imperialisms, American domination—all issues that can unleash unpredictable directions leading to unpleasant encounters. It wasn’t that a vanishing generation missed the war, but rather postbellum citizens often did miss being able to address a common past with an ally in a conversation calling for a pint of bitter to commemorate “the finest hour.” When the fellow and I raised our glasses, I knew I’d shared one more thing I wouldn’t ever see again.
DEVILS-ON-HORSEBACK. Dartmouth Castle lies near the mouth of the Dart estuary. Its earliest existing portion dates from 1388 when catapulting rocks at a seaborne enemy was the strongest response it could offer, but a century later weaponry had advanced—if that’s the word—to large cannons termed grete murderers and to a huge chain that could be pulled across the river to block ships. Yet, as elsewhere, the mighty foe laying waste to the castle was not a Gallic or Teutonic incursion, but omnivorous Time, sometimes a creator of irony: Military engineers in 1940 built phony fourteenth-century castellations atop a World War II gun-platform to camouflage it.
Down at Slapton Sands, a few miles southwest, the war showed a more haunting aspect along a now-lovely beach where a fisherman had recently found a sunken U.S. tank that residents raised and hauled ashore to commemorate the almost one-thousand Americans who died when a German U-boat sneaked in close and opened fire during military exercises prior to D-Day.
Villagette, were it a word, would describe Hope, which sits near the southernmost piece of Devon, and there I found quarters in a room with a full view of the Channel. The small cove, quiet except for the sound of the sea pitching onto the rocks, had neither a promenade nor amusements other than those available to legs or brain: walking, talking, reading, playing cribbage. The harbor lay in repose, its special link to warfare long past living memory, but in a shop window hung a tea towel imprinted:
HOPE COVE
THE ONLY PLACE IN ENGLAND
WHERE AN ARMADA SAILOR CAME ASHORE.
It ought to be enlightening to observe the way later generations can trivialize and peddle the great wars of their ancestors by turning suffering into shillings and death into dollars. Surely, on the way was a tea towel or coffee mug showing a slaughterous Nazi U-boat or a Slapton Sands shattered tank.
How Hope could support two public houses one can understand only by remembering that an English country-pub is to an American bar what a living room is to a hotel lobby: a place where everybody knows your name, or soon will if you stand quietly near the taps. I ordered a supper of John Dory, a flatfish with a visage somewhere between grotesque and loathsome. The waitress gave reassurance it would taste “lovely—if you close your eyes.” With each plate she served or picked up, she thanked me. Now, the English virtually never respond “You’re welcome” to a proffered thanks, but they make up for it by saying “Thank you” all over the place. When I left the pub that evening, I nodded good night to a fellow entering, and he touched his hat and smiled. “Thank you.”
I keep a list of descriptive terms for English dishes: bubble-and-squeak, chip butty, toad-in-the-hole, hubble bubble, parson’s nose, spotted Dick. The next morning I added devils-on-horseback, a name as inexplicable as the ingredients: a rasher of bacon wrapped around a stewed prune (I trusted of the nonballistic variety). It failed to rise beyond its ingredients, neither better, worse, or in combination something unexpectedly different; it was good only as lore to toss into a slow conversation.
THE HAND THAT CUT THE PUDDING. I knew Plymouth from earlier visits, so I passed through to catch the ferry across the River Tamar and enter Cornwall and towns along the way—Freathy, Portwrinkle, Crafthole. I was headed for a place everyone advised I simply must see, even if the season was July. Polperro is another reasonably genuine coastal village although the lures now offered were not to mackerel but to the grockle, hundreds of them—carloa
ds, caravanloads, coachloads—all parked well beyond the pale of local history, because Polperro sits pinched into a combe opening to the Channel. Its streets, while wider than alleys, were still sufficient to jam us together like a school of mullet. The ancient domestic architecture was a delight of stone and slate, but I became aware of behaving not so much like a mullet as an emmet milling along in wavering lines, bumping into other emmets blindly bent on some unseen goal. Having learned by demonstration that in Cornish emmet means “ant,” I wedged my way out.
Mevagissey possessed what I was coming to accept as requisite Cornish quaintness, but it lacked the throng of Polperro. The waters there, according to my antique guidebook, were formerly “fishfull” enough to call the village Fishygissey. In a hardier era, in 1601, John Carew returned home to Fishygissey after losing his right hand at the siege of Ostend, and walked into his lodgings and said to the hostess as he tossed his severed appendage onto the dining table, “That’s the hand that cut the pudding today.”
The byroads toward the small harbor of St. Mawes opened here and there onto cottages oozing droplets of fuchsia blossoms and gardens shoving up pastel puffs of hydrangeas, and every so often over the lane came a waft of honeysuckle. St. Mawes is on the quiet side of a peninsula jutting into Falmouth Bay, a sweet spot for a walk along the strand where I met a man who volunteered directions because he thought I looked lost, or so he said; in truth he was after an audience. His stories contained more words than its incidents could support, but I liked his ancient-mariner turns of phrase and his unwillingness to let me proceed without a passel of recitations. He enumerated the old vessels here formerly fitted out—victualized was his word—prior to sailing into the open Atlantic; after the name of each ship he added, “And she, too, gone to grief.” You mean sunk? “Aye, mate. Bound for Davy Jones, she were.”
Henry the Eighth had St. Mawes castle built sturdily enough that some four-and-a-half centuries later its compact cloverleaf of squat, stone structures just above the fetch of the sea was nicely evident. A woman looking down on it from the lane above said to a nipper still too small for his name, “Oh, do come look, William! What a deliciously darling little castle!” With its carvings, inscriptions, and gargoyles, it is the most decorated of Henry’s fortifications, one that expresses not the Renaissance but the Middle Ages of his predecessors. My guidebook: “There is something rather perverse in this deliberate archaism, especially where it hinders military efficiency.”
THERE’S A QUEEN IN MY PINT. Headlands and estuaries break the line of the southern coast of Cornwall and enforce a wandering route whether on foot or behind a wheel. In its antiquarian, understated voice, the pocket guide advised that Cornish “byroads twist rather more than seems strictly necessary.” At remote Constantine, a clustering of granite houses, I stopped in what I took for an ordinary groceryette to buy fixings for a seaside lunch. The back of the room was stacked full of hard spirits, some of them still boxed as if just hauled up from the beach by smugglers. There was, most notably, bottle after bottle of brandies and single-malt Scotches, including one costing nearly seven-hundred dollars; I started counting, lost track, and turned to a clerk, in fact the owner, Mister Rowe, to ask how many kinds were there. He calculated. “Today, a few more than two hundred.” How could such a small shop carry an inventory outnumbering the village population? He motioned me toward a counter, pulled out a bottle of cognac, and poured us a tot, proof against the morning mist. “If you specialize in something,” he said, “you can become known for it, and then people will seek you out.” Build it and they will come? “This may be the second-largest selection of Scotches in England.”
Leaving the coast for some miles, I ended up in Gweek, a name no more eccentric than many others in England: Nether Wallop, Clock Face, Bugthorpe, Fangfoss, Buttertubs, Nut End, Crank, and Lover come to mind. I crossed the River Hel from Mawgan where there is a funerary inscription waiting for a curious lector to decode its simple secret:
Shall we all dye.
We shall dye all.
All dye shall we.
Dye all we shall.
River of ominous name be damned, I followed it into Helford lying along a tidal stream below steeply wooded slopes allowing view of the place only in small segments so that, dreamlike, the village simultaneously appeared and vanished as I walked. Ivy-bestrung, thatched-roof cottages appeared to be taken not off an architect’s drawing board but from an illustrated children’s book, but the reality of the village was yachts and nouveau wealth.
The Shipwright’s Arms was a seventeenth-century pub once noted for the dipping of shillings into beer to stick them to the skull-crackingly low ceiling. The practice recently had been outlawed by the village council because, one fellow alleged, “From time to time a coin would come loose and drop into somebody’s pint. You know, that could choke a bloke. So now, when a bob comes down, it goes into the lifeboat fund.” But remaining across the yellowed ceiling were little round imprints of an inversed young Queen Elizabeth looking impassively down on the tipplers. “Twouldn’t be proper, now, would it,” he said, “to eat the queen.”
The lane out of Helford took a southward course over the scrub-grown Goonhilly Downs toward Lizard Point, the southernmost place in England, where a chaos of rocks lying offshore and obscuring fogs combine to create for mariners (said my pocket guide) “a deadly notoriety,” adding, “human ingenuity could never invent a more speedy and sure means of destruction for ships than is offered by the Lizard promontory as designed by nature.” But from high atop the headland on that morning, I watched a sea burnished with sun and polished by an innocuous wind. On the back of the Lizard, like warts, stood several little sheds selling snacks and gewgaws. In one higher than the others was a Mister Casley who for years had quarried dark-red, igneous serpentine mottled like reptile skin, which he turned on a lathe—as if the stone were wood—into a variety of lustrous juglets and small bowls that put a kindly face on the seamen’s treacherous rocks.
St. Michael’s Mount, a couple of hours westward, is one of the remarkable topographical features in England: a high and truncated, granitic cone surrounded by sea and surmounted by a castle–church–country seat all built into each other. If you’re familiar with the more famous—and somewhat grander—fortified cathedral high atop Le Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, you have an idea of this cross-Channel English counterpart. In fact, monks from Saint-Michel founded the Benedictine priory here in the twelfth century, although subsequent events made the history on the north shore one of soldiers instead of the holy fathers who departed long ago.
Just as at Saint-Michel, travelers can wait for low tide to walk a stone causeway across the shallow flats to the whilom harbor villagette at the base of the islet, and from there make a steep climb to the castellated buildings on top. The high and inspiring if precipitous views from the windows cause some visitors to keep a half-step back from the sills and bend cautiously at the waist for a peek down at the boisterous waves having a good whack at the dark boulders.
VINEGAR AGAINST THE PLAGUE. Penzance no longer—if it ever actually did—conjures up the romance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s pirates, but a couple of miles on along the coast is Mousehole (pronounced Mow-zull), the name coming from a lost Cornish word apparently having nothing to do with mice or holes. Pinched and bent streets, narrow rock-stairs, everything seemed to hang above the compressed haven, and in front of the stone houses, old boats served as planters. Gulls sat atop chimney pots to dispatch cries beginning at one end of the village and moving across the slates and tiles like breaking surf.
Outside one doorway was a thick stone, a couple of feet square, its center scooped into a shallow declivity. I asked the shopkeeper what it was. “We dug it up when we were refurbishing,” he said. “We’ve been told it’s a plague stone that used to sit at the edge of the village. During the Black Death, this basin held vinegar so outsiders could drop in their coins to disinfect them. What they needed, of course, wasn’t vinegar but rat traps.” br />
A DRAUGHT OF ADAM’S ALE. Grimness from another era lay at the end of the southwest coast, at the western promontory where England stops—or begins: the Land’s End, a place arousing English sentiment and curiosity beyond a foreigner’s comprehension, and an honored lure for grockles. I don’t believe more than one in a hundred Americans could name with precision the most western—or eastern, southern, or northern—point in the contiguous States, yet any alert English child knows and reveres this narrow cape, maybe because on maps it’s so clearly pointing into the Atlantic like the toe of an elfin boot. (Adults might discern a phallus engaging the seminal sea.)
The Land’s End, to my eye, was a modest piece of the remarkable Cornish coast, a stony protruding shoulder (to change the anatomical allusions) that gives way to several seabound rocks of shapes odd enough to have earned names: the Armed Knight, Irish Lady, Kettle Bottom, Shark’s Fin, and one only the English would come up with: Dr. Syntax’s Head (after the three early nineteenth-century poetic parodies of travel books—the first being Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, created by William Combe and Thomas Rowlandson). Those peculiar stony outliers are the western end—or beginning—of English ground. Next stop, North America.
Wilkie Collins, author of the classic mysteries The Moonstone and The Woman in White, speaks of the importance of the Land’s End to the English in his 1851 book of travels, Rambles Beyond Railways. If you will tolerate its length, let me set it down:
Something like what Jerusalem was to the pilgrim in the Holy Land, The Land’s End is—comparing great things with small—to the tourist in Cornwall. It is the Ultima Thule where his progress stops—the shrine towards which his face has been set, from the first day when he started on his travels—the main vent, through which all pent-up enthusiasm accumulated along the line of route is to burst its way out, in one long flow of admiration and delight.