Chapter 42

There are steep ups and downs on the nine miles and a half between Axminster, the byegone home of carpets, and Honiton, once the seat of the lace industry, where all routes from London to Exeter meet. ‘Honiton lace’ is made now in the surrounding villages, but not in the town itself.

The first hill is soon met with, on passing over the river Yart. This is Shute Hill, where the coaches generally were upset, if either the coachman or the horses were at all ‘fresh.’ Then it is a long run down to Kilmington, where the travellers, having recovered their hearts from their boots or their throats, according to their temperaments, and found their breath, promptly cursed those coachmen and threatened them with all manner of pains and penalties for reckless driving. Thence, by way of Wilmington, to Honiton.{298}

A quarter of a mile before reaching that town the traveller comes upon a singular debased Gothic toll-house. If he walks or cycles he may pass freely, but all carts and cattle have still to pay toll. This queer survival is known as King’s Road Gate, or by the more popular name of ‘Copper Castle,’ from its once having a peaked copper roof above its carpenter-gothic battlements.
Image unavailable: ‘COPPER CASTLE.’
‘COPPER CASTLE.’
THE LAST COACH

Honiton, whose name is locally ‘Honeyton,’ is a singularly uninteresting town, with its mother-parish church half a mile away from the one broad street that forms practically the whole of the place. Clean, quiet, and neither very old nor very new, so far as outward appearance goes, Honiton must be of a positively deadly dulness to the tourist on a rainy day; when to go out of doors is to get wet, and to remain in, thrown on the slender resources for amusement afforded by the local papers and the ten-years-old{299} county directory in the hotel coffee-room, is a weariness.

Once a year, during Honiton Great Fair, this long, empty street is not too wide; but all the year round, and every year, the broad highway hence on to Exeter is a world too spacious for its shrunken traffic. Broad selvedges of grass encroach as slyly as a land-grabbing, enclosing country gentleman upon this generous width of macadamised surface, and are allowed their will of all but a narrow strip sufficient for the present needs of the traffic. It is fifty-five years since the Great Western Railway was opened through to Exeter, and during that more than half a century these long reaches of the road have been deserted. Do belated cyclists, wheeling on moonlit nights along this tree-shaded road, ever conjure up a picture of the last mail down; the farewells at the inns, the cottagers standing at their doors, or leaning out of their windows, to see the visible passing away of an epoch; the flashing of the lamps past the hedgerows, and the last faint echoes of the horn sounding in melancholy fashion a mile away? If they do not, why then they must be sadly lacking in imagination, or ill-read in the Story of the Roads.

Where the roads branch in puzzling fashion, four and a half miles from Honiton, and all ways seem to lead to Exeter, there stands on the grassy plot at the fork a roadside monument to a missionary bishop, Dr. Patteson, who, born 1st April 1827, met martyrdom, together with two other workers in the missionfield, in New Zealand, in 1871. He was the eldest son of Sir John Patteson, of Feniton Court, near by,{300} hence the placing of this brick and stone column here, surmounted by a cross, and plentifully inscribed with texts. The story of his and his friends’ death is set forth as having been ‘in vengeance for wrongs suffered at the hands of Europeans by savage men whom he loved and for whose sake he gave up home and country and friends dearer than his life.’

This memorial also serves the turn of finger-post, for directions are carved on its four sides; and very necessary too, for where two roads go to Exeter, the one by Ottery St. Mary some two miles longer than the other, the passing rustic is not wholly to be depended upon for clear and concise information. Cobbett in his day found that exasperating direction of the rustics to the inquiring wayfarer, to ‘keep straight on,’ just as great a delusion as the tourist now discovers it to be. The formula, according to him, was a little different in his time, being ‘keep right on.’

‘Aye,’ says he, ‘but in ten minutes, perhaps, you come to a Y or a T, or to a X. A fellow once told me, in my way from Chertsey to Guildford, “keep right on, you can’t miss your way.” I was in the perpendicular part of the T, and the top part was only a few yards from me. “Right on,” said I, “what, over that bank into the wheat?”—“No, no,” said he, “I mean that road, to be sure,” pointing to the road that went off to the left.’

Here a branch of the river Otter crosses the road in the wooded dell of Fenny Bridges, and in the course of another mile, on the banks of another stream, stands the ‘Fair Mile Inn,’ the last stage into{301}
EXETER
Image unavailable: ‘THE LONG REACHES OF THE EXETER ROAD.’
‘THE LONG REACHES OF THE EXETER ROAD.’

{302}

{303}

Exeter in coaching times. Lonely the road remains, passing the scattered cottages of Rockbeare, and the depressing outlying houses of Honiton Clyst, situated on the little river Clyst, with the first of the characteristic old red sandstone church-towers of the South Devon looking down upon the road from the midst of embowering foliage. Then the squalid east end of Exeter and the long street of Heavitree, where Exeter burnt her martyrs, come into view, and there, away in front, with its skyline of towers and spires, is Exeter, displayed in profile for the admiration of all who have journeyed these many miles to where she sits in regal grandeur upon her hill that descends until its feet are bathed in the waters of her godmother, the Exe. Her streets are steep and her site dignified, although it is partly the level range of the surrounding country, rather than an intrinsic height, which confers that look of majesty which all travellers have noticed. The ancient city rises impressive in contrast with the water-meadows, rather than by reason of actual measurement. Wayfarers approaching from any direction brace themselves and draw deep breaths preparatory to scaling the streets, which, at a distance, assume abrupt vistas. Villas, with spacious gardens, and snug, prebendal-looking houses, eloquent of a thousand a year and cellars full of old port, clothe the lower slopes of this rising ground, to give place, by degrees, to streets which, as the traveller advances, grow narrower and more crooked, their lines of houses becoming ever older, more picturesque, and loftier as they near the heart of the city. Modernity inhabits the environs, antiquity is{304} seated, impressive, in the centre, where, on a plateau, closely hemmed in from the bustling, secular life of the streets, rises the sombre mass of the cathedral, the pride of this western land.