of Sidmouth, and it is quite in accord with the general trend of things that the newest, the largest, the reddest, and the most insistent of the hotels should have shoved a great hulking shoulder up against the pretty, rambling, white-faced cottage in Woolacombe Glen, where some earliest infant months of Queen Victoria were passed, and that it should have exploited the association by calling itself the “Victoria.”
There is no river mouth at all at Sidmouth, and the Sid, which so plentifully christens places on its banks, has not water enough to force its way to sea, as a river should. Instead, it abjectly crawls through the pebbles of the beach, as though wishful of escaping observation; but when storms heap up sand and shingle and the Sid is denied even this humble outlet, then it becomes an urgent matter to hire labour for the speedy digging out a passage, lest the low-lying town should be flooded.
WOOLACOMBE GLEN.
The sea-front of Sidmouth is, indeed, yet an unsolved problem. Many centuries ago, there seems to have been a harbour where the beach and the walk of the Esplanade now stand, the constant easterly drift of shingle being kept well out to sea by a cliff projecting from the Western end of the town, where its last remains, the Chit Rock, stood until 1824. But that protecting headland was gradually worn away and by sure degrees the river mouth was choked with shingle. It is much the same story as that which belongs to the Axe and to other rivers and obliterated harbours of South Devon.
Many projects have from time to time been set afoot to remedy this state of affairs, but without success. A plan to excavate the river mouth and form a harbour was mooted in 1811, and another in 1825. Again, in 1836, an attempt was made to construct a harbour pier on the site of the Chit Rock, but was soon abandoned. Even the more modest attempt made in 1876, to build a pier on either side of the river mouth—or rather, where the river mouth should be—failed; and it seems as though what was long ago written of Sidmouth will long continue to be true of it: “In times past a port of some account, now choaked with chisel and sands by the vicissitudes of the tides.”
At present, Sidmouth beach is open and exposed, like that of Seaton, but even when Turner made his drawing for the projected work on the “Harbours of England,” although there was certainly nothing even remotely like a harbour here, the Chit Rock remained, to afford some slight protection.
But the Chit Rock itself has disappeared. It vanished in that terrible November storm of 1824, of whose traces there seems to be no end on the southern coasts. With the rock went a number of cottages, and with the cottages almost went the inhabitants, among them the real original Dame Partington, who was rash enough to attempt to mop up the waves.
“THE OLD CHANCEL.”
Mrs. Partington might never have attained immortality, had it not been for Sydney Smith, who in 1831 compared the House of Lords, rejecting the Reform Bill, with her. Reform, he said, would come. The Lords were like Dame Partington at Sidmouth, who attempted to keep out the Atlantic with a mop, and failed. “She was excellent at a slop or puddle, but should never have meddled with a tempest.”
The old parish church was rebuilt, except the tower, in 1859. It was a rather wanton work, and to some minds the purely secular use made of a portion of its stones may be shocking. Those of the most sacred part of the building, the chancel, were sold and used in the erection of a singular-looking villa close at hand, named from this circumstance, “The Old Chancel.”
There can be few more charming nooks than that of Woolacombe Glen, where the cottage of Princess Victoria’s early infancy still stands; a white-fronted, long, low, rambling building set in midst of the most cool and delightful lawns and overhung by trees. But, charming though it be, the Glen is not what it was at that time, for the broad road leading down to the Esplanade is a modern innovation constructed on the site of other lawns, through which a little stream flowed to the sea. Alas! for that clear-running Woolabrook. It has been compelled into an underground pipe. And—a last little irritating pin-prick—the “Woolacombe” in the name of the glen is now shorn of the peculiarly Devonian connecting and softening a between the syllables, and has become merely “Woolcombe.” How horrid the deed, and how excruciating the thought that, if the same amputating process were extended throughout the county, we should exchange Babbacombe for “Babbcombe,” Lannacombe for “Lanncombe,” Ellacombe for “Ellcombe,” and the less lovely like of them!
High Peak, the tremendous hill and cliff that shuts in Sidmouth on the west, is well named. The road up to the top of it is a mile of exhausting gradients, with fortunately a little grassy ledge on the way, whence you look down on to a distant beach and along the pebbly coast to Ladram Bay and Otterton Point. Ladram Bay is reached either by cliff-top or along that tiring beach; or, greatly to be recommended above all other courses, by boat from Sidmouth, one of whose boatmen, with the pachydermatous hands that would scarce feel any effect from rowing fifty miles, will take you there if you give him a chance.
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