and substance of the stock.
General Simcoe paid much attention also to the culture of exotic trees. The black spruce of Newfoundland, the red spruce of Norway, the Weymouth pine, pineaster, stone and cluster pine, the American sycamore or butterwood, the black walnut, red oak, hiccory, sassafras, red bud, together with many small trees and shrubs of the sorts which, in the Western hemisphere, compose the undergrowth of the forests—all these different species were introduced and found to flourish at Dunkeswell.
The soil of Dunkeswell Common consisted chiefly of a brown and black peaty earth on beds of brown and yellow clay and fox-mould, all resting ultimately on a deep stratum of chip sand. Wherever the chip sand and marl emerged, the more retentive stratum of the latter held up the water, which burst forth into springs or formed “weeping ground”—“zogs,” as it is termed by the natives, who add that you must be careful where you plant your foot. Many of the morasses and peaty margins along the declivities and side-hills abounded with bog-timber. Out of a bed of peat near Wolford Lodge was raised an oak of this description, about twenty feet long and squaring thirteen inches at the butt. The whole of its sap was gone, and, to judge from its appearance, it might have been a fork of a much larger tree. Before it was taken up, General Simcoe received and refused an offer of five guineas for it. Local opinion favours Roughgrey Bottom, Dunkeswell, as the original of Blackmarsh or the Forbidden Land of Perlycross. The situation is fairly suitable; it was not far from the Blackborough quarries (see chapter xxxviii.).
There is probably still preserved at Wolford Lodge, which is a treasure-house of interesting curios, a specimen of the serpent stone, or cornu ammonis, found at the Blackborough quarries, which in their time have produced a large crop of fossilised shells, and delighted the geologist with instructive visions of the underworld. The specimen in question exceeded fourteen inches in diameter.
Once upon a time the Blackdowns were generally known as the Scythestone Hills, and travellers often digressed from the beaten track in order to pay a visit to the whetstone pits at Blackborough, which were justly regarded as a remarkable scene of industry, and, indeed, one of the sights of the West. These quarries were worked in the following way. A road or level about three feet wide and about five and a half feet high was driven from the side of the hill to a distance of three or four hundred yards. All the loose sandstones within eight or ten yards of the road were extracted, pillars being left to support the roof of the mine, until, having served their purpose, these also were gradually worked out and the whole excavation suffered to fall in. The size of the stones rarely exceeded that of a horse’s head; and all were more or less grooved and indented, their appearance suggesting that they had been subjected to the action of rills or running water. Many years have elapsed since the pits were in full working order. A little while ago there were two shafts remaining; to-day there is only one, and, most probably, by the time this paragraph is in print, the doom of the mines will be irrevocably sealed, and Finis appended to their history. Dr. Fox’s strange adventure in this weird spot must be in the recollection of all readers of Perlycross (chapter xii.).
But there is another wonder at Blackborough besides the quarries, and that is Blackborough House—a great rambling mansion, with windows and doors innumerable. The building, which is rented by an aged lady and her daughter, is so utterly inconsequent as to inspire curiosity concerning its origin in this lonely out-of-the-way place. Well, a good many years ago, Dr. Dickinson, of Uffculme, was in one of the eastern counties when he fell in with an old admiral who knew the spot, knew its former owner—the eccentric Lord Egremont—and told him all about it. Long before, the earl and the admiral were looking over the property, when the latter chanced to remark that it might be a good thing to erect a residence there. My lord was impressed with the notion, and the construction of this gigantic tenement—in its way almost as extraordinary as Silverton House, now demolished, which stamped him as an aedificator that neither reckoned nor finished—was his mode of giving effect to the idea.
In the middle of the last century Blackborough House was a warren of young students professedly reading with the Rev. William Cookesley Thompson, most of whom were of Irish nationality. They were a wild set, and enjoyed nothing so much as sharing in one of the country revels, which were then so common in Devonshire. On one occasion they made their way to Kentisbeare Revel, where an old woman had a gingerbread stall. Evening came on, and to avoid a slight sprinkling of rain, the dame took refuge in the doorway of the inn. At the same instant a wagonette or some such vehicle emerged from the adjoining passage, and turning a sharp corner, overturned the old woman’s stall, whose contents, tilted into the roadway, were eagerly scrambled for by children. Of course there were profuse, if not very sincere, apologies, and sympathetic promises of compensation, but whether they were ever honoured in the sequel my informant is inclined to query.
One great feature of a revel was wrestling, and this reminds me that at Kentisbeare there are about fifty acres of common, which were once the subject of debate between that parish and Broadhembury. After much bickering it was agreed to settle the point by “fair shoe and stocking,” with the result that the men of Kentisbeare were victorious, and acquired firm possession of the disputed territory.
CHAPTER IV
BLACKMORE’S SCHOOL
In 1837 R. D. Blackmore underwent a momentous experience, that being the year in which he entered, a trembling novice, the portals of the famous school, founded by Mr. Peter Blundell, clothier. With all its many virtues as a place of learning, Tiverton School long maintained a reputation for roughness, and those days were among its roughest. It might have appeared, therefore, a providential circumstance that the boy had a sturdy sponsor in Frederick Temple, with whom he at first lodged in the simplicity of Copp’s Court, though afterwards he became a boarder inside the gates. Nor can it be doubted that Temple, ever “justissimus unus,” must sometimes have interposed to prevent any unconscionable bullying of his delicate charge. Unfortunately he seems to have taken a severe view of his duties as amateur father; and on one occasion, many years later, when he handed to a prize-winner a copy of Lorna Doone, he mentioned, with a humorous twinkle, that he had often chastised the author by striking him on the head with a brass-headed hammer. We have it on the authority of Mr. Stuart J. Reid that Blackmore neither then nor subsequently felt the least gratitude for these attentions, and was wont to refer to his distinguished contemporary in language the reverse of flattering. And what he felt about his schoolfellow, he felt—or Mr. Reid is mistaken—about his school, the retrospect of the misery and privations of his boyhood affecting him to his latest hour with a lively sense of horror and reprobation.
One would not have thought it. The opening chapters of Lorna Doone, though candid, seem written with relish of the little barbarians at play, just as if Blackmore had settled with himself that the trials of child’s estate were goodly exercises for the larger palæstras of life and literature. The filial note is never wanting, and those classic pages, so redolent of the place, and so descriptive of its customs, even to the verge of exaggeration, appeal to the younger generation of “Blundellites” as a splendid and enduring achievement, to which Mr. Kipling’s Stalky and Co., and Mr. Eden Phillpott’s Human Boy, and even Tom Brown’s Schooldays, must humbly vail.
It would be a considerable satisfaction to report that the scenes which Blackmore pictured are still in all respects as he painted them; but to do so would be to tamper with truth, and lead to unnecessary disappointment. In the first place, the school, as a society of men and boys, was removed in 1882 to a new and more convenient abiding-place about a mile distant, where it has renewed its youth, and flourishes with such a plentitude of numbers as was never known on the traditional site by the bank of the Lowman. The venerable buildings—it moves a nausea to tell—have been remodelled into villas. Apparently there was no remedy, for, although there was talk at the time of acquiring them as a local museum and library, like the Castle at Taunton,