Æsthetically, however, you must look at these famous towns in detail with the eye of faith--not of an artist nor an archæologist. But they will pass, being neither unsightly nor in serious conflict with their traditions, which are great.
Now the Torridge, like the Tamar, rises in no moorland. In fact their infant springs are close together hard by the north coast. For this reason, though both are clear and rapid rivers, they have scarcely anywhere the turmoil of the Dart, the Tavy, or the Avon. The Torridge, as mentioned earlier, after running a heady, youthful course far southward, would seem to change its mind as if loth on second thoughts to leave the country of its birth; for, doubling back again, it hurries northward, and with a course parallel to its upper reaches rolls in fine broad sweeps of alternate deep and rapid beneath Torrington perched on its high hills, to Bideford and the sea. Now the region between the lower or northward-flowing half of the Torridge, extending west to the Tamar and
[Illustration: ON THE WEST LYNN, LYNMOUTH, DEVON]
Cornwall, is a land unto itself, and, as already noted, commonly alluded to by Devonshire farmers, cattle buyers, hunting men and such like as "the West country." It is watered by the Upper Torridge flowing southwards through it, and covers some two or three hundred square miles. In appearance it is normal Devonian; a succession of high red ridges of tillage and pasture, heavily fenced to their round summits, and traversed by narrow precipitous roads hemmed in between lofty, flower-spangled banks. Cold grey church towers stand out here and there above some small, clustering, slate-roofed village on a windy hill-top, and at intervals some deep, wooded glen bearing a noisy runlet to the Torridge throws a redeeming ray of beauty through a country otherwise open to criticism for a certain monotony of outline and detail, like many other parts of Devonshire.
But this "West country" or land of the Upper Torridge has the merit, one may almost say the charm, of unconventionality. For within its whole wide bounds there is scarcely a gentleman's residence but the indispensable vicarage, and even scattered cottages are rare, there being few labourers. The entire country, in fact, hereabouts is occupied by yeomen farmers, many of whom have lately bought their farms, and who mostly do their own work. It is the most sequestered and unknown part of habitable Devonshire. Scarcely any one but its occupants know anything about it, except such few as may penetrate it behind a hunted fox or as purchasers of stock. There is nothing, indeed, to bring any one in here, while the labours of locomotion except on horseback are prodigious. No social functions occur within it; no railroads disturb its calm; while the motor, nay, even the cycle, give it a wide berth. The farmers ride ponies, and, fifty years hence, will probably be riding ponies still. If it were a wild pastoral country, this land of the Upper Torridge, there would, of course, be nothing worthy of remark in all this. But, on the contrary, it is a quite normal district. The land is not very good, nor its occupants very progressive, so the formality of the country is delightfully broken by stretches of golden gorse, by moorish, ill-drained fields where snipe are numerous, by whole hillsides that Nature has clothed after her own fashion with birch and alder, blackthorn, or ash, straggling about waist deep in open brakes of fern or broom, and these are the haunt in winter of great numbers of woodcock--a country, indeed, full of birds, those of