“A clod--a piece of orange-peel-- An end of a cigar-- Once trod on by a princely heel, How beautiful they are!”
But the poor animal’s glory was hardly earned. Loyalty, expressed in terms of an unending burden of children, at last wore him out, and he died.
For a loving list of the great who have visited the town, you must please to look in those guide-books for yourselves, but we learn that “no year passes without some distinguished personage treading the ground of beautiful Ilfracombe, and giving another start to a new chapter of the town’s progress as a fashionable resort.” That remains true; I, myself, was there last year.
The old parish church has of late been little altered. It stands high at the west end of the principal street, midway between the deeps of the harbour and the alpine heights on which the railway terminus is placed, and its approach is by a steep flight of stone stairs.
There is something of almost every architectural period in Ilfracombe church, but the workmanship was ever of so homely a character that the styles all blend into one rude mass. The tower ascends in a singular diminishing fashion. In the large and crowded churchyard you notice most distinctly, as you are indeed intended to do, a stone recording no fewer than nine centenarians who lived and died at Ilfracombe between 1784 and 1897. This by way of advertisement of the astonishing salubrity of the place; but an inhabitant of Brighton chancing this way would be amused. At Brighton there are generally to be found half a dozen hale and hearty centenarians.
Odd names are not infrequent; for example, “Humphrey Rottenberry,” and Ann of the same name, who died aged 94, and thus nearly became one of those witnesses to the supreme value of the Ilfracombe air. Herapaths, too, abound.
The interior of the church is something of an architectural puzzle, owing to the additions made in succeeding ages. The grotesque thirteenth-century stone corbels supporting the waggon-roof and its array of wooden angels, are particularly interesting. They form a strange assemblage of monsters, in which some see only a freakish imagination; but many of them are illustrations of legends once current in this romantic shire. Prominent among them are the lean cow, Chiche-vache, and the well-conditioned cow, Bycorn: the first in so sorry a condition because her only food, according to the old story, was good women; the second so plump by reason of her diet being exclusively good and long-suffering husbands--and such, we all know, abound.
