North Devon

“Put your arms out and you’ll take off and fly right up over the sea,” said the old man who passed me on the lane yesterday as I walked towards the old Coffin Path and the cottage with the dead baby in the garden. The wind was up in North Devon and when the wind is up in North Devon it’s not the same as when the wind is up in South Devon. You look at North Devon on a day like this, the big blasted expanse of it, the way it seems wholly stripped of ornamental fuss, and you think, “Well, of course: now I know who did this. It was wind.” Even the people up here appear more harassed by weather than their southern counterparts. You see them in the towns, ducking into the pannier markets for shelter, lamb cutlets and cheap wool. That is North Devon to me: pannier markets, everywhere you look, and wind, and people with that squinting, hunched look you take on when wind is bullying you. What else? Roads whose central wish seems to be that you do not leave North Devon. Cinemas that look like they’re just getting around to showing the hot new blockbusters of 1996. Huts built by writers on steep cliffs. Solid-looking cottages with uneven walls, stained by the emissions of passing lorries on the roads that want to keep everyone in North Devon. Oh, and signs everywhere for something called ‘The Big Sheep’ which I refuse to investigate because after this many years I’m too far in, too committed to the idea of it just being an enormous sheep, standing alone, in a field, who people buy tickets to stare at.

I used to come to North Devon more often, back before I realised just how long it took to get from the top of the county to the bottom, which is effectively a whole different continent, with a whole different body language and wardrobe. I’d sometimes stay at my friend’s big house in front of the sea. Sometimes, her on-off boyfriend was there, tinkering with the motorbike he liked to ride along the cliffs at dusk. Sometimes she was there too. Sometimes it was just me. It’s a house with shutters and the shutters would bang furiously in the wind and I could never sleep. I’d walk down to the beach and watch the tide go out, and notice how much the rocks beneath looked like giant broken teeth and realise why they don’t call their beaches “coves” up here, why they’re always “mouths” instead. One day I walked to the writer’s hut on top of the cliff near my friend’s house - one of two huts, within only four miles of her front door - and my friend told me not to take my credit card with me. It seemed a curious piece of advice so I asked her why I shouldn’t and she said she’d been up there a few weeks ago and her credit card had blown out of her hand and into the sea. A couple of years later, in much much windier weather, I walked further, over the border into Cornwall, to the other writer’s hut, the one the eccentric vicar built up there in the mid-1800s. There were half-eaten sheep carcasses on the cliffs and the only other sign of human life apart from me was a helicopter which kept circling above my head, possibly in readiness for the moment when I was blown off the rocks into the sea. I looked for the ghost of the vicar, who would often invite his pet pig and nine cats into church with him and enjoyed playing a regular practical joke which involved dressing up as a mermaid and reclining on the rocks to freak out passing boats. I imagined the conversation that would ensue after the helicopter’s rescue crew hauled me out of the savage water.

“What on earth were you doing out there on a terrifying day like this, you big twat?”

“I was looking for the ghost of a Victorian vicar and his pet pig.”

“Is that something you do a lot?”

“Yes. I only just got back from searching for the ghost of the vicar FW Densham, of Warleggan, who alienated his entire congregation then continued to preach to an empty building, placing cardboard cut-outs of humans in the pews. He also once caused great controversy by repainting the exterior of the church in extremely vibrant colours. He died in 1953, alone, after an accident at home. It’s said his ghost is still seen wandering the sunken lanes surrounding the village. He didn’t have a pet pig, though, so I doubt his ghost does either.”

In November 2019, my friend who lives in the big house by the sea kindly went to look at a cottage on the North Devon coast on my behalf. I was living almost 400 miles away at the time and her considerate thought was that by looking at the cottage she could make sure it was worth my while to come all that way. The problem was, my friend who lives in the big house has a way of pinpointing the positive side of every situation, so even if she did see a house she had doubts about, it’s unlikely she’d say, “It’s a woeful box of imprisoned memories. 101% haunted. Don’t rent it.” Also my friend is evangelical about North Devon and was keen for me to live there, a few miles down the road from her big house. Her one negative comment was that the valley where the house stood didn’t get a lot of light. So I drove down to see the cottage, which was in a magical storybook location, three minutes’ walk from the sea, with a stream running in front of the garden, and was only £800 per month to rent, but from the second I stepped through the front door, I felt deeply uneasy. The living room’s ceiling was so low I couldn’t stand at my full height without banging my head, and every compartment of the building - with the sole exception of its semi-modern, extended kitchen - was extraordinarily dark, both literally and emotionally. I told the estate agent that it wasn’t for me. As we were leaving, she pointed out that the garden contained a dead baby from the 1950s. I spun around, ready for tiny gnashing milk teeth and a terrifying post-war nappy. “I mean, one is buried here,” she added. “There’s a little grave, just there. People were allowed to do that back then, I think.”

The house with the dead baby in the garden is in a village called Buck’s Mills. Yesterday I walked past it for the first time in almost five years, not because I had set out on purpose to reappraise the house but because it just happened to be on the route I’d planned, which took me along the old Coffin Path, along which people from Buck’s Mills used to carry their dead to the nearest church, at Parkham, almost four miles inland. I was happy to see that the house looked lived in - presumably by people of less than average height. I walked to the seafront, where the tide was falling back to reveal the smashed jaws underneath, and stood close enough to feel the spray of the waterfall that spills onto the beach from the village. Shortly afterwards I saw a sign warning me not to stand too close to the waterfall, since it was likely to be polluted, so I scrapped my earlier idea of washing my hair under it in slow motion while making a series of seductive facial expressions.

My route back inland led me through dense woods matured by sea mists, up a steep, knobbly valley whose oldness was all-engulfing and which felt like meeting the great great grandparent of other steep, knobbly valleys I’ve known whose oldness has been all-engulfing. I crossed a road flanked by stained houses. A footpath vanished under a pile of manure even bigger than the one Laura Dern shoved her arm into in Jurassic Park. A gust of the sea’s elongated salt breath threw me down a hill as my phone battery died. Abandoned hay tedders and grain carts slowly sank and submitted to the hungry, patient earth. A gang of lanky teenage girls emerged out of the dusk on a lonely lane and asked me if I knew where the party they were going to was. I said I couldn’t help them. Had I really looked even remotely like somebody who could? Mud caked my jeans. I felt tangibly diminished by comparison to the physical being I had been at lunchtime. Sweat and wind had sculpted my hair into a half-living offence to any reasonable idea of society. Less than ten minutes earlier, I’d been chased by a bull, having hopped a fence to escape another bull, sold the big breathy fucker a dummy then run to the safety of a cattle grid. The wind redoubled and I slammed my besieged legs up a gear, against their will, as I saw my car in the distance. I was glad to be here, feeling this weird, ragged, afflicted kind of good. I was in North Devon and I had perhaps never been informed of that fact, so emphatically, from so many angles.

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