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Clovelly

Clovelly is a village on the north Devon coast, with a fourteenth century harbour, and a number of cottages dating to that time. It is an estate village, and has been owned by only three families since the Norman Conquest.

The village is famous for its connection with the Victorian writer Charles Kingsley. Kingsley was eleven years old when his father was appointed curate at Clovelly. The family lived at 104, The High Street, and Clovelly was to have a profound influence on young Charles. When he grew up Charles Kingsley was to become a prominent figure, a christian socialist, professor of modern history at Cambridge, and a writer. His children's books were very popular. He wrote Westward Ho! in Clovelly, and echoes of the village can sometimes be heard in The Water Babies.

Clovelly became famous during Victorian times as a tourist attraction. Tourism was taking off at this time, and visitors would be brought in mainly by steamer from Ilfracombe, and south Wales. This was the age of the Industrial Revolution and villages like Clovelly seemed to offer a way back to a more innocent time. This image, inevitably, did not correspond with reality. Kingsley loved Clovelly, which is not surprising for such a lovely place, but he could also be realistic about life there. In one of his most famous poems, The Three Fishers, Kingsley wrote about a fishing tragedy out in Bideford Bay. Three young fishermen leave for their day's work, waved off by wives and girlfriends, but they are drowned in a storm. The village seems cold in its attitude to the deaths: "Men must work and women must weep." Life grinds on. People came here in the nineteenth century to escape the grind of the Industrial Revolution, but in reality fishing, Clovelly's industry, was a tough business like any other. And so was tourism. The idea of Clovelly as a survivor from a better, more community minded age is still played on in the information film that runs at the visitors centre. Personally I preferred visiting Charles Kingsley's house and hearing a recording of The Three Fishers. He gave me the feeling that he loved a real place, and not an idealised place, visited for a few days on a steam ship.

 

Writing for children has its origins in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Kingsley wrote his best known book, The Water Babies in 1863. Perhaps the new interest in childhood was like the new interest in villages, a reaction against the mechanised order of the Industrial Revolution. There seemed to be a general search for a special, magical place, free of the new order and rationality of the age, and villages and childhood were two places Victorian people looked. Naturally what they were looking for was hard to find. Clovelly is very nice but it is unreasonable to expect the village to be a lost Nirvana. In The Water Babies Kingsley has his hero Tom, the young chimney sweep, looking for a wonderful place called Vendale, which is "a quiet, silent, rich happy place; a narrow crack cut deep in the earth, so deep and out of the way, that the bad bogies can hardly find it." Vendale would be a good place to put on a tourist web site, but the directions to it are enigmatic:

"...you must go up into High Craven, and search from Bollard Forest north by Ingleborough, to the Nine Standards and Criss Fell; and if you have not found it, you must turn south and search the Lake Mountains, down to Scaw Fell and the sea; and then, if you have not found it, you must go northward again by merry Carlisle, and search the Cheviots all across Annan Water to Berwick Law; and then whether you have found Vendale or not, you will have found such a country, and such a people, as ought to make you proud of being a British boy." (Chapter 2)

Any place would be pushed to live up to the billing of Vendale, which like Clovelly, is a narrow crack cut deep in the earth, quiet and out of the way. Clovelly might not be Vendale, but it is one of those many lovely places you find in looking for it.

Directions: Clovelly is on the north coast of Devon, twelve miles east of Bideford of the A39. Car parking is available at the visitors centre, where an entrance fee is payable. Click here for an interactive map centred on Clovelly.

Access: The High Street is very steep, and the surface is cobbled, and can be slippery. The Visitors Centre, donkey stables, craft workshops are wheelchair accessible, as is Mount Pleasant, a picnic spot at the top of the hill offering good views.

Contact:

phone: 01237 431781

web site: http://www2.clovelly.co.uk/index.php