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After viewing sunken non-sites in Wales, we followed
Shelley and Harriet to the seaside town of Lynmouth, in
Devon. Here we found not too few, but too many Shelley
buildings—the local citizenry has been engaged in a decades-long
squabble over which of three sites he and Harriet had
inhabited. (The stakes are fairly high here. Since Lynmouth
is primarily a tourist town, the hotel that can boast
that it is the actual Shelley "honeymoon cottage" is guaranteed
a lively trade in romantic and/or Romantic tourists.)
Most picturesque of the three was a thatched cottage
owned by the "Rising Sun" pub. It was exactly the sort
of place one wished for young Harriet’s honeymoon—and
certainly fit her description of the place in a letter
to her friend Mrs. Nugent: "beautifully situated, commanding
a fine view of the sea, with mountains at the side and
behind us . . . . We have roses and myrtles creeping up
the sides of the house, which is thatched at the top.
It is such a little place that it seems more like a fairy
scene than anything in reality" (cited in Holmes 146).
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Unfortunately,
the site
of the place
is roughly
half a
mile from
that in
Holmes's
description;
the original
cottage,
he notes,
was "Hooper’s
Lodging" and "stood
a little
way back
from the
beach on
rising ground
where the
trackway
met the
two branches
of the Lyn
River, crossed,
and ran
down parallel
to the sea" (Holmes
146). The
building
that most
closely
matches
this location—indeed,
which seems
dead on
top of it—is
the current "Shelley’s
Cottage
Hotel," which
boasts
a Hooper
among its
previous
owners,
and the
reported
memory
of long-dead
residents:
in a 1901
newspaper
article,
100-year-old
Agnes Grove
of Lynmouth
stated
that she
remembered
Shelley
staying
at what
was then
the Woodbine
Villas;
more recently,
a local
resident
claimed
that in
the 1940s,
he saw
a visitor’s
book signed
by Shelley.
The building may well have been thatched at one time,
and, while its eleven bedrooms make it seem far too large
to be Harriet’s "such a little place," she had indeed
noted that it was "not half built" (cited in Holmes 145)
when the Shelleys lived there. In April 1998 a Richard
Briden of Essex, who hoped to restore and extend the building,
purchased the place. As of June 1999, however, work had
not yet begun.
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The Lynmouth historical society also mentioned that the
original place might have been situated at a third site
that burned down around the turn of the century.
The
historical
records
which would
solve the
mystery
are few,
partly
due to the
horrific
flooding
that destroyed
a huge
portion
of Lynmouth
(and seriously
damaged
the Shelley’s
Cottage
Hotel)
in August
1952.
Good sources
of information
are Lynmouth
historian
Tom Prosser
(Sheppards,
Castle
Hill,
Lynton
EX356JA,
phone:
01598
7535230)
and Erica
Gooch
of the North
Devon
Journal.
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)
)
)