Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1879 edition. Excerpt: ...and the station for Appledore, to which there is a ferry across the river. Appledore (= apple tree) is a busy fishing and shipping town immediately at the junction of the two rivers, the outport of Bideford, quaint in its look, and with an "ancient," not to say "fish-like," smell. It had its rise in the early days of the Newfoundland trade. 9m. Bideford. (Pop. 6969.) Hotels: Tantoris, New Inn, Newfoundland. Friendship's and Howe's are good houses of the Temperance class. Kingsley has once for all described "the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old' bridge where salmon wait for autumn floods, towards the pleasant upland on the W. Above the town the hills close in, cushioned with deep oak woods, through which juts here and there a crag of fern-fringed slate; below they lower and open more and more in softly-rounded knolls and fertile squares of red and green, till they sink into the wide expanse of hazy flats, rich salt marshes, and rolling sand-hills, where Torridge joins her sister Taw, and both together flow quietly towards the broad surges of the bar, and the everlasting thunder of the long Atlantic swell." Bideford is said to mean " By-the-Ford "--the ford in question being that by which the Roman trackway crossed the Torridge, within sight of the bridge which did away with the need for fording. The bridge is the most characteristic feature and institution of the town, five centuries old and more, though of late sadly modernized. In Devonshire it is the bridge of bridges, at least to a true Bideford man. Its origin is supernatural, for no foundation could be found until Sir Richard Gurney, parish priest, dreamt where it should be planted; its history...
