The parish church of Dartmouth, oddly enough, is neither St. Saviour’s in the town, nor St. Petrox at the castle, but St. Clement’s at Townstal, on the hilltop, quite a mile distant. Many of the very old and very fine fifteenth and sixteenth century overhanging and gabled houses have in modern times been destroyed, some by fire and some in wanton “improvements”; but Foss Street, looking along to St. Saviour’s, shows what old Dartmouth was like. There are found ancient houses with windows bracketed out upon strikingly artistic Renaissance carvings of lions and unicorns; but the houses in that street are decrepit, and the Butter Walk undoubtedly shows the best preserved old architecture. When we consider that Dartmouth was once, as a whole, like this, it will sadly be realised how grievous the change.

Dartmouth to-day is still a very busy place, and full of slummy little alleys, and extraordinarily swarming with children. Amid all this crowding and bustle of business there are always plenty of loafers to lean over breast-high walls, contemplating the picturesque scene, where houses crowd and cling to the very water’s edge, and old, half-forgotten waterside towers stand, silent reminders of a bygone need for watchfulness. At Bayard’s Cove in especial, the coal-lumpers, the boatmen, and the generally idle sit on the quay walls in the sun, or lean against them, keeping them up. The coal-lumpers work perhaps sixteen or twenty hours at a stretch, coaling the steamers that come into port, and then want no more work for a month. They laze away the days, run up a score at the nearest pub, and groan if by chance they see another job coming round the corner.

CHAPTER XX
THE DART—DITTISHAM—STOKE GABRIEL—“PARLIAMENT HOUSE”

The eight miles steamboat trip up or down the Dart is one of the finest things Devonshire has to show, for the river Dart is rightly thought the most beautiful of rivers. The Dart chiefly known in this manner by tourists is not the mountain-stream that rises in the heart of Dartmoor, but the tidal, salt-water estuary between Dartmouth and Totnes. Not only tourists, but all who have business between those two places, use the Dart and its steamers; for the district, hilly as it is, knows nothing of railways. The Dart is known well enough by tourists from the decks of these little steamers, but its shores and creeks, and the quiet villages along them, are rarely explored. The picturesque village of Dittisham is perhaps an exception, for the steamers call off its quay, and picnic parties penetrate so far. Dittisham is a large village occupying a rather puzzling geographical position on one of the numerous capes or headlands formed by the amazing windings of this romantic river. It looks upon the water from two directly opposite outlooks, and is partly the home of salmon-fishers, builders of fishing-smacks, and, in these latter days, a sprinkling of independent “residential” people, who enjoy the “quiet life.” A little row of white-washed and pink-washed and blue-washed houses faces upon a quay, and the “Passage House” inn marks where the boat plies across to Greenaway; but apart from this quayside there is scarce a level square yard of ground in Dittisham, whose lanes, bordered for the most part by old, heavily thatched cottages and gardens, where flowers and shrubs grow in prodigal luxuriance, are steep and stony in the extreme. Dittisham is always beautiful, but especially lovely in spring, when the surrounding orchards are in blossom: particularly the damson orchards, for which the place is locally famous.

A great deal of the supreme beauty of the Dart is due to the dense woods that cover the bold hillsides of either shore and are reflected with solemn loveliness in the tide. The Anchor Rock, prominent in mid-stream, lends its more or less authentic story to guide-book students, for legend tells us that the scolding wives of the community were landed upon it and given ample leisure to repent; although the very name of this solitary crag would lead the student to suppose that it was originally the spot whereon some early hermit, or anchorite, voluntarily secluded himself.

By crossing the river to Greenaway, and walking through woods and across meadows, the explorer comes, in a scrambly way, to a place very rarely seen by fleeting tourists. This is Galmpton—or “Gaamton” as the Devonshire folk call it—hidden away in a lakelike creek. Here the stranger finds an unexpected scene of industry, for in this nook, where the tide lazily rolls up and as lazily slides down, with the ooze and scum, and chance leaves and twigs voyaging back and forth, is a busy shipbuilding yard.

They do not build ocean liners at Galmpton, but they have had for some seventy years past a very fine steady business in the building of trawlers for the Brixham and Lowestoft fisheries; and sometimes a smart sailing yacht leaves these sheds. Here, for example, as I write, a teak-built yacht of one hundred tons, to cost £4000 is on the stocks, and will leave Galmpton fully rigged. The average output of this yard is twelve trawlers a year, and it gives employment to between sixty and seventy men, who live mostly at Dittisham, taking boat to and from work each morning and evening.

Aish, that spot historic in connection with the landing of the Protestant Defender in 1688, is not so easily discovered by the stranger in these gates, and its very remoteness was its chief recommendation in the times when it became historic. It is reached most easily by breaking the steamboat trip up the Dart at Duncannon Quay, which is also the landing-place for Stoke Gabriel, tucked away in its own shy creek. Stoke Gabriel is the least visited and most primitive place on the Dart, and headquarters of the salmon-fishery; as the nets, drying on long poles, and the strange jerseyed and booted figures of the fisherfolk proclaim. With every tide the salt water comes to fill the picturesque creek of Stoke Gabriel and to make a mirror for the woods to view their own loveliness, and with every ebb it flows out again in a murmuring cascade over the rude weir built of mossy boulders. It hushes the children of the village to sleep at night, and fills the ears on summer days with a lazy purr.

There is a good deal of Stoke Gabriel when you come to know it well. Particularly pretty is the little street of cottages leading up to the church, where the “Church House Inn” by its sign seems to indicate that it was originally one of those houses provided by the church for the accommodation of parishioners coming from some distance to attend service. Such houses were often kept by the parish clerk, who brewed the “church ales.” In the course of centuries the custom of clerical ale-brewing and keeping a “church-house” fell into disuse, and the house itself generally became a village inn. In this manner the singularly close neighbourhood of village churches and inns, often curiously commented upon, originated.

The church contains one rather pretty epitaph:

It is “To the memory of Mrs. Tamosin, wife of Peter Lyde, Deceased ye 25 of Febru. MDCLXIII,” and is inscribed upon a heart-shaped mural monument:—

It is curious to observe how the “Mrs.” has been inserted before “Tamosin,” as an afterthought. We seem to see in it a post-mortem jealousy on the part of the bereaved Peter Lyde that any one should use the name of his lost Tamosin without that formal title.

The passengers landing at Duncannon Quay are few; often there are none at all, and the few are rarely other than country-folk making for their quiet villages.

For the average tourist to land at Duncannon, instead of completing the time-honoured trip to Totnes, would be an originality never likely to enter into the mind of him. He takes the excursion trips as he finds them, and is content. And, being content, who shall blame him? Not I, for one; for his satisfaction with the well-worn round is of itself no ignoble thing in this dear Devonshire, where even the most frequented circuits are exquisite, and crowds unknown.

So it happens that the explorer making for Aish finds himself the only passenger for Duncannon, and is like to feel important when for him the steamer hoots and stops, and he goes over the side into the ferry-boat, amid the interested and wondering glances of the excursionists for Totnes.

Half-a-dozen strokes of the oars, and the boat brings you to the quay, nestling by the quiet waterside, where low cliffs of red earth dip to the shore. “One penny, sir, please,” says the old boatman, who, with straw-hat of primæval plait and design, like a thatched roof, seems a survival of the old Devonshire rustics, whose speech was so unintelligible to those tourists who were the first to ever burst into these unknown wilds. Appearances, it is well known, are deceptive, and here no less than elsewhere; for when you look upon the raw newness that has replaced the old ramshackly and delightfully sketchable aspect of Duncannon Quay, and remark upon the change, this seeming survival says—oh, the shock of it—“Oh, yes, it’s been thoroughly renovated.” Not unjustifiably, I think, one feels aggrieved, both at that renovation and at that departure from the ancient Doric of the countryside. Time was when this old lank boatman, with the clothes that seem to have grown in one of his native orchards, rather than to have been made, and with a tanned and freckled face, the colour of the russet apple;—time was, I say, when this ferryman, who merely paddles about in this remote nook of the Dart, would have phrased it differently, and would have said: “’Ee’s proper did up,” which is certainly more racy of Devon.

The “doing up” or the “renovation”—whichever you will—of Duncannon Quay is certainly thorough. Its two houses are faced with that pallid stucco of which they are so alarmingly fond in modern Devon; neat little white brick piers stand in a neat little row, with neat little railings in between, on the quayside; and a corrugated tin hut is posted at the end. The Philistines have descended upon Duncannon, with a vengeance; and although the ferryman, with his intimate knowledge of the moist Devon climate, is of opinion that the newness will not last long, we venture to think that when the edge of novelty has been taken off by the weather, it is shabbiness, and not picturesqueness, that will result. One thing is certain; neither moss nor lichen ever yet grew on galvanized corrugated iron.

Aish, we know, means Ash, and is merely the old-world style of pronunciation crystallised in writing, and perpetuated on many maps, but our boatman styles it “Ash.” Yet even he is not without some lingering relics of the old rustic inflections, for he directs the enquirer to it by advising him to “volley” the telephone wire. A few years ago, one would have “volleyed” the “telegraft”; yet another few years, with wireless communication everywhere and all the poles and wires abolished, and the chief landmark and standby of local guides gone, what will the stranger do then but lose his way?

There really are unusual numbers of ash trees on the way to Aish, and fine ones, bordering the road, or “Parliament Lane” as the rustics yet know it, between Brixham, Yalberton, and this historic hamlet. Two or three country seats or villas, with a number of modern cottages, and two or three ancient thatched dwellings: such is Aish; but “Parliament House” is, after all, not in Aish, but away, through it, considerably on the other side, in a fine solitary situation at the foot of a steep hill, in what is, with a peculiar appropriateness, called Longcombe. It is not difficult to see into the minds of those who selected this cottage for that meeting. Aish is a small hamlet now, and must have been very tiny then, but that place was far too large and crowded, where one house commanded another and where the foregathering of fine gentlemen could be noted and remembered against a possible day of reckoning. So, through Aish and to Longcombe, those cautious negotiators came and conducted their parley in this leafy solitude. And although it is on the direct road to Totnes, it is solitary still; a place where on your approach you hear a child say, in the softly reverberant Devon speech, “Mothurr, here’s a man”; and mother, thus advised, gazes long after the unwonted sight.

I wish, for the sake of completeness, I could say that an ash overhangs the road at this point: but I cannot. It is an oak, and a very fine oak, which here frames in the picture made by the old cottage at the foot of the hill.

Built of local ragstone and thatched, the old dwelling has probably not been altered in any particular since the memorable time of that secret conclave, and it still belongs to the Seymours, or St. Maurs, as they now—harking back to the ancient spelling—choose to style themselves. The historic association is the subject of a diffident allusion inscribed in recent times on a stone pillar in the garden:—

The remainder of the voyage up the Dart to Totnes is along a gradually narrowing stream, past the noble hanging woods of Sharpham, to Bridgetown Quay, where the road-bridge and the narrowed river alike forbid further progress.

Of Totnes there is a great deal more to be said than can be set down here. Between the mythical legend of its being founded by Brutus the Trojan and modern times, it has acquired a history which demands volumes. It had a mint in Saxon ages, is described as a walled town in Domesday, and was not without some eminent rottenness as a rotten borough at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It has a mystical castle mound, with a circular shell of a keep on the summit, an ancient gateway spanning the main street, and an interesting old guildhall. Its beautiful church is among the very finest in Devon, and the quaint old piazza shops vie with those of Dartmouth. There is, as may well be supposed, much doubt of Brutus the Trojan having been the founder of Totnes, but the legend is indestructible, from very inability to disprove it; besides, let into the pavement outside 51, Fore Street, you are shown the very granite boulder on which Brutus set foot when he landed! and so he becomes associated, at the beginning of the town’s long story, with a wanderer, in his own way equally remarkable, at its close. For in Totnes you may see, in the open space called “The Plains,” a monument to William John Wills, a native of the town, and son of a local doctor, which narrates how he was born in 1834, emigrated in 1852 to Australia, and, having been “the first of mankind to cross the Australian Continent, perished in returning.” He was a greater traveller than Brutus; and his exploits, as we see, are matters of ascertained fact.

CHAPTER XXI
DARTMOUTH CASTLE—BLACKPOOL—SLAPTON SANDS—TORCROSS—BEESANDS—HALL SANDS

The little coach that runs daily from Dartmouth to Kingsbridge has a steep climb up out of Dartmouth. Here the pedestrian certainly has the advantage, for, tracing his coastwise way round through the woods of Warfleet creek, where a disused limekiln by the waterside looks very like an ancient defensible tower, he comes at last upon the strangely grouped church of St. Petrox, the Castle, and the abandoned modern battery, all standing in a position of romantic beauty, where the sea dashes in violence upon the dark rocks. The “garrison” of Dartmouth Castle in these days is generally a sergeant of garrison artillery retired from active service, or in some condition of military suspended animation not readily to be understood by a logically minded civilian. It is a situation worthy of comic opera: in which you perceive the War Office erecting batteries for defending the entrance to the harbour, and then, having completed them, furnishing the works with obsolete muzzle-loaders, capable of impressing no one save the most ignorant of persons. Then, these popguns having been demonstrated useless, even to the least instructed, they are removed at great expense, and their places left empty: it having occurred in the meanwhile to the wiseacres ruling the Army that, in any case, under modern conditions, a hostile fleet would be able to keep well off shore and to throw shells into Dartmouth, without coming in range of any ordnance ever likely to be placed at the castle.

So the sergeant-in-charge, who lives here with his wife and family, and is apparently given free quarters and no pay, on the implied condition that he makes what he can out of tips given by tourists, is not burdened with military responsibilities. The present incumbent appears to have developed strong antiquarian tastes, is learned in the local military operations of Cromwell’s era, and a successful seeker after old-time cannonballs and other relics of strange, unsettled times.

You cannot choose but explore the interior of the Castle, for as you approach there is, although you may not suspect it, an Eye noting the fact. The Eye is the sergeant’s, and there is that way about old soldiers which admits of no denial when he proposes that he shall show you over. You are shepherded from one little room to another, peer from what the sergeant calls the “embershaws” (by which he means embrasures), and then, offering the expected tribute for seeing very little, depart.

The coastguard path ascends steeply from Dartmouth Castle and follows a rough course along a deeply indented headland of dark slate-rock, that plunges almost everywhere, without hesitation, into deep water. Patches of sands are few and inaccessible; and, confronting every good ship making from the south-west for Dartmouth, the black Ham Stone rises with an ugly menace from sunshiny seas, ringed around with its own little circle of foam. Thus you come, round Hollowcombe Head and Redlap Cove to Stoke Fleming, past rocky bastions, where the rival yellows of sea-poppy and yellow toad-flax enliven the dark slate, and the Devon “wall-flower” the spur valerian, not the gilly-flower—flourishes bravely in occasional masonry walls.

Stoke Fleming, standing high and wind-swept, is of a Cornish sternness, and its great dark church tower is so bleak-looking, that not even the sunniest day can put a cheerful complexion upon it. It was built in the Perpendicular period, and is just about as complete an example of long-drawn perpendicularity as can be imagined, rising, stage upon stage, until at last it ends, for all the world as though the old-time architect of it had gone on, like a child building with a “box of bricks,” as far as he dared. A perky little banneret vane on the roof aids this impression. Ferns grow plentifully in the joints of the masonry, to the very summit, and are every now and then removed, but they always reappear. The tower is said to have been built as a mark for sailors, but however that may be, it is certainly one of a very numerous type in South Devon, and own brother to that of Halwell, quite six miles from the sea.

Below Stoke Fleming lies the charmingly sequestered glen of Blackpool, where a little stream comes out of an emerald valley and oozes away through a perfect semicircle of sands, guarded by pinnacled rocks. Dense masses of trees, some of them strangely exotic in appearance, overhang the road. This quiet and beautiful spot was the scene of a descent by the Bretons in 1403. An expedition set out from across the Channel, under the command of one Du Chatel, and after raiding Tenby and Plymouth came ashore at Blackpool with the object of taking Dartmouth in the rear. Unfortunately for them, the Devonshire folk had got wind of what was in store, and when the raiders landed they happened unexpectedly upon some six hundred defenders, lying hid until the supreme moment, behind entrenchments. Among these valiant defenders of hearth and home were many women, who fought like devils and slew great numbers of Breton knights and men-at-arms with catapults. Only a sorry remnant of the invaders escaped those gentle creatures, and Dartmouth was on that occasion saved. But, bolder and with the reward of boldness, others came the next year and sailed in to Dartmouth town and burnt it to the ground.

Blackpool sands were destined to witness a yet more historic landing, for it was here that the great Earl of Warwick, the “Kingmaker,” who had made Edward the Fourth king, and then quarrelled with his handiwork, came back from exile in 1471, with an armed expedition, intent upon unmaking him. It was Warwick’s last throw, and ended a few weeks later with his defeat and death at the battle of Barnet.

Sunday-school treats are held nowadays on the golden sands of Blackpool; sands that in more than a figurative sense have been found golden, for a discovery was made here in modern times of gold coins dating from that period, and doubtless lost in the confusion of the landing.

The entirely uninteresting hamlet of Street passed, standing at the head of the next rise, the road goes, steep and winding, down to one of the most remarkable stretches of coast-line in Devon; the famous Slapton Sands, a flat two miles of raised beach along which, ages ago, the present high road was formed. The sands take their name from the village of Slapton, a mile inland, and consist of small shingle thrown up by the sea, and banking back the outflow of three streams, which thus forms a long and marshy freshwater lake, the whole length of this shingly bank. Just as you come down-hill upon the finest view from above of the sea, the sands, the Ley, as this freshwater lake is named, a long and lofty blank wall shuts out the scene and proclaims the malignant humour of the landowner who built it.

Sparse and hungry-looking grass grows on the ridge of the shingle, but the yellow sea-poppy thrives, and so does the spurge, or milkwort, whose poisonous juice is milk-white and innocent-looking. Here, too, on the inner face of the bank, looking upon the rush-grown waters of the Ley, the purple blossoms and hairy leaves of the mallow are abundant, while bordering the highway, and braving the dust of it, are masses of the thrift or sea-pink.

The Ley, or Lea, is one of the most noted resorts of wild birds in Devon, and its two hundred acres are frequented in winter by sportsmen, whose headquarters are the lonely “Sands Hotel,” standing solitary, a mile from anywhere, on the shingly ridge, facing the sea one way, and on the other the highroad and the Ley.

The waters of the Ley are crowded with ferocious pike and other fish, and the vast banks of sedge and rush are peopled thickly, not only with the winter concourse of wild duck and geese, but with the shy birds of the fields and woods. Inland, the marshy lowlands ascend gently, with white-faced cottages in little groups among the trees, and an old bridge spans the water at a favourable point and helps a bye-road on the way to Slapton. The scene is not greatly disturbed; the midday coach comes by on the high road, with a cheerful tootling of its horn, and disappears, on the way to Torcross; a wild bird pipes as it flies overhead, and a fish leaps up from the still water, after a fly; that is the summer aspect. But in winter the wild-fowler wakes the echoes of the hills with his sport, and when the gales blow strong out of the south-west there is a sea-wrack in the air and foam in the road, that make the enterprise of walking from Street to Torcross almost as wet a business as sea-bathing.

Torcoss is a hamlet at the extremity of the Sands, where the road turns inland to Charleton, Stokenham, and Kingsbridge. Its back is to the slightly projecting headland that divides these sands from the further stretches of sand and shingle, extending towards the Start, and with an air of wondering mildly at its own existence, and further wondering if it is really worth while to exist at all, it faces the long flat road along which we have come. Of all the unlikely places, here is an hotel, and out of that hotel, as the present chronicler passed, there came a German waiter in a dress suit, and stood on the beach among the bronzed fishermen, watching the evolutions of a naval squadron, half a mile off-shore, in the deep water of Start Bay. Thinking many things and strange, I passed upon my way.

The direct road to Kingsbridge lies to the right hand, through Stokenham. That the quiet of country life was in the long ago occasionally broken by picturesque doings denied to us is evident in this extract from the parish records of the year 1581:

Another interesting record at Stokenham—which, by the way, you must be careful not to pronounce “Stok’n’am” but “Stoke-en-ham,” as though it were a dish, like eggs-and-ham—is the epitaph upon:

This is a relic of the siege of Salcombe Castle and the military operations between Cavaliers and the Parliament troops. It seems that the Puritan soldiery, attacking a farm-house, were met with a stout resistance and fired through a window, mortally wounding the farmer’s daughter.

To follow the coast from Torcross to the Start, it is necessary at this point to take to the sands, or, more strictly speaking, the shingle; extremely heavy walking, but endurable on account of the interesting rocks piled up in huge masses on the shore. The slaty cliffs have here fallen in ruins, with picturesque results. Some of the great blocks twenty feet or more in height, have sides quite smooth and lustrous.

We are here in a district not indeed far removed from modern accommodation, but in the same primitive condition as it must have been a century, or even more, ago. The fine shingle gives place to a waste of laminated slate and then, where the cliffs die away for a space into a marshy bottom, to a scrubby flat piece of waste leading to the hamlet of Beesands, marked on many maps as Beeson Cellar.

Beesands has a perpetual air of rejoicing, for on every fine day the waste between the sea and the one row of fishermen’s cottages flies its banners to sea and sky. It is only the domestic wash hung out to dry, but the effect is one of festival.

There is a something Irish in the look and the manners and customs of Beesands. The drying-ground of washing and of fishing-nets is rich in old tins and brickbats, and is populated numerously with fowls, housed as a rule in decayed boats turned keel upward. They are the most trustful cocks and hens in the world, and follow the fishermen into the inn and the cottages like dogs.

A tourist not preoccupied with the arts would inevitably style this a “miserable place,” a “wretched hole,” or other things uncomplimentary; but to a painter, wanting atmosphere and utter unconventionality, it is delightful. Poor fisherfolk are its only inhabitants, and its one inn neither offers accommodation to the tourist, nor, if it did, would he be likely to accept it. For one thing, strangers, either here or at the sister hamlet of Hall Sands are rare, both places being innocent of roads of any kind. Just a row of rude whitewashed cottages on the level: that is Beesands, and just a double row of somewhat superior cottages on the cliffside; that is Hall Sands.

A mile of climbing up cliff paths and scrambling down, and then across another scrubby bottom where the white campions grow, brings the adventurous stranger to Hall Sands, built into the tall dark cliffs, just as the house-martens plaster their nests against the eaves. The hardihood—the foolhardihood, if you like it better—that ever induced mortal man to build houses in this perilous position under the threatening eaves of the cliffs and on the margin of the waves can only be appreciated by those who look upon the place itself. It beggars description.

The scene is one of a wild beauty, the cliffs rising dark and craggy overhead, draped thickly with ivy, the end of the street blocked with gigantic masses of fallen rock, and the sea at the very foot of some of the houses; with here and there a narrow strip of beach.

The hardy fisherfolk exist chiefly on seine-net fishing and crab and lobster-catching. The trained Newfoundland dogs that are still a feature of this hamlet and of Beesands are fewer than of yore. There were some seven or eight of them, taught to swim out through the particularly rough surf of this shore, to meet incoming boats and bring the end of a rope to the beach, so that the boats might be hauled in.

The later history of Hall Sands is somewhat thrilling. It seems that for some years past the shingle in front of Hall Sands has been dredged away by the contractors for the extension works at Keyham Dockyard, Plymouth, for the purpose of making concrete, and that the Government committed the incredible folly of allowing it. The inevitable and foretold result happened. In September 1903 most of the foreshore disappeared in a storm, and in the spring of 1904 the very existence of Hall Sands was threatened. The one inn of the place, the “London,” stood with other cottages on a piece of rock jutting out to sea. Suddenly, one afternoon, a heavy ground-swell wrecked them. The landlady was making tea, when the side of the house disappeared, without warning. Since then Hall Sands has been without an inn. To help build the new concrete sea-wall and the slipway, which have since been built in the effort to remove the danger that ought never to have been incurred, the Government granted £1,750, while the Member of Parliament for the county division subscribed £250, and the contractors contributed an unascertained sum. The whole miserable history would assure us, if we did not already know it, that Governments—it matters not of what party—are entirely callous upon subjects that do not endanger their own existence. Now if this had happened in Ireland, the outcry against the “murdering Saxon” would have been appalling.

CHAPTER XXII
THE START AND ITS TRAGEDIES—LANNACOMBE—CHIVELSTONE—EAST PRAWLE—PORTLEMOUTH

The Start looms up prominently from here, but it is a long scramble up out of Hall Sands and round by the coastguard path to that weird spot.

The uncanny-looking Start has impressed itself upon the imaginations of most of those who have seen it. Polwhele, the historian of Devon, led to the thought by the fantastic solemnity of the rocky headland, and by the sound of its name, gravely assures us that here, in the dim dawn of history, stood a temple of the Phœnician goddess, Astarte, the “Ashtoreth” of the full-blooded Scriptural denunciations of the “worshippers of strange gods”; the more suave and worshipful Venus Aphrodite of the Greeks, fair goddess of the sea.

The Start—Start “Point” is a redundancy—has, however, nothing to do with heathen mythology, suitable though it be, above all places, for altars of hungry sea-gods. The name of the headland is the Anglo-Saxon “Steort,” which itself means simply a point or tail; as seen in the name of the Redstart, or “redtail”; but to the fanciful, these cruel rocks, the scene of so many fearful wrecks, seem not unlike the sacrificial altars of some blood-stained superstitious cult.

The Start projects far out to sea, a dark mass of gneiss rock with quartz veins. It is in the uncomfortable shape of a razor-backed ridge, with demoniacal-looking humps, spires, and spines of iron-hard rock, ranging from prominences like the vertebræ of a crocodile’s back to sharp points in the likeness of hedge-stakes. The weird imagination of Doré never conceived anything in scenery more shuddery than that of the Start, and the coastguards, who declare that you have not seen England until you have come to the extremity of this difficult point, are not without some reason for their cryptic saying.

It behoves the stranger to be careful how he comes to his exploration, for this, Λ, is the section of the Start. Sloping sides of short slippery grass at an alarming angle descend dangerously to the sea from the serrated skyline, and a false step will send you rolling down to those rocks that have proved fatal to full many a shipwrecked mariner.

It is some sixty years since the lighthouse at the extremity of the point was built. The lantern of it is two hundred feet above the sea; and shows two lights, lit every evening, ten minutes before sunset: a revolving beam once every minute for vessels out in the Channel, and a constant fixed gleam for shore-going boats, to warn them off the Skerries bank.

But, for all these safeguards, the Start remains a fatal point. When a “snorter” from the south-west, or a fog, sends vessels out of their course upon this coast, they are doomed. The lights are next to useless in foggy weather and at such time the fog-horn, bellowing in unearthly manner, is fraught with every kind of tragical suggestion.

Among the many wrecks of modern times is that of the Spirit of the Ocean, March 23rd, 1866, when twenty-eight out of thirty were drowned, the Gossamer, China tea-clipper, driven ashore between the Start and Prawle Point in December 1868, when thirteen of a crew of thirty-one were lost; the Emilie, laden with saltpetre, broken up during a fog in June 1870; and the Lalla Rookh, a large vessel, coming home from Shanghai, laden with 1,300 tons of tea and 60 tons of tobacco, wrecked in March 1873 near Prawle Point. Shortly before the vessel struck she ran so close to the rocks that four of her crew jumped on to them as she flew by; but this was a wreck which did not touch the deepest note of tragedy, for in the end, all but one of those on board were saved. There was, however, a woeful waste of cargo, and the little beaches near by, and the long three miles of Slapton Sands, were for days strewn in places with the wreckage of the Lalla Rookh, and ridges of tea eleven feet high, and trails of tobacco of almost equal size, were piled up at high-water mark by the waves.

Most dramatic was the wreck of the steamship Marana, in the wild blizzard of March 9th, 1891. As night closed down upon the wild scene off the Start, the lighthouse-keeper’s wife, looking forth from behind a window, upon that seething world of torn sea and whirling snowflakes, thought she saw a vessel drive through the smother of it, under the lighthouse. No help was possible, and the vessel was gone like a ghost. The tale that was afterwards told was a pitiful one.

Just before the vessel struck, and was broken in two, amidship, the crew made for shore, twenty-two of them in the lifeboat and four others in a smaller. The surf in Lannacombe Bay was so great that they dared not attempt a landing, and made for Prawle, where the lifeboat was smashed to pieces on the Mag Ledge. Most of the unfortunate sailors were drowned, only four surviving to tell the tale. A fifth, who had managed to drag himself, bruised and bleeding, from the rocks to land, lay down, exhausted, for shelter, and died out there in the snow. It was not until a fortnight later that his body was found.

It was on the same occasion that the Dryad was totally wrecked at the extremity of the Start at midnight, and all hands lost. One survivor was seen at daybreak, clinging to a rock, but before help could reach him he was washed away.

The neighbourhood of the Start is an unsatisfactory place to be in on a day threatening rain, for it is outside roads, and the more than knee-high bracken of the coastguard paths is at such times a supersaturating growth. And the way up-along and down-along and round this way and that, past Pear Tree Point, where there are not any pear-trees (and I dare swear there never were any) is toilsome. Beyond the Point is the yellow strand of Lannacombe, famous for Lannacombe Mill and its miller, who, when French privateers were here, there, and everywhere in the old rumbustious days and visited him one night, flung his money-bag out of window and found it, safe enough, the next morning, suspended in an elder-bush. The guide-books tell how the ruins of the mill may be seen, but they shyly hide themselves from some, and the other Lannacombe Mill, up the combe, which may not be historic in this small sort, is at any rate picturesque enough to be excused a story. If one were not afraid of getting wet through on a moist afternoon, here by the clucking water-wheel and the moss-grown walls and the clear-running mill-leat should some hours be whiled away.

But the day that had gloomed at length grew damp, and necessity compelled a double-quick to the most accessible village: that of Chivelstone. On the way to it, that fine rain characteristic of Devonshire came down like smoke from the hills. “’Tes what us carls a miz-wet,” said a farm-labourer, trudging home contentedly beneath a thick covering of potato-sacks; and they do not call it amiss, for the mist is undeniable, and there is no mistaking the wetness of it.

A traveller’s curse upon all landowners who suppress inns, and all villages without spirit sufficient to maintain one. Here the “Seven Stars” inn of guide-books, the only inn of Chivelstone, was not in existence, and this obviously was no resting-place. So to East Prawle, along a featureless road, in a wet and swirling fog, the way made musical with the howls and trumpetings of the Start fog-horn.

East Prawle ceased its growth in the act of developing from a farm-yard into a village; so that there are cottages where there should be ricks and cow-byres, and muck where there should be houses. Grass grows and liquid manure lies in the road, and stones and rocks in the pastures; and, altogether, Prawle, which is a very undesirable spot of earth, is a splendid example of matter in the wrong place.

But gentility of a kind has come to Prawle. You can never tell: the wind bloweth where it listeth; overmantels and preposterous photograph-frames, to say nothing of spiky articles of furniture in bamboo-ware, all projections and easily overset through the window, are to be found in the unlikeliest places. And that is how—Heaven help them and us!—they spell gentility at Prawle.

The Point—well-known by name to diligent readers of the shipping news in the daily papers—is crowned at Hurter’s Top with the Lloyd’s signal station, where the vessels going out and home are “spoken.” It is a rude and jagged Point, and its rugged character lends it an air of greater height than it possesses. It rises suddenly out of a down, sloping towards the sea, and may be compared with the appearance of a hacked and uneven quarter of a round Dutch cheese. Off this point H.M.S. Crocodile was wrecked, and on the next westerly headland, Gammon Head, two Spanish galleons.

All the way round from this point the great dark mass of Bolt Head shows finely, away across the arm of the sea running up between Portlemouth and Salcombe. Portlemouth, although of so impressive a name, is a meagre place on the very crest of the rugged upland overlooking Salcombe and the Kingsbridge River, and consists of merely a farmhouse with a few cottages grouped round the ancient church of St. Onolaus, otherwise, abating that Latinised form, the early sixth-century British St. Winwaloe. The horribly plastered exterior of the tower would dissuade many from seeking a further acquaintance with the church, by which the finely carved and painted thirteenth-century rood screen would be missed. In the churchyard, to the north-west of the tower, is a grim slate headstone, with a still more grim epitaph, on one “Richard Jarvis, of Rickham in this parish, who departed this life the 25th day of May 1782, aged 79:—