  Devonshire, like Cornwall and Kent, is remarkable in having both a northern and a southern seaboard; a peculiarity shared by no other English county. Its two shores present striking points of difference. The south coast-line is broken by many estuaries. On the other shore there is only one important river mouth. There are, it is true, many little coves and inlets on the Bristol Channel, some of them of great beauty; but they make little show upon the map of England, and the stern outline of the North Devon coast affords no harbour of refuge. Both shores are rock-bound. But while the southern cliffs are, in great measure, of warm-hued and even brightly-coloured stone, those on the north are dark and gloomy; and their tones, although in some places very beautiful, are set in quieter key—in grey or brown or even verging upon black. Again, the southern shore is fringed at some points with sandy beaches; while on the north coast there are no sands at all, except on the western side of Bideford Bay. Along the northern seaboard of Devon there runs a series of magnificent cliffs, in parts heavily wooded, The Castle Rock, Lynton Down such a hollow, the deep and finely-wooded valley of Glenthorne, runs the border-line that divides Somerset from Devon. Rather more than three miles west of it there stands out into the Bristol Channel the dark mass of Countisbury Foreland, the most northerly point in the county, and one of the highest along its coast, 1100 feet above sea-level. Four miles beyond the Foreland, at the mouth of a deep and well-wooded valley, Valley of Rocks, Lynton Ilfracombe is a place that has played a part in history. In the fourteenth century it provided six ships towards Edward III's expedition against Calais. It was from this port that Queen Elizabeth sent troops to Ireland during the rebellion of the Earl of Tyrone. In the Civil War it was taken alternately by Royalists and Parliamentarians. It was from Ilfracombe that Wade and Ferguson and other Sedgemoor fugitives tried in vain to escape by sea. And it was here, in 1796, that the French squadron which afterwards landed 1000 scoundrels of the LÉgion noire at Fishguard, on the opposite coast—the last hostile invasion of these islands—burnt the fishing-smacks lying in the harbour. The French ships were in the end taken by Lord Bridport. A short distance west of Ilfracombe is Wildersmouth, a beautiful bay, with a gravelly beach, famous for its richness in the lower forms of marine life, and three miles farther down the coast juts out Bull Point, a bold headland guarded by a powerful lighthouse, marking the north-eastern limit of the most dangerous part of the coast, which here turns abruptly southward, facing squarely to the open Atlantic. A little farther on is Morte Point, whose name the popular fancy regards, although without foundation, as hinting at the deadly character of its black, jagged, sea-swept rocks. The village of Mortehoe, a few hundred yards inland, was the property in the thirteenth century of the de Traci family, one of whom was among the murderers of Thomas À Becket. But there is no ground for the legend that he was buried here, or for the traditions of him that are current in the district. A tiny little cove on the south side of Morte Point, called Barracane Beach, was once famous for its rare and beautiful shells; but it is now so widely known, and its charm is so completely lost, that it has been said of it that there are more collectors than specimens. Ilfracombe, from Hillsborough Beyond Morte Point is Morte Bay, most of whose shore lies low, and is fringed throughout almost its entire length by the broad expanse of Woollacombe Sands, along whose margin, at heights varying from eight to fifteen feet above high-water mark, may be traced at intervals a raised sea-beach. At the southern extremity of Morte Bay is the noble headland of Baggy Point, a magnificent piece of cliff, haunted by crowds of sea-birds, and pierced by many caves. The shore of Croyde Bay, beyond the Point, is famous for its fertility; and from the crest of Saunton Down, the last headland before the estuary formed by the waters of the Taw and the Torridge, is a view which, embracing sea and coast-line, rich expanses of farm-land, the distant heights of Dartmoor Braunton Burrows is a long, wide tract of sand-hills, some eighteen square miles in area, stretching far inland, and reaching to the estuary of the Taw and the Torridge, with deep hollows among which, without a compass, it is quite possible to get completely lost. It is a place of much interest to the naturalist and the antiquarian. A number of rare plants are found here, great quantities of primitive flint implements have been discovered in the sand, and at low water the remains of a submerged forest are to be seen along the shore. The estuary formed by the combined streams of the Taw and Torridge, the former of which is also known as the Barnstaple River, flows into Barnstaple Bay at the south end of Braunton Burrows. There is no port on the open coast; but just inside the estuary are the quaint old town of Appledore and the equally ancient village of Instow, on the left and right banks, respectively, of the river Torridge. In the mouth of the same stream, a little to the south of Appledore, is a long flat rock called the Hubblestone; named, according to tradition, after the viking Hubba, who pillaged this coast in the reign of Blocking up a great part of the river mouth, and stretching down the coast past Westward Ho! a distance of about two miles, is the Pebble Ridge, a remarkable bank of shingle and sea-worn boulders, some of which are of great size, though the majority are not more than a few inches in diameter. The sea has gradually shifted it further and further inland, and it now covers what was once a long stretch of good pasture-ground. On its landward side are the golf-links of Northam Burrows, considered to be among the finest south of the Tweed. Westward Ho! a modern watering-place named in honour of Kingsley's great romance, is chiefly interesting on account of its submerged forest, in whose peat and clay, deeply covered by the sea at high tide, have been found, not only the trunks of large oak and fir-trees, and bones of the wild boar, stag, horse, and dog, but bones of man, together with charcoal, pottery, and implements of flint. Six miles south-west of Westward Ho! and in the centre of the curve that marks the southern shore of Barnstaple Bay, is the prettily situated fishing-village of Buck's Mill, with red and wood-crowned cliffs behind and beyond it, and extending to Clovelly, the famous little town that may truly be called one of the most remarkable spots, not in Devonshire only, but in all England. Crowded in a hollow in the cliff, with woods on either side, and with an air of climbing up from its Cliffs near Clovelly A long stretch of wild and magnificent coast-line extends from Clovelly to Hartland Point, where the shore again turns southward, and again from Hartland to the county border; a wall of precipitous black cliffs, relieved here and there by bands of red schist, and broken at Clovelly Harbour Hartland Point, believed to be the Promontory of Hercules alluded to by the geographer Ptolemy, is a noble headland, whose dark steeps rise 350 feet sheer up out of a dangerous and ever restless sea. Perhaps there is not, in any other part of North Devon, more striking evidence of volcanic upheaval and disturbance than is to be seen in the curved and gnarled and twisted strata of the cliffs that tower above Hartland Quay. Six miles south of Hartland the northern seaboard of the county ends, as it began, in a deep hollow in the Church Rock, Clovelly |
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