er,
and the stream ran below me, between banks that were very green with
moss and beautifully shaded by sycamores.

From Woody Bay the scene grows wilder and grander. Seaward tower the
rocky cliffs, falling sheer to their base, jagged slate rocks which are
the home of gulls and ravens, with precipitous slopes of short and
slippery grass, where the mountain sheep feed; inland the brown moor
stretches, bare and open to the sky, with a cluster of little cottages
and a grey church hidden and sheltered in a dip of the ground.

From Woody Bay the road strikes inland to Martinhoe, which takes its
name from the same overlords of the district whose appellation is found
in Combe Martin (which in Domesday is written simply as Comba or Combe)
and across the moors to Parracombe, which has been the home of the
yeoman family of Blackmore since 1683. The little grey twelfth-century
tower which William de Tracy is said to have built, as he built many
churches in expiation of the murder of Thomas a Becket, stands just
above the railway line from Lynton to Barnstaple, but the church used
by the small population of the village--and this and Trentishoe only
number together three hundred souls--stands lower down the combe. As
one passes these villages, isolated on the wide moors and guarded each
by its lonely small church, rising squarely and almost without ornament
against the background of the hills, one thinks often of those
beautiful lines of Kipling's in the poem he calls "Sussex":

"Here through the strong unhampered days
The twinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
The Lord who made the hills."

I crossed a wild and desolate gorge, barren, rocky and windswept; the
tinkle of clear water ran down over the grey boulders out of sight and
dropped down the face of the cliff into the sea; brown and grey lay the
hillsides and rocks under the glaring noonday sun; there was no living
soul in sight, no movement, save far below the flight of a pair of
ravens or the white flick of a gull's wings out to sea. Gorge beyond
gorge lay the land, still and colourless in the circle of a sea and sky
widely and splendidly blue. I felt that I walked on a younger earth,
just emerged from its fierce chaos of whirling molten matter, and as
yet unsoftened by luxuriant vegetable growth, an earth of stark rocks
and hot mud, teeming with potential life, of dry thin air and blazing
sunshine, very harsh and desolate and