A DEVONIAN HEADLAND. 
149 
the name of that pretty fire-tailed bird, common in the combes, 
the redstart. On a dark night we may watch with interest the 
varied revolving lights of the light-houses on these two extremi- 
ties of the great bay. Then, at times, it is a glorious sight to see 
the sun set behind the distant tors of Dartmoor, and to catch the 
twin granite peaks of Heytor standing out distinct against the 
glow and radiance of the western sky. 
Of historic and poetic memories, a perfect wealth lies all 
around. The inland heights, which we may catch with our eye, 
were a chain of hill-forts — now called burys or castles — which 
were fought over, and no doubt bled over, ages before the 
Romans or the English came over to conquer the land. Looking 
across to the three-shired river-valley we may see what is left of 
the house where was born the greatest of English commanders, 
the man under whom the English marched proudly to victory at 
Blenheim and Ramifies and Malplaquet. A little further up the 
same valley we look on the now sleepy little town which was 
the birthplace of the professor who bewitched Oxford with the 
charms of geology — a town which existed as a British village 
long before Roman times, and whose name is borne by a special 
kind of Turkey carpet, invented here, but now made in busier 
regions. A little below lies a grey-walled and ivy-clad ruin, 
which was the ancient home of the Courtenay family ; and not 
far off was the home of the Bonvilles, a famous race that fought, 
and bled, and perished in the Wars of the Roses. 
Close by, in the western combe, nestles picturesquely the 
house, now a farmhouse, where was born the founder of one of 
the Oxford colleges; and, in the old village church, the attention 
of little boys used to be diverted from the sermon by counting 
the effigies of the founder’s mother and the twenty children borne 
by her to her two husbands, which stood, in two little diverging 
rows, behind her. Not far off up the bay stands the little cobb — 
a quite local term for a pier or small harbour — where landed the 
invasion of the ill-fated Monmouth, known by the peasantry as 
King Monmouth, which came to so disastrous an end at Sedge- 
moor, the last battle that has been fought, or it is hoped will 
ever be fought, on English soil ! On the other side of the bay, 
behind the Berry Head that we look across to, landed the later 
invasion by the Prince of Orange, which brought in the dynasty 
that now rules us. 
Looking seawards we have immediately on our right a land- 
slip, more than a century old, where fie 
“ Rocks, crags, and knolls, confusedly hurled, 
The fragments of an earlier world,” 
while halfway up the cliff is one of the mouths of a quarry of 
hard chalk that runs under the down — the other mouths being 
a mile inland — which has probably been worked for upwards of 
a thousand years, has furnished materials for almost all the old 
churches and edifices within a circuit of many miles, and has 
