church. There
are also remains of Transitional work, and in the chancel is a Decorated
piscina.

Leading inland from Ilfracombe are 'lovely combes, with their green
copses, and ridges of rock, and golden furze, fruit-laden orchards, and
slopes of emerald pasture, pitched as steep as house-roofs, where the
red long-horns are feeding, with their tails a yard above their heads.'
About twenty-two miles to the west, the sea-line is broken by an island,
about which there is an indefinable air of romance. Lundy is three and a
half miles long, its greatest width is a few yards short of a mile, and
it is surrounded by high and dangerous cliffs and rocks--too well known
even in the present day by the ships wrecked on them. Perhaps those
oftenest heard of are the reefs of the Hen and Chickens, 'fringed with
great insular rocks, bristling up amid the sea,' which dashes on them in
a never-ceasing cloud of foam on the north, and the fatal Shutter on the
south-west. Lundy has been described as a 'lofty table-headed granite
rock.... The cliffs and adjacent sea are alive with seabirds, every
ledge and jutting rock being alive with them, or they are whirling round
in clouds, filling the air with their discordant screams.' Westcote
remarked: 'In breeding time, in some places, you shall hardly know where
to set your foot but on eggs,' and adds that it affords 'conies
plentifully, doves, stares (which Alexander Nectan termeth Ganymede's
birds).' Mr Chanter translates 'Ganymede's birds to be gannets, as there
were very many of these birds there'; but an older commentator soars
higher, and thinks of eagles and ostriches!

A description of Lundy as it was in the middle of the eighteenth century
is dimly suggestive of Robinson Crusoe. 'Wild fowl were exceeding
plenty, and a vast number of rabbits. The island was overgrown with
ferns and heath, which made it almost impossible to go to the extreme of
the island. Had it not been for the supply of rabbits and young
sea-gulls our tables would have been but poorly furnished, rats being so
plenty that they destroyed every night what was left of our repast by
day. Lobsters were tolerably plenty, and some other fish we caught. The
deer and goats were very wild and difficult to get at. The path to the
house was so narrow and steep that it was scarcely possible for a horse
to ascend it. The inhabitants by the assistance of a rope climbed up a
rock in which were steps cut to place their feet, to a cave or