el where
the traveller might pause for prayer before venturing into the solitudes
beyond. The remains of this structure, however, are now slight. At
Plympton St. Mary was the priory, and at Plympton Earl the castle of the
Earls of Devon, a brook flowing between them to the river. Both stand
near the head of the estuary, and are in ruins. The priory was the
wealthiest monastic house in Devon, but the castle was only important as
the head-quarters of Plymouth's Royalist besiegers in the Civil War. The
priory was the nurse of the noted port of Plymouth, and its earlier
beginnings can be traced to the fostering care of the Augustinians, who
developed the fishing-town that subsequently became the powerful
seaport. Plympton, the old rhyme tells us, was "a borough-town" when
Plymouth was little else than a "a furzy down." The priory was founded
in the twelfth century, and was long patronized by the neighboring Earls
of Devon. The Augustinians, legend says, were the first to cultivate the
apple in Devonshire, and the ruins still disclose the moss-grown
"apple-garth." Little remains of the monastery beyond the old refectory
doorway and walls. The town of Plympton Maurice is in the valley near
by, famous as the birthplace of Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1723, but the
house has been swept away, though the grammar-school in which his father
taught remains. Reynolds is said to have made good use of the
recollections of the grand scenery around his birthplace in furnishing
landscape backgrounds for his pictures. The town afterwards elected him
mayor, though he rarely visited his birthplace, but in lieu sent the
corporation his portrait painted by himself. Here begins the broad
estuary known as the Laira, at the mouth of which stands Plymouth, the
town covering the land between the Laira and the Hamoaze, the estuary of
the Tamar, with its adjoining suburbs of Stonehouse and Devonport. Here
are now a population of two hundred thousand, while the station is of
vast importance as a government dockyard and barracks, with a chain of
strong protecting fortifications for defence from attacks both by sea
and land. Along the southern bank of the estuary extend the woods of
Saltram, the seat of the Earl of Morley. Then we come to Catwater Haven,
crowded with merchant-ships, and the older harbor of Sutton Pool. Mount
Batten on one side and Citadel Point on the other guard the entrance to
the haven. It was here that the English fleet awaited the Armada i