s not induced men
from other districts to come and "expand."

The little village of Culbone, near Porlock--if one may call half a
dozen cottages a village--is not an anomaly; indeed, it is a kind of
geographical whim. The cleft in which it lies faces towards the north,
and it is so deep and so deeply wooded that for four of the winter
months there is no direct ray of sunlight in the gorge, only the sky or
the light high up on the summits to remind the score of folk who live
there that they are not shut in a green prison. Even at midsummer
their sunrise is several hours later than for the rest of the world.
Among the darkest part of the green thickets stands the church, which
is probably the smallest parish church in England, or shares that
distinction with the church of Lullington in Sussex or St. Lawrence's
in the Isle of Wight. One or two of the tiny churches in Cornwall are
smaller. There is St. Piran's, but that is now a ruin on a beach, with
only the low walls of the very early building remaining; and there is
the church of St. Enodoc, near Wadebridge, which the saint must have
forgotten and the world overlooked, for it got lost among the low
sandhills and the sand drifted over, and it is only fifty years since
it has been found again, a delight to the few who ever see it, with its
squat grey tower barely seen over a tall hedge of tamarisk, and before
it the short grass rich with thyme, giving place to the sand-hills
which run out to the long level stretch of the beach, and behind it the
sand-hills yielding to the clean dry grass of the downs.

But these charming small buildings are mostly of very simple and
primitive construction, and St. Culbone has the construction of a
perfect parish church within the limits of its thirty-four feet from
east window to west door, with a nave, and a tiny chancel thirteen feet
long, and a small truncated spire, similar to that of Porlock Church.
Its patron saint is the Celtic St. Columban--Culbone is a simple
corruption of his name--who lived about the same time that St.
Dubricius crowned Arthur at Caerleon, about A.D. 517; of how this tiny
church came to be built (for the present fifteenth-century building
stands on the site of a pre-Saxon foundation, which was dedicated to
the Celtic saint), or what refuge or sanctuary it was, there is no
historical record; doubtless a remnant of the British, harassed by
Saxon raids on Porlock, hid themselves in this dark gorge, and there