re several methods of travel. Either
one may take train to Ilfracombe, and there take coach, following the
coast-road through Watermouth, Lydford, Combe Martin, Trentishoe, and the
Hunter's Inn, twenty miles of the most magnificent coast scenery in
England; or, if one has the courage to take pack on back, one may walk
it, past Watermouth Castle, and the tiny land-locked harbour beneath,
which was said by Kingsley to be the safest harbour on this coast, smooth
and sheltered always, however high the seas are running outside; past the
tiny village of Lydford, which bears the same name and reminds one of the
seventeenth-century poem of "Lydford Law," though the poem was written of
the town on the Lyd, near Tavistock. But here are a couple of verses:

"Oft have I heard of Lydford law,
How in the morn they hang and draw,
And sit in judgment after.
At first I wondered at it much,
But since I find the matter such
As it deserves no laughter.

"They have a castle on a hill;
I took it for some old wind-mill
The vanes blown off by weather.
To lie therein one night 'tis guessed
'Twere better to be stoned or pressed
Or hanged, ere you come thither."

"Lydford law" and "Jedburgh justice" seem equally to have been synonyms
for arbitrary and summary punishment.

But, leaving this digression, we proceed on our way, past Berrynarbor and
the old farm of Bowden, where Bishop Jewel was born, and the beautiful
church where he was baptized, with its great Perpendicular tower, built
of red and grey sandstone, rising above the wooded combe, and its old
lich-gate, set in the thickness of the churchyard wall, and almost hidden
by the luxuriant summer foliage; past Combe Martin, famous for its
ancient silver-mines rather than its beauty, yet with a very beautiful
church, with a Perpendicular tower even higher than that of Berrynarbor,
soaring above the sheltering elms, and throwing its long shadow across
the stream which curves round the church-yard among the old yew-bushes--a
church worth stepping aside to see, with a fine carved oak screen in the
interior, of the fifteenth century, the doors of the screen made in such
a way that they will not entirely close, in order to show plainly forth
to all sinners that the gates of heaven are always open; past Martinhoe
village, which was the scene of one of the most cruel and cold-blooded of
all the Doone murders, when they carried off the wife of Christopher
Bad