The village itself lies in a ravine of the rock, and the 'street' is so precipitous that the eaves of one house are on a level with the foundations of its next neighbour above. Kingsley and Dickens have written descriptions that, scarcely overlapping, seem to complete each other. 'I was crawling up the paved stairs, inaccessible to cart or carriage, which are flatteringly denominated Clovelly street; ... behind me a sheer descent, roof below roof, at an angle of 75 deg., to the pier and bay, two hundred feet below and in front of me; another hundred feet above, a green amphitheatre of oak and ash and larch, shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, across which the low, soft, formless mist was crawling, opening every instant to show some gap of intense dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam of sunshine upon the white cottages, with their grey steaming roofs and bright green railings packed one above another upon the ledges of the cliff; and on the tall tree fuchsias and gaudy dahlias in the little scraps of courtyard; calling the rich faint odour out of the verbenas and jessamines, and, alas! out of the herring heads and tails also, as they lay in the rivulet, and lighting up the wings of the gorgeous butterflies, almost unknown in our colder eastern climate, which fluttered from woodland down to garden, and from garden up to woodland.' The human element tinges the other sketch more strongly: 'The village was built sheer up the face of a steep and lofty cliff. There was no road in it, there was no wheeled vehicle in it, there was not a level yard in it. From the sea-beach to the cliff-top two irregular rows of white houses, placed opposite to one another and twisting here and there, and there and here, rose like the sides of a long succession of stages of crooked ladders, and you climbed up village or climbed down the village by the staves between, some six feet wide or so, and made up of sharp, irregular stones. The old pack-saddle, long laid aside in most parts of England, as one of the appendages of its infancy, flourished here intact. Strings of pack-horses and pack-donkeys toiled slowly up the staves of the ladders, bearing fish and coal, and such other cargo as was unshipping at the pier from the dancing fleet of village boats and from two or three little coasting traders. As the beasts of burden ascended laden, or descended light, they got so lost at intervals in the floating clouds of village smoke, that they seemed to dive down some of the village chimneys and come to the surface again far off, high above others. No two houses in the village were alike in chimney, size, shape, door, window, gable, roof-tree, anything. The sides of the ladder were musical with water, running clear and bright. The staves were musical with the clattering feet of the pack-horses and pack-donkeys, and the voices of the fishermen urging them up mingled with the voices of the fishermen's wives and their many children.... The