Westward Ho! a modern watering-place named in honour of Kingsley's great romance, is chiefly interesting on account of its submerged forest, in whose peat and clay, deeply covered by the sea at high tide, have been found, not only the trunks of large oak and fir-trees, and bones of the wild boar, stag, horse, and dog, but bones of man, together with charcoal, pottery, and implements of flint. Six miles south-west of Westward Ho! and in the centre of the curve that marks the southern shore of Barnstaple Bay, is the prettily situated fishing-village of Buck's Mill, with red and wood-crowned cliffs behind and beyond it, and extending to Clovelly, the famous little town that may truly be called one of the most remarkable spots, not in Devonshire only, but in all England. Crowded in a hollow in the cliff, with woods on either side, and with an air of climbing up from its little tidal harbour sheltered by a rough stone pier of the time of Richard II, it consists of one long, winding, pebble-paved street, too steep for wheeled traffic, with quaint and irregularly-built cottages to left and right, beautiful with creepers and myrtles, fuchsias and geraniums. Not only is Clovelly intimately associated with the memory of Charles Kingsley, whose father was rector here, but it is the original "village of Steepways," in Dickens and Collins' Christmas story, _A Message from the Sea_. [Illustration: Cliffs near Clovelly] A long stretch of wild and magnificent coast-line extends from Clovelly to Hartland Point, where the shore again turns southward, and again from Hartland to the county border; a wall of precipitous black cliffs, relieved here and there by bands of red schist, and broken at intervals by green combes such as are characteristic of the seabord of Devon; a terrible coast, strewn with fragments of wreckage from ill-fated ships. [Illustration: Clovelly Harbour] Hartland Point, believed to be the Promontory of Hercules alluded to by the geographer Ptolemy, is a noble headland, whose dark steeps rise 350 feet sheer up out of a dangerous and ever restless sea. Perhaps there is not, in any other part of North Devon, more striking evidence of volcanic upheaval and disturbance than is to be seen in the curved and gnarled and twisted strata of the cliffs that tower above Hartland Quay. Six miles south of Hartland the northern seaboard of the county ends, as it began, in a deep hollow in the cliffs, Marsland Mouth, a beautiful combe, down which, under storm-beaten oaks and thickets of thorn and hazel, there winds the stream that forms the border-line between Devonshire and Cornwall. [Illustration: Church Rock, Clovelly] 9. A Peregrination of the Coast: 2, The English Channel.