The road rounds a headland and dips again to Woody Bay. The sweep of the cliffs here is bold and beautiful, the bay is quite a wide sweeping curve for this land of creek and gorge, and the slopes of the cliffs are heavily wooded (which has probably led to the present corruption of the name from the earlier form of Wooda Bay); but there has been an outbreak of new houses and a new sanded road, which alarmed me, being in the mind for birds and solitude, and I kept the high white road which goes round the summit of the cliffs. Woody Bay is beginning to be popular in the summer months among those less conventional folk who like to live off the beaten track during their holidays, and are not frightened by long distances or difficulties of access, but it is still quite a tiny place and has not yet suffered that exploitation of the picturesque which has overtaken Ilfracombe and Torquay, and many beautiful spots in Devon. Seen from the high road that runs round the cup of the hills its sprinkle of new little pink houses below look like toys, and their dainty chalet-villa architecture fits the illusion; so also does its smoothed green terrace of fields, which seem no bigger than the nursery tablecloth, with Noah's ark animals, cows and horses, feeding on them. The road crosses the stream which runs into the bay, and I rested here, sitting on the parapet of the bridge, before I took to the unshaded, stony white upper road. There was a pleasant sound of falling water, and the stream ran below me, between banks that were very green with moss and beautifully shaded by sycamores. From Woody Bay the scene grows wilder and grander. Seaward tower the rocky cliffs, falling sheer to their base, jagged slate rocks which are the home of gulls and ravens, with precipitous slopes of short and slippery grass, where the mountain sheep feed; inland the brown moor stretches, bare and open to the sky, with a cluster of little cottages and a grey church hidden and sheltered in a dip of the ground. From Woody Bay the road strikes inland to Martinhoe, which takes its name from the same overlords of the district whose appellation is found in Combe Martin (which in Domesday is written simply as Comba or Combe) and across the moors to Parracombe, which has been the home of the yeoman family of Blackmore since 1683. The little grey twelfth-century tower which William de Tracy is said to have built, as he built many churches in expiation of the murder of Thomas a Becket, stands just above the railway line from Lynton to Barnstaple, but the church used by the small population of the village--and this and Trentishoe only number together three hundred souls--stands lower down the combe. As one passes these villages, isolated on the wide moors and guarded each by its lonely small church, rising squarely and almost without ornament against the background of the hills, one thinks often of those beautiful lines of Kipling's in the poem he calls "Sussex":