Hartland Quay, half a mile down the road, is an example of the overweening confidence of man in his ability to battle successfully with the forces of nature. You see, as you come down the road over the down, a tumultuous ocean, no longer the Bristol Channel, sometimes dun-coloured with the outpourings of the Severn, and not, except under extreme provocation, to be stirred to great waves, but the Atlantic Ocean itself, dark blue with great crested waves rolling inshore, whether it be calm weather or boisterous. Only, in the last case, the always majestic sight becomes not a little terrifying here. Where the down curves to the sea and the road dips steeply, in a hairpin corner, a rugged point, all bristling with black, jagged rocks, runs out, and in between them is a little flat space--the Quay. On one side is an isolated conical hill, capped with a flagstaff, and on the other a formidable reef, black as ink, with the rock-strata tipped perpendicularly in some convulsion that attended the world’s birth. Between these extremes lies the opening for the entrance of small craft, and a sorry haven it must be for any distressed mariner in severe weather. The place is lonely, save for the “Hartland Quay Hotel” and a few coastguard cottages; and the stone pier built out to sea, by which it was proposed to make Hartland Quay in some small way a harbour, has been battered utterly out of existence by the waves. Watching the enormous walls of water, curving and advancing with an imperious unhasting grandeur, you do not wonder that anything less solid than the living rock should go down before them. The breaking rollers fill the scene with briny particles that hang in air like frost and taste salt on the lips, and the wind blows strong and invigorating from its journey of thousands of miles across the open sea. An easy path leads from this point around Catherine Tor and its waterfall, into a wide moor-like valley where a little stream, fussing noisily in its peaty bed among occasional boulders, hurries along to join the sea. The scene where this rivulet, arriving abruptly at the cliff’s edge, falls sheer over it, in a long spout of about a hundred feet, is the most dramatic thing on the coast of North Devon. Imagine the lonely valley, not in itself very remarkable, suddenly shorn off in a clean cut, disclosing a smooth face of rock as black as coal, ending in a little beach--and there you have Speke’s Mouth, as it is called. [Illustration: SPEKE’S MOUTH.]