From here it is possible to follow the cliffs to Welcombe Mouth: a fatiguing journey. The quicker way, and also perhaps the more beautiful, is up the valley and into the road; coming down into the wooded vale of Welcombe Mouth by a zigzag route, amid a tangle of undergrowth. The village of Welcombe, which takes its name from a holy well dedicated to St. Nectan, is marked by its church-tower a mile inland; the valley itself being solitary, except for one very new and blatant farmstead. Here, as in all these other vales dipping to the sea, a little stream goes swirling down through the tangled brakes of the combe, to end ineffectively on the beach. Welcombe Mouth is associated with the exploits of “Cruel Coppinger,” supposed to have been a Danish sea-captain, wrecked off Hartland. Thrown ashore in dramatic fashion, and narrowly escaping death at the hands of the half-savage Welcombe people of over a century ago, who nursed odd prejudices against allowing wrecked sailors to survive, he settled awhile in the district, and himself became a wrecker and smuggler. He and his exploits are now part of local folk-lore, and the novelists have got hold of him too; but it would seem that, cast ashore with clothes all torn from him by the fury of the waves, he recovered consciousness only in time to prevent his being knocked on the head. Jumping up, seizing a cutlass, and vaulting, naked as he was, on to the back of a horse, he galloped up the combe to the sheltering house of some people named Hamlyn, parents of the Dinah Hamlyn whom he subsequently married. The exploits of Coppinger the Cruel, as they survive in legend, verge upon the incredible. How he beheaded a gauger with his own cutlass on the gunwale of a boat, how he thrashed the parson at the dinner-table, and how he was wafted away by a mysterious ship, from off the romantic-looking Gull Rock, that looms darkly off the coast; are they not all enshrined in the folk-lore of the West, and particularly in the verses of which here is a sample? “Would you know of Cruel Coppinger? He came from a foreign land; He was brought to us by the salt water And carried away by the wind.”