The tiny bay that opens out from this twilight lane is a quiet spot, where boulders are scattered about amid the sand and shingle, with that look of studied abandon customary in stage-carpenters’ versions of the seaside; and surely we can give no higher praise than that! It is a spot where one might fitly converse with some not too forward young mermaid (keep your eye off her tail, and such, by all accounts, should be presentable enough); to be auditor of strange, uncanny legends; a thousand fearful wrecks “full fathom five,” and dead-men’s bones and drowned treasure. But for tales of drowned treasure, or “money sunk” and lost, which, after all, is much the same to the owner of it--one need not go far, nor seek the dangerous society of mermaids. Wooda Bay, yonder, across the intervening neck of land, has a modern story of some interest. It was somewhere about 1895 that Benjamin Greene Lake, of the London firm of solicitors, Lake and Lake, conceived the idea of “developing” this secluded and extremely lovely spot, and of making it, as it were, a newer Lynmouth. He purchased much land, caused many roads to be made to the bay, and built an elaborate timber landing-stage for steamers. A few houses were indeed built here and there: among them the “Glen” Hotel, but Wooda Bay has not developed to any extent, in the building-estate sense. How many thousands of pounds were lost here, seems uncertain; according to some accounts, £25,000, or by others, much more. Unfortunately, this was one of Benjamin Greene Lake’s many speculations financed with other people’s money--without their knowledge or consent. He was sentenced in January 1901 to twelve years’ imprisonment, for converting trust funds to his own use. He had in various projects made away with no less than £170,000 of his clients’ money. So there was an end of this great development idea. Only a few scattered houses and the roads gashed in the hill-tops remain to tell of it, for the sea speedily washed away every fragment of the timber pier. The name of Wooda Bay, therefore, falls ill on the ears of not a few defrauded persons. It is a pity, for it is one of the loveliest bays on an exceptionally lovely coast. The Post Office authorities have adopted the new-fangled spelling, “Woody,” instead of “Wooda,” as appears by the tree-shaded post-office here; and the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway, which has a station for it, set down in a far-off wilderness, appears to spell the name, with a fine air of impartiality, in both styles. But the old rustic Devonian way was “Wooda”; a form characteristic of innumerable place-names throughout the country, and exemplified near by, in “Parracombe,” “Challacombe,” “Fullaford,” “Buzzacott,” and innumerable others. Delightful lanes lead round the shores of the bay, amid woods, with here and there a waterfall; notably at a point where a bridge carrying a lane over a little stream is inscribed Inkerman Bridge, 1857.