The very ground, sloping to the cliffs hereabouts, is honeycombed with the tunnels in which the puffins make their nests. The ruins of one of several ancient round towers, presumably old-time defences of the isle, are met with on turning the point and making for the curious pile of rocks called the “Mousetrap.” A track of marshy ground here diversifies the scene. Tibbet’s Point rises 510 feet above the sea. Beyond it is the “Templar Rock,” a cliff-profile singularly like the helmeted face of a man. At this eastern extremity of the Half-way Wall is a logan-stone that, owing to the decay of its support, no longer rocks to a vigorous push. The circuit of the island is completed on passing the deserted workings of the Lundy Granite Company and its empty cottages. CHAPTER IX CHAMBERCOMBE AND ITS “HAUNTED HOUSE”--BERRYNARBOR The modern suburban extensions of ’Combe are devouring the rustic lanes far in the rear, and the natural wildness of Devonian landscape, that seems so untamable, is being pitifully bridled. New terraces of cheap houses climbing unimaginable steeps, deploy their battalions of “desirable residences” over the hills: each house with its pretentious name--“Hatfield,” “Blenheim,” “Burghley,” maybe--their sponsors, without humour themselves, the cause of much satiric humour in others who chance by them. You must pass many such on the way to Chambercombe (originally Champernowne’s Combe), one of the places no visitor to Ilfracombe is bidden to miss seeing; Chambercombe being a still rustic valley where there even yet nestles an ancient farmhouse, formerly a manor-house of a branch of the Champernowne family, and long enjoying a rather vague and ineffectual reputation as a “haunted house.” Suddenly, passing “Champernowne Terrace,” the uttermost outpost of ’Combe, and a bankrupted mineral-water factory, you come to the opening of Chambercombe; a road steeply descending, hollow, rutty, with tall hedgerow elms--in a word, Devonian. Down at the bottom, the eye rests gratefully upon a steep-roofed old whitewashed building, enclosed within high and thick courtyard walls, and approached through a gateway: the old home of those North Devon Champernownes, extinct, equally with their South Devon namesakes of Modbury, long generations ago. For many years it has been a farmhouse, and in all this time its uncertain legendary fame has grown, so that now, by dint of its nearness to the town, and of the constant stream of curious visitors who plagued the very life out of the farming folk, the present occupants have taken Opportunity by both hands and exploit the legend to commercial ends; as the notice, with a generous profusion of capital letters displayed at the gateway, discloses. Tea and refreshments may, you read, be obtained, and even lodgings had, at Chambercombe Farm, “With its Haunted Room And Coat of Arms Shown To Visitors.” [Illustration: CHAMBERCOMBE.]