The little inlet, so shut in, has an exclusive air, in contrast with the open semicircular three-miles sweep of Woolacombe Sands; but refreshment caterers have descended upon the place with tents. They have done the like at Woolacombe Bay itself, for in these days Woolacombe Bay is a name denoting more than an expanse of water with a sandy fringe. The safe bathing in the sea, and the extensive golfing on the sand hills or in the flat fields have converted what was, literally, a “howling waste”--for the winds occasionally blow great guns here--into the semblance of a seaside resort. There were, but a few years ago, only some three houses here, including the old manor mill, whose water-wheel formed a picturesque object beside the little stream that empties itself into the bay; but now there is a great red brick hotel with the usual “special terms to golfers,” and a little red town has sprung up around it, with a fringe of rather blear-eyed shops facing the sea, and some better, turned at right angles to it. There is so impossible a look about the whole thing, that “here we have no abiding place” is a quotation that rises promptly to the mind of the observer. It looks, with its refreshment booths and array of chairs on the shore in summer, like some camp-meeting in a desolate part of America. But it is intended to last; a permanent water-supply has been installed and a kind of modern missionary tin church, dedicated to St. Sabinus, who voyaged across from Ireland a thousand years ago, to convert the heathen of this neighbourhood--and was wrecked on this shore--has been erected. Woolacombe Bay, however, is a melancholy place. It has had no past, and it is difficult to imagine it with a future. Only a fanatical golfer to whom the world beyond his putting-greens and his bunkers is merely incidental, could long find occupation here.