Croyde is not so entirely removed from social intercourse. It is still a pretty, scattered rustic village lining a road running down a valley to the sea, with a brawling stream beside the road; but on the shore of Croyde Bay, where there are yellow sands, some recent seaside houses have been built. It is a pretty and cheerful little bay; not large enough to look melancholy and desolate, like that of Woolacombe, and the road on to Saunton is excellent; having really been remade across Saunton Down, as part of a “development” scheme. Excellent, that is to say, from the point of view of a motorist, for it is broad and straight, and the surface is beyond reproach. But it is, it must be added, more than a trifle bald and uninteresting to those who do not regard roads as the nearer perfection the more closely they resemble a race-track. Whether Saunton be “sand-town” or whether it was originally named “Sainct tun,”--as, in some sort, a holy district--is still a vexed question; and likely to remain undecided, for these shores are remarkable both for saints and sands. We have already told briefly how St. Sabine--or Suibine, as he was known in Ireland--landed in disorder on Woolacombe sands in the dim past. Here were chapels of Saint Sylvester, Saint Michael, and Saint Helen; and here St. Brannock came ashore in A.D. 300, to convert the heathen, and incidentally to found the church called after him at what is now Braunton, in “Brannock’s-town.” More of him anon. But legends tell how he built his early church of timber cut in forests by the seashore, and dragged inland by harnessed stags. Where, it has been asked, did these forests stand? No one knows where legend begins and fact ends; but it is certain that underneath these miles of blown sand, on to Braunton Burrows, and again at Northam Burrows and on to Westward Ho, there lie the remains of a prehistoric forest, overwhelmed by sea and sand, or in some ancient subsidence, many centuries ago.