It is at no great distance from Hartland Point that the /Torridge/, most circuitous of Devonshire rivers, rises. First flowing in a south-easterly direction past Newton St. Petrock and Shebbear and Sheepwash, it presently makes a bend and follows an almost precisely opposite course north-westwards. In about the middle of the loop which it forms in preparing to stultify itself, it is augmented by the Okement, which has come almost due north from Cranmere Pool, brawling down a valley which, near Okehampton and elsewhere, is finely wooded. Past Yew Bridge and Dolton and Beaford, Torridge continues its sinuous course; and as it approaches Great Torrington, set on a hill some 300 feet above its right bank, its valley presents the combination of smooth haugh and precipitous rock shown in our view (page 49). Torrington has a history, and little besides. Even the church, enclosed in a notably pretty God's acre, graced with avenues of beeches and chestnuts, has no special interest save that it contains the carved oak pulpit in which the great John Howe preached before his ejectment in 1662; for it had to be rebuilt after the Civil War, having been blown up by the accidental explosion of a large quantity of gunpowder while it was being used as a magazine and prison. Two hundred Royalists were confined in the building at the time, and these, with their guards, all perished. Winding round Torrington Common, gay in due season with gorse and bracken, our river glides on past Wear Gifford--an idyllically beautiful spot incongruously associated with a melancholy tragedy--to the "little white town" described by Charles Kingsley in the opening paragraph of his one great story. White it hardly is in these days, but this is the only qualification that strict accuracy requires. The famous bridge of four-and-twenty arches dates from about the same period as that at Barnstaple, which it considerably exceeds in length. The town itself lays claim to a much higher antiquity, for it traces its origin to a cousin of the Conqueror, founder of the illustrious line which came to full flower in the Richard Grenville who, as he lay a-dying, after having matched the _Revenge_ against the whole Spanish fleet of three-and-fifty sail, was able proudly to say, in a spirit not unlike that of a later naval hero, that he was leaving behind him "an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier, that hath _done his duty_ as he was bound to do." He it was who revived the fortunes of Bideford after a period of decline, and so increased its prosperity by attracting to it trade from the settlements in the New World that it was able to send seven ships to join the fleet that gathered in Plymouth Harbour to fight the Spaniard. With memories such as these, the town may surely abate its eagerness to have accepted as Armada trophies the old guns which have been unearthed from its dustheap.