Thurlestone church is neighboured on the hillside in these expansive times by a golf club, which, in the interest of golf-balls, has actually had the impudence to spread wire-netting over the charming little rustic stream that here flows to the sea; and near by are the ornate brand-new villas built and furnished by speculators with an eye on the possible huge profits to be earned from letting them for the summer season, in these times of a revived appreciation of the countryside. It is with a malignant joy that the wayfarer perceives the speculators to have overreached themselves, and the villas—“white elephants” says the ferryman at Bantham—to be unlet. How, indeed, should Thurlestone become a place of resort? It is remote, and its sands, unstable and shelving steeply to the sea, are extremely dangerous. The dark, stern, upstanding Perpendicular tower of the old church looks down grimly upon these white and red and yellow upstarts. It is a fine, large church, the successor of an earlier, as the great Norman bowl-font of red sandstone would seem to prove, and the designers of it designed in a fine, large, broad style, suited to the coarse-grained granite and limestone of their building-materials. That Rev. Mr. John Snell, chaplain to Charles I., who was with the Royalist garrison in Salcombe Castle, was rector here, and although one of the articles of surrender declared that he was not to be disturbed in his living, he was plundered of his goods, and his farm-stock was twice carried off by the Puritans, so that he found it prudent to leave. Unlike so many others, he lived to return to his parish, and, I have no doubt, rendered things in his turn, extremely uncomfortable for some. One little natural human touch of him remains, in the entry in the register under his hand, against the years covered by the Commonwealth:— “_Monstrum horrendum informe_,” Horrible and shapeless monster. “This is youre houre and ye power of darkness.” The iron had evidently entered into his soul.