Descending to this strange spot, you look down upon the leads of the church tower and thence come by rough and steep tracks to the shore, where a little stream runs by the water-wheel of the old mill on to the shingle of the beach. So near is the wheel to the sea that in times of storm the salt water of the waves mingles with the fresh, and so close to the tide are the walls of the mill-house that when the winds lash the waters into foaming breakers the rooms smell of the salt spray, and are filled with the clamour of the elements. Here the singular picturesqueness of the place is most fully revealed, and the church to which just now you descended is seen to stand high and boldly above the beach, on a commanding knoll, girt about with a circular brick retaining-wall heavily buttressed, lest it, as well as the church, and the churchyard it shores up from a sudden descent, should come toppling down in common ruin. The age, the rugged beauty, and the interest of the church are almost completely hidden beneath a coating of plaster, and the grass grows rankly in the churchyard, where the odd epitaph may be noted: Henry Kembil died Nov. 25 1725 ’Tis over with your friend Mind That. An arresting inscription, surely, and not a little puzzling until it is discovered that Henry Kembil was a ferryman of the Yealm and a portion of his epitaph is a play upon the word “over,” by which, shouting across the river, the would-be passenger who is versed in Devon ways still brings the ferryman to him. [Illustration: WEMBURY.] Save, indeed, for the hullabaloo created by the battleships out to sea and the forts off Plymouth, practising their heavy guns, Wembury would scarce be associated with bloody war; yet if this place is really the “Wicganbeorch” of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—as by antiquaries it is supposed to be—it saw particularly hard fighting in A.D. 851, when “Ceorl the Ealdorman, with the men of Devon fought against the heathen men (that is, the Danes), and there made great slaughter and got the victory.” Those “heathen” men or Danes were the vikings, of whom early history has so much to tell; but here we see the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, in writing “Wicganbeorch,” which means Wiking-bury—adopting the advice given so many centuries later by Tony Weller to his dutiful Sam, and “spelling it with a ‘we.’” The big gun practice of the battleships out in the Channel, whose roaring is like that of several thunderstorms growling in concert across the water, is very impressive, and majestic, and altogether different from the sound of firing from the forts, producing a less resonant noise, like that of rude and impudent persons, very much out of temper, violently and continually slamming doors.