A very serious drawback incidental to the exploration of districts that grow increasingly beautiful as you proceed is that all the available stock of admiratory adjectives is likely to be expended long before the journey’s end. They must be carefully husbanded, or you come at last to a nonplus. Therefore, please at this point to assume beauties that—in the Early Victorian phrasing—can be “more easily imagined than described.” For the rest, conceive a wedge-like opening in the cliffs, cleft to permit the egress to the sea of a little stream, at all times too tiny for such a magnificent portal, and often in summer altogether dried up. On the western side plant a coastguard station, built like a fort and walled like a defensive stockade; and there you have the seaward aspect of Branscombe. The landward look of it is entirely different. Looking from the sea, and walking away from it, three valleys converging seaward are discovered; each one profound, each richly wooded and fertile, and in each little instalments of Branscombe village, dropped casually, as it were, here and there. I had at first assumed the name “Branscombe” (which is pronounced with a broad “a,” like “ar”) to be derived in part from the British _brân_, a crow, and “Crowcombe” it might well be; but it seems, by the dedication of the church to SS. Winifred and Bradwalladr, that it is really St. Brannoc’s Combe, for “Brannoc” is an alias of Bradwalladr. Away up the valley road are little groups of the quaintest cottages, with tiny strips of gardens scarce more than two feet wide, forming, as it were, a fringe or hem to the walls, and merging directly, without fence, into the roadway. But no gardens anywhere can show greater fertility or a more pleasing variety of flowers. Among them are to be seen spoils of the neighbouring cliffs, in the shape of petrified vegetation from the coast between Branscombe and Weston Mouth. [Illustration: BRANSCOMBE.]