For the rest, Starcross is merely a more or less modern development of a very ancient little fisher hamlet of the inland parish of Kenton, close upon two miles inland, and is said to have been originally “Stair-cross”; a crossing, or passage, to Exmouth. Maps, showing how the road from Exeter only approaches the coast at this point and then immediately turns away again, support this view. The high road, leaving Starcross, winds around Cockwood Creek, and passing for a while over level ground ascends, steep and narrow and between high banks, past the old-time smugglers’ haunt, “Mount Pleasant Inn,” and so over the cliff top to Dawlish. Hut the coastwise path by the Warren, and so over the railway to Langston Cliff and the sea-wall, is the only way for beauty. Over the cliffs, by the high road, you come dispirited into Dawlish, with the latest greedy proceedings of speculative builders very much in evidence before the town itself is seen. Such a manner of approach is highly injurious. It is as though a guest bidden to a country house were admitted through the back door. One had rather enter Dawlish by train, for the railway runs along a sea-wall under the cliffs, and the station is built on the edge of the sands. CHAPTER X DAWLISH—ASHCOMBE—THE PARSON AND CLERK Dawlish looks its very best from the railway station; not the least doubt of it, and looks best of all to passengers bound elsewhere. From the train you have on one side the blue sea, the red rocks, the yellow-brown sands; and on the other the lovely lawns and gardens in midst of the town, with the little stream called “Dawlish Water,” tamed and trimmed, and made to tumble over half a hundred little cascades, in between. In short, like any tradesman, Dawlish displays its best goods—nay, more, its entire stock-in-trade—in the shop window. The name of Dawlish is rather by way of being a calamity. Antiquaries declare it derives from the Celtic _dol isc_; that is to say, “the meadow by the water”—and as we have seen, the stream and the gardens are the chief feature of the place—but the modern form of the name is fatally attractive for cheap wits. Even great minds have declined to the remark that “Dawlish is dawlicious”; and as the excursion trains in summer draw up to the platform and strangers step out from the carriages, to stretch their legs for a moment before going on, the idiot jape trips off a hundred tongues. At Dawlish, however, the traveller first realises himself fully in the West. The view, the colour, the speech, all proclaim it.