In pre-railway days Teignmouth lay, as it were, in an eddy of traffic. The mail coaches went from Exeter to Plymouth far inland, and only strictly local stages hugged the coastwise roads; but with the opening of the South Devon Railway, as it then was, Teignmouth at once was placed on the main route from London to the West. There should certainly be a statue of Brunel on the Den at Teignmouth, for by planning the railway to run along the coast he not only made the fortune of the town, but added magnificently to the picturesqueness of the shore, in building that two and a half miles of massive sea-wall on which the railway comes into the town. Teignmouth is one of those very few places the railway does not vulgarise, by bringing you in at the back door, so to speak, and through the kitchen and the scullery. You are brought along that sea wall, in full view of a gorgeously-coloured coast, into a fine airy station, expectant of the best, and are not disappointed in that expectation; if, indeed, a little mystified as to your bearings. To acquire those bearings, the proper way, after all, here as elsewhere, is to enter the town by road, whether by the extravagantly hilly high road along the cliff tops, or along the sea wall. That is the geographically educative way, by which you shall see how the original Teignmouth was built on a flat sandy spit at the mouth of the Teign estuary, and how by degrees it has grown upwards and backwards, away from river and sea, even to the lower slopes of the lofty moorland of Haldon. The most outstanding peculiarity, and one of the finest features of Teignmouth is “the Den,” the wide sweep of lawn that ornaments the whole of the seaward side of the town and at once stamps Teignmouth as something wholly out of the ordinary. “The Den,” properly “dene,” was originally a flat sandy waste where the fishermen of the old fishing town dried their nets, and when the town suddenly was made to take on the appearance of a fashionable resort, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and a formal front was built, looking upon the sea, the houses were planned in a huge crescent, following the lines of that open space. Whether this was done from choice or necessity does not appear, but it would certainly seem that the builders of what was then “modern” Teignmouth were offered no alternative, and that they dared not lay hands upon what was really common land. Within the memory of many visitors to Teignmouth the grassy Den has wonderfully improved. A comparatively few years ago it was still scrubby and common-like, and its bordering flower-beds and rockeries were rich only in rocks, but the grass now grows green, the flowers flourish, and sheltering shrubs have grown phenomenally. The fishermen still exercise their ancient prescriptive right of spreading their seine nets out to dry on the grass, but, for some reason or another, not so greatly as before.