Berry Head is a kind of natural barrier, or unsurmountable wall, to the Brixham people. You will readily understand why it should be so, if you seek to walk round to Kingswear by the coast. It is so, not so much by reason of the steepness and ruggedness of the way, for the road out of Brixham, up-along to the railway-station and so on to Churston Ferrers, is equally heart-breaking, but there are all manner of occasions for going in _that_ direction; while few have any business, or pleasure either, over Berry Head, or along that lonely and rugged coast, save some poor fool of an exploring tourist who, encountering rain on these shelterless coastguard walks, is fain to think, like the Melancholy Jaques in Arden, that when he was at home, he was in a better place. Hence the peculiar appositeness of the Brixham synonym for death, “going round the Head,” as it were into the Unknown. “Bless ’ee! ’er’s bin gone round the Head these dree months” was the reply to an inquiry after one recently dead. Primed with all this knowledge, it is scarcely with uplifted heart that the explorer scales these minatory heights. On the way to the Head the road looks down upon the incomplete breakwater, begun in 1843 and abandoned when 1,300 feet of it had been built and £21,000 expended. Across the bay lies Torquay, glorious in the sunshine; behind us is the end of the world, as it seems—the gorsy plateau of the Head, with a forlorn refreshment house among the ruins of five forts erected during the Napoleonic scare, themselves built amid the walls and earthworks of the Romans, constructed some 1850 years ago. Here is the Ash Hole, a cavern where the soldiers of the early nineteenth century flung the bones and broken pottery and domestic refuse of their barracks on the top of a similar deposit made by the Roman soldiery of the first century of our era. And beneath the potsherds of the Romans is stalagmite, and beneath _that_ again the bones of animals extinct aeons before Rome began. Ugh! From hence it is an easy walk to the sheer edge of this great mass of pink limestone, which drops perpendicularly down into deep water. Round the point, the cliffs grow darker and more jagged, with the Cod Rock and Mewstone out in the sea and Durl Head, splashed pink and black, marked by a deserted iron mine. Durl Head looks across to Mudstone Sands, not really muddy, and Sharkham Point. Inland, in between them, is Windmill Hill, with its celebrated cave, sharing the prehistoric honours of Kent’s Cavern. No visitor to Brixham who arrives by steamboat is likely to be left in ignorance of “Philp’s Cave,” for handbills extolling the glories of it are plentifully distributed at such times.