Bathing Machines for Ladies are kept,
With Towels and Gowns, all quite correct.
Thomas is the man who provides everything:
And also teaches Young People to swim.”
Some enthusiastic scholar has even done this into Latin, and the result is seen on the wooden walls of the shanty.
White limestone pinnacles shut in the eastern side of the Cove, and shade off into pink and red and grey. On the western side a cliff path goes winding round the headland of Hope’s Nose and Daddy Hole Plain. The Hole there is a rift in the plateau, and “Daddy,” the affectionate name bestowed upon the Devil by local folk, who perhaps did not stop to consider when they did it that they thus proclaimed themselves children of Satan.
On the inland road to Torquay is that famous place, Kent’s Cavern, whose prehistoric contents led men of science to wholly revise their ideas of the world’s history.
The situation of Kent’s Cavern, although only a mile from the centre of Torquay and in the Wellswood suburb, is still semi-rural. A limestone bluff, shaggy with bushes, trees and ivy, rises abruptly to the right of the road, and in the side of it is a locked wooden door, upon which you bang and kick for the guide, who is guide, proprietor, and explorer in one. When he is not guiding, he is engaged in digging and turning over the wet red earth, alone in the dank lonesomeness with the spirits of prehistoric man and the bones of the extinct animals that ranged the valleys of Torquay when the world was young. The freehold of the famous cavern which ever since 1824 has been the theme of more or less learned geological treatises was recently sold at auction for a trifling sum; not to an institution or a scientific society but to the guide, who has conducted many geological pundits over it, and by consequence has acquired an air of greater omniscience than the most completely all-knowing of those not remarkably modest men of science.
ANSTEY’S COVE.