The entirely uninteresting hamlet of Street passed, standing at the head of the next rise, the road goes, steep and winding, down to one of the most remarkable stretches of coast-line in Devon; the famous Slapton Sands, a flat two miles of raised beach along which, ages ago, the present high road was formed. The sands take their name from the village of Slapton, a mile inland, and consist of small shingle thrown up by the sea, and banking back the outflow of three streams, which thus forms a long and marshy freshwater lake, the whole length of this shingly bank. Just as you come down-hill upon the finest view from above of the sea, the sands, the Ley, as this freshwater lake is named, a long and lofty blank wall shuts out the scene and proclaims the malignant humour of the landowner who built it.
Sparse and hungry-looking grass grows on the ridge of the shingle, but the yellow sea-poppy thrives, and so does the spurge, or milkwort, whose poisonous juice is milk-white and innocent-looking. Here, too, on the inner face of the bank, looking upon the rush-grown waters of the Ley, the purple blossoms and hairy leaves of the mallow are abundant, while bordering the highway, and braving the dust of it, are masses of the thrift or sea-pink.
The Ley, or Lea, is one of the most noted resorts of wild birds in Devon, and its two hundred acres are frequented in winter by sportsmen, whose headquarters are the lonely “Sands Hotel,” standing solitary, a mile from anywhere, on the shingly ridge, facing the sea one way, and on the other the highroad and the Ley.
The waters of the Ley are crowded with ferocious pike and other fish, and the vast banks of sedge and rush are peopled thickly, not only with the winter concourse of wild duck and geese, but with the shy birds of the fields and woods. Inland, the marshy lowlands ascend gently, with white-faced cottages in little groups among the trees, and an old bridge spans the water at a favourable point and helps a bye-road on the way to Slapton. The scene is not greatly disturbed; the midday coach comes by on the high road, with a cheerful tootling of its horn, and disappears, on the way to Torcross; a wild bird pipes as it flies overhead, and a fish leaps up from the still water, after a fly; that is the summer aspect. But in winter the wild-fowler wakes the echoes of the hills with his sport, and when the gales blow strong out of the south-west there is a sea-wrack in the air and foam in the road, that make the enterprise of walking from Street to Torcross almost as wet a business as sea-bathing.
Torcoss is a hamlet at the extremity of the Sands, where the road turns inland to Charleton, Stokenham, and Kingsbridge. Its back is to the slightly projecting headland that divides these sands from the further stretches of sand and shingle, extending towards the Start, and with an air of wondering mildly at its own existence, and further wondering if it is really worth while to exist at all, it faces the long flat road along which we have come. Of all the unlikely places, here is an hotel, and out of that hotel, as the present chronicler passed, there came a German waiter in a dress suit, and stood on the beach among the bronzed fishermen, watching the evolutions of a naval squadron, half a mile off-shore, in the deep water of Start Bay. Thinking many things and strange, I passed upon my way.
TORCROSS.
The direct road to Kingsbridge lies to the right hand, through Stokenham. That the quiet of country life was in the long ago occasionally broken by picturesque doings denied to us is evident in this extract from the parish records of the year 1581:
“Henri Muge, a pirat of the sea, was hanged in chains upon the Start, the 28 day of September.”
Another interesting record at Stokenham—which, by the way, you must be careful not to pronounce “Stok’n’am” but “Stoke-en-ham,” as though it were a dish, like eggs-and-ham—is the epitaph upon: