Roar’d out aloud ‘I’m murdered!’
And shall this blood which here doth lye
In vain for right and vengeance cry?
Do men not think, tho’ gone from hence,
Avenge God can’t her innocence?
Let bad men think, so learn ye good,
Live each that’s here doth cry for Blood.”
This is a relic of the siege of Salcombe Castle and the military operations between Cavaliers and the Parliament troops. It seems that the Puritan soldiery, attacking a farm-house, were met with a stout resistance and fired through a window, mortally wounding the farmer’s daughter.
To follow the coast from Torcross to the Start, it is necessary at this point to take to the sands, or, more strictly speaking, the shingle; extremely heavy walking, but endurable on account of the interesting rocks piled up in huge masses on the shore. The slaty cliffs have here fallen in ruins, with picturesque results. Some of the great blocks twenty feet or more in height, have sides quite smooth and lustrous.
We are here in a district not indeed far removed from modern accommodation, but in the same primitive condition as it must have been a century, or even more, ago. The fine shingle gives place to a waste of laminated slate and then, where the cliffs die away for a space into a marshy bottom, to a scrubby flat piece of waste leading to the hamlet of Beesands, marked on many maps as Beeson Cellar.