The main streets of the town are pleasant enough, though most of the houses are small and of the usual lodging-house type. Seaton depends for its deserved popularity upon its open position, in which it differs from most Devon and Dorset resorts; its bracing air, due to the wide expanse of the Axe valley, and above all to the beautiful surrounding country. Treasure hunts along the beach for garnets and beryls are among the excitements of a fortnight in Seaton.
The unimposing way in which the Axe enters the sea will be remarked at once. It is supposed that the Danes made use of the river mouth as a harbour for their pirate ships and it was without doubt a port of some importance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For the siege of Calais it provided two ships. But Leland (temp. Henry VIII) remarks that the silting up of the Axe had made the harbour useless for all but "small fisschar boates." The river now has great difficulty in getting to the sea at all through the high bank of shingle.
A good deal of Honiton lace is made both here and at Beer, though this East Devon industry is slowly dwindling in the several localities in which it was once an important commercial item.
The environs of Seaton are beautiful and interesting. The most popular excursion is to the Landslip at Dowlands. The nature of the scenery is so strange and bizarre, as well as beautiful, that it would impress the most stolid and sophisticated as something quite out of the common. North of the town are the villages of Colyford and Colyton; visitors are usually content to view these from the train, but they are worthy of closer inspection. The first-named is now a small village two miles from the sea. It is on the high road from Lyme Regis to Exeter and was once an important borough with a charter dating from the reign of Edward I. Colyton, a mile farther, is a queer old place with narrow, crooked streets. Its Perpendicular church is of much interest, and seems to have been designed by an architect with original ideas who, however, has not been preëminently successful in its details. The square battlemented tower with its octagonal lantern above is poorly executed, but otherwise the uncommon conception arrests attention and is worthy of praise: The parvise chamber over the porch, like many others, was for a long period the town school. The nave, rebuilt about the middle of the eighteenth century, is of no interest, but the Perpendicular arches between the chancel and aisles are very elaborate and fine. The Pole chapel is formed out of the eastern end of the south aisle and separated from the other portions by a stone screen of elaborate and beautiful workmanship. Within are the ornate figures of Sir John Pole and his wife. On the other side of the chancel is the Jacobean mausoleum of the Yonges, a great local family during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Gothic tomb with the recumbent figure of a girl upon it is known locally as "Little Chokebone." Margaret Courtenay, daughter of an Earl of Devon, was said to have been suffocated by a fish-bone, but the tradition has been doubted. From the armorial bearings above the tomb it would appear that the figure represents one of the daughters, or possibly the wife, of the sixth Earl of Devon. An interesting inscription in the south transept perpetuates the name of John Wilkins, who was minister from 1647 to 1660 when, as a Nonconformist, he was deprived of the living.
The vicarage was originally built in 1529 by Canon Brerewood, who erected the stone screen of the Pole chapel. It has been altered and partly rebuilt, but the porch retains the original inscription placed there by the Canon—" Meditatio totum; Peditatio totum."
Colcombe Castle, half a mile from the town, is now Colcombe Farm. It was once the seat of the Courtenays and the headquarters of Prince Maurice during the Civil War. In 1680 the Duke of Monmouth stayed either here or at the Great House near by, now a farm, but once occupied by the Yonges. An old stone arch in a field above the castle covers a spring of clear cold water.
Seaton Hole, the western extremity of Seaton Bay, lies under White Head, which is not white but brownish grey. Up the steps from the beach, a path leads from the "Hole" for a mile of steep up and down walking and then the explorer reaches Beer, famous for its "free trade" and its memories of a prince of smugglers—Jack Rattenbury; the 'Arrypay of Seaton Bay. His adventures, though not on the grand scale of the hero of Poole, were exciting enough, from his capture by the French, while ship's-boy on a local coaster, to his attempted arrest by a posse of soldiers in a Beer inn, where his escape was effected by the women of the village raising the cry "A wreck! a wreck!" and diverting his captors' attention. Rattenbury died in 1833 after receiving the princely sum of one shilling per week pension during the last years of his life from Lord Rolle. During this period he dictated his memoirs for publication in Sidmouth, to an editor who unconsciously gave the book a delicious touch of humour by putting into the mouth of this son of a Devon shoemaker the grandiloquent phrases of an early Victorian divine.