St Brannock Church is large, and, like Morte Church, is partly Perpendicular and partly Early English. It has an unusually wide panelled roof, and on one of the panels is carved a sow and some little pigs—an illustration of a legend connecting the saint with the church, for the tradition ran that he had been told in a dream to build his church 'wherever he should first meet a sow and her family.' A similar group is to be seen in the porch of the church at Newton St Cyres. Some of the bench-ends in St Brannock's Church are very beautifully carved.
The road to Barnstaple, bending to the south-east, follows the estuary of the Taw for nearly six miles.
The town is very prettily placed, but it is dominated by modern buildings, and has not the air of antiquity with which its history might have invested it. The river sweeps round a bend of a green and pleasant valley just above the town, and along the strand is a walk shaded with trees, looking over the river to a pastoral country beyond. Nearer the bridge is Queen Anne's Walk, 'an open portico near the river, called the Quay Walk, being an exchange of the merchants, etc.,' renamed when it was rebuilt in Queen Anne's reign. From the bridge westward the scene has an air of peaceful contentedness. Sea-gulls flutter among the sand-banks, from which 'the sea retires itself' at low-tide, leaving only a small, shining stream, which seems 'to creep between shelves and sands.' Beyond are green marshes, and gentle rounded hills behind them lead on one from another. The country is much the same all along the river to the sea.
Bideford is proud of its bridge, which is very high, and has sixteen arches. Several people have been given the credit of building it, and its date is supposed to be some time during the thirteenth century.
The church, dedicated to St Peter and St Paul, is cross-shaped, and the lead steeple looks well against the sky, especially when it is surrounded by a shoal of swallows swooping and darting about it in all directions. The church has been much restored, and altered from the original building; evidently there were once three altars in it; and a piscina still remains in the south aisle, close to the west wall of the transept. A curious monument was erected in 1634 by Martin Blake, the Vicar, to his son and four children who died very young. A heavy and elaborate framework surrounds a severe likeness of a melancholy-looking man, who is resting his head on his hand. On the monument are short detached sentences, numbered:
'1. He was cut off in the flower of his life.
. . . . .
'10. His heart on fire for the love of God.
'11. Martin Blake, the Father, was taken from the Pulpit, and sent to Exeter jail for four years.
'12. The Pulpit empty, and the congregation waiting for him.