The East Devon Scene
I speak of the interior to which thereafter I confined my journeys. What I found most satisfactory about it was the extent and inviolability of its mixed woodlands whose timber still stands all the way from Axminster to Exeter, where the Old•Red Sand- stone which shares West Devon with the granite begins. The desolation and the folly of clear-felling are not here as, for instance, in Wales and elsewhere. It is an idle hobby of mine to note whether the contiguity of one county to another corresponds with a change in their respective landscapes. Since the Saxon shire-makers certainly did not consider geological mutations in their cartography, such correspondence can only be coincidence. But it certainly occurs between West Dorset and East Devon, whose landscape is sui generis. Its gault and greensand present entirely different features from the Hassle singularity of its neighbour. What is more, this Devonian scene in contradistinction to Dorset's is structurally a very simple one. It consists of long and comparatively straight-backed ridges with a thatch of dark woodland (no erosion trouble here !) and smallish fields (like the ginger-bread nuts of Dawlish) on the lower slopes melting into broad, flattish vales rather than valleys, whose stocked cornfields and stacked pasture ones are more expansive. The ridges have rather indeterminate extremities except where they are rounded off into sickle- or scythelshaped curves.
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