Health and pleasure resorts and all parasitic towns in fact, inland or on the sea, have no attractions for me and I was more than satisfied with a day or two of Sidmouth.

Then one evening I heard for the first time of a place called Branscomb--a village near the sea, over by Beer and Seaton, near the mouth of the Axe, and the account my old host gave me seemed so attractive that on the following day I set out to find it.

Further information about the unknown village came to me in a very agreeable way in the course of my tramp.

A hotter walk I never walked--no, not even when travelling across a flat sunburnt treeless plain, nearer than Devon by many degrees to the equator.

One wonders why that part of Devon which lies between the Exe and the Axe seems actually hotter than other regions which undoubtedly have a higher temperature.
After some hours of walking with not a little of uphill and downhill, I began to find the heat well-nigh intolerable.