It had lain since the days of Arundel's Rebellion.

The Londoner vowed to build a new church there on the towans, where the songs of prayer and praise should mingle with the voice of the waves which God had baffled for him.
The people warned him of the sand; but he would not listen to reason.
He built his church--a squat Perpendicular building of two aisles, the wider divided into nave and chancel merely by a granite step in the flooring; he saw it consecrated, and returned to his home and died.

And the church steadily decayed.

He had mixed his mortar with sea-sand.

The stonework oozed brine, the plaster fell piece-meal; the blown sand penetrated like water; the foundations sank a foot on the south side, and the whole structure took a list to leeward.
The living passed into the hands of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, and from them, in 1730, to the Moyles.