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.

[Illustration:  SEATON HOLE.]

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 preeminently 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.