The vicarage was originally built in 1529 by Canon Brerewood, who erected the stone screen of the Pole chapel.  It has been altered and partly rebuilt, but the porch retains the original inscription placed there by the Canon—­” Meditatio totum; Peditatio totum.”

Colcombe Castle, half a mile from the town, is now Colcombe Farm.  It was once the seat of the Courtenays and the headquarters of Prince Maurice during the Civil War.  In 1680 the Duke of Monmouth stayed either here or at the Great House near by, now a farm, but once occupied by the Yonges.  An old stone arch in a field above the castle covers a spring of clear cold water.

Seaton Hole, the western extremity of Seaton Bay, lies under White Head, which is not white but brownish grey.  Up the steps from the beach, a path leads from the “Hole” for a mile of steep up and down walking and then the explorer reaches Beer, famous for its “free trade” and its memories of a prince of smugglers—­Jack Rattenbury; the ’Arrypay of Seaton Bay.  His adventures, though not on the grand scale of the hero of Poole, were exciting enough, from his capture by the French, while ship’s-boy on a local coaster, to his attempted arrest by a posse of soldiers in a Beer inn, where his escape was effected by the women of the village raising the cry “A wreck! a wreck!” and diverting his captors’ attention.  Rattenbury died in 1833 after receiving the princely sum of one shilling per week pension during the last years of his life from Lord Rolle.  During this period he dictated his memoirs for publication in Sidmouth, to an editor who unconsciously gave the book a delicious touch of humour by putting into the mouth of this son of a Devon shoemaker the grandiloquent phrases of an early Victorian divine.

[Illustration:  BEER.]

The picturesque and unspoilt little beach and the village street leading down to the sea are in great contrast to the new houses built on the hill behind, and the fine new church erected at the instance of the Lord of the Manor, one of the Rolle family.  This replaced an ancient chapel dedicated to St. Michael, from which two old memorial tablets were transferred; one is to “Edward Good, late an Industrious fisherman,” who left twenty pounds in trust for the poor of Beer and Seaton in 1804, and the other to “John, the fifth sonn of William Starr of Bere, Gent., and Dorothy his wife, which died in the plague was here bvried 1646.”  The dwelling of this Starr family was the Tudor house at the end of the main street which bears on it the design of a star, the rebus of the one-time owners.

A firm tradition is current among the fishermen, most of whom gain a livelihood in the summer by boat hire, that their forefathers were Spaniards shipwrecked in the Cove just after Beer had been depopulated by the plague, and that they settled in the empty houses, intermarrying with the maids of Devon left in the village.  The story is certainly made convincing by the remarkably dark and foreign appearance of the villagers, especially in the case of the older men.