[Illustration:  BELVEDERE TOWER.]

[Illustration:  KENTON CHURCH.]

The village of Kenton was hidden in a small dell, and possessed a village green, in the centre of which were the remains of an old cross.  The church tower was one hundred feet high, surmounted by an unusually tall pinnacle at each corner, the figure of a saint appearing in a niche, presumably for protection.  Kenton must have been a place of some importance in early times, for Henry III had granted it an annual fair on the feast of All Saints.  The magnificent screen in the church not only reached across the chancel, but continued across the two transepts or chapels on either side, and rose in tiers of elaborate carving towards the top of the chancel arch.  No less than forty of its panels retained their original pictures of saints and prophets, with scrolls of Latin inscriptions alternating with verses from the Old Testament and clauses from the Apostles’ Creed.  Most of the screen was fifteenth-century work, and it was one of the finest in the county; much of the work was Flemish.  On it were images of saints, both male and female, and of some of the prophets, the saints being distinguishable by the nimbus or halo round their heads, and the prophets by caps and flowing robes after the style of the Jewish costumes in the Middle Ages.  There was also a magnificent pulpit of about the same date as the screen, and so richly designed as to equal any carved pulpit in Europe.  It was said to have been carved from the trunk of a single oak tree and ornamented in gilt and colours.

The number of screens in the churches near the sea-coast caused us to wonder whether some of them had been brought by sea from Flanders or France, as we remembered that our Cheshire hero, and a famous warrior, Sir Hugh de Calveley, who kept up the reputation of our county by eating a calf at one meal, and who died about the year 1400, had enriched his parish church with the spoils of France; but the lovely old oak furniture, with beautifully figured panels, some containing figures of saints finely painted, which he brought over, had at a recent “restoration” (?) been taken down and sold at two pounds per cartload!  We sincerely hoped that such would not be the fate of the beautiful work at Kenton.

We now came to Star Cross, a place where for centuries there had been a ferry across the River Exe, between the extreme west and east of Devon.  The rights of the ferry had formerly belonged to the abbots of Sherborne, who had surmounted the landing-place with a cross, which had now disappeared.  The ferry leads by a rather tortuous passage of two miles to Exmouth, a town we could see in the distance across the water; but troublesome banks of sand, one forming a rabbit warren, obstructed the mouth of the river.  We also passed through Cofton, a small village noted for its cockles, which the women gathered along the shore in a costume that made them resemble a kind of mermaid, except that the lower half resembled that