South-east Devon, that block of country between the Exe and Dorsetshire, is watered through its very heart by the Otter and on its extremity by the Axe. There can be little question but that, of all the west country which lies aloof from the moor, this south-east corner of Devon, watered mainly by the Otter and familiar to many strangers who visit the watering-places of Seaton, Sidmouth, or Budleigh, is the most beautiful in general landscape. The contour of the hills is more varied and effective, nor have they been denuded of timber about their more conspicuous portions as in most other parts of the county. The bank-fences too are more umbrageous, and the bright red soil has here an uncommon fertility, which gives an even added verdure to the grass and a brighter glow to the fallows. This gracious region has all the hill qualities of Devonshire, with a general look of luxuriance and abundance which is absent from the chess-board bareness that is the characteristic of such large tracts of the county.
The Otter, though bright and clear, is not a moor-bred river. But as it sweeps and swirls free of timber upon a pebbly bed, amid open meadows of extraordinary verdure and between banks of a most brilliant ruddy hue, it always seems, in company with its immediate neighbour the Axe, to claim a place of its own among Devon streams. Here too the Devonshire village of the alien idealist, the novelist, and the play-wright is more in evidence, for the simple fact that East Devon approximates in some respects--cottage architecture among them--with the neighbouring counties where the old-fashioned picturesque thatched village is still much more of an every-day reality.
[Illustration: THE ARUN, ARUNDEL CASTLE, SUSSEX]
The physical attractions of the three south-eastern counties--Surrey, Sussex, and Kent--owe little in comparison with the regions hitherto treated of to their rivers. But use and custom are all powerful even in the appeal which Nature and landscape make to persons genuinely susceptible to their influences. It is tolerably certain that to the great numbers of such for whom these counties and others, practically of the same class, represent the rural England with which they have any sort of intimacy, this want of water, or at any rate waters of an inspiring kind, ceases to be felt. One might almost say it becomes a lost sense, from lack of familiarity; and that the standards of perfection in landscape from this point of view arrange themselves, regardless of what to another temperament is an irreparable blemish.
