The river Taw is fine, but the lovely Torridge is its much more beautiful sister. Those familiar with South Devon will readily find a remarkable resemblance between the estuaries of the Exe and the Torridge, and in the upper reaches will not fail to note an equal likeness to the Teign, just below Newton Abbot. And, to clinch the resemblance, Instow Quay is not unlike Starcross, with the further similarity of a railway running by. Here is the same waterside line of houses, chiefly of the Regency and Early Victorian white-faced sort, just on the verge of becoming romantic, by mere effluxion of time. Little plaster-faced villas with green-painted verandahs and hairpin railings enclosing close-cropped hedges of privet or euonymus, approached by neat pebble-pitched pathways, sometimes, for greater effect of decoration, done in white pebbles, with a pattern of brown. I can imagine our great-grandmothers, as pretty girls of sweet seventeen, in book-muslin, taking holiday here and reading Jane Austen and Mrs. Gaskell.
Opposite lies Appledore, with the tall tower of what looks like a church on its scarred hillside, and is really a look-out tower known as “Chanter’s Folly”; and sometimes you may see the grey mass of Lundy, on the horizon. Lonely Lundy, to which His Majesty’s mails go only once weekly from Instow Quay, per sailing-skiff _Gannet_. For those who like tumbling on the ocean wave, the cruise there and back in the day on those weekly sailings is enjoyable; but for those who do not happen to be good sailors, the return fare of five shillings only admits to five shillings’ worth of sheer misery. So Lundy generally remains to unseaworthy visitors to Instow a great unknown quantity.
The road runs close beside the estuary, all the way from Instow to Bideford, passing the nobly wooded hillsides of Tapeley Park, with its tall obelisk to the memory of one of the Cleveland family who fell at Inkerman. Bideford, on the opposite shore, becomes revealed, not only as a waterside town, but as very much of a hillside town as well, and with a not inconsiderable suburb on the hither side of the river: a suburb known as “East-the-Water.” Here we come to the heart of that district of North Devon so intimately associated with Kingsley and his “Westward Ho!” that it is very generally known as the “Kingsley Country.”