The castle stands high among vast, sharp-edged waves of sand at the edge of a cliff, and looks at the sea and a long, empty shore. At its feet a little river can be seen running in a narrow valley. A few miles off it rises in the red moorland, then it falls with many a cascade down ladders of crag, broadens among willows where long leaves are all horizontal in the wind, and here by the castle it has reached an elvish, merry old age already, as it moves clear over the brown stones and out among the rocks to the sea. Opposite the castle, across the river, the other side of the valley is clothed in dense and luminous oak wood. Where the river joins the sea both the castle hill and the wooded hill break away into a broken multitude of bristling rocks, and among their alleys and hidden corridors and halls the waves leap with the motion of a herd of ridgy cattle galloping through narrow gateways. Beyond, and away for ten miles, the high dark coast sweeps in a curve which the sea whitens by showing its teeth; and round the headland at the end the ships come and go at starry intervals. Landward, the country rises in long, steep, furzy curves, interrupted by sudden rocks, to the red moor and the autumn evening sky of towering, tumultuous and yet steady grey cloud.
The castle stands among pale sand and long plumy grasses. The sand is deep within the hollow and roofless circuit of the broken walls, through which, here and there, come glimpses of sea or sky disconnected from any fragment of the land, so that I seem to stand between the sea and sky. In the summer ivy-leaved toad-flax buds and harebells, most delicate flowers, whisper from the crevices. But nothing lives here now. The trunk of an old tree that once grew through the walls is now so much worn that what it was when it lived is not to be known. Not only is all human life gone from here, but even the signs of its decay are invisible. The noble masonry can suffer no more except at the hands of men; it is too low and too strong. It is a rude crag. Neither history nor legend speaks intelligently of it. It is but known that it was raised by hands, and each man that comes to it has to build it again out of his own life and blood, or it remains not far removed from nothing. The wayfarer starts at the sight of it, tries in vain, shuddering at the cliff and the desolate sea, to conceive a life lived by beings like himself in such a place. To have lived there men must have had fairy aids or the blood of witches or of gods in their veins.