The air is sharp, yet healthful, giving appetite both to labour and rest, drawing out man's life longer than those which live in countries subject to fogs and vapours, if they do not, as the common sort of man in this corrupt age, weaken themselves by excess.

Roads and lanes twist abruptly in apparent confusion all over the landscape. Off the turnpike roads of 1809 run smaller branch-roads, making a close network in the intervening country; and off these smaller roads there run, every few hundred yards, yet narrower lanes that penetrate along remote combes or deep into the flanks of some massive hill, to end in a nameless farmyard, with the unpathed fields beyond and all around. So many farmsteads in Devon lie alone at the end of a deep-sunken lane thick with mud in winter, stony and rutted in summer. Every lane has its own history: it is not there by accident: and every twist it makes once had some historical meaning, which we can sometimes decipher today, but not often.