Springhead Road continues its straight and level way, until—

Only at a noontime in winter did I notice this, when the sun was low enough to make its reflection distant enough: that rather distant horizon ahead to the right looks as if it is at least as high as we are here. But the bright streak showing above it is not a low strip of cloud: it is the dazzle of the sun on the sea.

PICTURE:

The road continues its relatively straight and level way, until entering among trees it sends off obliquely to the left a wide gravelly track, called the Coach Road. You could turn off along it.

Or, continuing, you find the Springhead Road beginning to dip. It is still on the plateau top, but the plateau is not perfectly flat: it is bevelled toward its edge. The gradient steepens by three stages, in the last of which the road nosedives off the end of this promontory of the upland. It slides straight down through the woods to a pretty corner with a bench, where a smaller lane slips shyly into it from the right.

But this is the Rocombe Lane, which split off from the one you are on less than a mile back, and found its way here along a lower contour of the hillside. So you go on down Springhead Road.

It drops precipitously, at first around an S of curves, then straight, so that you see gaping in front of you the valley in which lies Uplyme. (And, if you have time to look up, there is another sight of the sea, now ahead to the left, through a cup. The cup is the mouth of the Lim valley.) You have to haul on your bicycle brakes to stop beside this farm, where a crossing lane offers ways left==, ahead==, and right.