Read "Bladys of the Stewponey" by Sabine Baring-Gould online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
At the opening of this story something was said of the curious isolated and inhabited rock, like a huge tooth, that bears the name of Holy Austin.
This detached mass, rising some seventy feet high, stands on the slope below the headland of Kinver Edge, of which at some remote period it formed a buttress. It is honeycombed with dwellings, of which there are ten, in three storeys; the topmost have their faces built up in gables, but the chambers are all excavated in the rock. Originally there was no such face of masonry, but the disintegration of the screen of sandstone by weather and rough usage made it necessary to so front it. The lowest storey or ground floor opens on the same face, the east, and is almost on a level with the hillside, at all events at one point; but the middle storey is reached by a track in the face of the cliff, that falls away on the west in a manner so precipitous that these cave dwellings are accessible only by the ledge. Of the ten habitations, some of which have more than two rooms, only four are occupied at the present time; three are void, and the rest have crumbled into ruin.