LYNTON
And so, round a spur of the hills, and high above the wooded gorges of
the West Lyn, we come to Lynton.
It lies upon the north-western slope of a hill, deep among trees; the
few houses and hotels--which is all that it consists of--seem to have
their roots stuck deep into the ground, while their tall chimneys soar
above the tree-tops. If you are freakish-minded, indeed, you may pitch
cherry-stones down your neighbour's chimneys, for the houses stand one
atop of each other, clustering along the North Walk, which is cut round
the side of the cliff; some built high above the road, with steep green
banks of laurel and glossy dark myrtle; some built below it, so that as
you walk the chimney-pots and tall pointed gables lie within touching
distance of your hand. It is curiously unfamiliar to see houses from
such an angle, a perspective of the roofs, with the windows and doors
become unimportant; it is an aeroplane view of the world, or perhaps,
more properly, a bird's view, for you may pause and poise to look down
on Lynton and Lynmouth as no aeroplane at present can.
[Illustration: Lynmouth Bay and Foreland]
The stony white road from the station and from Lynmouth struggles up
the hill to a small open space--what in any Italian hill-town would be
called a piazza, though it is only a few score feet in extent--opposite
the church and the Valley of Rocks Hotel. This, I believe, is the only
level spot in the village, save a club tennis-ground, which has been
levelled out of the hillside, for the few shops or houses run
precipitately down the little side-streets, or up towards the top of
Hollerday Hill. It is also the original site of the old village of
Lynton, when it had no fame as a holiday resort, and barely a history,
being left alone on its lofty cliff, as of no special value to anyone;
for, although the present parish church is partly Perpendicular and
partly of a later date, while the chancel is modern, it stands upon the
foundations of a small earlier church, which, surrounded by a few poor
cottages, with walls of cob and roof of thatch, a rough ladder leading
to a sort of loft, which was the sleeping apartment of all the family,
and a little patch of herb garden in front of each, comprised the
village of Lynton when we find it first, in the thirteenth century,
mentioned as a parish in the "valor" of Pope Nicholas.
Below it, then as now, lay the small fishing village of Lynmouth--or
Leymouth, as it was formerly called--a similar group of rude small
cottages, clustered in isolation, with the sea before and the great
moors behind, the people subsisting chiefly on coarse bread, salted
meat, and fish--often stale fish, for fish was the one thing of value
that Lynmouth yielded, and that would go to some representative of Ford
Abbey, under whose rule Lynton and Lynmouth came. Yet it should surely
have been easy, with a little help and instruction, to have grown many
varieties of vegetable food, for flowers grow in abundance, and
evergreens grow to a great size and beauty, while the variety of trees
is remarkable--larch, chestnut, sycamore, oak, ash and birch, elm and
beech, showing the fertility of the soil and the temperateness of the
climate, in spite of the seaward position of the village.
But it is not the history of Lynton, nor its old associations, which
calls us to it, but its beauty entirely. Stand upon one of the
terraces of Lynton on a still summer evening, looking east to
Countisbury Foreland, and see the water of the bay still and gleaming
in the evening light, the great headlands ruddy and golden above it.
The steep sides of the gorge of the East Lyn are warm and sunlit, they
glow richly with purple and russet; over the rocks of the valley a
faint flicker of grey mist begins to hang above the stream. From the
trees around and below comes a great cawing of rooks, drowning the rush
of the water below; they settle into their nests in the great green
elms, then suddenly there is a caw, a scurry, a rush, and they fly up
as if shot out of the tree-tops. There is a flapping of wings, and
much angry sound; they circle once or twice, and then sink back to
their homes again. It is a beautiful sight to watch a rook volplaning
down to a tree as you can watch them from the terraces at Lynton;
moving on a level with your eye, you can see the detail of each
movement of their wings, see them let themselves drop through the air,
yet with muscles taut and legs and claws stretched ready for a foothold
on the particular slender branch which is home.
As you watch, amused and interested, as this protracted nightly
programme is enacted--and never yet, throughout England, have any rooks
gone to bed quietly--the colour fades from the headland and the sea,
the mist has gained on the valley, drawing its grey wisps and streamers
higher and higher up the sides of the gorge; the tide has gone out,
very smooth and still, leaving a broad flat stretch of wet shore in the
little bay, which shines with the last of the daylight like a clear
mirror; the lights of the houses in Lynmouth begin to show through the
trees, pale yellow in the twilight, patches of soft colour, rather than
light; and the rushing of the river sounds very loud because of the
silence of the birds. Inland the hills lie, fold behind fold, in
gentle, misty curves; it is that exquisite hour which only northern
summers give, when the slowly-fading twilight and the slowly
brightening moon hold earth and sky in a faint pellucid light.
Or take a walk, on a bright May morning, from Lynton to Heddon's Mouth,
along the cliffs, and see open before you, step by step, seven miles of
the loveliest coast scenery, perhaps, in England.
First there is a wooded strip of road, called the North Walk, which
runs round the side of Hollerday Hill. The shadows are dewy in the
early morning, and birds are singing from the green mass of the trees
on either hand; there is a faint smell of wood-fires from the houses
below, acrid and very pleasant; the chestnut leaves are just opening,
and the sycamores have still the early flush of red on their tiny
leaves; it is very cool and fresh under the trees. Then the wood stops
abruptly, and the road runs out on the bare hillside and winds round
the great headland to the Valley of Rocks. Behind, the wall of cliff
rises steeply, great boulders and outcrop of rock, fantastic in the
sunlight; below it falls sheer to the sea, where the misty blue turns
green at the base of the cliff. Looking down the sheer slope, which is
dull brown with last year's heather, and grey with the wiry grey grass
that grows on moors and mountains, I could see the grey backs of the
gulls, flying far below me. It was a very still morning, but I saw a
fishing-smack, which had been lying motionless, catch a sudden rise of
wind and come about, leaving a white circle of foam in her wake. From
the height where I walked she looked infinitely little, like a ship in
a fairy-tale, no bigger than a walnut shell; I could see the clear
small reflection of her tiny hull in the smooth water, her sails
rosy-tinted in the morning sunlight, very beautiful and magical. There
was no fleck of cloud in all the wide blue of the sky, but the horizon
was hidden by a faint haze, sunlit but impenetrable, and from somewhere
in the mist came the reiterated wails of a siren, from some ship
groping its way up the Bristol Channel.
I rounded a corner from shadow into sun, and below me lay a tiny creek,
a churn of foam round its rocks, the blue water running green and sandy
in the shallows, and a flock of wheeling gulls to possess it; before me
rose the great crag of the Castle Rock, each plane and angle of its
twisted slate pile cut sharply in light and shadow, and against this
sullen grey background a newly flowered gorse bush blazed in the
sunlight.
[Illustration: The Valley of Rocks]
The Castle Rock stands at the mouth of the Valley of Rocks, about which
so much has been written, which has been compared to an amphitheatre of
giants, or the scene of some titanic conflict, where the huge granite
crags and boulders have been torn up and tossed about by supernatural
and terrific forces. In honesty I must admit that this seems to me an
exaggeration. Any walker who goes with this in his mind must, I think,
be disappointed; the place is wild enough, and barren enough, a bleak,
bare, waterless brown dip in the high lands, without tree or stream to
soften it, except in a stone fold, a winter shelter for sheep, where a
few twisted and stunted alders exist stubbornly; but the outcrops of
rock from the brown grass are not specially remarkable to anyone
familiar with cliff scenery, and there are many gorges within twenty
miles of Lynton which are, to my mind, wilder and grander. There are
hut-circles of the neolithic age in the valley, though many of them
have been destroyed by the people who live round, to build the walls of
their own cottages; but the often-repeated fantasy of this valley as
the haunt of Druid rites seems to me, not only unsupported by evidence,
but without justification, in the formation of the valley or the
wildness of the rocks.
Brown under the sunlight, shadeless and glaring, when a blustering
north-easter is blowing down it, the Valley of Rocks is a bitter and
inhospitable spot; I have been glad to go into the sheep-fold and
crouch under the lee of the stone wall for a moment's respite from the
wind and the stinging particles of sharp dust that it flung in my face
as I battled up the road. Once, in such a wind, I climbed the Castle
Rock, and squeezed myself between two great boulders looking seaward
over the choppy water--it was a land wind, which does not send the
waves rolling in great breakers, very splendid to see, but worries it
and dirties it, leaving broken cross waves of muddy grey water--and I
startled a pair of ravens who had built a nest on a sharp ledge of
rock, just beyond where I sat, and had not heard me coming, because of
the noise of the wind. They startled me also, as one of them flapped
out, close to my face, and flew screaming away, as I pulled myself up
into shelter, but the other stood on its jut of rock, almost within
arm's length, and looked at me. I saw its ugly long head as it turned,
its great beak and its neck of a bird of prey, and then it flew off;
and though I sat very still for a long time, hoping they might return,
they only flew round me and past me, showing me the great black sweep
of their wings as they went. But as I sat there, on that wild crag and
that wild morning, I noticed a tuft of dog-violets, growing out of a
fissure in the grey rock, and shaken and pounded by the bitter wind.
How wonderful is the tenacity of nature. A few grains of dust blown
into a crack of barren rock, a few seeds wind-carried also, and then
germination in the rain and sun, and when the spring comes, this little
clump of flowers in its due season, part of the intricate and mighty
forces of renewal throughout the fertile world.
When I was walking from Lynton to Heddon's Mouth, however, I crossed
the mouth of the Valley of Rocks, just behind the Castle Crag, and kept
the road to Lee Bay. Here it runs a few hundred yards inland, through
the grounds of Lee Abbey, a green and fertile fold of ground between a
sea-headland, and gently wooded ground that rises inland. The abbey,
which is beautifully situated, with a hump of cliff sheltering it
seaward, and a great smooth slope of green sward running down to a tiny
bay, and set among a fine group of sheltering pine-cedars, was built
about 1850, and somewhat too much "after the Gothic style." Parts of
the house are of pleasant red brick, overgrown with glossy ivy, but a
portion of the building--dining-room or library, I do not know
which--is like an east window of the Perpendicular period, fitted with
sun-blinds! There was never an Abbey here, either, and the name is as
new as the Gothic, but there is history here, and tradition as well,
for the house stands on the site of the old Grange Farm of Lee, which
was a large, rambling, plain building, with gabled ends and thick
walls, thatched roof and tall chimneys, to which Hugh de Wichehalse
sent his family when the plague ravaged Barnstaple in 1627.
After that the de Wichehalses were for nearly a century the chief
family of Lynton, and the last of them, Mary, to whom her father left
this estate, is said to have returned here, after the ruin of her
family and her betrayal by a faithless lover, and to have lived here
with a faithful servant until she was drowned off Duty Point, either by
an accident, or, as tradition asserts, by throwing herself down from
the cliff, which is the southern point of the little bay. Her body was
never found, and the mixture of fact and legend which has gathered
round her forms the basis of the tragic tale of Jennifred de Wichehalse
which is given by the Reverend Mundy.
After leaving the grounds of Lee Abbey the road climbs steeply up the
opposite headland. Up this hot and stony road I went, leaving Lee Bay
below me, the tiniest of bays, a little blue rockgirt pool, guarded
with great shags of rock, into which runs a rivulet, down the greenest
and shadiest of gorges, where the trees meet overhead, and the clear
water runs between narrow banks of primroses, and the bright grass and
flowers follow the stream right down to the wave-smoothed stones of the
beach.
The sun beat on me as I climbed the hill, and the dust rose as I walked
from the loose, stony road. I came gladly into the shelter of trees,
ash and oak chiefly, not yet out in leaf on this exposed slope, though
the celandines and wild anemone were in flower, and the ground and the
banks were green with new growth, ground-ivy and columbine, with its
heart-shaped glossy leaves, wild parsley, and the beautiful serrated
little leaves of the wild strawberry. On the left-hand side of the
road, on the higher slopes, the trees had all been cut (one of the sad
exigencies, I fear, of war), and they were burning the ground as I came
past; the smell of burning wood followed me, and the thin wreaths of
blue smoke, curling up the hillside, looked faint but ominous in the
morning sunshine like a warning beacon, indeed, of the approach of some
raider.
As I paused for breath, and stood looking down at the exquisite blue
glimmer of the sea through the grey stems of the ash and the delicate
thin tassels of the larches, a drama of hunting passed before me.
There was a thin squeak of terror and a scurry of wings, and some
swallows fled past with a hawk in pursuit. He was almost upon the
hindermost, when he crossed the path of a rook, who rose at him, cawing
angrily, and was immediately joined by two or three others, who rose
from the trees. The hawk turned with incredible swiftness; I saw the
great white bars of his underwings as he "banked" steeply, and went
off. The swallows had escaped and the rooks sank back into the green
tree-tops. All this happened within a yard or two of me; I saw it in
detail, terror in the movements of the swallows, and the eager stretch
of the hawk's head and the gleam of his eyes.
This is to me one of the charms of walking along these lonely high
cliffs: you must go quietly, and if not alone, then with a companion
who will stop often and stand quietly, and you will see birds from
beautiful and unfamiliar angles; below you, showing the broad stretch
of their wings and the markings of their backs, or on the level of your
eye, so that you can see the distinctive shape of their head and beak,
their flight and their movements. To see two buzzard hawks above a
blue sea, circling below you, and then rising higher and higher in a
great sweeping spiral, their wings taut till they have the upward curve
of a bow, and motionless as they ascend, save for an occasional broad
beat as they come, perhaps, to what airmen call a "pocket" in the air,
and so up until they are two specks against the dazzling brightness of
the sky, and you can no longer look at them--this is to me pleasure and
occupation enough for a long summer's morning. Or to watch the gulls,
hanging motionless head on to a brisk wind, or swooping and diving for
fish, black and white and grey changing swiftly across them as they
turn different angles of back and breast and wing to the sun; or to sit
on a high moorland as the evening falls, and hear the melancholy call
of the plover across the brown heather, and watch their strange, broken
flight as they fly low, and waver, and seem to fall as if you had
winged them--sitting there quietly with your hands before you and
intending no harm to any bird on God's earth--and then with a sudden
turn, which shows you all the white underpart of their wings, rising
again and flying strongly, their broad black wings dark against the
evening sky. All this may be had by anyone who will walk solitarily
and with seeing eyes.
How beautiful are birds in flight!--the dart of a kingfisher, the sweep
of a hawk, the dip and turn of a swallow, the tremulous beat of a
rising lark, even the scurry of a park sparrow for the little bit of
bread you throw him, all different and all beautiful; and what tiny,
ineffectual, maimed creatures they are when they are dead, and their
wings folded! What pitiful little structures of flesh and bones and
tiny heart and brain to be so bright and swift in the wide air!
The road rounds a headland and dips again to Woody Bay. The sweep of
the cliffs here is bold and beautiful, the bay is quite a wide sweeping
curve for this land of creek and gorge, and the slopes of the cliffs
are heavily wooded (which has probably led to the present corruption of
the name from the earlier form of Wooda Bay); but there has been an
outbreak of new houses and a new sanded road, which alarmed me, being
in the mind for birds and solitude, and I kept the high white road
which goes round the summit of the cliffs. Woody Bay is beginning to
be popular in the summer months among those less conventional folk who
like to live off the beaten track during their holidays, and are not
frightened by long distances or difficulties of access, but it is still
quite a tiny place and has not yet suffered that exploitation of the
picturesque which has overtaken Ilfracombe and Torquay, and many
beautiful spots in Devon. Seen from the high road that runs round the
cup of the hills its sprinkle of new little pink houses below look like
toys, and their dainty chalet-villa architecture fits the illusion; so
also does its smoothed green terrace of fields, which seem no bigger
than the nursery tablecloth, with Noah's ark animals, cows and horses,
feeding on them.
The road crosses the stream which runs into the bay, and I rested here,
sitting on the parapet of the bridge, before I took to the unshaded,
stony white upper road. There was a pleasant sound of falling water,
and the stream ran below me, between banks that were very green with
moss and beautifully shaded by sycamores.
From Woody Bay the scene grows wilder and grander. Seaward tower the
rocky cliffs, falling sheer to their base, jagged slate rocks which are
the home of gulls and ravens, with precipitous slopes of short and
slippery grass, where the mountain sheep feed; inland the brown moor
stretches, bare and open to the sky, with a cluster of little cottages
and a grey church hidden and sheltered in a dip of the ground.
From Woody Bay the road strikes inland to Martinhoe, which takes its
name from the same overlords of the district whose appellation is found
in Combe Martin (which in Domesday is written simply as Comba or Combe)
and across the moors to Parracombe, which has been the home of the
yeoman family of Blackmore since 1683. The little grey twelfth-century
tower which William de Tracy is said to have built, as he built many
churches in expiation of the murder of Thomas à Becket, stands just
above the railway line from Lynton to Barnstaple, but the church used
by the small population of the village--and this and Trentishoe only
number together three hundred souls--stands lower down the combe. As
one passes these villages, isolated on the wide moors and guarded each
by its lonely small church, rising squarely and almost without ornament
against the background of the hills, one thinks often of those
beautiful lines of Kipling's in the poem he calls "Sussex":
"Here through the strong unhampered days
The twinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
The Lord who made the hills."
I crossed a wild and desolate gorge, barren, rocky and windswept; the
tinkle of clear water ran down over the grey boulders out of sight and
dropped down the face of the cliff into the sea; brown and grey lay the
hillsides and rocks under the glaring noonday sun; there was no living
soul in sight, no movement, save far below the flight of a pair of
ravens or the white flick of a gull's wings out to sea. Gorge beyond
gorge lay the land, still and colourless in the circle of a sea and sky
widely and splendidly blue. I felt that I walked on a younger earth,
just emerged from its fierce chaos of whirling molten matter, and as
yet unsoftened by luxuriant vegetable growth, an earth of stark rocks
and hot mud, teeming with potential life, of dry thin air and blazing
sunshine, very harsh and desolate and beautiful.
[Illustration: Heddon's Mouth, near Lynton]
Then a great cleft runs inland, fenced by a bold headland on either
hand, and I have rounded Highveer Point and am looking down Heddon's
Mouth. Heddon is the corruption of the Celtic word "etin," which means
a giant, and the Celtic spirit which so named this wild valley had
indeed a sense of the poetry and grandeur of places. Sheer either side
rise the slate hills, bare, waterless, and treeless. The southern hill
is one steep slope of scree; the northern hill, Highveer Point, on
which I stand, is covered with dead gorse and heather, which they have
been burning in the spring, and the sharp smell lingers still. A
thousand feet below runs the river, shut narrowly between these great
cliffs, with hardly foothold for a sparse sprinkle of trees between
these dark walls, and for the ribbon of white road that runs from the
sea to Hunter's Inn, a mile inland. There two streams meet, and the
place is as green as a little paradise, and bright with running waters,
but it lies round the bend of the hill on which I stand, and what I see
before me is this shadowless great gorge, without tree or shrub or
flower, the magnificent shoulders of cliff lifted against the hot and
cloudless sky; inland the heat shimmering on the rounded surface of
hill behind hill, and out to sea a little froth of white where the blue
water breaks into foam on the point of some just submerged jag of rock.
A vast silence holds the place, save for the deep undertone of the
rushing water far below, so deep and so distant that it is rather like
a dull vibration in my brain than a sound in my ears. The heavy
buzzing of a fly and the rattle of the wind in the brim of my straw hat
do not break this impression of great silence; they seem to lie on it
rather, like feathers on the surface of a deep pool. The shadow of a
hawk goes slowly past me on the dusty white road and across the bare
hillside, on an outcrop of rock, bleak and grey in this brilliant
light, a butterfly, a red admiral, stands motionless, his wonderful
wings of crimson and iridescent blue stretched wide, and shining in the
sunlight with incredible colour.
There are scenes of a different beauty at Lynton from that of these few
miles of cliff--and to me lacking something of the spaciousness and
splendour of Heddon's Mouth--but beautiful none the less. Go into
Lynmouth, down the steep and stony road--a true Devonshire road, still
the same as Celia Fiennes described them in her tour through England in
1695: "Ye lanes are full of stones and dirt for ye most part, because
they are so close ye sun and wind cannot come at them"--among the
steep, tree-embowered, whitewashed houses, which with the sun blazing
on their flat white walls suggest rather a little village of the
Pyrenees or Northern Italy than Devonshire cottages, that and the
luxuriance of the trees through which the East Lyn and the West Lyn
foam down to the little beach, and the prodigal flowering of bushes and
shrubs. Follow the East Lyn up to Watersmeet, which is about two miles
from Lynmouth through one of the most beautiful wooded gorges in
England. Past the hotels you go, and a little straggle of small modern
houses, past the untidy little patch which would be the suburb of a
larger community, with upturned boats and washing drying in the sun,
and within five minutes a turn of the road hides Lynmouth and the sea
from your backward look, and you stand in the heart of a valley and
beyond signs of habitation. The southern slope is beautifully wooded,
showing every range and variety of green, from the light vivid green of
larches to the dull brownish tone of the oaks. The northern slope
rises brown and rocky, the edges clear-cut against the brilliant sky;
there is a great sound of birds, and always the noise of water running
over stones.
As you ascend the river the gorge becomes narrow and more thickly
wooded; the path winding along it is hot and close and still; the water
is clear brown in its depths, and green in the shallows and where it
slides over a mossy stone; it bubbles into foam in its tiny waterfalls
and cataracts and miniature whirlpools; it is deliciously sweet and
cool. The green moss grows to the very edge of its white stones, and
ferns and hart's-tongues and lilies-of-the-valley clothe the sides of
the hill; there are celandines and primroses and wild strawberry in
flower, and the lovely white cup of the ivy-leafed bell-flower.
Nowhere, perhaps, save in the west of England (I do not speak only of
Devon, for I know of little valleys in Cornwall which are as fertile as
the Garden of Eden, held in the rocky jaws of some bleak cliff), but in
what we call "the West," is there such peculiar beauty of contrast,
bold outlines of cliff and cove, great stretches of moor lying open to
the sky, and wooded combe and valley or small green sheltered hollow of
such blossoming fertility.
The Watersmeet, the point where the Hoaroak Water joins the East Lyn,
breaking down over a thunderous small white waterfall, and a beautiful
spot enough, is vulgarized by notices embodying the commercial rivalry
of two different tea-houses. By one you are invited to walk on the
right bank of the river, as being the only public footpath (given in
the official guide of the Lynton Urban District Council); by the other
you are invited to a "unique view" of the Watersmeet, and assured you
will be solicited for patronage in no way.
On the loneliest, loveliest day in early summer this smacks of tourist
parties, and I made haste to leave the river path and the sheltering
trees and climb the road to Brendon, a road as steep and hot, as stony
and glaring, as I have ever climbed. Up and up I went for half an
hour, seeing nothing but the banks and hedges on either hand; every
turn in the road I thought was the last span that would bring me out on
the hill-tops, and every turn of the road showed me another. But at
last I stood above Brendon, and before me spread the moors, brown and
purple in the sunlight, and the little old grey church of Brendon just
below me, in a slight dip of the high ground.
[Illustration: Castle Rock, Lynton]
The woods of the Lyn Valley climbed to my feet, and I sat down in the
shade of the outermost fringe of trees to eat my lunch, and dream and
muse, and doze away the first hot hours of the afternoon. I sat
looking down over the valley; below me and to right and left the green
spikes of the larches were aflutter in the wind; before me rose a great
bare shoulder of hill, outlined sharply against the blue. Overhead the
sun was blazing, but in the wood the sunlight hung mistily among the
trunks and branches of oak and birch; it looked as if the wood were
filled with tremulous sunlit water, rather than with air and sun. The
air from off the moors was keen and very sweet. I lay on the dry,
clean turf and moss, looking up at the cloudless sky; a solitary
swallow hawking far up seemed no bigger than a fly, and a brilliant
green fly on a leaf above me, buzzing turbulently, seemed portentously
big and important. I lost my sense of space and time and of the world
in relation to men, set, as it were, as the background to men, and I
slipped into a world which belongs to the birds and the mice and the
moles, and the fish in the clear stream below; I watched the
chaffinches and thrushes, and a little grey ash-tree near me which was
full of linnets, delicious, sleek, grey, sweet-piping, busy little
birds, sliding and skimming in and out of the tree, a little home of
song and love-making, of intimate and familiar life. I heard a cuckoo
calling from the thick woods of the valley below, like the note of a
bell, very far away. I noticed the unopened buds of the ash shining
like silver against the flawless blue sky; it seemed to me I had lain
there a hundred years looking at them, and hearing the thin song of the
linnets, in a world entranced from movement or the passing of time.
And then I fell asleep.