Presently, at Brendon Two Gates (where there is but one gate), we pass out of Exmoor and Somerset and into Devon, at something under six miles from Lynmouth. Alongside the unfenced road across the wild common, as far as Brendon Rectory, the sheep lie in hundreds. Then suddenly the road drops down into the deep gorge of Farley Water, and comes, with many a twist, to Bridge Ball, a picturesque hamlet with a water-mill. One more little rise, and then the road descends all the way to Lynmouth, through the splendidly romantic scenery of the Lyn valley and Watersmeet, where the streams of East and West Lyn unite.
Circumstances have by this time made the traveller, who promised himself a luxurious and leisurely journey, a hot, dusty and wearied pilgrim. To such, the sudden change from miles of sun-burnt heights is irresistibly inviting. To sit beneath the shade of those overhanging alders, those graceful hazels, oaks, and silver birches, reclining on some mossy shelf of rock, and watch the Lyn awhile, foaming here in white cataracts over the boulders in its path, or smoothly gliding over the deep pools, whose tint is touched to a brown-sherry hue by the peat held in solution, is a delight. It is a delightful spot, to which the tall foxgloves, standing pink in the half-light under the mossy stems of the trees, lend a suggestion of fairyland.
WATERSMEET.
The road winds away down the valley, its every turn revealing increasingly grand hillsides, clothed with dwarf woods, and here and there a grey crag: very like the Cheddar Gorge, with an unaccustomed mantle of greenery. Descending this fairest of introductions to the North Devon coast, past the confluence at Watersmeet, where slender trees incline their trunks together by the waterfall, like horses amiably nuzzling, one comes by degrees within the “region of influence”—as they phrase it in the world of international politics—of the holiday-maker at Lynmouth, who is commonly so lapped in luxury there, and rendered so indolent by the soft airs of Devon, that Watersmeet forms the utmost bounds to which he will penetrate in this direction, when on foot. And when those who undertake so much do at length arrive here, they want refreshment, which they appear to obtain down below the road, beside the stream, at a rustic cottage styling itself “Myrtleberry,” claiming, according to a modest notice on the rustic stone wall bordering the road, to have supplied in one year 8,000 teas and 1,700 luncheons. There thus appears to be an opening for a philosophic discussion of “Scenery as an Influence upon Appetite.” The place is so far below the road that, the observer is amused to see, tradesmen’s supplies are carried to it in a box conveyed by aerial wires.
And so at length into Lynmouth, seated at the point where the rushing Lyn tumbles, slips, and slides at last into the sea. One misses something in approaching the place, nor does one ever find it there. It is something that can readily be spared, being indeed nothing less than the usual squalid fringe that seems so inevitable an introduction to towns and villages, no matter how large or small. There are no introductory gasworks in the approaches to Lynmouth; no dustbins, advertisement-hoardings, or flagrant, dirty domestic details that usually herald civilisation. The customary accumulated refuse is astonishingly absent: mysteriously etherialised and abolished; but how is it done? In what manner do the local authorities magic it away? Do they pronounce some incantation, and then, with a mystic pass or two, abolish it?
CHAPTER II
LYNMOUTH
Lynmouth would have pleased Dr. Johnson, who held the opinion that the most beautiful landscape was capable of improvement by the addition of a good inn in the foreground. We have grown in these days beyond mere inns, which are places the more luxurious persons admire from the outside, for their picturesque qualities—and pass on. Dr. Johnson’s ideal has been transcended here, and hotels, in the foreground, in the middle distance, above, below, and on the sky-line, should serve to render it, from this standpoint, the most picturesque place in this country. One odd result of this complexion of affairs is that when a Lynmouth hotel proprietor issues booklets of tariffs, including photographic views of the place, he finds that all his choice pictures contain representations of other people’s hotels. This is sorrow’s crown of sorrow, the acme of agony, the ne plus ultra of disgust. Resting on the commanding terrace of the Tors Hotel, seated amidst its wooded grounds like some Highland shooting-box, I can see perhaps eight others; and down in the village a house that is not either a hotel, an inn, or a boarding-house, or that does not let apartments, is a shop. And I don’t think there is a shop that does not sell picture-postcards! There are some few very fine villas, situated in their own grounds, on the hillsides, but whenever any one of these comes into the market, it also becomes a hotel.
And yet, with it all, there is a holy calm at Lynmouth. Save for the murmur of the Lyn, the breaking of the waves upon the pebbly shore, or the occasional bell of the crier, nothing disturbs the quiet. As there are no advertisement-hoardings, so also there are no town or other bands, minstrels, piano-organs, or public entertainers. Rows of automatic penny-in-the-slot machines are conspicuously not here. There is not a railway station. Nor is there anything in the likeness of a conventional sea-front. The Age of Advertisement is, in short, discouraged, and I am not sure that the ruling powers of the place have not something in the way of stripes and dungeon-cells awaiting would-be public entertainers.