Lynton and Lynmouth: A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland

by John Presland

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.