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.
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.