If Nature is austere upon these hills, in the valley she is riotous. We seem to be dropping down and down into her generous heart, and, like the poet, we bless ourselves with silence. Far above us, as we wind beside the river, the tall sides of the valley are clear-cut against the sky; but just below the line of rock and heather the rich woods rise up and take triumphant possession of the hills, and fill every curve and hollow, and clothe the steep heights, and hang over the stream, and rustle by the wayside. We have dropped so suddenly and deeply into these green waves that we almost expect them to close over our heads. And as the road winds on we think at every corner that all this beauty must come to a sudden end. Surely we have passed the climax: surely the next curve will take us out of this enchanted valley into the world we know. But the beauty does not end. It grows; and only finds its climax in the red and green headlands, and in the lovely village that lies between the hills where the valley ends in the sea.
Lynmouth below and Lynton above, when one recalls them, seem, like Clovelly, too good to be true. All the charms of Devon are here. Charms that elsewhere seem incongruous are here in accord; grandeur and homeliness agree together; the lion lies down with the lamb. Boats and heather are in the same picture; the cliffs are clothed with woods almost to the water’s edge. The two places cannot be compared; they are so different that neither is complete without the other. Some love best the boats and shallow pools and shaded river of Lynmouth; and to some the wide view from Lynton hill seems the fairest thing in England.
VIEW FROM LYNTON.
Wherever we stay ourselves, there is little to be gained by taking the car up the cliff. The only roads that lead away from Lynton are the Parracombe road and the road to Hunter’s Inn, which is not open to motors—that wonderful road that runs through the wild Valley of Rocks, and past the Castle Rock with its fine views of the coast, and past Lee Abbey on its grassy plateau, and then for miles along the face of the cliff, with dense woods closing round it on every side, and, through the trees, hints of a blue sea very far below. This narrow way that is hung so high in air, and has so many sharp corners and steep pitches, is truly not a motoring road. It turns inland where a gap comes in the cliffs, and ends at Hunter’s Inn, in a narrow gorge that is sheltered from every wind.
From Lynton we look over the roofs of Lynmouth to Countisbury Hill and the red road that climbs it—apparently quite perpendicularly. Into the mind there steals a hope that this is not our road. But it is.
We may avoid it, of course, by going back to Simonsbath and taking the road through Exford and Whiddon Cross to Dunster—a road that is fairly good, if dull. But most of us will think the loss of all the beauty of the moors and woods is too heavy a price to pay for ease of travelling. The lower part of Countisbury Hill, it is true, is quite as rough and nearly as precipitous as the hill to Lynton, but as we rise the surface becomes quite good, and the gradient is nowhere so steep as at the bottom. And from the top of the cliff we look away across the heather to the high uplands of Exmoor, and see below us on the right the green cleft in the hills that is the Doone Valley.
RIVER LYN.