The LYN, sometimes called the East Lyn, to distinguish it from the West Lyn, is one of the shortest as it is one of the most wilful of the Devonshire streams, its length not exceeding a dozen miles, while in a direct line its outlet is only half that distance from its source. Rising on Exmoor, a little to the north of Black Barrow Down, its upper valley is bleak and bare, and in this part of its career there is little to differentiate it from other moorland waters that hurriedly leave the dreary solitudes in which they have their birth. Above Oareford it dashes and splashes along over boulders and rocky ledges, the hills that rise from either bank being bare of aught but ling and brake and heather, save that the lower slopes bear here and there a group of wind-swept scrub-oaks; it is only lower down that the ravine assumes the combination of wildness and luxuriance in which Lyn is excelled by none of its sister streams. How can we pass Oareford without recalling that we are in the country of John Ridd and the Doones? It was in the parish of Oare that the giant yeoman was born and bred; it was in the little Perpendicular church of St. Mary that he married the lovely but elusive Lorna Doone; it was from its altar that he sallied forth to pursue the man whom he believed to have slain his bride, his only weapon the limb of a gnarled oak which he tore from its socket as he passed beneath it. Many there be who come into these parts to spy out the land, and to such it is a pleasant surprise to find that there are still Ridds of the Doones engaged upon the soil at Oare. Less palatable is the discovery that Mr. Blackmore has thought fit to mix a good deal of imagination with his word-pictures. The Badgworthy “slide,” in particular, which the hero was wont to climb in order to get speech of the captive maiden, has been the occasion of grievous disappointment. It is at Malmsmead that the Badgworthy Water—the dividing line between Devon and Somerset—falls into the Lyn, and “makes a real river of it”; the “slide,” a mile or so up the “Badgery” valley, as they call it hereabouts, is simply a succession of minute cascades formed by shelving rocks over which a little tributary stream glides down out of the Doone Valley.
The novelist has not scrupled to take ample liberties with such of his characters as are not purely imaginary, as well as with his scenes; but, unless tradition is a very lying jade, the Doone Valley really sheltered a gang of robbers, said to have been disbanded soldiers who had fought in the Great Rebellion. One may still see traces of what are believed to have been their dwellings, though one writer profanely identifies them with pig-sties; and it is credibly stated that the destruction of the miscreants by the country-folk was provoked by the cruel murder of a child, as described in the romance. Nor may one doubt that the mighty John was an actual personage, though it were vain to seek for his history in biographical dictionaries. As to Lorna, what if Mr. Blackmore has invented her? Is that to be counted to him for unrighteousness?
Photo: Chapman & Son, Dawlish.
“CLAM” BRIDGE OVER THE WALLABROOK.
From Malmsmead, with its primitive bridge of two arches, to Watersmeet, where the Brendon Water plunges down a charming glen on the left to lose itself in the larger stream, the Lyn ravine is a very kaleidoscope of beauty and grandeur. Watersmeet, “an exquisite combination of wood and stream, the one almost hiding the water, the other leaping down over rocky ledges in a series of tiny cascades,” must tax the painter’s pencil, and is certainly no theme for a prosaic pen; and of Lyndale the same despairing confession must be made. Every turn in this lovely glen reveals some new beauty, until, with Lynton lying in the cup of a hill on the left, one reaches Lynmouth, where, just before the river plunges into the sea, it receives the waters of the West Lyn as they merrily tumble out of Glen Lyn. Southey, whose description of these and other features of the place has been quoted to the point of weariness, was one of the first to “discover” Lynmouth; and in these days it has no reason to complain that its unrivalled attractions are not appreciated. For some years it has had its little mountain railway, to spare those whose chief need is exercise the fatigue of walking up the hill to Lynton; and now the lines have been laid which bring it into touch with the South Western and Great Western systems at Barnstaple. Let us hope that it will not presently have to complain of defacement at the hands of the lodging-house builder, and of desperation inflicted upon it by hordes of day-trippers, with their beer-bottles and greasy sandwich-papers!
