Lee Bay

LYNTON AND LYNMOUTH

A PAGEANT OF CLIFF & MOORLAND

BY

JOHN PRESLAND

ILLUSTRATED BY
F. J. WIDGERY

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
MCMXVII

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

LEE BAY . . . . . . . . . . . . frontispiece

BOSSINGTON HILL

DUNKERY BEACON

THE DOONE VALLEY

WOODY BAY AND DUTY POINT, WEST LYNTON

THE SHEPHERD'S COTTAGE: DOONE VALLEY

LYNMOUTH BAY AND FORELAND

THE VALLEY OF ROCKS

HEDDON'S MOUTH, NEAR LYNTON

CASTLE ROCK, LYNTON

DUTY POINT

THE MOORS NEAR BRENDON TWO GATES

HARVEST MOON, EXMOOR

THE DOONE VALLEY IN WINTER

LYNTON: THE DEVIL'S CHEESERING

DUNKERY BEACON FROM HORNER WOODS

LYNTON AND LYNMOUTH

CHAPTER I

DEVONSHIRE

The original Celtic name for Devonshire, the name used by the Britons whom Caesar found here when he landed, was probably "Dyfnaint," for a Latinized form of it, "Dumnonia" or "Damnonia," was used by Diodorus Siculus when writing of the province of Devon and Cornwall in the third century A.D. So that the name by which the men of Devon call their country is the name by which those ancient men called it who erected the stone menhirs on Dartmoor, and built the great earth-camp of Clovelly Dykes, or the smaller bold stronghold of Countisbury. At least, conjecturally this is so, and it is pleasant to believe it, for it links the Devon of our own day, the Devon of rich valleys and windy moors, the land of streams and orchards, of bleak, magnificent cliff and rock-guarded bay, of shaded combe and suave, fair villages, in an unbroken tradition of name and habitation with the men of that silent and vanished race.

Up and down the length of England, from the Land's End to the Northumbrian dales, lie the traces of these far-off peoples whose very names are faint guesses preserved only in the traditions of local speech. Strangely and suddenly we come upon the evidence of their life and death: here a circle of stones on a barren moor or bleak hilltop, there a handful of potsherds