Lynton

Lynton and Lynmouth, though often mentioned in the same breath, are very different in character. Lynton is the younger of the two settlements and sits atop a great cliff 600 feet high; Lynmouth, far below, clusters around the junction of the East and West Lyn rivers just before they reach the sea.

Lynton is a bright and breezy village, its houses and terraces mostly Victorian. The Lyn and Exmoor Museum, housed in a restored 16th-century house, has an interesting collection of tools and products of bygone local craftsmen and other exhibits relating to the area, including a reconstructed typical Exmoor kitchen of around 1800.

If you are visiting Lynton in August, you won’t be able to avoid the strange characters lurking in gardens and doorways, sitting on roofs or shinning up drainpipes. Don’t worry – they are just participating in the Lynton & Lynmouth Scarecrow Festival, a popular event that has become the largest and longest running such festival in the West Country.

To the west of Lynton, about a mile or so along a minor road, is one of the most remarkable natural features in Devon, the Valley of the Rocks. When the poet Robert Southey visited the area in 1800, he was most impressed by this natural gorge “covered with huge stones...the very bones and skeletons of the earth; rock reeling upon rock, stone piled upon stone, a huge terrific mass”. In Lorna Doone, the author RD Blackmore transforms the site into the “Devil’s Cheesering” where Jan Ridd visits Mother Meldrun who is sheltering under “eaves of lichened rock”. And it was after walking along the clifftop path, more than 1300 feet above the sea, in company with William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, that ST Coleridge was inspired to write his immortal Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

An unusual attraction in the valley is its herd of feral goats, introduced here in the 1970s. A good time to see them is in January when the nannies give birth to their kids.