Valley of Rocks

You're standing in a valley that runs the wrong way. Instead of dropping down to the sea, it runs parallel to it, a dry U-shaped trough walled with jagged tors of weathered sandstone, and picking across the screes above you, quite unbothered, are wild goats. This is the Valley of Rocks, just west of Lynton, and it is one of Exmoor's strangest and most celebrated landscapes.

The geology is the heart of the puzzle. This is what's called a dry valley, a valley cut by a river that has since vanished, diverted or lost, leaving this deep hollow running along the coast with no water in it. Its tors are Devonian sandstone, the same hard Hangman Grits that armour this coast, frost-shattered over the ages into pinnacles and stacks that people long ago gave names to. There is Castle Rock, rising sheer above the sea, the great landmark tor of the valley. There is Rugged Jack, a name that suits its broken, tumbled crest. And there is the Devil's Cheesewring, because local legend held that only the Devil himself could have flung these stones into such wild disorder, piling them up as if for some dark purpose of his own. The names alone tell you how this place has always stirred people's imaginations, and it has drawn admirers for centuries. In the Romantic age the poets came walking here, Wordsworth and Coleridge among them in 1797, and later this coast gave R. D. Blackmore the wild backdrop for his novel Lorna Doone.

As you explore, look for a few things. First, Castle Rock, the great tor above the sea. Walk out toward it, and from its foot the view opens along the coast with the path threading beneath the crags. Second, the goats. A feral herd has roamed here for generations, descendants of animals once kept in the valley, and you'll spot them on ledges and skylines, sure-footed on ground that would stop you dead. Please don't feed or approach them. Third, look up at the crag tops for birds, for the ravens that breed here croaking over the pinnacles, for stonechats among the gorse, and now and then a peregrine cutting the air. Fourth, notice the plants clinging to the exposed slopes, the heather and gorse and cushions of pink sea campion. And fifth, back toward Lynton, look for the Victorian cliff railway, opened in 1890, which still runs water-powered between the twin towns of Lynton and Lynmouth below, one perched on the clifftop and the other down at the shore.

Here's a thing worth holding in mind as you stand among these tors. In 1797, two young poets walked out along this coast, deep in talk, their heads full of a new kind of poetry that would find its wildness and its wonder not in tidy gardens but in exactly this, raw rock, wind, sea and solitude. Wordsworth and Coleridge were on the walking tours that helped shape English Romanticism, and it was landscapes like this one, elemental and untamed, that fired them. When you look up at Castle Rock with the goats silhouetted on the skyline and the wind off the Channel in your ears, you are seeing very nearly what they saw, and feeling, perhaps, a little of what moved them.

From here the Coast Path presses on out of Lynton toward Combe Martin, and it's a long, hilly stage, some of the most demanding walking on the whole trail, so it pays to start early and pace yourself. The crag tops can be wild and windy in any season, so keep well back from the edges, especially when the wind is up. Take your time among the tors, watch for the goats one last time, and walk on. Walk safe.