Lynton and Lynmouth
Lynton and Lynmouth are twin villages perched dramatically on the North Devon coast of England, within the Exmoor National Park, and they represent one of the most scenically spectacular settlements in the entire British Isles. Lynton sits atop a near-vertical cliff some 150 metres above sea level, while Lynmouth clings to the shore at the mouth of the East and West Lyn rivers where they meet the Bristol Channel. The contrast between the two is extraordinary: Lynmouth is intimate, harbour-centred and enclosed by towering wooded cliffs, while Lynton commands sweeping panoramas across the water toward Wales. Together they earned the nickname "Little Switzerland" from Victorian tourists who found the deep gorges and dramatic relief reminiscent of Alpine landscapes.
The human history of this area stretches back through the medieval period, when Lynmouth served as a modest fishing and trading harbour, its small fleet harvesting herring from the Bristol Channel. The villages grew in significance during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the Romantic movement swept through British intellectual life, and writers and artists began seeking out wild, sublime landscapes. Poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and his young wife Harriet spent several weeks at Lynmouth in 1812, and William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both visited the surrounding Exmoor country. By the Victorian era, the arrival of improved roads and eventually coach services turned the villages into fashionable resorts, with the construction of grand hotels and villas on the clifftop at Lynton.
The Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway, opened in 1890, is one of the most remarkable pieces of Victorian engineering in England and remains the steepest and longest water-powered cliff railway in the country. It connects the two villages across a gradient of approximately one in one and three quarters, running on a purely hydraulic principle: water from the East Lyn River is pumped into tanks beneath each car, and the heavier descending car pulls the lighter ascending one up the cliff on a counterbalance system. No electricity or fuel is used. The railway is a Grade II listed structure and still operates today, offering passengers a memorable, slightly vertiginous ride with expanding views over the harbour and channel as they ascend.
The physical character of Lynmouth in particular is deeply atmospheric. The village is hemmed in on three sides by cliffs thick with oak, ash and sessile woodland, and the two rivers crash together in a jumble of mossy boulders just before reaching the sea. The harbour wall frames a small beach of grey and ochre pebble. Whitewashed and rendered cottages crowd the narrow lanes, many draped in wisteria and climbing roses in season, and the salt air mingles with the smell of the oak woodland drifting down from the Valley of the Rocks and Watersmeet. The sound of rushing water is almost constant, as the Lyn rivers run fast and clear over their stony beds even in summer, and in winter their roar can be heard throughout the village.
That sound of water carries a shadow of tragedy, because on the night of 15 August 1952, the worst flood disaster in modern British history struck Lynmouth. Exceptionally heavy rainfall over the saturated peat moors of Exmoor sent a catastrophic wall of water down the narrow Lyn valleys. The flood carried boulders, tree trunks and debris through the village with devastating force, demolishing or severely damaging more than ninety buildings, destroying bridges and cars, and killing thirty-four people. The disaster prompted a complete rebuilding of the lower village and a significant reengineering of the river channels, which is why much of what visitors see today in Lynmouth dates from the 1950s rather than being genuinely Victorian or earlier. A small but affecting memorial and flood exhibition in Lynmouth tells the story of that night and the community's recovery.
The surrounding landscape is extraordinary by any measure. The Valley of the Rocks, a dry coastal valley just to the west of Lynton, is a strange geological formation of jagged rock towers and pinnacles rising from short turf grazed by feral Cheviot goats, with the sea visible beyond. Watersmeet, reached by a beautiful riverside walk upstream along the East Lyn, is a National Trust property at the confluence of two rushing streams set in a deep, fern-hung gorge. Exmoor stretches inland with its rolling heather and grass moorland, ancient Bronze Age barrows, red deer herds and the distinctive Exmoor ponies. The South West Coast Path passes through, offering walks in both directions along vertiginous clifftops with views that, on clear days, extend to the Welsh coast across the channel.
Visiting Lynton and Lynmouth requires some planning. The roads leading down into both villages are steep and narrow, particularly the A39 descent into Lynmouth, and the road down from Lynton to the harbour is extremely tight. Parking in Lynmouth is very limited; the main car parks are in Lynton, from which the cliff railway provides the sensible and enjoyable descent. The villages are busiest in July and August, when the combination of school holidays and fine weather draws large crowds to what are essentially small lanes and a modest harbour. Spring and autumn are arguably better times to visit: the woodland is spectacular in October colour, spring brings bluebells and fresh green to the valley woods, and the crowds are far thinner. Winter visits have their own austere appeal, with storms in the channel and the rivers running high, though some facilities close. The nearest significant town is Barnstaple, about twenty miles to the south, and the nearest railway station is at Barnstaple, from which bus services run to Lynton.
A curious and disturbing footnote to the 1952 flood involves persistent claims, investigated decades later, that the disaster may have been partly caused or dramatically worsened by a secret RAF cloud-seeding experiment called Operation Cumulus, which was being conducted over southern England in the days preceding the flood. Declassified documents and the accounts of RAF veterans interviewed in the early 2000s suggest that aircraft were deliberately seeding clouds with silver iodide and other agents over Devon shortly before the catastrophe. The government has never formally acknowledged any connection, and the full truth remains disputed, but the claims have never been definitively refuted either. They add an uneasy layer of possible human agency to what was officially recorded as a natural disaster.