eems to me, not only unsupported by evidence,
but without justification, in the formation of the valley or the
wildness of the rocks.

Brown under the sunlight, shadeless and glaring, when a blustering
north-easter is blowing down it, the Valley of Rocks is a bitter and
inhospitable spot; I have been glad to go into the sheep-fold and
crouch under the lee of the stone wall for a moment's respite from the
wind and the stinging particles of sharp dust that it flung in my face
as I battled up the road. Once, in such a wind, I climbed the Castle
Rock, and squeezed myself between two great boulders looking seaward
over the choppy water--it was a land wind, which does not send the
waves rolling in great breakers, very splendid to see, but worries it
and dirties it, leaving broken cross waves of muddy grey water--and I
startled a pair of ravens who had built a nest on a sharp ledge of
rock, just beyond where I sat, and had not heard me coming, because of
the noise of the wind. They startled me also, as one of them flapped
out, close to my face, and flew screaming away, as I pulled myself up
into shelter, but the other stood on its jut of rock, almost within
arm's length, and looked at me. I saw its ugly long head as it turned,
its great beak and its neck of a bird of prey, and then it flew off;
and though I sat very still for a long time, hoping they might return,
they only flew round me and past me, showing me the great black sweep
of their wings as they went. But as I sat there, on that wild crag and
that wild morning, I noticed a tuft of dog-violets, growing out of a
fissure in the grey rock, and shaken and pounded by the bitter wind.
How wonderful is the tenacity of nature. A few grains of dust blown
into a crack of barren rock, a few seeds wind-carried also, and then
germination in the rain and sun, and when the spring comes, this little
clump of flowers in its due season, part of the intricate and mighty
forces of renewal throughout the fertile world.

When I was walking from Lynton to Heddon's Mouth, however, I crossed
the mouth of the Valley of Rocks, just behind the Castle Crag, and kept
the road to Lee Bay. Here it runs a few hundred yards inland, through
the grounds of Lee Abbey, a green and fertile fold of ground between a
sea-headland, and gently wooded ground that rises inland. The abbey,
which is beautifully situated, with a hump of cliff sheltering it
seaward, and a great smooth slope of green sward run