nd unpretending small villages,
Parracombe, Brendon, Bratton-Fleming, each with its history and its
little church, and the homesteads from which the young men have gone,
in their humble twos and threes, to take their part in this war of
millions. There is the grand solitude of Heddon's Mouth and the
raven-haunted cliffs to Lynton; there is Lynton itself, drowned in the
green woods that surge up the steep hillside; there is the West Lyn
Gorge, shadeless and sultry even on a spring day, and the East Lyn
Valley, where ferns and lilies of the valley grow, and every green
thing that loves moisture and shade; and the Watersmeet, where there is
a perpetual rushing of waters which drowns the song of the birds; there
is Porlock, between the moors and the marshes, and the drowned forest
of Porlock Bay; there is the green magnificence of Horner Woods or
Bossington, and the cloud-wreaths that gather and lift on the summit of
Dunkery; and here, easternmost of our journey, is Dunster, the castle
on its wooded hill rising above the long street of the village, and the
edge of Exmoor beyond, dipping now from its bleak heights in gentle
wooded undulations to the shores of the Bristol Channel. The Tower on
the Hill, that is the meaning of the word "Dunster," and the name
fittingly describes it; for it dominates many miles of beautiful and
fertile country, and stands feudally above the village, perceptible
from every angle of the street, at once a guardian and a menace. It
has stood so for a thousand years, for it was a stronghold of the Saxon
Kings before William the Conqueror gave it to William de Mohun, and he
built his gloomy Norman fortress, with its massive, windowless walls,
and squat strong towers, of which nothing now remains save a
bowling-green which marks the site of the old keep.

The main part of the present building dates from "the spacious days of
great Elizabeth," when her nobles needed rather magnificent
country-houses than fortresses for defence; but the gatehouse, with its
four flanking towers, was built in the time of Henry V, and the oldest
part of the castle is the gateway by the side of the main entrance,
which was built by Reginald de Mohun in the time of Henry III, while
Henry Luttrell added the south front in the "antique taste" of a
hundred years ago. Yet, like so many cathedrals, and not a few of the
castles and great houses of England, like Hampton Court or Ely
Cathedral, the varying styles of architecture