ather, and grey with the wiry grey grass
that grows on moors and mountains, I could see the grey backs of the
gulls, flying far below me. It was a very still morning, but I saw a
fishing-smack, which had been lying motionless, catch a sudden rise of
wind and come about, leaving a white circle of foam in her wake. From
the height where I walked she looked infinitely little, like a ship in
a fairy-tale, no bigger than a walnut shell; I could see the clear
small reflection of her tiny hull in the smooth water, her sails
rosy-tinted in the morning sunlight, very beautiful and magical. There
was no fleck of cloud in all the wide blue of the sky, but the horizon
was hidden by a faint haze, sunlit but impenetrable, and from somewhere
in the mist came the reiterated wails of a siren, from some ship
groping its way up the Bristol Channel.

I rounded a corner from shadow into sun, and below me lay a tiny creek,
a churn of foam round its rocks, the blue water running green and sandy
in the shallows, and a flock of wheeling gulls to possess it; before me
rose the great crag of the Castle Rock, each plane and angle of its
twisted slate pile cut sharply in light and shadow, and against this
sullen grey background a newly flowered gorse bush blazed in the
sunlight.

[Illustration: The Valley of Rocks]

The Castle Rock stands at the mouth of the Valley of Rocks, about which
so much has been written, which has been compared to an amphitheatre of
giants, or the scene of some titanic conflict, where the huge granite
crags and boulders have been torn up and tossed about by supernatural
and terrific forces. In honesty I must admit that this seems to me an
exaggeration. Any walker who goes with this in his mind must, I think,
be disappointed; the place is wild enough, and barren enough, a bleak,
bare, waterless brown dip in the high lands, without tree or stream to
soften it, except in a stone fold, a winter shelter for sheep, where a
few twisted and stunted alders exist stubbornly; but the outcrops of
rock from the brown grass are not specially remarkable to anyone
familiar with cliff scenery, and there are many gorges within twenty
miles of Lynton which are, to my mind, wilder and grander. There are
hut-circles of the neolithic age in the valley, though many of them
have been destroyed by the people who live round, to build the walls of
their own cottages; but the often-repeated fantasy of this valley as
the haunt of Druid rites s