150 
A NATURALIST’S NOTES IN NORTH DEVON. July, 1890 . 
sharp zit zit of another Dipper caught my ear as he sped 
along on rapid Kingfisher-like flight. The hanging oak woods 
were very quiet, and devoid of bird music, for it was the silent 
moulting season, and the Green Woodpecker and Marsh 
Titmouse are the only birds seen which I find entered in my 
note book. 
A right glorious drive it is for the naturalist from Ilfra¬ 
combe to Lynton by coach. The new road, which keeps 
along the coast as far as Watermouth, affords fine sea views ; 
but more interesting, though less convenient, is the old coach 
road, into which we strike at Combe Martin. Here, where 
our first halt is made, the children bring specimens of the 
pretty silver-lead-ore from the mines, worked three hundred 
years ago. The deep, narrow road along which we pass is 
bordered with high fern-clothed banks, topped with rampant, 
straggling hedges, whose hazel boughs in places brush our 
faces even on the coach top. The scarlet berries of the 
rowans, conspicuous where the trees overhang the edges of 
the wooded and ivy-clad cliff at Watermouth, still brighten 
the hedges, and a noticeable feature is the thick masses of tall 
Hemp Agrimony (Eupatorium cannabinum j, with dull purplish 
flowers. A terrifically deep descent brings us down to Parra- 
combe, where we pull up at the “ Pox and Goose,” close to 
which runs the clearest and brightest of trout streams. Then 
a long pull up the two-mile hill and we come out on a new 
scene, into fresh light air. Parracombe Common, in all its 
August glories, of which who can tell! Who can convey any 
notion of the effect produced by Ulex nanus and Erica cinerea, 
the dwarf gorse and heather, purple and gold, purple and 
gold, stretching for miles and miles ? A few sheep are feeding 
on the rather scanty provender. Little horned fellows, 
different enough from the large heavy West Devon sheep, for 
we are on the hitherto unenclosed borders of Exmoor Forest 
now, and these are Exmoor sheep. A pair of croaking Car¬ 
rion Crows flap away as we approach; they have, no doubt, 
sometimes in winter an opportunity of tasting their nominal 
food after one of those great snowstorms of which Jan Eidd tells 
us so graphically. Far off on the southern horizon, blue in the 
distance, we catch sight of the granite peaks of Dartmoor, forty 
miles away. A few more miles and we are skirting the valley 
of the West Lynn, to the beauties of which it would be hard 
to do justice. Its precipitous sides, clothed with wood, in 
which the natural oak scrub is fast giving way to the more 
profitable larch plantations ; and at the bottom, now through 
a narrow belt of meadow, now through and half hidden by 
the woods themselves, ripples and babbles, splashes and 
foams, the silver river. 
