From Porlock to the little port of Porlock Weir is a walk of two miles along a narrow lane between high green hedges. The road leads nowhere else but there and back; it is a kind of enchanted road which goes to an enchanted village, a village at the world's end, beyond the circle of mere reality. Every cottage in Porlock Weir is just such a little cottage as J. M. Barrie's fairies might build, low-browed under a steep thatch, with great tall chimneys, in which are cut just such little windows as would frame a fairy's head, looking out and laughing and nodding at you; whitewashed, half-timbered cottages, grouped together in a jumble of delicious curves and angles, with dusky, deep oak doorways, and stone steps hollowed by the feet that have gone in and out, and long leaded windows, softly yellow with lamplight in the mellow twilight of summer evenings, and gardens--oh, gardens that are small, and walled with stone, and running over with colour and bloom as no other gardens in the world could ever be! Hydrangeas, geranium, larkspur and evening primrose, columbine, forget-me-not, roses--and, indeed, the roses have gone wild with freedom, and threaten to overflow and drown the village, trailing over the wall, running up the tall chimneys, thrusting in at the open windows--nor are there names for all the flowers that bloom here, for all the mellow gold and crimson and blue and yellow and purple that glow in the sunlight, and fade gently into shadows of themselves as night falls. Beyond is the sea, all round the flowering meadows of the marsh, behind the moors; to anyone who has had the fortune to see Porlock Weir on such a day in May as this I recall, when this England of ours seems, to our fancy, to gather up all beauties of colour and sound and scent and sunlight of which the long winter and the chill, reluctant spring have starved us, and offer them all at once in immeasurable bounty, this village will seem to them to have the loveliness of magic.
The beauty of Exmoor is a stranger beauty and more remote than that of these lovely villages. It is the beauty of space, I suppose, and the great open arch of the sky; it is the clouds and cloud shadows, the changing light from dawn to evening through the blazing colourless hours of midsummer noon to the tender light of the falling day, when the land lies in long, suave, misty curves; it is the swirl of mist down its hillsides, and the solemn banking of great heavy rain-clouds, purple and black, above it, that gives it so rich and varied a beauty: for it is like a great open canvas, on which an artist's hand makes wonderful pictures of a myriad changes of sun and shadow. Anyone who has seen Exmoor, as Mr. Widgery has seen and loved and painted it, on a still September night, under the mellow splendour of the harvest moon, high above the infinite shadowy blue of the horizon and the misty moor, has seen a rare loveliness he must travel far to match.