There is always, in the summer, a cheerful stir in Lynton, and the railway has by no means abolished the four-horsed coach that plies between Ilfracombe and this point, and even on to Minehead. But when the close of the season has come and the holiday world has gone home, what then? The hotel-keepers and all the ministrants to the crowds of visitors must surely, to protect themselves from sheer ennui, institute a kind of desperate “general post,” and go and stay with each other, on excessive terms, to keep their hands in, so to say.
The six miles or so of the North Devon coast between Lynmouth and Glenthorne, where it joins Somerset, may best be explored from Lynton by taking the coast-line on the way out, and returning by the uninteresting, but at any rate not difficult, main road. The outward scramble is quite sufficiently arduous. The road sets out at first, artlessly enough, full in view of the sea. It rises from about the sea-level at Lynmouth, steeply up to a height of some four hundred feet at Countisbury, passing beneath a rawly red, new villa built on the naked hillside by a wealthy person whose hobby it is said to be to visit a fresh place almost every summer, to build a house, and then to move away. The name of the house I forget; suffice it to say that the Lynmouth people, gazing with seared eyes upon it, know it as “The Blot.” Below, on the left, is the strand known as “Sillery Sands,” which sounds like champagne. Some style them “Silvery” sands, others even “celery”; but they are not “silvery”; and no celery, and still less any champagne, is to be found there.
At the summit of this steep road are the few scattered cottages of Countisbury, or “Cunsbear,” as the old writers have it. Few would suspect that the names of Countisbury and Canterbury have an origin nearly akin; yet it is so, “Kaint-ys-burig”--the “headland camp,” being closely allied to the original Kaintware-burig, the “camp of the men of Kent.” But to the writers of a generation ago, who wrote in a blissful age when there were no students of the science of place-names to call them to account, the name was set down as a contraction of “county’s boundary.” Distinctly good as this may possibly be as an effort of the imagination, it is not borne out by facts; for the county boundary did not exist at the time when the name came into being, county divisions having been settled at a much later date. Moreover, the boundary is a good three miles distant. Old Risdon, writing in 1630, is even more delightful. He takes what the scientific world styles the “line of least resistance,” and gaily dismisses it with “probably the land of some Countess.”