Watersmeet
Jun. 18th, 2025 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
puddleshark
I have been away, over the border in Devon for a few days, staying on Exmoor. The hills are higher and wider and wilder in Devon, and the valleys and the streams rockier. One day I followed the Coleridge Way long distance footpath from Rockford to Watersmeet.
There is indeed a ford with some rocks at Rockford, a place where the East Lyn River is at its calmest and only knee deep, and you might roll up your trousers and wade across with caution. Unless the river is in spate...
... in which case you will have to stay at the Rockford Inn, a 17th century coaching inn, and wait for the river to subside.
Actually, these days there is a little wooden footbridge across the river just by the inn, and once across the river you can take the left hand path to Watersmeet.
The view from the bridge. The disconcertingly bouncy but fairly solid bridge.
It is a very, very green and glorious path, through the oaks and the beeches, with the East Lyn River tumbling over rocks and waterfalls alongside it. Green and glorious, but strangely free of romantic poets in white shirts.
Yellow-flowered Cow Wheat growing beside the path.
Watersmeet is where the East Lyn River and Hoar Oak Water meet, and flow on together down to Lynmouth.
Waterfall on Hoar Oak Water.
Watersmeet House. Once a fishing lodge, but now a National Trust tea room. I arrived at 4.30pm, and the tea room closes at 5pm. Excellent timing. There was tea: a pot of good strong National Trust tea to refuel me on the return journey.
Watersmeet is so stunningly beautiful, but I am a little disappointed in how my photos turned out - pretty enough, but lacking in magic. I suppose it's one of those places that only a professional photographer could capture. But I am kicking myself for not taking a polarizing filter with me.
Re: Wow!
Date: 2025-06-19 10:18 am (UTC)