Lynmouth, Devon
Historical Description
Lynmouth, a village in Devonshire, on a small bay of the Bristol Channel, at the mouth of the rivers East Lyn and West Lyn, 18 miles NE of Barnstaple. It has a post, money order, and telegraph office under Barnstaple. A service of first-class steamers plies between Ilfracombe, Bristol, Cardiff, and Lynmouth in the season. It is a beautiful and romantic place, is frequented for sea-bathing, and has several hotels, salt-water baths, and excellent lodging-houses. Much of the older portion of it was overwhelmed and destroyed in 1607 during a gale at springtide. The bold promontory called Conntesbury Foreland, flanks the E side of its bay; precipitous hills, falling abruptly to the water's edge from a height of about 1300 feet, are all around; and a highly romantic tract, comprising wild ridges, towering crags, sub-alpine valleys, and impetuous streams, and merging into Exmoor, forms the environs. Southey pronounced Lynmouth the finest spot he ever saw, except Cintra and the Arrabida, and says, respecting its two rivers-" Each of these flows down a combe, rolling down over huge stones like a long waterfall; and immediately at their junction they enter the sea, and the rivers and the sea make but one sound of uproar. Of these combes, the one is richly wooded, the other runs between two high, bare, stony hills. From the hill between the two is a prospect most magnificent; on either hand combes, and the rives before the little village-the beautiful little village. Ascending from Lynmouth, up a road of peculiar steepness, you reach a lane which by a slight descent leads to the Valley of Eocks-a spot which is one of the greatest wonders in the west of England." The streams afford prime trout fishing, and occasionally salmon fishing. In the winter large quantities of herrings are frequently caught. An hydraulic lift has been constructed for taking persons up from Lynmouth to Lynton. In 1886 Lynmouth was ecclesiastically annexed to Countesbury, and a small church was erected in the Early English style. There is a lifeboat station.
Maps
Online maps of Lynmouth are available from a number of sites:
- Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- Google Streetview.
- National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
- OpenStreetMap.
- old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
- Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)
Newspapers and Periodicals
The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following newspapers covering Devon online:
Visitations Heraldic
The Visitation of the County of Devon in the year 1564, with additions from the earlier visitation of 1531, is online.
The Visitations of the County of Devon, comprising the Heralds' Visitations of 1531, 1564, & 1620, with additions by Lieutant-Colonel J.L. Vivian, published for the author by Henry S. Eland, Exeter 1895 is online.