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| Lorna Doone and John Ridd at the Water Slide - By Chordboard (Self, from material in my possession.) [Public domain, GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
"Three rivers rise near Simonsbath - the Barle, the Exe, and Badgworthy Water. The last is most beautiful; a walk from it brings us to Badgworthy Wood, a romantic spot where rocks rise over the varied and lovely ferns and brushwood, and deep glens are overshadowed with trees. It is delightful to be roving here and listening to the song of the birds, and the soft frou-frou of the leaves, while the gorgeous colours of the wild flowers and ferns charm the eye. At the upper end of the wood is a little streamlet over which there is a rustic bridge. This stream, which slides over a long rocky fall, is called the Water Slide, and is the spot where John Ridd, in Mr. Blackmore's celebrated story, climbed to meet Lorna Doone. The banks are rich in ferns, and the whole scene lovely. Following the path by the hillside up the valley, we reach the Doone Glen, immortalised in the same work. It is a valley, in the centre of which a high mound of earth rises, and divides it in two; it was here that those remarkable outlaws, the Doones, dwelt; but a few stones half-buried and in the ground are all that now remain of their houses. They were (apart from fiction) a band of outlaws and robbers, who were supposed to have come from the North in the time of the Commonwealth, and to have settled in this wild spot. The times were too disturbed and troubled for the Government to be able to remove or exterminate them, and the people of the neighbourhood, who paid them blackmail, were terribly afraid of them..." [cont.]
Valentine (undated)
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