At the end of the harbour pier stands the Rhenish Tower, a squat stone turret that George Tugwell, writing in 1863, judged to be "on the whole, of no great use." It went up in the nineteenth century, gained balconies later once people had decided the original was an eyesore, and was carried off entirely by the 1952 flood. It was rebuilt in 1954.
Behind it, two rivers arrive together. The East Lyn comes down a broad wooded valley from Watersmeet; the shorter West Lyn drops more sharply. They join at the bridge just before the harbour, which is both why the village exists and why it has so little flat ground to sit on. The name comes from the Old English hlynn, meaning a torrent, which for a settlement built where two of them collide is simply accurate. Cliff and woodland press in on every side, so Lynmouth runs in a thin line along the water: Lynmouth Street and its shops to the west, Mars Hill and the harbour forming the older maritime core, and later houses stringing eastward beside the river.
Lynton sits about five hundred feet directly above, and the usual way between the two is the cliff railway. It opened on Easter Monday in 1890 after the publisher Sir George Newnes backed a local engineer and builder, Bob Jones, to construct it, and Mrs Jeune performed the opening. The track is 862 feet long and rises around five hundred feet, worked entirely by water: the top carriage fills a tank until it outweighs the lower one and gravity does the rest. It remains the only fully water-powered railway of its kind in the country. Dogs are allowed on board, which matters, because the alternative is a set of steep footpaths, the Zig-Zag among them, described as an old smugglers' route. These are handsome walks and also the local commute, and the gradients are a real consideration if you are pushing a buggy or dragging a tired child. Getting here at all takes some patience: the nearest station is Barnstaple, eighteen to twenty miles off by road, with the 309 and 310 buses making the connection, and the roads across the moor are short in miles but never quick.
Four pubs work the harbour front. The oldest in feel is the Rising Sun, a crooked, low-beamed inn with sloping floors and narrow passages, run by Hall & Woodhouse, looking straight out to sea. The kitchen leans on Exmoor and the coast: small plates, duck-liver parfait, ham-hock terrine, Exmoor lamb rump, whole Devon sole, baked hake, moules marinière, an Exmoor beef burger, and on Sundays a choice of pork loin, Exmoor striploin or a cranberry-and-pistachio nut roast. Dogs are welcome in the bar, and there is a garden, though on a site this tight you should not expect a lawn. The inn keeps the tradition that R. D. Blackmore wrote chapters of Lorna Doone here; it is a tradition rather than a settled fact, and the building is old enough to carry it comfortably.
A few doors along, the Ancient Mariner is the harbour-front pub of the Bath Hotel and has committed fully to the maritime theme: the interior holds a full-size torpedo, an octopus sculpture by a local artist, and a good deal of other nautical clutter. The menu ranges wider than the decor suggests, from goat's-cheese arancini with beetroot and balsamic ketchup and Cornish mussels in leek, garlic, white wine and cream, to steak and Exmoor ale pie, the Ancient Mariner fish pie, Tarka lager-battered haddock, Devon venison ragu, buttermilk fried chicken with Asian noodles and coconut broth, and a cauliflower steak with lentil dhal. Families and dogs are accommodated, and there are vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options. In the pub's outdoor area, Simone's Sarnies sells focaccia proved for a day or two before baking, filled with things like bacon and egg or Cajun chicken.
The Barque, at 19 Lynmouth Street, is the newest arrangement of an old pub. The Bath Hotel group took on what had been the Village Inn in 2024 and reopened it as the Barque in April 2025, refurbished as part ship, part cabinet of curiosities, with a real log fire and separate bar and restaurant areas. Families and dogs are welcome here too. The fourth, the Rock House, sits over on Manor Green at the eastern edge of the harbour, a hotel bar and British restaurant with sea-facing grounds; in warm weather people eat in the garden looking out over the water, and dogs are welcome. Its Picturesque building dates to the early-to-mid nineteenth century, and it lost part of its grounds when the river was straightened after the flood.
For a proper sit-down meal there is also the Bay View at Bonnicott House, where the owner and head chef, Sarah, cooks from local farmers, fishermen and producers: onion, cider and thyme soup with a cheddar crouton, scallops with black-pudding crumb and pea purée, pork belly with cider and mustard, soy-glazed salmon with teriyaki noodles. Booking and pre-ordering are essential, and the restaurant keeps seasonal hours, so it is not a place to arrive at on spec.
The rest of the eating is casual and mostly aimed at the harbour. Mad 4 Seafood Café on Lynmouth Street does crab-and-prawn sandwiches, Porlock oysters, dressed-crab salads, seafood baskets and a platter called the Oh Buoy. Two chip shops compete for the walk-back trade: the Esplanade Fish Bar on the front, doing cod, haddock, chips, mushy peas and pickled onions, and the Harbour Shed on Riverside Road, refurbished a few years ago and now run by Matt Clark, who also holds the Rising Sun and the Rock House. Cafés fill in the gaps. The Coffee Mill on Riverside Road is an outdoor garden café with cakes, scones, pasties, baked potatoes and ice cream; the Coffee Shack out by the eastern beach pours Origin Coffee and Exmoor Tea and does hog-roast rolls and cream teas for walkers and swimmers; the Lyndale Tea Rooms run to paninis, jacket potatoes, omelettes, Devon cream teas, homemade cakes and a Jammy Dodger blondie; and the Pavilion Dining Room upstairs in the Pavilion has loose-leaf tea, coffee and cakes with a lift to reach it.
A proper food shop means a trip up to Lynton. What Lynmouth has instead is a run of small independent shops. At the corner of the Esplanade, opposite the harbour and the Rhenish Tower, Aladdin's Cave sells shells, nautical gifts, jewellery and framed work by three local artists; it is run by Linda and has traded for generations. Lynmouth Pottery is a working studio where Russell Kingston and Jessica Turrell make ceramics on site and sell their own pieces rather than souvenir stock, Kingston known for contemporary takes on traditional slipware. The Spinning Wheel on Riverside Road is packed with soft toys, teddy bears, puzzles and pocket-money toys, and there are others besides: XOX Lightning Tree for handmade vegan candles, the Lorna Doone Candy & Sweet Shop, Exmoor Sheepskin and the Lynmouth Soapery among them.
The walking is why many people come. The classic outing follows the East Lyn up to Watersmeet, where the river meets Hoar Oak Water in deep woodland and the National Trust runs a tea-room in Watersmeet House; the full circular back over Countisbury and the cliff-top coast is five and a half miles, takes around two and a half hours, and is graded challenging, with mud, steep steps and an exposed stretch. If that is too much, the Woodside walk is under a mile there and back and close to level, running beside the East Lyn past cascades, the flood-repair retaining walls and the Middleham memorial gardens. Westward, a coast-path circuit of under five miles climbs to the Valley of Rocks, a dry valley of tumbled crags with a resident herd of feral goats, and you can take the cliff railway up to save the first ascent. A fifty-minute harbour-and-rivers loop through Mars Hill and Manor Green gives a first orientation without leaving the village. Lynmouth is also where the fifty-one-mile Coleridge Way from Nether Stowey ends, and where the Two Moors Way, the hundred-and-two-mile Devon Coast to Coast from Ivybridge, finishes; the South West Coast Path runs through as well.
The two beaches are boulder, rock and coarse shingle rather than sand. The eastern one, below Countisbury Hill, is fine for a short walk, some supervised play and a dog, but there is no lifeguard and no facilities, and the tides come in fast under cliffs that shed rock, so it wants respect. The rock pools reward attention; rangers run guided sessions on the shore and turn up crabs, anemones and chitons. For wet afternoons there is the Flood Memorial Hall, whose permanent exhibition tells the 1952 story with photographs, survivor accounts and a scale model of the village as it stood before, and Glen Lyn Gorge, a waterworks and hydro museum with water wheels, cannons and turbine-driven fountains alongside a steep gorge walk. The Exmoor National Park Centre, opposite the harbour, is free, dog-friendly and useful for maps and advice, and Manor Green has putting greens, tennis courts and a play area in season.
The church, St John the Baptist, is Victorian: founded in 1869, finished in 1870 to designs by E. Dolby of Abingdon, with the north aisle enlarged in 1908 and the tower added in 1921. Inside there is a hexagonal carved stone pulpit, a brass eagle lectern of 1895, a font on Purbeck-marble shafts and oak choir stalls with a hint of Art Nouveau. It came through the 1952 flood intact and now holds a small flood exhibition of its own.
That flood is never far from the surface. On the night of 15 August 1952, after extreme rain over Exmoor, the East Lyn and the West Lyn burst through the village; thirty-four people died, fifty-five of the two hundred and twelve properties were destroyed and another twelve had to be pulled down so the channels could be widened. Riverside Road runs along the old bed of the East Lyn. The village that stands now is largely the rebuilt one, finished in 1958. Before all that, Lynmouth was a fishing place. Herring was landed and smoked in cottage cellars and sent as far as Holland, and one late-eighteenth-century account claimed the catch could be so heavy that surplus fish went onto the fields as manure. Tourism arrived during the Napoleonic Wars, when the Continent was closed and British landscapes came into fashion; Robert Southey called it "the beautiful little village... resembles a Swiss village," which is where the "Little Switzerland" tag began. Shelley brought his first wife, Harriet, for about nine weeks in 1812 while he worked on Queen Mab; she is said to have sewn fire balloons and floated his pamphlets out to sea in little boats before the household left in a hurry, worried about government watchers.
One story sits above the rest. On a January night in 1899, unable to launch into the gale at Lynmouth, the lifeboat crew took their ten-ton boat, the Louisa, overland to Porlock Weir instead. Around a hundred people and eighteen horses hauled it thirteen miles over Countisbury Hill, with men going ahead to widen the road and a wheel mended at the Blue Ball inn along the way. After eleven hours they launched, stood by the stricken ship, and every one of the eighteen people aboard her came home. That is the kind of thing the harbour remembers about itself. Down at the water the cliff-railway carriages are still passing each other on the slope, one going up as the other comes down, filling and emptying their tanks with river water exactly as they have since 1890.