Lynton

Water, height and the Valley of Rocks

The two cars of the cliff railway pass each other halfway up the slope between Lynton and Lynmouth, one going down heavy with water, the other rising as it empties. There is no engine. Each car carries a tank beneath the floor; the tank at the top is filled, the extra weight sends that car down, and it hauls the lighter one up on the same cable. The water comes from the West Lyn, more than a mile away, through five-inch pipes, under rights the company secured by Act of Parliament in 1888 and holds in perpetuity. The line opened on Easter Monday, 7 April 1890, and has worked the same way ever since. Its owners call it the only fully water-powered railway in the country and the highest of its kind anywhere; both waiting rooms, upper and lower, date from 1890 and are listed in their own right.

You want the railway, or a steep walk, because Lynton and Lynmouth are one place at two heights. Lynton stands on a plateau about 500 feet up. Lynmouth is the harbour below, where the East and West Lyn come down off the moor and meet the Bristol Channel. The steep wooded gorges between them earned the pair their old nickname, Little Switzerland, usually traced to Robert Southey, who came through in 1799 and reached for the Alps. Everything about the upper town assumes you have arrived out of breath.

A mile along the cliff from Lynton, the ground opens into the Valley of Rocks, a dry coastal valley with no river running through it and a great deal of rock reclining on rock. Southey, again, described it as "the very bones and skeleton of the earth; rock reclining upon rock, stone piling upon stone, a huge terrific mass." The named formations are Castle Rock, Devil's Cheesering, Ragged Jack and Mother Meldrum's Cave, and among them wanders a herd of feral goats. Do not approach or feed them. In the middle of all this sits a cricket pitch, closely mown, where Lynton and Lynmouth Cricket Club has played since 1876. The club calls its ground the Queen of English cricket grounds and keeps a record of the local hazard, which is that the goats occasionally stop play. Sir Christopher Ondaatje is the patron. A short, mostly level route from the town reaches the valley and is manageable for pushchairs, though the passing places make it no good for wheelchairs; a separate one-mile stroll is laid out to be accessible for some visitors.

Pubs and dining in the upper town

For a pub in the town itself, the Crown on Market Street is the obvious all-rounder: a restored old inn that is also a fifteen-room hotel, with an informal bar, dining rooms and an outdoor terrace. The kitchen leans on West Country meat, seafood and cheese, and the menu runs to salt-and-chilli calamari with chipotle mayonnaise, mushroom and truffle arancini, mussels in a white-wine cream, smoked-haddock linguine with lobster sauce, lamb shank, a beef and red-wine pie and beer-battered fish and chips. There is cask ale, dogs are welcome and the terrace catches the evening.

Round on Queen Street, the Queens is a two-level town pub that turned itself into a casual Asian restaurant in 2026, when it took on Nartnapa Thai Kitchen. Nartnapa is Thai, trained under the television chef Yingsak and cooked alongside him on Thai television before spending more than a decade in the Lyn valley; the menu now names duck spring rolls, tempura squid, Thai fishcakes, tom yam soup, green and panang curries and pad Thai, with fish and chips, burgers and steak still on for anyone not in the mood. There is a rear patio and well-behaved dogs on leads are fine. Up on Longmead, the Sandrock is a smaller, quieter Edwardian hotel-pub run by Jane and Nick Rampton, with original features, a large wood-burning stove, a garden and a couple of changing beers on. Down at Lynbridge, below the town, the Cottage Inn building dates to the seventeenth century; it was damaged in the 1952 flood and rebuilt afterwards by a local firm, Nancekivels.

For a town of roughly 1,400 people, the eating is out of proportion to the size. The Oak Room does Spanish and Mediterranean tapas under Mike and Yana — patatas bravas, prawns, chicken rolls with spinach and jamón, sharing plates and Spanish wines — from an 1890s building that was once a tea room laid on by Sir George Newnes; the small terrace takes dogs at lunch. The Vanilla Pod cooks Mediterranean and Middle Eastern, with lamb tagine, pan-fried sea bass, mezze and an Egyptian orange-and-almond cake, and caters properly for vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free diners. The Old Bank is the ambitious one, a small-plates place whose list has included monkfish scampi, potted shrimp on crumpets, Fowey mussels with nduja and cider, glazed pig cheeks, Exmoor beef carpaccio and beef ragù with gnocchi. Restaurant Kensington is a modern British steakhouse doing chateaubriand; Number Ten stretches its own sourdough for pizza, with a buffalo-mozzarella Neapolitan and a Diavolo, alongside pappardelle with beef ragù.

Cafés and local provisions

The daytime places are just as thick on the ground. Charlie Friday's is a bohemian coffee shop with a locally sourced fry-up, chilli nachos, doorstep sandwiches and a vegan cashew-cream quiche, and toys and a children's menu to keep the table occupied; Devon Life once named it the county's best coffee shop. No. 1 Lynton is run by Mike and Mark, who go by M&M, and does local sausages at breakfast, ploughman's, fish-finger sandwiches, cheesecake and cream teas, with a dog-biscuit jar by the counter. North Coast Café, opened by Jason and Neil after five years running a guest house, makes club sandwiches, bagels and handmade scones in flavours such as apple crumble, cherry and almond, and ginger with lemon curd. The Old Coach House Café keeps it plainer and heartier — steak-and-ale pie, bubble and squeak, sausages with mash, peas and onion gravy.

The shops match the kitchens. A Little Deli on Queen Street, run by Laura and Dan, was named the South West's specialist delicatessen of the year in 2024 and stocks local and West Country makers; the pair sum up the enterprise as "from small acorns grow major oaks." The Studio at 8 Lee Road makes more than forty flavours of fudge on the premises and sells Quince Honey Farm honey, whortleberry jam and traditional sweets alongside it. Horizon Coffee Company roasts in small batches in the town. The Londis on Lee Road covers the everyday shopping, and a mile inland at Barbrook the filling-station shop turns out to carry a serious local range — John May sausages, bacon, gala pie and Scotch eggs, Spicy Mare curries and dhal, Exmoor Ales, local eggs and honey. The Spicy Mare itself is the work of a chef called Ilona, whose Kerala beef curry, vegan dhal and lime-and-mango chutney have taken regional gold awards.

Church, civic history and the museum

St Mary the Virgin stands close to the cliff edge, which Pevsner recorded simply as "perched on the cliffs overlooking the sea." Its tower is thirteenth-century; most of the rest was rebuilt between 1891 and 1905 by J. D. Sedding and Henry Wilson, and the interior mixes neo-Norman stonework with Art Nouveau glass, including a window to four sons of Sir George Newnes and a 1907 Lady Chapel light by Christopher Whall. The oak pulpit of 1899 is carved with children holding a crab, a ram and a donkey, which is a more local set of subjects than you usually find above a lectern. The parish registers reach back to 1569, two medieval bells survive in the tower, and the church keeps memorial material for the victims of the 1952 flood, when exceptional rain sent the rivers through the valleys on the night of 15 August and killed thirty-four people. The Valley of Rocks Hotel took in survivors; Lynton's height above the water spared its centre the worst.

Newnes, the publisher whose Strand Magazine serialised Sherlock Holmes, is the reason a good deal of the town looks as it does. He built Hollerday House above the town in 1893; it burned down in 1913 and was never rebuilt, though its terraces and planting still lie in the woods on the hill. He also paid for the town hall, opened in August 1900 at a cost of £20,000, a neo-Tudor and Art Nouveau pile that Historic England rates among the finest of its type. The oldest domestic building in the town is a plainer thing: an eighteenth-century cottage, once shared between two families, that was condemned in 1962 and saved by the townspeople, and now holds the Lyn and Exmoor Museum, flood photographs, a Victorian doll's house and a golden eagle found storm-battered on the moor in 1920. When the weather closes in there is also a cinema of sixty-eight seats in a former Methodist chapel, opened in 2001 by Bill and Sue Pryor and now run by their daughter Kate.

Getting here and an old goat story

Getting here means Barnstaple, the nearest railway station, and then the Stagecoach 310 up to the Lynton car park; by car it is the A39, then the B3234 down off the moor at Barbrook. The summer coastal bus reaches Lynmouth below, which leaves you the cliff railway or the climb.

There is a footnote worth keeping. When the Domesday commissioners came through in 1086 they lumped Lynton in with the Ilkertons and valued the combined entry at seven pounds, up from thirty-five shillings when it changed hands. Among the livestock recorded there, they counted seventy-five goats. The lord who held it was a man the record calls William the Goat. The goats in the valley are not his.