And now, after having fully considered the evidence for and against the much-debated existence of these old reprobates and masterless men, let us advance into their country, and into that of the romantic Lorna, who was, of course, an adopted Doone merely.

The way to Oare, branching off to the left, plunges immediately down into the profound valley of the Oare Water. “Hookway Hill” is the name of this abominable road, bad enough in its own native vileness, but rendered worse by the strange humour of the local road-repairing authority, always at pains to deposit cartloads of stones on it in the summer, so that there shall be plenty of opportunity for the tourist traffic to roll this loose material in by the autumn. Thus the literary pilgrim to the scenes of “Lorna Doone” is made to earn that title, eloquent as it is of suffering and difficulties encountered, wrestled with, and overcome. Long is the way and steep and winding, and he who, cycling, would seek to avoid the prodigious stones by tracking to the side, must make his account with the yard-long projecting blackberry brambles, armed with monstrous thorns, that curry-comb the face, clutch off the cap, or take one by the arm in a confidential grip, like some old friend who would bid you “wait a bit.” Later on in the year, possibly, hedgers will be at work with their “riphooks,” slashing off these terrors of the way, and then woe to the cyclist’s tyres! It is a nice point, where and when the blackberry bramble is most offensive; when it is in a position to scarify the traveller’s person, or when, shorn off and lying in the road, its thorns play havoc with india-rubber.

At the foot of Hookway Hill, the peaty little Oare, or Weir, water, rushing over a pebbly bed is crossed by Robber’s Bridge, and thenceforward the road runs level, past Oareford, and then as an exceedingly narrow lane, to Oare; passing two or three solitary farms that in these latter days provide for summer visitors whose humour is for a fortnight or a month in the wilds. One of these is identified, more or less accurately, with the “Plovers Barrows’ Farm” of the novel.

Presently Oare church appears, on the left hand, almost wholly hidden in a circle of tall, spindly trees, and neighboured only by one farm. It is a grey, sad-toned building, this centre of interest in Lorna’s tragedy. Chiefly in the Perpendicular style, it consists of an embattled western tower and a nave without aisles. The chancel is a modern addition. All day and every day in the summer an old man sits in the little north porch, with the key of the church on a bench beside him, and if, not seeing the key, you try the door, and, finding it locked, ask him, he will give it you, and leave you to let yourself in: mutely remaining there, a living hint for a tip. “Lorna Doone” has done this. “Parish clerk, he be, an’ used to be saxon,” remarked an old road-mender. “He do mek’ a dale o’ money,” is the rustic opinion; but what amount may be represented by “a deal of money” in this estimate does not appear. Also, “Dree an’ saxpunz a wik,” he gets from the parish: so there is no old age pension for him; and unless the parish of Oare, in a fit of wild extravagance, springs another eighteenpence, he will be a loser.

The interior of Oare church is, truth to tell, lamentably uninteresting, and architecturally deplorable. A something wooden, that does duty for chancel screen, divides nave from sanctuary, and a few characterless marble and slate tablets are affixed to the walls: one of them to the memory of a Nicholas Snow, 1791. A tablet to various members of the Spurryer family exhibits a curious uncertainty as to how the name should be spelled. “Spurre” and “Spurry” are the two other versions given. The name of “Peter Spurryer, Warden, 1717,” appears under one of a couple of fearsome paintings in the tower, representing Moses and Aaron; the work of one “Mervine Cooke, Painter.”

Under a deplorable representation of the triple Prince of Wales’ feathers, placed on the wall near the pulpit, to commemorate a visit of the Prince of Wales in 1863 will be found the only interesting object in the church: a rudely carved stone bracket supporting what was once a piscina. Shaped in the form of a head, the expressionless face is flanked by two hands. Very few visitors can have any notion of the meaning of this grotesque object, and most people set it down as a mere fantasy; but the thing is symbolical, and really typifies the Divine gift of speech. Other examples are found throughout England: notably in the churches of Bere Regis, in Dorsetshire, and Gotham, Nottinghamshire.^[8] This carving is by far the oldest thing in Oare church, and is probably a relic from some earlier building.

From Oare we come directly to Malmsmead where the Badgworthy Water divides Somerset and Devon, and is spanned by a grey, timeworn, two-arched bridge.

The scene is sweet and idyllic. Here the bridge, grown thickly with ferns and moss, and stained red, brown, and orange with lichens, spans the water in hump-backed fashion, and on the opposite—that is to say, the Devonshire—shore, the three farmsteads of Malmsmead, Lorna Doone, and Badgworthy Farms stand side by side in seeming content, sheltered beneath swelling hills. Day by day in summer a long succession of brakes and flys bring visitors from Lynton and Lynmouth and set them down here for an afternoon’s exploration of the Badgworthy Valley, or drive them on to Oare.

To see one of these brake-drivers take the steep rise of the narrow bridge of Malmsmead at full speed, and so continue his reckless way along the narrow lanes, is to realise that death possibly awaits the cyclist who descends hills and rounds the sharp corners of these lanes at high speed at such times when these vehicles are about.

For the comfort and refreshment of these “Lorna Doone” pilgrims, the three farms, that were nothing but humble farmsteads in the days before Blackmore wrote that popular romance, have now become rustic restaurants, doing a very thriving and remunerative business, at prices which, calculated on the basis of their charge of twopence for a small glass of milk, must be rapidly earning a more than modest competence for these simple folk. Simple, did I say? Well, that, perhaps, is hardly the word. Nor is the content that seems to be pictured here, in every circumstance of running water, moss-grown bridge, and bird-haunted trees, more than a hollow mockery. Come with me over the bridge, into Devon, and I shall show you evidence of keen commercial rivalry, in the notice-board displayed from the hedge of Malmsmead Farm, which says “No connection with Lorna Doone and Badgworthy Farm.” Now it is a curious fact that the names of these rival rustic refreshment-providers are the same—French—but that does not by any means explain the hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness that are displayed between these neighbours; for few must be the pilgrims in these parts who acquire such trivial facts. The stranger coming from the direction of Oare and halting awhile on the bridge, to admire the beauty of the scene, will soon find himself invited, by one or other of these people, to patronise his establishment, and will thereby learn something not to the advantage of the rival. Hearing the tale of one, you are shocked at the depth of infamy with which the other is charged, but the people of the neighbourhood take it all philosophically enough. “I ’xpec’ they do saay ’most as bad o’ he,” is the general remark.

On a busy day, as many as twenty-seven waggonettes and other vehicles may be found at Malmsmead, drawn up empty, awaiting the return of the “Lorna Doone” sightseers from the Badgworthy Valley and the Doone Valley, or Oare. Constant repetition of the trip, day by day in the season, for many years, has rendered the drivers indifferent. Some you may observe asleep, others playing cards, and all those who are awake swearing. Meanwhile, the pilgrims in search of the Doone Valley and the homes of those entirely fabulous people have tailed away along the footpaths beside the Badgworthy Water, in search of literary landmarks. Few, however, get as far as the so-called “Doone Valley,” for it is a very considerable walk; and most people have by this time sadly realised that Blackmore’s fervid descriptions of places are, as a rule, remarkable for their shameless exaggeration. In sober truth, the Badgworthy Valley, that opens out of Malmsmead, forms a much more striking scene than the supposed stronghold of the Doones. It is a typical moorland vale, with the Badgworthy Water—or the “Badgery” as they style it in these parts—pouring down out of the sullen Exmoor hills, gliding with an oily smoothness over waterslides, foaming over stickles, or splashing like very miniature Niagaras over great moss-grown boulders.

The valley is not nowadays so lonely as Blackmoor pictures it: in fact, the terrible “Badgery Valley,” as described by him, never existed, and almost the entire thing is a delusion and a snare. Plantations of fir and larch partly clothe the rounded hills on the left hand, and a farmhouse (since the publication of “Lorna Doone” named “Lorna’s Bower,” in big letters that, painted on its whitewashed garden-wall, stare across the stream) is perched comfortably half-way up the hillside.

The footpath that winds ribbon-like beside the stream comes presently to Badgworthy Wood, a wood of stunted oaks, whose limbs are bearded with a grey-green moss that tells sufficiently of the humid atmosphere and the mists that drift from Exmoor. Parson Jack Russell believed Badgworthy Wood to have been a Druid’s grave; but we may, perhaps, with safety decline to accept him as an authority on the subject. Now, had he expressed an opinion on horse-coping and sharp practice generally in horsey matters, his views would carry all the weight due to such an acknowledged authority.

Here the foxglove grows in the shade, and hart’s-tongue ferns come to an unusual size. The whortleberry plant, too, flourishes in this moist spot to a height prodigious for whortleberries. Some of them must run up to eighteen inches; but the berries have not the sweetness of those that grow on the dwarfed plants of the sun-scorched, rain-furrowed, and wind-lashed downs.

Save for the passing of groups of “Lorna Doone” pilgrims, the place is very solitary. The hills that look down upon the valley here rise higher, and draw closer in, swooping down in naked round outlines in the foreground, and filling in the distance with dense blue-black plantations of larch. The bald outlines of those near at hand are sharply accented by a wind-swept lone thorn-tree that stands out curiously against the sky. Below it, stretching down the hillside is an ancient earthwork, in shape roughly like the letter Y; and down below this again, the Badgworthy Water foams and slides amidst its boulders.

Quietly walking through the little wood, and then silently along the grassy paths through the almost breast-high bracken beyond, I started a fox from his summer afternoon sleep on a sun-warmed boulder; a fine, but gaunt fellow of crimson hue, and with a magnificent brush. Not one of your full-fed Midland foxes, plump with a long career of raids on poultry-runs, but one accustomed to picking up a mere living by sheer hard work in these wilds. He loped leisurely away into the woods, with an easy swinging gait that looked deceptively slow. Up along there, where he disappeared amid the tangled branches, a monstrous square mass of rock stands half-revealed, remarkably like some ancient stone-built house; a veritable Mockbeggar Hall, that, on a near approach, is found to be no habitation of man, but a crannied, cliff-like place, partly draped with ivy; the home of jackdaws, and tunnelled about the base of it with the runs of hares and rabbits.

And thus, at length one comes to the terrible “Doone Valley,” or, as it is better, and correctly known, Lankcombe; a pretty vale branching to the right, not in the least terrible, you know, and in fact rather dull and commonplace, after the beauties of Badgworthy. Perhaps the enthusiastic Lorna Dooneite, if he would keep his enthusiasm, had better not adventure thus far; for though he may indeed see some problematic ruins and doubtful foundations of houses, he will assuredly be keenly disappointed. A commonplace shepherd’s hut looks down upon the scene, young plantations mantle the quite unremarkable hills, and romance fails to keep the expected tryst.

But if so be the pilgrim resents being cheated of scenic delights, let him then retrace his steps, cross Malmsmead Bridge into Devon, and so proceed a distance of some six miles down the enchanting gorge of the Lyn, to Lynmouth. No novelist has flung the spells of romance upon that delightful scenery, which is indeed sufficient in itself to enchant the stranger, without such extraneous aid. Or, if it be desired to return to Porlock, let the stranger proceed to Brendon, and then descend the hill at Combe Park, coming thus again to the ridge of moorland that runs between Porlock and Lynmouth. Here turning eastward he will come to Glenthorne, where the wooded cliffs plunge daringly to the sea, and where the boundary line passes that divides Devon and Somerset. The name of Glenthorne clearly invites irresponsible and foolish rhyme, and so, responding to so obvious an invitation, these pages shall conclude with such: