Valley of Rocks

The valley has good exposures of the Lynton Beds (formally the 'Lynton Formation') that are among the oldest Devonian rocks in north Devon and are highly fossiliferous.

[8] The valley retains some of its original character and presents an appropriately grand natural setting for open-air theatre, but the addition to it of a cricket pitch and, more recently, a car park have robbed the area between the landward and seaward walls of crags of some of the wildness it once possessed.

[9] In late 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth visited the valley together and decided to write a prose tale called "The Wanderings of Cain" set there, though it was never completed.

[12] In her poetical illustration to an engraving of a painting by Thomas Allom, Letitia Elizabeth Landon views the place as suitable for the unhappy, but, as she puts it "Gloomy vale!

[14] A visit to the area in 1974 by the Australian composer Miriam Hyde with her husband led to her writing the piano piece Valley of Rocks in 1975, which became her best-known composition.