ash-tree near me which was
full of linnets, delicious, sleek, grey, sweet-piping, busy little
birds, sliding and skimming in and out of the tree, a little home of
song and love-making, of intimate and familiar life. I heard a cuckoo
calling from the thick woods of the valley below, like the note of a
bell, very far away. I noticed the unopened buds of the ash shining
like silver against the flawless blue sky; it seemed to me I had lain
there a hundred years looking at them, and hearing the thin song of the
linnets, in a world entranced from movement or the passing of time.
And then I fell asleep.

CHAPTER V

LYNTON (_continued_), COUNTISBURY, AND NORTHWARD

The word "Lynton," Mr. Chanter tells us in his interesting monograph on
the village, means the town on the lyn, and "lyn" is the Celtic word, not
for river, but for pool, and occurs in this meaning all over England, in
Northumberland, Yorkshire, Kent, Herefordshire. It is strange, perhaps,
that this rushing mountain stream should have been named from its very
rarely occurring pools, but the authority is indubitable.

The Celtic folk who named it, the "early Britons," as our childish
history books used to call them, were not, of course, the first
inhabitants of this wild and wooded spot; there are neolithic
remains--hut circles and burial-places--fairly thickly scattered along
this coast, and a certain number of flint implements have been found.
The hut circles in the Valley of Rocks, of which traces still remain,
though many of them have been destroyed quite recently, within the last
two hundred years or so, belong to this period, and it is probable that
the earth-camps of Lynton and Countisbury, of Parracombe, Martinhoe, and
Ilfracombe, were built by the immense labour of this vanished people.
Remains of the early Bronze period show that there was a moderate
population in this district before the Roman Conquest. Of Roman remains
there are none, save a few coins of doubtful authenticity found at
Countisbury, which are supposed to have been scattered and buried by a
resident clergyman at the close of the last century, with the avowed
intention of "fogging" later antiquarians--surely the strangest
"fourberie" ever indulged in by a reverend gentleman. All other evidence
points to the fact that the Romans never occupied North Devon, though
they may have held in temporary garrison one or other of the existing
camps of the district.

These camps open up mo