Parking in a car park at Combe Park, Hillsford Bridge, we made our way through the Watersmeet Estate (National Trust) along Hoaroak and down to the seaside town of Lynmouth. The walk follows this Devon Explorer route.

We passed through deep wooded gorges echoing with the grunts and bellows of rutting stags (listen below).

Lynmouth must be a busy place in summer and even now in mid October there were ice cream licking, fish and chip stuffing, dog walking and rucksack toting people everywhere, in the tourist shops, the cliff railway, lifeboat station and fountain.

In August 1952 the picture was rather different as a devastating flood overwhelmed the village killing 34 people. A plaque by the river shows where houses stood before they were washed away.

Walking back up by the East Lyn river we passed and crossed a variety of bridges, some replacements following the great flood, some more recent. The photograph (bottom) shows one recently ruined, whose replacement was waiting in our car park to be inserted - though how they were to transport it down we could not imagine.

Half way back is the National Trust's Watersmeet Estate, very popular and ideal for family refreshment. Watersmeet House is the height of Victorian Romanticism with distant links to Shelley and Gainsborough.

The short walk we took formed part of the extensive Two Moors Way - over 100 miles of fine walking from Exmoor to Dartmoor and on to the south Devon coast.