Even the roofs are covered with flowers; every cranny bears a blossom or a tuft of green.

Then above, long stretches of barren heath (with a few twisted and wind-tortured trees), where the sheep pasture and the sky-lark sings, and in and out of the red-fronted cliffs the querulous sea-gulls flash in the sunshine, and make their plaintive moan.

Near Lynton there is the famous Valley of Rocks, where the wise woman, _Mother Melldrum_, had her winter quarters under the Devil's Cheese-wring.
[Illustration: xiv.jpg Cheese-wring] The irregular pile of rocks that goes by this name is wrongly called Cheese-_ring_ (or _scoop_) in some editions of "Lorna Doone," instead of Cheese-_wring_ or (_press_), which it somewhat resembles in shape.
Southey began the fortune of Lynton as a watering-place, and wrote a glowing description of the village and the Valley of Rocks.

Of the latter he says: "A palace of the pre-Adamite kings, a city of the Anakim must have appeared so shapeless and yet so like the ruins of what had been shaped after the waters of the flood subsided." Great bowlders, half hidden by the bracken, lie about in wildest confusion; the remains of what seem to be Druidic circles can be traced here and there, and it is hard to persuade one's self that the ragged towers and picturesque piles of rock are not the work of Cyclopean architects.
"Our home-folk always call it the 'Danes,' or the 'Denes,' which is no more, they tell me, than a hollow place, even as the word 'den' is," says _John Ridd_.

"It is a pretty place," he adds, "though nothing to frighten any body, unless he hath lived in a gallipot." The valley is well protected from the wind, and "there is shelter and dry fern-bedding and folk to be seen in the distance from a bank whereon the sun shines." Here _John Ridd_ came to consult the wise woman toward the end of March, while the weather was still cold and piercing.