Final today we are doing a local walk along the coast westwards, slightly in land then return via the valley of rocks to say hello to the famous Lynton feral goats. The walk out was quite hard lots of up hill, just to drop back down. We got good views of Lee Abbey and Castle Rock.
There seemed to be lots of flies about, and they all liked hanging out around me, Helen was not bothered by them at all. Helen had a theory that it was because of the witch hazel she had on, I decided it was because I did not have a shower this morning!
You are reminded at every gate and style that you are on abbey land as there is often a short religious, saying attached to the wood work. Birds were very scarce to start with but later we came across lots of Goldcrest, and even a Peregrine Falcon. We also passed a working party trying in vein to win the battle with the Rohdedendrons. One friendly lady, from Cambridge, explained that they worked in the morning and had the afternoons off, my guess is that it some how subsidised the accommodation.
We had lunch down at Lee Bay where there is some shelter from the wind and odd shower that had started to become more frequent. Then we walked back up to Tea Cottage (run by the abbey) for some cake. Very nice tea shop with fair trade shop attached. I had apple cake with pixie dust, served by Pixie in person, and Helen had lemon drizzle cake and ewxcellent hot chocolate, which we then needed to walk off.
We walked past the abbey, and on to Castle Rock, where the feral goats are. The climb to the top was fairly easy, the top was a bit disappointing because it seems that the goats must sleep there at night out of the wind and rain, but they don’t move when they need to poo, so there was goat poo everywhere.
We sat for a while between Castle and Rugged Jack and could see what we took to be Guilemots flying from the cliffs and swimming in the sea. We chose to walk back to Lynton over the hill and despite the hard slog to the top it proved well worth the effort, we stopped to have a look at some duck like birds, that turned out to be swimming Gannets, and spotted two Dolphins/Porpoise both with a calf swimming close by.
We were back in Lynton by 1700 we had been out for 6.5 hours and walked over 10 miles, but with all the walking we have done recently we felt we could have walked further. We rounded the day off with fish and chips for tea and an episode of the apprentice.