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Came in 1872 and stayed at the Castle Hotel. A spot consecrated to supreme repose. Perched on the side of one of the great mountain cliffs with which this coast is adorned, and on the edge of a lovely gorge through which a broad hill-torrent foams and tumbles. A capital centre for excursions. Of his strolls in the Valley of Rocks he wrote: None is more beautiful than a simple walk along the running face of the cliffs to a singular rocky eminence whose curious abutments and pinnacles of stone have caused it be named the Castle Visited Lynton in 1925 walking from Brendon. He purchased a copy of Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor for his companion and they lunched at the Cottage Hotel. The view from the balcony was beyond everything I have seen --- Straight ahead and across the gorge, the hillside rose hundreds of feet above us into a cap of well shaped rock. Behind that the Lyn valley opened out in long perspective of winding water and many coloured woods, heather and grass. To the left was the bay, not deeply blue but of a strangely pure clear colour and beyond it a line of surf between the water and the cliffs which fell away East and North ...
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Came in Christmas 1926 (Russell had visited earlier with his second wife Dora in 1924.) They stayed in Lynton but whether they stayed at the Valley of Rocks or the then Lee Abbey Hotel is unclear. Dora, fifty years later, recorded the name of the hotel as The Valley of Rocks but this does not have the octagonal room she also describes which is at Lee Abbey. Please see page about 'Peter Pan'
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