When I was walking from Lynton to Heddon's Mouth, however, I crossed the mouth of the Valley of Rocks, just behind the Castle Crag, and kept the road to Lee Bay. Here it runs a few hundred yards inland, through the grounds of Lee Abbey, a green and fertile fold of ground between a sea-headland, and gently wooded ground that rises inland. The abbey, which is beautifully situated, with a hump of cliff sheltering it seaward, and a great smooth slope of green sward running down to a tiny bay, and set among a fine group of sheltering pine-cedars, was built about 1850, and somewhat too much "after the Gothic style." Parts of the house are of pleasant red brick, overgrown with glossy ivy, but a portion of the building--dining-room or library, I do not know which--is like an east window of the Perpendicular period, fitted with sun-blinds! There was never an Abbey here, either, and the name is as new as the Gothic, but there is history here, and tradition as well, for the house stands on the site of the old Grange Farm of Lee, which was a large, rambling, plain building, with gabled ends and thick walls, thatched roof and tall chimneys, to which Hugh de Wichehalse sent his family when the plague ravaged Barnstaple in 1627. After that the de Wichehalses were for nearly a century the chief family of Lynton, and the last of them, Mary, to whom her father left this estate, is said to have returned here, after the ruin of her family and her betrayal by a faithless lover, and to have lived here with a faithful servant until she was drowned off Duty Point, either by an accident, or, as tradition asserts, by throwing herself down from the cliff, which is the southern point of the little bay. Her body was never found, and the mixture of fact and legend which has gathered round her forms the basis of the tragic tale of Jennifred de Wichehalse which is given by the Reverend Mundy. After leaving the grounds of Lee Abbey the road climbs steeply up the opposite headland. Up this hot and stony road I went, leaving Lee Bay below me, the tiniest of bays, a little blue rockgirt pool, guarded with great shags of rock, into which runs a rivulet, down the greenest and shadiest of gorges, where the trees meet overhead, and the clear water runs between narrow banks of primroses, and the bright grass and flowers follow the stream right down to the wave-smoothed stones of the beach.