The /Lyn/, sometimes called the East Lyn, to distinguish it from the West Lyn, is one of the shortest as it is one of the most wilful of the Devonshire streams, its length not exceeding a dozen miles, while in a direct line its outlet is only half that distance from its source. Rising on Exmoor, a little to the north of Black Barrow Down, its upper valley is bleak and bare, and in this part of its career there is little to differentiate it from other moorland waters that hurriedly leave the dreary solitudes in which they have their birth. Above Oareford it dashes and splashes along over boulders and rocky ledges, the hills that rise from either bank being bare of aught but ling and brake and heather, save that the lower slopes bear here and there a group of wind-swept scrub-oaks; it is only lower down that the ravine assumes the combination of wildness and luxuriance in which Lyn is excelled by none of its sister streams. How can we pass Oareford without recalling that we are in the country of John Ridd and the Doones? It was in the parish of Oare that the giant yeoman was born and bred; it was in the little Perpendicular church of St. Mary that he married the lovely but elusive Lorna Doone; it was from its altar that he sallied forth to pursue the man whom he believed to have slain his bride, his only weapon the limb of a gnarled oak which he tore from its socket as he passed beneath it. Many there be who come into these parts to spy out the land, and to such it is a pleasant surprise to find that there are still Ridds of the Doones engaged upon the soil at Oare. Less palatable is the discovery that Mr. Blackmore has thought fit to mix a good deal of imagination with his word-pictures. The Badgworthy "slide," in particular, which the hero was wont to climb in order to get speech of the captive maiden, has been the occasion of grievous disappointment. It is at Malmsmead that the Badgworthy Water--the dividing line between Devon and Somerset--falls into the Lyn, and "makes a real river of it"; the "slide," a mile or so up the "Badgery" valley, as they call it hereabouts, is simply a succession of minute cascades formed by shelving rocks over which a little tributary stream glides down out of the Doone Valley.