On a busy day, as many as twenty-seven waggonettes and other vehicles may be found at Malmsmead, drawn up empty, awaiting the return of the “Lorna Doone” sightseers from the Badgworthy Valley and the Doone Valley, or Oare. Constant repetition of the trip, day by day in the season, for many years, has rendered the drivers indifferent. Some you may observe asleep, others playing cards, and all those who are awake swearing. Meanwhile, the pilgrims in search of the Doone Valley and the homes of those entirely fabulous people have tailed away along the footpaths beside the Badgworthy Water, in search of literary landmarks. Few, however, get as far as the so-called “Doone Valley,” for it is a very considerable walk; and most people have by this time sadly realised that Blackmore’s fervid descriptions of places are, as a rule, remarkable for their shameless exaggeration. In sober truth, the Badgworthy Valley, that opens out of Malmsmead, forms a much more striking scene than the supposed stronghold of the Doones. It is a typical moorland vale, with the Badgworthy Water—or the “Badgery” as they style it in these parts—pouring down out of the sullen Exmoor hills, gliding with an oily smoothness over waterslides, foaming over stickles, or splashing like very miniature Niagaras over great moss-grown boulders. The valley is not nowadays so lonely as Blackmoor pictures it: in fact, the terrible “Badgery Valley,” as described by him, never existed, and almost the entire thing is a delusion and a snare. Plantations of fir and larch partly clothe the rounded hills on the left hand, and a farmhouse (since the publication of “Lorna Doone” named “Lorna’s Bower,” in big letters that, painted on its whitewashed garden-wall, stare across the stream) is perched comfortably half-way up the hillside. The footpath that winds ribbon-like beside the stream comes presently to Badgworthy Wood, a wood of stunted oaks, whose limbs are bearded with a grey-green moss that tells sufficiently of the humid atmosphere and the mists that drift from Exmoor. Parson Jack Russell believed Badgworthy Wood to have been a Druid’s grave; but we may, perhaps, with safety decline to accept him as an authority on the subject. Now, had he expressed an opinion on horse-coping and sharp practice generally in horsey matters, his views would carry all the weight due to such an acknowledged authority. [Illustration: BADGWORTHY VALLEY.] Here the foxglove grows in the shade, and hart’s-tongue ferns come to an unusual size. The whortleberry plant, too, flourishes in this moist spot to a height prodigious for whortleberries. Some of them must run up to eighteen inches; but the berries have not the sweetness of those that grow on the dwarfed plants of the sun-scorched, rain-furrowed, and wind-lashed downs.