Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/171

Rh grown with fern as not to be easily distinguishable. Lynton Church has been well enlarged and is very pleasing. It is fabled that a band of marauding Danes succeeded in landing at Lynmouth, ascended the cliffs, and were surrounded and massacred in the Valley of Rocks, which bears the name of "The Danes" or "Danes' Combe." But this is one of those many legends invented to explain a name; the original signification has been lost. It was called originally Dinas, the castle or camp. Lee Abbey never was an abbey. It was the seat of the De Wichehalse family, refugees, it is pretended, from the Low Countries in or about 1570. But, as a matter of fact, the Wichehalse family first turns up at Chudleigh nearly half a century before their reputed flight from Flanders. They were cloth merchants apparently, and one of the family, Nicholas Wychalse, the third son of Nicholas of Chudleigh, having married a wife from Pilton, settled at Barnstaple and died there in 1570. As merchants in the wool trade the Barnstaple branch did well, and married into some of the best county families. All the rigmarole about their being De Wichehalse, and being of noble Flemish ancestry, and of their having fled from Alva's persecution, may be dismissed as pure fable.

The story goes that in the reign of Charles II. Sir Edward de Wichehalse was the head of the house and lived in splendour at Lee Abbey. He had an only child, a daughter, who was wooed and proved over-fond towards a nobleman high in the favour of James II. The lover proved faithless, and the deserted damsel threw herself from the cliffs at