John Doyle in Lynton and Lynmouth

John Doyle is in this special report on the summer season and arrives in Lynton and Lynmouth.

News reporter John Doyle is on a working holiday taking his Volkswagen Camper to some of Devon and Cornwall's seaside resorts. He arrives in Lynton in the Exmoor National Park and takes a trip down to the seaside at Lynmouth where he visits the Rhenish Tower. The resort made international news in August 1952 when the River Lyn burst its banks and what became known as the Lynmouth flood destroyed houses with twenty-five people losing their lives.

The Rhenish Tower at the end of the quay or pier was built in the 1800s by General Rawdon to store salt water for bathing and was pumped into his house nearby. An electric light was added a beacon for passing ships. In 1954 two years after being washed away by the Lynmouth flood it was rebuilt. It is called Rhenish because it is a replica of towers on the River Rhine. The Coleridge Way begins or ends in Lynmouth and is fifty-one miles of coastal path leading to Nether Stowey in Somerset, where the famous poet penned The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1797. Shelley and Gainsborough were also famous visitors. The villages are on the Tarka Trail and the Two Moors Way over Exmoor and Dartmoor runs from Lynmouth to Ivybridge.