Where did all the people go? What people? This is Exmoor…
Mission: Get away from it all this summer Location: Britain’s quietest National Park
SUMMER. HOLIDAY. Two of the most magical words in the English language. Put together they conjure images of long walks on sunny days, of deep-green views, of ice cream by the sea – but, let’s be honest, places getting pretty crowded too. So the coming pages are all devoted to walking away from the summertime bustle. Read on to discover secret hills in Britain’s favourite places, explore wild land that rarely opens to the public, find the nation’s remotest beds and brightest stars – and more. Whether you have a week, weekend, or an hour on your way home from work you’ll find tranquil walks where you can revel in the golden days of summer, starting with a trip to the quietest national park in the land.
THERE ARE MANY inexplicable things in life. The popularity of Love Island. That a train to York can cost more than a flight to Spain. And why so few people visit Exmoor. According to stats from National Parks UK it is the quietest of Britain’s national parks with 1,374,000 visitors a year. That’s less than one tenth of the Lake District (18,411,000) or the South Downs (18,846,000). It’s a proper head-scratcher – you could point to the place to define the word gorgeous – but it’s also a gift for walkers seeking summertime solitude.
Designated in 1954, Exmoor National Park spans 267.5 square miles of Somerset and Devon, bound by the Bristol Channel to the north, the tiny town of Dulverton at its southern point, and the villages of Elworthy and Combe Martin to east and west. Footpaths criss-cross the park but there are no motorways or trunk roads, and only two A-roads. In fact, large swathes are untouched by Tarmac and what there is can be excitingly narrow and vertical. Maybe that’s what keeps some visitors away.
Or perhaps it’s because there’s no sizeable town for a holiday basecamp. The Lake District has Keswick, the South Downs has Lewes, but the whole of Exmoor is home to just 10,000 people, mostly in scattered hamlets and isolated farms. It takes the twin villages of Lynton and Lynmouth to form the only settlement with more than 1500 residents.
Or maybe it’s because Exmoor doesn’t have a singular selling point, unlike many national parks. For seaside you think Pembrokeshire Coast. For woodland, New Forest. But Exmoor isn’t just moor. Exmoor is a little bit of lots of things, an intriguing miniverse of wild heathery upland, lush farmland, forested combe, rugged cliff and bright stars (it became Europe’s first Dark Sky Reserve in 2011).
The park’s 37 miles of coast is a superlative place to start. Climb to the top of Great Hangman near Combe Martin and you’ll be standing on the highest cliff in England, 1043 feet above the sea. Walk ten miles from Countisbury to Porlock and you’ll be in the longest stretch of broadleaf coastal woodland in Britain. The South West Coast Path surfs it all end to end, along cliffs of folded rock where you can peep into remote bays, across streams as they tumble into the sea, and through the bottle-green tunnel of ancient oak woods. And let’s not forget the most famous place on Exmoor: The Valley of Rocks.
Once home to the West Lyn River but now dry, the valley runs parallel to the coast, its seaward slope stacked into the great crenellations of Castle Rock and Rugged Jack, with the Bristol Channel like a moat far below. 19th-century Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, was awestruck by the ‘rock reeling upon rock, stone piled upon stone, a huge and terrific mass’ and wondered if it might be ‘the ruins of some work erected by the devils who concubinated with the fifty daughters of Diocletian.’ In fact, the rocks were spectacularly shattered by freeze-thaw cycles during the last Ice Age and the valley is now home to both a Victorian cricket pitch and a herd of feral goats. We should say that the least-visited national park doesn’t mean never-visited, and this view can get busy.
For a gentler coastal scene, Porlock Bay marks the widest gap in Exmoor’s cliffline and a rare chance to get down to sea level. Its once-bustling quay and pebble beach is backed by a broad vale scooping
south and east to Dunster. Despite its tranquil look it’s undergoing rapid change. A 1996 storm saw the sea breach the bay’s shingle ridge and rather than repair it, nature was left to take its course. Freshwater marsh is now saltmarsh and as you walk here you’ll see winners and losers: many more wading birds, but dead oaks stand like sculptures.
Above the marsh, green fields lift to plump moors, topped by the curve of Dunkery Beacon. At 1705 feet, this is the highest spot on Exmoor, and in Somerset. Both the views, and the cairn that marks the summit, are vast. On a summer’s day all you’ll hear is the song of skylarks and the breeze ruffling across miles of purple heather and ripening bilberries. A short way west at the core of Exmoor is the area that was once a Royal Hunting Forest, where all the deer were property of the king. The royal prerogative ended in 1818, but red deer still roam the park and the stags’ bellows echo loudly during the autumnal rut.
Dunkery Beacon is well-loved, but there are many quiet ways up and there’s plenty of lonely high ground across the park to explore. The area known as The Chains is the wildest landscape on Exmoor, and its tussocky grass, spongy terrain, and windbent beeches make a bleak but haunting walk.
270 miles of river burble across Exmoor and many spring high on the moors, including the Exe from which it takes its name. The fast-running waterways slice serpentine combes through the sandstone, cutting valleys that are often brimful with woodland. The contrast as you drop from the wide-open hills into the enclosing leafy steeps is bewitching, as the blue sky narrows to just a thin wedge above.
Watersmeet is one of the most enchanting of these green valleys, where the East Lyn River and Hoar Oak Water merge and chuckle off together down Myrtleberry Cleave. The mingling rivers – and the National Trust tearoom – reel in a good number of visitors, but a short walk will see you alone with the ferns, gnarly trees and mossy rocks. Also beautiful is the Barle, which twists south from The Chains in a fast-running sparkle that’s home to salmon and trout. At Tarr Steps it flows beneath the longest clapper-bridge in Britain, where people have crossed the river on 17 stone slabs since medieval times.
“While it may be quiet now, it’s entranced many famous writers. The Romantic Poets Wordsworth and Coleridge roamed far over Exmoor.”
The park is alive with the stories of people who once lived here, from mesolithic flint flakes at Hawkcombe Head to neolithic standing stones at Chapman’s Barrows, to Iron Age hillforts, ancient field systems and the medieval village of Dunster, with its mighty castle above. And while it may be quiet now, Exmoor has entranced many famous writers. The Romantic Poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge are forever linked with the Lake District, but they loved the West Country too. From a house at Nether Stowey in the nearby Quantocks, they would roam far over Exmoor – a rambling habit considered so strange they were suspected of being spies for Napoleon. And it was a ‘man from Porlock’ who interrupted Coleridge in the writing of Kubla Khan at Ash Farm near Culbone, making him forget the rest of the poem.
Most famously Exmoor inspired R.D. Blackmore to write Lorna Doone, a historical romance based on local landscape and legend. There’s a memorial to him in Badgworthy Valley – now known as Doone Valley - ‘whose novel... extols to all the world the joys of Exmoor’. Perhaps it’s time for another Blackmore to extol Exmoor today and encourage a few more visitors to this gorgeous place. Or perhaps we’ll just keep it as our little secret.