The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Almost more extraordinary than these ode-inspiring landscapes is the fact that this National Park is so peaceful’
“A savage place! as holy and enchanted/As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted.” So penned Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Kubla Khan. His imagination was fired by wild expanses close to home: Exmoor’s heather-purpled hillsides, wooded combes and craggy coastline.
Almost more extraordinary than these ode-inspiring landscapes is the fact that this 267-square-mile National Park, marking its 70th birthday in 2024, is so peaceful, receiving fewer than one-10th of the visitors who throng the Lakes.
Yet Exmoor is epic. It encompasses England’s most remote shoreline and highest sea cliffs, soaring to the 1,043ft-high Great Hangman.
Centuries of history unfurl, from Neolithic stones to Dunster’s medieval castle and Jacobean Yarn Market. Magnificent red deer have browsed these hills for millennia, alongside Exmoor ponies – today they are scarcer than wild tigers.
As Europe’s first International Dark Sky Reserve, it also offers stellar star
Exmoor, England
gazing, championed during October’s Dark Skies Festival.
As for its big birthday, the National Park is celebrating by making Exmoor lovelier still. Rather than fireworks and fiestas (though expect some in October), the focus is on nurturing nature: recovering rare temperate rainforest, restoring viewpoints, and planting Kings Wood near Simonsbath.
Also in 2024, Exmoor’s enviable hiking network will be augmented by the King Charles III England Coast Path, partly following the most striking legs of the South West Coast Path. Other waymarked trails include the Coleridge Way, snaking 51 miles across the moor and through Lorna Doone country to Lynmouth, in turn revealing Exmoor’s most bucolic, romantic and remote faces. No septuagenarian ever looked more alluring.
How to do it
On Foot Holidays (01722 322652; onfootholidays.co.uk) offers a six-night Coastal Exmoor self-guided walking trip featuring sections of coast path and Coleridge Way. From £965pp, including B&B accommodation, some meals, luggage transfers, route directions and maps.
Paul Bloomfield fell for Exmoor while rambling and rockpooling during childhood holidays.