Escaping to North Devon and Exmoor - Day Five

 To help you navigate our blog more easily - this link - https://wherenexthun.blogspot.com/2025/06/how-to-navigate-our-blog.html will take you to a summary page detailing all our blog posts. Clicking on a link will open that post in a new browser window. To return to the home current page just close the browser page and return to the post you were reading beforehand

Day Five: we disappear into Dulverton

“It’s your fault”.

“What is?”

“These steep hills.”

“What?? How do I get the blame for Exmoor having hills?”

“You said ‘Let’s go a little further on because it’s only 2 o’clock’”.

“No! Excuse me but that was you! You said that. I told you there was a quicker way back to the campsite but you said ‘Let’s go a little further because we have still got plenty of time left’”.

“You didn’t tell me it was 20% steepness on the hills though.”

“WHAT? Seriously? Yes, I did. I told you there were black arrows on all the roads leading from Tarr steps”.

“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me there were hills and they were steep!”

“IT’S EXMOOR, EXACTLY WHAT WERE YOU EXPECTING?”

“You said ‘there are one or two hills we will have to go up and down today!’ ONE or TWO……not thousands!”.

“And you made me eat a cream tea before the last bit of the bike ride”.

“WHAT? I was having the cream tea and you INSISTED on sharing mine! Don’t you go blaming me for your inability to turn down a scone!”.

 

Twenty-two miles today took three bars off our E bike battery monitors. Three bars!

The mistake was Dulverton. Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. I mean who puts a settlement right down the bottom of a winding river valley, 300m below the surrounding high moorlands. What an insane piece of medieval geographical thinking! I mean seriously, all roads out of Dulverton go up hills! It must have been hell being a cart pulling horse in medieval Dulverton.

The bike ride down from Halse to Dulverton gave us fair warning – a four-mile long winding descent, the lower section of which followed the clear, tumbling waters of the river Barle through deciduous woodlands, past narrow valley meadows on tiny floodplains.

Could you get a motorhome into Dulverton? Yes, if you had nerves of steel. Some of the approach roads are narrow and steep. Roads within the little town narrower still with some tight turn T junctions. Anyway, the bigger issue is whether you could get it into the car park. I wasn’t convinced I’d get 6.32m long Bryony in there!

Quirky independent shops selling antiques, household accessories and ladies’ fashions, some interesting buildings, three cafes and a couple of pubs. With the bikes, we were limited to where we could go for coffee. Rear gardens were inaccessible and the only café with an accessible garden wasn’t open for the week (go figure, shop part is open but café bit closed in the middle of August…ours not to reason why). 

We sat on a bench and drank take away coffees watching the world go by, sedately. Extreme excitement came in the form of the bin lorry. It managed to block one street entirely for twenty minutes which led to a snarl up around the town. Traffic congestion everywhere. Grid lock. Locals even came out of houses to see what all the excitement was about. When the bin men pulled their lorry across the entrance to the car park to allow all the roads to start moving again, then the excitement really intensified, as half the traffic jam vehicles were trying to get in or out of it.

A quick trip to the National Park office and I departed 15 minutes later with a new South Coastal footpath handbook, a book about map navigation and some information leaflets on stargazing on Exmoor.

I found Maggie still sat on the same bench surrounded by traffic and bin men.

“Glad to see you back here, I was beginning to worry I had fossilised and the bin men were about to remove me”.

Sarcastic one liner wit. Maggie has a degree in that, I’m sure of it!

We debated whether to visit the Guildhall Heritage and Arts centre and the Dulverton model railway exhibit of Dulverton Station, but we decided too much excitement for one day was bad for the blood pressure and so when the frustrated local and tourist drivers had cleared the roads, we felt it safe enough to once again venture back onto them ourselves.

The journey to Tarr Steps, an ancient clapper bridge was, no surprise here, hilly!

 

“There are also plenty of challenging routes for cyclists”.

Exmoor Visitor 2021

We laughed at that phrase in the local free National Park information newspaper. That one sentence is such a well-crafted literary piece of understatement! Pulitzer Prize winning stuff!!

 

As we expected, Tarr steps was busy but not unpleasantly so. Children paddled in the shallow river water; people picnicked on the grassy banks. Others posed for photos on the bridge. The Tarr farm restaurant on the hillside did a roaring trade and surprise, surprise, we found ourselves eventually sat on its lovely terrace sharing MY cream tea and admiring the views out across the steep sided narrow valley. Given we had only just finished our own packed lunch, this was excessive and unnecessary gluttony on my part, but hey, it’s all about supporting local businesses after the pandemic lockdowns isn’t it!

Which is where we came to discuss the route back home. The short route – 3 miles back up the road we had earlier come down; or the 9-mile route which involved crossing the clapper bridge and then cycling all the STEEP, HILLY, WINDY lanes back. The LONGER route. The one Mag CHOSE in response to my observation “There are two ways back, here they are, which one would you like to do?”.

  

The 22 mile route cycled today, with 950m of ascent, is as follows:

·        B3223 to Dulverton

·        Back retracing route along B3223 to car park at Marsh bridge

·        Turn right up hill to Higher Marsh, taking right hand fork just before Draydon Farm and continuing up hill to re-join B3223

·        Taking next left down to Liscombe and on down to Tarr Steps

·        Crossing river via bridge and along road to Hawkridge Church, where take next right

·        At end of this lane turn right and then taking second right signposted to Withypool (nice café, village shop, river bank picnic spot and two small car parks and a pub)

·        Lane up to B3223 at Cromers Cross and then along B3223 to Spine Cross, turning left back to Halse Farm.

Dulverton is a hub for outdoor activities on Exmoor and there are plenty of well signposted walks spiralling out of the town in all directions. Just remember they ALL go upwards!

I have to confess, that for the first time ever, I went up a hill today that I thought was going to defeat me. E Bikes are great and in the two years and 2600 miles I have cycled on mine, I have yet to ever and I mean ever, have to stand up to get up a hill. Today, I almost had to stand and, horror of horrors, I was in turbo mode in lowest gear and with another 500m of hill to get up, I was just about done in! Phew, close, just made it with thumping heart and tired legs!

“There are also plenty of challenging routes for cyclists”.

Exmoor Visitor 2021

That bit of understated journalism needs to come with a health warning as well!