The Valiant Soldier closed in 1965 when the brewery decided the town had too many pubs, and the last landlord, Mark Roberts, simply put down his cloth and left. The change stayed in the tills. His wife Alice went on living upstairs into the mid-1990s, and when the community and Teignbridge District Council acquired the building in 1997, they opened it as a museum with everything more or less where the Roberts had left it. It is the sort of thing that only happens when nobody is in a hurry to redecorate.
Buckfastleigh sits on the southern edge of Dartmoor, in the valley where the Dart, the Mardle and the Dean Burn all run through — three rivers, which is a lot of water for one town, and the reason it once had textile mills, a corn mill, a paper mill and a tannery all going at once. Dartmoor begins here, more or less at the top of the high street.
There are still pubs that are open. The Globe Inn, at 123 Plymouth Road, is dead in the centre — a locals' place with open fires, Sunday roast, pizza including something called the hunter's BBQ, and cheesy chips. Dogs are welcome in the public bar. The White Hart is a single-bar town-centre pub, CAMRA-listed, with timber beams, horse brasses, two wood-burners and Hunters Half Bore speciality beers at 4%. Down at Buckfast, on the banks of the Dart near the Abbey, the Abbey Inn has a heated riverside terrace and eight rooms; dogs get the bar and the terrace but not the restaurant.
The walking starts at the door. A signposted riverside loop follows the South Devon Railway, the heritage steam line that runs seven miles along the Dart to Totnes Riverside and back. Hembury and Holne Woods are an easy reach, with trails past an Iron Age hillfort and a Norman motte-and-bailey. The Abbot's Way sets off from Buckfast Abbey, and the 108-mile Dartmoor Way passes through on its Buckfastleigh–Ashburton section.
For families there is Victoria Park, with a heated open-air swimming pool and a playground with a zip wire, and the Buckfast Butterfly Farm & Dartmoor Otter Sanctuary, where the otters are fed at 11.30, 2 and 4.
Above the town, up a long flight of steps, stands Holy Trinity Church — now a roofless, stabilised shell after an arson fire gutted it in July 1992. It marks the original monastic site, occupied by AD 1018 before the monks moved north to the present Buckfast Abbey. In the churchyard is a caged tomb. It holds Squire Richard Cabell, who died in 1677 and, as Britain Express records, was "rumoured by locals to be in league with the devil." He was penned under a heavy stone with iron gratings built over it to stop him coming up. His legend fed into The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The Abbey down the road still makes Buckfast Tonic Wine, sold since the 1890s under the original slogan: three small glasses a day, for good health and lively blood. The monks kept bees, too. Brother Adam spent seventy-eight years among them and bred a strain of his own, the Buckfast Bee, at an isolated apiary out on the moor.