James Bowden & Son runs two shops across three floors in the middle of Chagford, and between them they sell footwear, camping gear, compasses, penknives, binoculars, radios, DIY tools, electrical fittings, pet food, paint, gardening kit, household goods, gifts, toys, books and sweets. James Bowden came to the town in 1862, bought the old Forge in Mill Street and turned it into the Vulcan Iron Works. In 1922 the works built the first radio valve set in Devon, and queues formed to hear it. The firm still trades. Its old rival, Webbers, ran for five generations and is now a Spar. If you need a compass, a bag of nails or a moorland waterproof, this is a good town to be in.
Chagford stands on a hillside that rises steeply off the riverside meadows of the Teign, on the north-east edge of Dartmoor, in the shadow of Meldon Hill and Nattadon Common. The name means gorse-ford — *chag* for the gorse, *ford* for the crossing at Chagford Bridge, from which the town takes its name. The centre is a small square with an octagonal granite building planted in the middle of it, known to everyone as the pepperpot, built in 1862 to replace a dilapidated thatched market hall called the Shambles. Around 1,540 people live here. It had banks once, and a post office, and it has lost both — the thatched Lloyd's, said to be the only thatched Lloyd's in England, closed in 2017. What it has kept is nearly everything else.
Four pubs stand in and around the square, all of them with rooms and food. The Three Crowns is the one you notice first, a thatched building whose oldest parts date to the 13th century, when it was the home of Sir John Whiddon, a judge under Mary I and Elizabeth I. It runs to fish and chips, hand-made pies, Sunday roasts and seafood platters, an 8oz ribeye at £26 and a 6oz fillet at £28, eaten under stone walls and beamed ceilings beside an inglenook fire. Some in the town rate its ales the best around. It is also, by long tradition, haunted.
The Globe Inn, on High Street, was once the Gregory's Arms and keeps its original coaching yard. Graham and Mary Flight run it. Three cask ales pour as standard — Dartmoor IPA, Dartmoor Jail Ale and Otter Bitter — alongside Sam's Autumn Scrumpy, and the kitchen does fish and chips and an Otter Ale pie in two bars with big open fires. It appears regularly in the Good Beer Guide, dogs are given water and biscuits in both bars, and in 2012 it won a south-west Community Hero Award.
The Ring O'Bells has stood on its site since before the 16th century and has burned down at least twice. Karen cooks steak pie and a spinach, mushroom and feta pie using Devon produce. The building has had other uses: the front was once a Stannary Court dealing in tin taxation, the middle section held prisoners overnight, and the upper floor was used for the coroner's inquests — the Crowner's Court — with the coroner summoned from Exeter each time. The rear of the first floor was once a mortuary. It is now a dog-friendly pub with rooms.
The fourth, the Chagford Inn on Mill Street, has become the reason some people drive here. Ollie Vernon and Jordan Ralph took it on just before lockdown; Vernon trained at Exeter College and does whole-carcass butchery on site, nose to tail, to cut waste. The pub is in the Estrella Damm Top 100 Gastropubs list and holds an AA Rosette, and the cooking shows it: Dartmoor rabbit with cannellini beans, kale and pickled garlic; Brixham scallops with cauliflower, herb oil, black pudding and monk's beard; a seven-spice Sladesdown duck breast with apricot and watercress; a "chouxbarb crumble" that is a crumble-topped choux bun filled with vanilla cream and forced rhubarb. Three courses start at £30. The building was the Bakers' Arms, then Buller's Arms after the Boer War general, and has only been the Chagford Inn since 2014.
That is a lot of dining for a place this size, and it does not stop at the pubs. Whiddons is a 16th-century thatched restaurant on High Street where a chef named Paul cooks Devon cream, fish, meat and fruit. Folklore Kitchen and Social, run by Matt and Posey on Mill Street, is a daytime café and guest house doing Japanese-fusion food — ramen, gyoza, satay kimchi — with evening dining on Fridays and Saturdays and a rating of 4.9 across roughly 135 reviews. The Old Forge on the Square, run by Simon Searle and his wife Claire, is ranked first of the town's fourteen restaurants on Tripadvisor and serves breakfast, lunch and cream teas. The Birdcage, run by Louella near the church, does a cream tea one reviewer scored nine out of ten, and a warm brownie with local clotted cream and vanilla ice cream.
For provisions, Beachwood Bakery is the standout. Julia Cotts moved from Los Angeles to Devon in 2016, named the bakery after her old neighbourhood, started as a market stallholder and opened the shop with funding from the local community. Its bread is made by hand from organic stone-milled flour, most of it from Northumberland; the Village Loaf is 30 per cent wholemeal, 70 per cent white, and the ice cream is churned in-house with no additives, sold by cone or small tub only. In June 2021 the Financial Times named it one of the fifty greatest food stores on the planet. It opens three days a week. Blacks Delicatessen, run by Chris and Catherine Mount for around sixteen years, does homemade quiches, ready meals, cheeses and picnics; Michael Caines, formerly of Gidleigh Park up the lane, calls it "a very special place." Fat Mouse Dairy sells cheese, the Fruit Loop sells greens, and Jaded Palates — founded by Ian Renwick, who spent three years learning winemaking in France — sells the wine.
Half a mile out of town on the Two Moors Way, on the banks of the Teign, is the swimming pool. It is a 34-metre open-air lido, river-fed, low-chlorine, dug out by hand by local residents on land given by the Hayter-Hames family and opened in 1933. It is said to be the largest open-air freshwater pool in the south-west. There is a grassy sunbathing area, a toddler pool with toy boats and watering cans and plastic ducks, and a Tea Shed selling drinks and cakes. In summer it opens most afternoons.
The walking starts at the front door. The classic is the riverside route down the Teign to Castle Drogo — the last castle built in England, designed by Lutyens for the founder of the Home and Colonial Stores between 1911 and 1930 — and on to Fingle Bridge, a 17th-century packhorse bridge in the Teign Gorge with an inn beside it. You can walk the whole eight-mile loop from the town rather than drive to it, along the high Hunter's Path and back low by the river. Behind the town, Meldon Hill climbs to 390 metres; the pull up from Chagford is steep, and the top gives you the town below and Nattadon Common opposite. Further out lie Scorhill Stone Circle, reached across the Teign-e-ver clapper bridge, and Kestor Rock, and Fernworthy Reservoir, where you can buy a day permit for the brown trout from a self-service kiosk. Chagford sits on the Two Moors Way, which runs 102 miles from Ivybridge across Dartmoor and Exmoor to Lynmouth on the north coast.
There is a station in none of this. The nearest railheads are Exeter, about 22 miles off, and Okehampton, reopened in 2021 on the Dartmoor Line; the town lies off the A382, four miles west of Moretonhampstead, and bus 173 links it to Exeter via Drewsteignton and Tedburn St Mary. Families get Jubilee Park on New Street — two tennis courts, a skate ramp, a zip wire and a good deal of climbing equipment — and, once a year on the third Thursday of August, the Chagford Show, an agricultural gathering now in its 124th year with more than 350 sheep, 250 horse entries and a vintage section.
The history is worth having, though the town wears it lightly. Chagford was made a stannary town by Edward I in 1305, one of only four in Devon through which all Dartmoor tin had to pass to be weighed, graded, taxed and traded. The Stannary Court met in the square, and on 6 March 1618 the upper floor of the old market house collapsed during a sitting, killing about ten people including the steward, Eveleigh — reputedly at the moment a witness gave false evidence under oath. Tin ran out around 1600, wool came and went, and the town reinvented itself as a resort. It was here, in the 19th century, that the moorland guide James Perrott set up the first Dartmoor letterbox — a glass jar in a cairn at remote Cranmere Pool, for walkers to leave a card — and so invented letterboxing, which is still played. Perrott is buried in the churchyard, and had in his time guided Charles Kingsley, R. D. Blackmore and Charles Dickens across the moor.
The church, St Michael the Archangel, is Grade I, its granite tower finished in 1513 and rising about 69 feet. Look up in the nave and you will find, among the carved oak roof bosses, the tinners' mark of three hares sharing three ears between them — two ears each, three ears in all, and the arithmetic does not resolve however long you stare. The font was carved from local granite in 1857 by a Chagford mason, John Aggett. And there is a grave inside for Mary Whiddon, who on 11 October 1641 was shot dead by a jealous suitor just after her wedding. The Three Crowns had been her home; she left it to marry. The Royalist poet Sidney Godolphin was killed in the porch of that same inn two years later, of which Lord Clarendon wrote that the skirmish left "the misfortune of his death upon a place which could never otherwise have had a mention in the World."
Chagford has had a mention or two since. But the smaller thing is this: at St Michael's, a bride who has just signed the register will still walk over to Mary Whiddon's tomb and lay a single flower on it before she leaves.