The Drewe Arms sits on The Square, thatched and cob-walled, and it was run for seventy-five years by one woman. Mabel Mudge — Auntie Mabel — took over in 1919 and retired in October 1994 at the age of ninety-nine, which made her Britain's longest-serving and oldest licensee. The pub kept the period interior she presided over: it's on CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors and has been named their Heritage Pub of the Year. It closed in 2022. The village then crowdfunded more than £550,000 — reported as the country's most successful community-pub raise — bought the freehold, and reopened it in March 2024. The kitchen serves seasonal meals from a chalkboard Tuesday to Saturday, plus a Sunday roast.
The name is younger than you'd think. It was the New Inn in the 1890s, then the Druid's Arms, and only became the Drewe Arms in the 1920s, at the prompting of Julius Drewe — tea merchant, founder of Home & Colonial Stores, and the man building Castle Drogo up on the ridge.
The square, the church and the pub sit together in a compact centre that has been a conservation area since 1972 and gets photographed a great deal. The Church of the Holy Trinity is Grade I listed, mostly fifteenth and early sixteenth century, with a four-pinnacled west tower. Inside there's a barrel-vaulted nave roof, nine floor ledger stones — a large set for a Dartmoor church — a Drewe memorial designed by Edwin Lutyens, and a set of pew carvings put in during 1936 showing Dartmoor wildlife: ponies, hares, foxes, woodcock, salmon and deer. The room above the main door once did service as the Parish Clerk's office and the village schoolroom.
For everything else there's the Post Office and Stores, which handles the parish.
The village stands on high ground above the River Teign, and the reason most people come is what the river does below it. The Teign carves a wooded gorge with walls rising past 200 metres, and the classic circuit runs the Hunter's Path along the high slopes — steep in places, with drop-offs — and the Fisherman's Path along the water, linking the village, Castle Drogo and Fingle Bridge in a six-kilometre loop. Iron Age hillforts face each other across the gorge: Prestonbury Castle to the north, Cranbrook Castle to the south.
At Fingle Bridge, a mile and a half below the village, a sixteenth-century granite bridge crosses the river beside the Fingle Bridge Inn. It's family-run, has river-fronted terraces and log fires in winter, and welcomes children and well-behaved dogs. Walkers stop for the veggie burgers, the raspberry Eton mess, the cream teas, or the Sunday carvery, for which you should book.
Mains water only reached the village in 1966; Mrs Dorothy Drew is said to have used the well until then.
The pew carvings are the thing that stays with you — someone in 1936 decided the church needed hares and salmon in the woodwork, and there they still are, keeping an eye on the congregation.