Olive is the dog at the Palk Arms, and Tripadvisor reviewers mention her by name, which tells you what sort of pub it is before you've walked in.
The pub itself is a 16th-century freehouse standing high above the Teign Valley, with long views across the hills to the Haldon Moors. The food is home-cooked and cheap — lamb and mint burgers in fresh buns with hot crispy chips and homemade coleslaw, ploughman's, a lot of it around five pounds. The ales come from Teignworthy and Dartmoor, the cider is Devon, and there's a wood-burning stove in the front public bar.
A lounge with settees leads back to a dining room that overlooks the valley. Children are welcome until half past eight, it closes on Mondays, and it is reputedly haunted. It ranks fourth of twenty-one restaurants in Bovey Tracey, which is the town you drive to for most of what the village doesn't have — which is most things, two miles down the road.
One reviewer called it "a proper country pub that serves good food at very reasonable prices with friendly and welcoming staff including Olive the pub dog."
St Mary's is the other landmark, and the more surprising one. It is Grade I listed, its tower dating to around 1250, the rest largely rebuilt around 1450. The ceilure — the decorated ceiling over the rood screen — is described as "one of the finest in the country." Below it the screen carries 32 panels of original medieval saints. The font is older still: a bowl of local stone on five shafts, carved around 1170. The parish registers begin in 1541.
The village is old in the way Devon villages are old. Domesday recorded it as Hanoch, twenty households, one cob and sixty sheep, worth thirty shillings a year to its lord — a Saxon thane named Alnoth, until the Normans handed the manor to a man called Roger. The name means "at the high oak-tree," which is roughly where you are: 600 to 800 feet up on the south side of the Teign Valley, on the south-eastern edge of Dartmoor.
North of the houses lie three reservoirs — Tottiford, Kennick and Trenchford — built between the 1860s and 1907 to supply Torquay and Newton Abbot, and now fringed with oak, sweet chestnut and rhododendron. A circular walk of around ten kilometres links all three, and the guides call it particularly beautiful in autumn. Above the village, Bottor Rock is a granite outcrop that was once a prehistoric settlement.
John Hill was vicar here for 53 years, from 1775 to 1828. His four sons went to the Napoleonic Wars: one captained a ship at Trafalgar, one was lost at sea, and one was wounded at Waterloo.
Getting here needs a car. Newton Abbot has the nearest mainline station, six or seven miles east, and the 182 bus runs the Teign Valley, but the roads are narrow and the hill is steep.
Steep enough that one modern resident, known locally as Nick the Sledger, is remembered for arriving in the village by sledge when the snow comes down. It is that kind of hill.