Southeastern Dartmoor
Holne
A small historic settlement above the wooded River Dart gorge, with a centuries-old inn and church and nearby moorland walks.
- Best for
- Holne Woods and River Dart walks
- Village anchors
- The Church House Inn and St Mary the Virgin
- Don't miss
- The painted rood screen and the medieval bridges
Photo: Hugh David Loxdale · CC BY-SA 4.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A small village with an unusually deep history
Holne pairs its 1329 inn and Grade I church with wooded River Dart walks, medieval bridges and Venford Reservoir.
The church and the Church House Inn are the village's principal landmarks. Beyond them, the supplied research identifies Holne Woods, Sharrah Pool, Holne Bridge, New Bridge and Venford Reservoir as the useful outdoor reasons to visit.
Where to go
Places in Holne
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesThe Church House Inn
A family-run Devon Longhouse, pub and restaurant with three en-suite letting rooms, locally sourced pub food, real ales and a beer garden with a stream and chickens.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Holne
- Access
- Dogs are made very welcome and biscuits are provided.
Holne Woods
A National Trust woodland walk following the southern bank of the River Dart from New Bridge toward Bellpool Island and Sharrah Pool.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Source-based planning allowance: around 100 minutes for a New Bridge to Sharrah Pool return
- Locality
- southern bank of the River Dart
Sharrah Pool
A popular wild-swimming spot on the River Dart at the western end of Holne Woods, about 50 minutes on foot from New Bridge.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Source-based planning allowance: around 100 minutes for the return walk from New Bridge
- Locality
- western end of Holne Woods
Walks & outdoors
1 place
Venford Reservoir
A reservoir at the foot of Dartmoor's south moor beside the Dart Gorge, described in the research as one of the park's most popular beauty spots.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 60 minutes
- Locality
- foot of Dartmoor's south moor beside the Dart Gorge
History & heritage
3 places
Church of St Mary the Virgin
A church built around 1300 and enlarged early in the 16th century, with a painted wooden rood screen retaining original colour and 38 saint panels.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 30 minutes
- Locality
- highest hill in the village
Holne Bridge
A Grade II* medieval bridge over the River Dart, rebuilt in 1413 and one of the two bridges the research says make chocolate-box scenes.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 20 minutes
- Locality
- River Dart below the village
New Bridge
A medieval bridge over the River Dart, rebuilt in 1413 and named by the research as the start of the south-bank Holne Woods walk.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 20 minutes
- Locality
- River Dart below the village
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Three ways to explore Holne
Signature outings
A painted medieval screen
The church's c.1500 wooden rood screen runs across the nave and aisles, with rich carving, 38 saint panels and original colour.
A bridge rebuilt in 1413
Holne Bridge is the Grade II* member of the two medieval River Dart bridges identified in the supplied research.
Water beside the gorge
Venford Reservoir sits at the foot of Dartmoor's south moor beside the Dart Gorge.
The village story
Holne Village Guide
An original Travel Fox guide to Holne's inn, church, River Dart landscape and long history.
The Church House Inn
The Church House Inn was built in 1329 to house the stonemasons working on the church next door, and the two buildings have shared a wall ever since. It's a Devon Longhouse — pub, restaurant, and three letting rooms — with a beer garden a visitor review describes as "a lovely beer garden with a stream and chickens." That is an accurate description. There are chickens, and there is a stream.
The kitchen does seasonal British food: hand-crafted pies, grilled steaks and burgers, all locally sourced. The Sunday roast runs from noon to six with a choice of three meats, a fish option and a vegetarian one, and it fills the room. There are four real ales on tap, the Dartmoor IPA among them, plus a back-bar of more than twenty gins, ten whiskies and ten spiced rums, which is a wide range for a village of around 250 people. Dogs are made welcome and given biscuits.
The Church and Village
The pub is run by Tom and Tina, the latest in generations of the Hillman family, and reopened in May 2022 after a long closure and a careful restoration. Inside it keeps an oak screen fitted around 1530 and an eighteenth-century elm bench in the main room. One room is named the Kingsley Room, after the novelist Charles Kingsley, who was born at the nearby vicarage in 1819 while his father was briefly the curate. A door up in the rafters of the stable bar is said to have been an escape route used by Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War.
There are no shops to speak of. The church and the pub are the village, more or less, which the two of them have managed between them for centuries.
Woods, Bridges and Reservoir
The Church of St Mary the Virgin sits on the highest hill in the village and is Grade I listed. It was built around 1300 and holds a painted wooden rood screen from about 1500, running in three sections across the nave and aisles, with thirty-eight wainscot panels each showing a saint and much of the original colour still on them. The screen was conserved in 2005, paid for by a bequest from a Miss Joan West. In the churchyard there's a hollow, split yew thought to have been planted around the same time the church went up; the more generous local estimates put it well over a thousand years old.
The walking is the reason most people come. Holne Woods, owned by the National Trust, follows the southern bank of the River Dart from New Bridge up to Sharrah Pool, a wild-swimming spot about fifty minutes on foot. Both Holne Bridge and New Bridge are medieval, rebuilt in 1413, and span the gorge below the village. Venford Reservoir sits nearby at the foot of the south moor.
Getting Here and Earlier Holne
Holne is about four and a half miles from Ashburton and the A38, with the heritage South Devon Railway steaming out of Buckfastleigh down the road. There are no buses to rely on, so you come by car.
The Domesday surveyors found thirteen villagers here in 1086, along with seven smallholders and eight slaves, and valued the manor at three pounds to its lord, William of Falaise. Nearly a thousand years on, the pub still keeps chickens.
Stay around Dartmoor
Make a longer stay of it
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
Third-party photographs are credited to their named creators and reused under the linked Creative Commons licence or public-domain dedication. Travel Fox stores an optimised local copy; the file-specific changes and any browser-applied display crop are disclosed below. Reused photographs link both to the Wikimedia Commons source record and to the declared source image; Travel Fox's own photographs carry no such record and are marked as ours. These image licences do not cover Travel Fox text, branding or page design.
- File:St. Mary the Virgin Church, Holne, Dartmoor South Devon, UK.jpg — photograph by Hugh David Loxdale; Own work. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
- File:Holne, Venford Reservoir Dam - geograph.org.uk - 6154553.jpg — photograph by Nigel Cox; Holne: Venford Reservoir Dam by Nigel Cox. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- The Church House Inn — churchhouseholne.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Church of St Mary the Virgin — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Holne Woods — nationaltrust.org.uk national body or asset manager
- Sharrah Pool — visitdevon.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Holne Bridge — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- New Bridge — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Venford Reservoir — swlakestrust.org.uk other published source