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 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.
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.
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.