Lustleigh

May Day Beneath the Cleave

In the middle of the Town Orchard sits a granite boulder with names carved into it. Each one is a May Queen, one for every year since 1954, and on top of the boulder is a granite throne cut from Blackingstone Quarry stone, inscribed "MM" for the millennium. Doug Cooper designed it and Warren Pappas carved it. On the first Saturday of May, children still parade to the orchard for maypole dancing and the crowning of a new Queen, a tradition Cecil Torr of Wreyland revived in 1905 with fete games that once included bowling for a pig.

The village arranges itself around a green with a granite cross, a cricket pitch, and thatched cottages, all of it under the steep wooded ridge of Lustleigh Cleave. The River Bovey runs below.

The Pub and the Tea Room

The pub is The Cleave, a 15th-century thatched building with a snug bar, a log fire, and a garden with its own car park. It's a tied Heavitree house, so the ales come from the Heavitree Brewery. The kitchen does pub classics alongside a specials board built around fresh fish — reviews mention pork belly, BBQ chicken, a rack of pork ribs with barbecue sauce, and a Sunday lunch that gets called superb. Dogs are welcome. It changed hands recently and the reviews since have been kind about the new ownership.

For tea there's Primrose Tea Rooms, reopened after a few years shut, doing scones with jam and cream and a reputation for the best cream tea in Devon. That is the tea room's claim, and it draws visitors from further afield than Devon to test it.

Village Changes and Valley Walks

Shopping is simpler. The Dairy, formerly Peter's Stores, is the only shop left. The village used to have a post office, a school, a general store, a second-hand shop, grocers and a tuck shop. All of them have gone, most into private houses, including the railway station, which closed in 1964.

The walking is the reason most people come. Lustleigh Cleave is a steep, rock-strewn wooded valley above the Bovey, and you can walk straight into it from the green. At the north-west end, Hunter's Tor carries an Iron Age hillfort and views across to Hound Tor. At the other end stands the Nutcrackers, a logan stone that could be gently rocked back and forth to crack nuts, at least until someone toppled it and it had to be reset. The old railway line is now the Wray Valley Trail, part of National Cycle Route 28, which links the village on foot or by bike toward Bovey Tracey and Moretonhampstead.

Church Stone and Domesday Honey

The church of St John the Baptist is Grade I, its chancel built around 1250. Inside is the Datuidoci Stone, cut sometime around 550 to 600 AD and inscribed "Datuidoc, son of Conhinoc" — one of Dartmoor's earliest Christian memorials.

Domesday recorded the manor as Sutreworde and valued it at £7. Among the tenants were five bee-keepers who rendered seven sesters of honey, which is a rare enough entry that the bees seem to have mattered here.

A Village of Reputation

The Daily Telegraph once called Lustleigh "one of England's greatest villages." It is also reputed to be among the most expensive places in rural England to buy a house, which the people carving their names onto the boulder each May are welcome to.