The Castle Inn stands 200 metres from the entrance to Lydford Gorge, a 16th-century Devonshire inn beside the castle it is named for. It has thirteen bedrooms, a beer garden, and a kitchen that runs to char-grilled fillet steak with tomato and mushrooms, homemade beef and ale pie, and beer-battered haddock. Starters go from soup of the day at £4.95 to smoked mackerel with gooseberries, pickled cucumber and horseradish. Desserts are homemade and change daily on the specials board. Dogs and walkers are welcome, which in a village that exists for walking is less a policy than a necessity.
The other pub is the Dartmoor Inn, on the Moorside edge of the village. It is a gastropub with three rooms and a place in the Michelin Guide, rated 4.9 on Tripadvisor and ranked first of the four places you could eat in Lydford. The cooking is built around whatever the nearby farms and producers have that week: roast moorland sirloin for Sunday lunch, a butternut squash roast for the vegetarians, most of the menu gluten-free or adaptable. One review put it plainly: "The Dartmoor might present as a pub but the cooking is way above standard gastropub levels."
There is a darker footnote to the address. In Charles Kingsley's *Westward Ho!*, the outlaw Roger Rowle — leader of the Gubbins, a real 17th-century clan of sheep-stealers and cut-throats known as the Robin Hood of Dartmoor — is killed at the Dartmoor Inn near Lydford. The food has improved.
The gorge is the reason most people come. Run by the National Trust, it is the deepest river gorge in the South West, a mile and a half of wooded ravine cut by the River Lyd, and rare enough to count as temperate rainforest. The Waterfall Trail is an hour's circular to the 30-metre Whitelady, the tallest waterfall in the region. The Devil's Cauldron Trail is shorter and stranger, ending on a platform bolted over a swirling pothole. Both the West Devon Way and the Dartmoor Way pass through the village, heading off toward Brentor and Tavistock along old drove roads.
The Church of St Petroc stands almost in the shadow of the castle. Grade II* listed, 13th-century at the core, it keeps a late-Saxon font hewn from a single block of Hurdwick stone and a rood screen carved in 1903 by the Pinwill sisters of Ermington. In the churchyard is the grave of George Routleigh, a watchmaker who died in 1802 and whose epitaph describes him as wound up "in the hopes of being thoroughly cleaned, repaired and set agoing in the world to come." People come to read it.
Lydford was once bigger than all this. A Saxon burh under Alfred, a royal mint striking silver pennies, and by Domesday one of only four boroughs in Devon, taxed, the survey notes, equally with London. The stone tower that survives was a Stannary prison so grim that Parliament in 1512 called it "one of the most hanious, contagious and detestable places in the realm." From it came Lydford Law: hang first, try afterwards.
Okehampton and Tavistock are each about ten minutes off, the 118 bus links the three, and the station closed in 1968. What is left is the water in the gorge, and the watchmaker waiting to be set agoing.