Bowerman's Nose rises above the village: a weathered granite pillar that, if you squint, resolves into a man in profile, cap on his head, long nose protruding. The story is that Bowerman was a hunter who chased a hare through a coven of witches, upset their cauldron, and got turned to stone. His hounds became the rocks on the next hill, which is why that one is called Hound Tor. Dartmoor explains its skyline this way.
Manaton is really two villages. The upper one gathers around a wide green ringed by thatched cottages, with St Winifred's Church on its north side. The lower one, down by the Kestor Inn, grew from the older hamlets of Water and Freelands. The whole place sits in the southeastern corner of the National Park, four miles south of Moretonhampstead, surrounded by tors and the Becka Brook valley. Locals called it "the 'ton."
The Kestor Inn is the pub, and the hub of village life. Refurbished in 2020, it does lunches and evening meals from Devon's seasonal produce, plus a Sunday carvery from midday with a choice of local meats or a vegetarian option. There's takeaway fish and chips and cream teas if you'd rather eat outside. Its own description calls it "a cosy, friendly pub in the heart of Dartmoor serving good hearty food," and there's a function room named, without ceremony, the Room with a View.
Beyond the pub, stock up before you arrive. There are no shops, no butcher, no farm shop in the parish — Manaton is scattered and small, and the nearest supplies are in Moretonhampstead or Bovey Tracey, both around four miles off.
St Winifred's is a 15th-century church, and St Winifred herself a 7th-century Welsh princess and patron saint of virgins — only six churches in England are dedicated to her. Inside is a Tudor rood screen, painted and gilded around 1500 with saints including St Ursula and St Nicholas, every face on it deliberately defaced under Edward VI's 1548 decree against superstitious images. In 1779 lightning struck the tower and nearly split it in two. The churchyard cross had a stranger fate: a Victorian rector objected to the old custom of carrying a coffin three times around it before burial, and it was removed and destroyed.
The walking is the reason to come. A four-mile circular takes in Kitty Jay's Grave, a moorland burial always kept with fresh flowers by hands nobody has ever caught, reputedly a farmer's daughter who hanged herself in the late 18th century. That legend moved the novelist John Galsworthy, who stayed at Wingstone farmhouse from 1903 to 1923, to write his short story "The Apple Tree" here in 1916. Hound Tor, under two miles away, hides the foundations of a medieval hamlet abandoned six hundred years ago.
The Domesday surveyors found three villagers here in 1086, along with 10 cattle, 30 sheep and 25 goats, and valued the whole place at ten shillings. Newton Abbot station is eight or nine miles by road, and in summer the Haytor Hoppa bus loops out to the village and back.
Becky Falls sits outside the village — fifty acres of ancient woodland where the Becka Brook drops seventy feet through granite boulders. You hear it before you see it, which is the point.