If you type "Peter Tavy Inn" into a sat-nav it will send you into the middle of the moor, so the pub's own website tells you to enter the postcode PL19 9NN instead. Follow that and you arrive at a 15th-century country inn a mile off the A386, with slate floors, low beams and log burners, two miles north of Tavistock on the western edge of Dartmoor.
The Inn began as lodgings for the stonemasons rebuilding the church, which is one of the more direct ways a pub can come into existence. It is known for its home-made pies — the steak and stilton and the chicken, ham and leek are the ones reviewers keep coming back for — served in portions described as hearty rather than delicate. Puddings run to apple crumble, home-made ice creams and sorbets, and a cheese board of four Devon cheeses. There are up to five local beers on, all from within Devon, including Jail Ale from the Dartmoor Brewery and Sam's Cider from Winkleigh.
Walkers, cyclists, dogs and children are all welcome, and dogs are allowed in the restaurant. Out the back there's a patio and a second, "hidden" garden looking out over the moor. It runs about 4.5 on Tripadvisor across more than a thousand reviews, one of which is titled "Nice food, grumpy owners," which you can take or leave.
There is no shop. For that you go to Tavistock, two or three miles down the road.
The village itself is small — 296 people at the last count — sitting at the mouth of a combe where the moor meets the fields. The tors gather around it: Cox Tor, Roos Tor, White Tor. Just above the village is the Combe itself, a narrow glen described locally as holding "the vast number of small, but exquisitely beautiful falls." A fingerpost points back towards Peter Tavy via the Combe, one mile.
Walk higher and the ground turns prehistoric. White Tor has a double ring of stone walling and is one of only two possible Neolithic settlements recognised on Dartmoor. Across Langstone Moor there's a stone circle, a faint stone row, and the Langstone menhir — 2.7 metres tall, the third-highest standing stone on the moor. At a crossroads out on the open ground is Stephen's Grave, where George Stephens was buried under a granite post in 1763. He had lost the prospect of marrying a farmer's daughter, Mary Bray, and as a suicide was buried outside the parish. His ghost is said to walk the moor.
The Church of St Peter is Grade I listed and mostly 15th-century, with a granite tower carrying four enormous pinnacles. The north-west one was taken off by lightning in 1803. Inside there's a font from around 1250, a medieval painted screen, and Tudor oak pew-ends carved with heads, Green Men and mermaids.
The rector W. McBean once sent his churchwarden, Roger Mudge, to clear the parish out of the Inn during services. Mudge — a relative of the innkeeper — would announce himself loudly enough to empty the pub before he got there.