Sourton

Inside the Highwayman

The Highwayman Inn bills itself as the most unusual pub in Britain, and for once the claim is hard to argue with. The entrance is built into an old Launceston-to-Tavistock stagecoach. Inside there is a Tutankhamun sarcophagus, a six-foot Minotaur named Asterion, and a bar counter carved from bog oak into the shape of a sea-dragon. The gothic door to Rita Jones's Locker Bar was salvaged from an eighteenth-century whaling ship called the Diana, and carved with the head of the goddess the ship was named after.

Rita and Buster Jones moved here from South Wales on Michaelmas Day in 1959, and Rita named the place after her romantic notions of highwaymen in the moor mist. It has stayed in the same family for over sixty years. Before that it was a thirteenth-century coaching house, once called the Golden Fleece. Well-behaved dogs are welcome, the food is light bar fare on seasonal hours, and there is accommodation across the road at Cobweb Hall, where the two bedrooms have four-poster beds and spiral staircases. There are said to be three ghosts, including a cavalier called Samuel.

Village, Tor and Railway

The village itself is smaller and quieter than its pub. Around 420 people live in Sourton, mostly in bungalows, along the A386 on the north-western edge of Dartmoor, beneath the craggy ridge of Sourton Tors. From the village you can walk straight up onto open moor, and on a clear day Brentor church is visible far to the west.

The main walking draw is the Granite Way, an eleven-mile traffic-free trail on the old railway trackbed between Okehampton and Lydford. It crosses the 1874 Meldon Viaduct, a 165-metre iron span over the West Okement River, and passes close to Meldon Reservoir, from which a short circular reaches the high-altitude oak woodland of Black-a-Tor Copse. The trail is flat and fully off-road, which makes it good for families on bikes.

Ice Ponds and Church Bells

Up on the flank of the tor are the remains of the Sourton Tors ice works, where an engineer named James Henderson built shallow ponds in the 1870s to freeze natural ice, shipped down to Plymouth to pack fish for the London train. Mild winters and the arrival of artificial ice killed it within a few years. Only the pond banks are left.

The Church of St Thomas à Becket sits at 260 metres beneath the tors, its dedication reputedly made by descendants of William de Tracy, one of the men who murdered Becket. It has a fifteenth-century font, a wagon roof studded with bosses, and five bells cast in 1796. Pevsner described some of the chancel tracery as "the craziest and most incorrect" he had seen.

From Domesday to the Village Hall

The Domesday surveyors recorded eighteen cattle, a hundred sheep and fifty goats here, and valued the whole place at seven pounds. Okehampton and its station are about four miles up the A386; the 118 bus covers the distance in around ten minutes, every day except Sunday. The village hall runs bingo, quizzes, concerts and cream teas, and hosts the annual Sourton Show.

A Summer Place on the Moor

In 1630 the historian Thomas Westcote wrote that Sourton is "a good summer place for the natives, though perchance it will not be pleasing to some tender and nice constitutions in the Winter." At 260 metres on the edge of the moor, that still holds.