Until 1993, being served at the Rugglestone Inn meant opening a door and helping yourself from the casks stacked behind it. There was no bar. Miss Audrey Lamb, who was born in the building and lived there until the year before she handed it on, ran it that way for decades; the bar counter only exists because someone eventually knocked a hole in the wall beside the cellar and topped it with a piece of elm. The pub still pours its ales by gravity, straight from the barrel, no pumps involved. Dartmoor Legend, a 4.4% bitter from the brewery at Princetown, is always on, alongside a 4% session beer that Teignworthy brews specifically for the pub and calls Rugglestone Moor Beer. There is a cider from Sandford Orchards and a gin made in Widecombe itself. The building started as a farm cottage in the 1700s and became an inn in the 1830s, named after the Rugglestone — a logan, or rocking, stone that sits just outside the village.
The Rugglestone is a short walk out of the centre, which is part of its appeal. Its garden is reached across a small bridge over a moorland stream, with picnic tables and the moor rising beyond. The kitchen does a platter of ham, cheddar and stilton with pickles and homemade coleslaw, haddock fried in beer batter, and a vegetable madras with poppadum and mango chutney. Jacket potatoes start at £9, mains at £16. Well-behaved dogs are welcome on a lead. Landlords Ness and Richard keep it going, and the local CAMRA branch named it Pub of the Year in 2012 and again in 2017.
The Old Inn sits in the middle of things, on the village green. It is the older of the two pubs by some centuries — the central part is 14th-century, and was reputedly built by the masons who were working on the church, as somewhere for them to eat and sleep. The old stable survives and is now part of the dining room. A fire in 1977 took most of the roof and the first floor, so a good deal of what you see was rebuilt around the stone that held. It is a Hall & Woodhouse house, run by landlords Michael and Shane, and the menu is broad: Whitby scampi, a chicken breast under pulled pork and melted cheddar, a pork and apple cider hot pot, gammon with eggs, stone-baked pizzas. Sunday brings a roast of Devonshire beef and pork with a nut roast for anyone who wants it, served in two sittings at noon and half past two. Puddings run to sticky toffee, scones and cherry pie. The garden has a duck pond and a population of free-roaming bantam hens and a rooster, and the pub keeps a treat behind the bar for visiting dogs.
Between the two, on the green, is the Café on the Green, which opened in 1926 and bills itself as Dartmoor's first purpose-built tea room. It is coming up on a century of doing the same thing. The scones are baked from scratch every morning; there are cream teas, breakfasts and lunches, and the place makes a point of welcoming walkers, cyclists, families and dogs. It shuts on Mondays and otherwise runs ten till four.
The rest of the village is small and does what a village does. There is a post office, a couple of gift shops selling postcards and the local Toby jugs, and a working forge. At the west end of the Church House, Sexton's Cottage is a gallery and gift shop stocking work by Dartmoor artists and makers — ceramics, baskets woven locally, books by local authors. On the fourth Saturday of each month the Church House itself becomes a market hall, with handmade chocolates, Devon honey, West Country cheeses, cider, bread, pasties and jams, and the building is opened up to look round.
A mile out, at Chittleford Farm, Shilstone Rocks Riding Centre keeps a stud that breeds pedigree Dartmoor ponies and runs hour and two-hour hacks for all abilities up onto Hamel Down, Bonehill Rocks and Buckland Beacon. It is British Horse Society approved and has been trading since the 1970s.
What most people come for, though, is on the hills around. The village sits low in the valley of the East Webburn river, with high ground on both sides: Hamel Down to the west, and to the east a line of tors — Honeybag, Chinkwell, Bell and Bonehill Rocks — along the skyline. The tall church tower is visible from all of them, the village clustered around its green below. The classic walk is the Widecombe Round, a nine-mile circuit from the green that climbs the flat plateau of Hamel Down and comes back along that eastern ridge of tors. For something shorter, you can drive up to the roadside parking at Bonehill Rocks and do a 3.6-mile loop over Honeybag, Chinkwell and Bell with most of the climbing already behind you. Bonehill itself is a five-minute drive and an easy scramble for children — safe boulders, roadside parking, a lot of view for very little effort. Steven Spielberg thought so too: he filmed part of War Horse near here in 2010.
Push further onto the ridge and you reach Hameldown Tor at 529 metres, and just north of it Grimspound — a late Bronze Age settlement of 24 hut circles inside a low stone wall, one of the best-preserved on the moor. Hameldown Cross, on the same ridge, is said to be the highest cross on Dartmoor. The Dartmoor National Park Authority publishes a free walking leaflet for the village, worth picking up if you are staying a week; AllTrails lists around twenty routes from the green, easy family strolls up to full moorland days.
You will need a car. There is no railway and never has been; the nearest stations are at Newton Abbot, the post town, and Exeter, and the roads in are narrow, steep and single-track in places, off the B3387. Widecombe Hill climbs east toward Haytor — one of the largest and busiest tors on the moor, about three miles away and a short walk to its summit. In summer the 271 bus, the Haytor Hoppa, runs on Saturdays and Thursdays from Newton Abbot station up over Haytor to the village and on to Becky Falls, which is useful for a car-free day out but runs only two days a week, so it is no substitute for the car. Within twenty minutes you can reach Buckland-in-the-Moor, where the church clock has "MY DEAR MOTHER" lettered around its face in place of numerals; Buckland Beacon, where two granite slabs are inscribed with the Ten Commandments, cut in 1928; Ashburton, a stannary market town of antiques shops; and Postbridge, with its 13th-century clapper bridge of flat granite slabs over the East Dart.
Then there is the history, which is more than a village this size has any obvious right to. The church is the reason for the nickname: St Pancras, known locally as the Cathedral of the Moor, has a granite tower around 120 feet high and a peal of eight bells, tall out of all proportion to the parish beneath it. Inside, the wagon roof carries carved wooden bosses, among them the tinners' emblem of three hares sharing three ears in a circle — the church grew partly on the proceeds of the tin trade on the moor above. On Sunday 21 October 1638, during afternoon service with around 300 people inside, the church was struck in a violent storm now thought to be one of the earliest recorded cases of ball lightning. Four people were killed and around sixty injured. The village schoolmaster set the disaster down in rhyming verse on four painted boards that still hang by the west door, and popular legend blamed the Devil, said to have come to collect a gambler named Jan Reynolds who had pledged his soul if ever found asleep in church.
The Church House on the green was built around 1537 to brew "church ales" for parish feasts. Over the centuries it became an almshouse, then a workhouse with a school on the first floor, and in 1935 the parish raised £1,200 to buy it and give it to the National Trust. Outside it stands a 15-inch naval shell, donated after the First World War to thank the village for gathering sphagnum moss, which was used as emergency field dressings. Domesday recorded the whole place in 1086 as six households — two villagers, two smallholders and two slaves — held by Tavistock Abbey and worth a pound.
Widecombe's real fame is the fair, held on the second Tuesday of September, and the folk song it inspired, with its roll-call of Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney and Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all, riding to the fair on Tom Cobley's borrowed grey mare. The Times once put Widecombe on a list of the coolest places to move to in the UK, which prompted lovetovisit.com to note that "no one was more surprised than the residents of Widecombe in the Moor." And in the south transept of the church, unbothered by any of it, a working model of Uncle Tom Cobley and his companions still rides the grey mare toward the fair.