The pebbles on Budleigh Salterton's beach are older than the cliffs behind them. Large, smooth and oval, around 440 million years old, they were said to have been thrown up onto the shore by the Great Storm of 1824. The 2.5-mile stretch of them marks the start of the Jurassic Coast, backed by red sandstone cliffs the colour of terracotta.
At the west end are the Steamer Steps and, on Marine Parade, the Longboat Café, which runs its own fishing boat and belongs to the Exmouth Mussel group. The crab and lobster are caught, cooked and prepared locally, which is not something most seafront cafés can claim.
The High Street and Fore Street carry the independent shops — books, gifts, homeware, clothes — and on the last Friday of the month (except December) the car park off the High Street fills with up to fifteen local producers selling bread, meat, fish and the rest of it, nine until one. Pynes Farm Shop sits on the outskirts for meat, cheese and veg, and Otterton Mill, two miles off, is one of the oldest working watermills in the country, with a bakery and café attached.
There are three pubs in the town proper. The Feathers on the High Street is really two places under one roof: a sports bar with a pool table, darts and big screens, and a quieter family restaurant, plus a skittle alley that doubles as a function room and four en-suite rooms upstairs. Dogs are welcome, and there's an enclosed courtyard garden. The Salterton Arms is a two-minute walk from the beach and builds its menu on Devon suppliers. The Rolle Arms, out on the approach road and named after the family who owned most of the town, does home-made pub food — sandwiches, jacket potatoes, a cheddar ploughman's at lunch.
The walking is the flat kind. A level path runs along the sea wall beside the Otter estuary, past bird hides, before joining the South West Coast Path up onto the cliffs. The estuary is a nature reserve of about 33 hectares with more than 120 bird species recorded, and England's first wild beavers in centuries were spotted here in 2013, and breeding by the following year — the trial was made permanent in 2020. Buggies manage the estuary paths without trouble.
Above the beach, with views over Lyme Bay, is the croquet club, which fields over eleven international-standard lawns and is reckoned one of the best in Europe. This is that sort of town.
Salt-making gave it the name Salterne, the pans overseen by monks from Otterton Priory until the eighteenth century. Sir Walter Raleigh was born a couple of miles north at Hayes Barton in 1552, and in 1870 Millais painted The Boyhood of Raleigh from a house on Fore Street; the seawall in the picture still stands, and the old seadog telling tales was modelled by a river ferryman named Vincent.
Exmouth station is five miles off, the M5 about eleven, and the Stagecoach 157 runs through from Exmouth to Sidmouth. Hilary Mantel lived here until 2022 and presided over the September literary festival. "We live to the age of Methuselah," she wrote. "Check out Fore Street any day."
