Allerford

Bridge, River and Village Form

The packhorse bridge at Allerford has two arches of red sandstone, a cutwater pointing upstream and a cobbled path about 1.3 metres wide. It is medieval, still carries people across the River Aller every day, and has never had a serious modern refurbishment. A deep ford runs alongside it.

The village follows the river in a single line, a pattern fixed by the sixteenth century. The cottages are close-set, built of red sandstone rubble under slate and Bridgwater tiles, with tall chimney stacks up their flanks and the rounded bulge of a bread oven here and there. A community orchard separates one part of the settlement from another. The Aller is a constant presence, visible in the gaps between buildings and audible almost everywhere.

Tea Room and the Nearest Pub

For food and provisions there is the village shop and tea room, which is licensed, has a garden, and makes no secret of wanting walkers, families and dogs through the door. The kitchen does Exmoor cream teas, jacket potatoes, a farmer's ploughman's, toasties, crumpets, a vegan tart, and cakes that include a gluten-free option, with Miles tea and milkshakes to follow. The shop half sells Exmoor honey from local beekeepers, regional cider and ale, seasonal flowers from Tivington Farm School, handmade jewellery and a rack of old-fashioned sweets. It took a bronze in the 2025/26 Bristol, Bath and Somerset Tourism Awards. One visitor, Rob G, wrote that "this haven is so much more than a tea garden."

Allerford has no pub, and has never had a church; for both you look outside the village. In Porlock, two kilometres west, is the Ship Inn — known locally as the Top Ship — run by Royston and Caroline Connor in a building they date to the thirteenth century. The menu runs from a farmhouse Scotch egg with piccalilli and a mixed-cheese ploughman's to beer-battered haddock, a smash burger, chicken cassoulet, duo of lamb, and pan-fried sea bass with a samphire-and-crayfish sauce. Dogs are welcome, there is a large outdoor area and a children's play space, and the ales carry Cask Marque.

Schoolroom, Archive and Forge

The old school in the middle of the village was built in 1821, taught children until 1981, and reopened in 1984 as the West Somerset Rural Life Museum, run by volunteers. Its Victorian schoolroom still has the long desks and benches; children can put on Victorian clothes and write on slate with a slate pencil. The West Somerset Photographic Archive keeps around sixty albums of local faces and places from the 1880s to the 1960s. The forge across the road, built in 1905–06, is still a working smithy — West Country Blacksmiths, who ask you to make an appointment before visiting the workshop and gallery.

Paths to Selworthy and Agnes Fountain

Walking is the reason many people come. A National Trust circular of about eight miles climbs from Allerford to the church and beacon at Selworthy, drops steeply to Hurlstone Point and the pebble beach at Bossington, then crosses the River Aller and returns through Bossington; the wider Holnicote Estate carries a hundred and fifty miles of footpaths and bridleways. On a steep slope in Allerford Plantation, a waymarked path passes Agnes Fountain, a medieval holy well of stone slabs around a spring, with Porlock Bay laid out to the west.

Arrival, Old Records and Running Water

Getting here means the A39, which passes just to the south, or the AtWest service 10 and the seasonal Stagecoach 300, which stop at Allerford Bus Shelter on the Minehead–Porlock route — worth checking times before you travel. The nearest mainline trains are at Taunton, since Minehead's station belongs to a heritage line. The Domesday surveyors valued the whole place at a pound a year. It has changed little since the early 1840s, keeping its shape, its river and its single street, and on a quiet afternoon the loudest thing is the water going under the bridge.