The Barbrook Filling Station sells petrol, newspapers, logs and coal, and, if you ask, local jams, chutneys, honey and cider. It is family-run and does a lot of jobs at once: convenience shop, off-licence, hot-food counter, groceries and dairy. Barbrook sits where the A39 meets the B3234, about a mile south of Lynton and Lynmouth, with cottages grouped along the West Lyn in a steep, densely wooded valley.
About two kilometres out, West Ilkerton Farm sells its own meat: pedigree Red Ruby Devon beef and Exmoor lamb, born and raised on the hill, the beef dry-aged for at least three weeks. Chris and Victoria Eveleigh, who goes by Tortie, sell by pre-arranged collection or local delivery, and stock comes and goes, so it is worth a call before you drive up. They also run tractor-trailer tours around the Red Ruby cattle, with a wheelchair-accessible trailer for anyone who needs one.
The village pub, the Beggars Roost Inn, is closed and up for sale, so for a sit-down meal you go into nearby Lynmouth. There the Ancient Mariner is hung with maritime clutter, a full-size torpedo and an octopus sculpture by a local artist among it. The kitchen does steak and Exmoor ale pie, haddock in Tarka lager batter, Cornish mussels in leek, garlic and white-wine cream, Devon venison ragù and its own fish pie. Dogs are welcome.
There is direct footpath access from Barbrook down towards Lynmouth and the riverside walks at Watersmeet, though the ground rewards a proper OS map. The Lynmouth and Watersmeet Explorer runs three and a half miles up the East Lyn through a wooded gorge to Watersmeet House, about two and a quarter hours over steps, roots and slippery rock. For something gentler, the Watersmeet to Ash Bridge circuit is 2.2 miles of woodland beside the river, dogs on leads.
St Bartholomew's was built in 1875 as a mission church for the sawmill community at Barbrook Mill, a simple nave and sanctuary with a north aisle and a single bell turret. The wooden reading room that went up beside it in the early 1900s is now the village hall. The Methodist chapel and its schoolroom date from 1870; a stone inside records that John Glidden laid it on 5 July that year, and the original pews and a mahogany-railed reading desk are still in place. Rose Cottage, older still, is a 17th-century two-room house built hard against the rock, with the remains of a cloam oven inside.
On 15 August 1952, nine inches of rain fell on Exe Plain and the Chains and drove the Lyn rivers into flood. Thirty-four people died across the disaster; Barbrook lost buildings, and some of what stands now went up afterwards to replace them. PC Derek Harper and the fire crew pulled someone to safety near Barbrook Bridge that night; Harper later received the George Medal. The bridge itself came down later that night.
Beyond the village the ground opens out. Nearby, the Valley of Rocks runs dry above the Bristol Channel, its cliff paths grazed by a herd of feral goats, and the signed loop around it is a mile. At Woody Bay the revived Lynton and Barnstaple Railway still runs restored heritage carriages on a short steam trip along a line that first opened in 1898.
Barnstaple, eighteen miles off on the Tarka Line, is the nearest station; the 309 and 310 buses connect it through to Lynton and Lynmouth. At night the valley goes properly dark, with the settlement sitting partly within Exmoor's Dark Sky Reserve buffer zone, and the woods on either side close the village back in.