The Black Venus Inn sits low and beamed under stone the pub gives as 16th-century, back when it was the Ring of Bells. The Birch family have held it since 2004, and Darren and Sophie run it between them: he works the bar and the kitchen, she grows produce in the garden behind and hangs her own paintings on the walls.
The kitchen turns out a wild game, chestnut and cranberry shortcrust pie, a twelve-hour pulled-lamb curry, pan-fried Atlantic hake with beetroot risotto, and Fowey mussels in garlic, white wine and cream. Fresh fish comes in daily, and Sunday brings a choice of roasts. Pudding might be sticky toffee with caramelised banana and honeycomb ice cream. The cask beer to look for is St Austell Cornish Best Bitter, with two more that change.
There is a beer garden, a car park, free Wi-Fi, a pool table and a children's play area. Dogs are welcome, and the inn sends walkers straight out of the door and round by the River Bray, its footbridge and ford.
For everything else there is the Post Office and Stores, which handles post, everyday banking and Drop & Go, and is said to stock guidebooks, groceries, snacks and some alcohol.
Challacombe lies along the shallow upper Bray valley, an open plateau of permanent pasture cut by streams. The houses gather loosely around the stream crossing and press up against the road. The southern end is quieter, with older cottages and farmsteads, stone walls, ferns and hedgebanks, and small rendered cottages under slate roofs with stumpy chimneys, a few with the stone left bare.
The walking starts at the door. A 2.6-mile loop takes in the old mill, the schoolhouse, the chapel and the ford before turning back; a longer route of 8.2 miles climbs 325 metres onto open moor above Bray Reservoir, past Bronze Age barrows to the Long Stone and the Devon–Somerset boundary. The moor up there is tussocky and can be boggy, and a compass is worth carrying in poor visibility.
Holy Trinity church stands about a mile out at Barton Town, left there when the village drifted towards the new Simonsbath road in the 19th century. It is Grade II*, its west tower probably early 16th-century, the nave and chancel rebuilt in 1850. Inside are a probably-14th-century octagonal font, a wineglass pulpit reached through the vestry wall, and stained glass dated 1901 and 1902. Its annual sheepdog trial still raises money for the parish.
The Domesday surveyors set the place down as Celdecomba: six households, and the whole valued at a pound a year. Older in its position is the Edgerley Stone beside the B3358, standing since at least 1207, a rough local block a metre and a half high that once marked the Royal Forest of Exmoor and still marks the Devon–Somerset line. The weathered initials "F Isaac" and "F Bray" are cut into its face.
There is no bus. The B3358 runs through towards Simonsbath and can move fast; the nearest station is Barnstaple, about sixteen kilometres off. It is best reached by car.
A former postmistress remembered biscuit tins floating through the shop in the 1952 flood, though Challacombe itself came through without loss of life.