Countisbury

The Blue Ball on the Coaching Road

The Blue Ball Inn sits at the top of Countisbury Hill, low-ceilinged and dark-beamed, with stone fireplaces and a history of feeding travellers on the coaching road between Porlock and Lynmouth since the thirteenth century. It is the village's refreshment point, and there is free parking beside it, first come, first served.

The Sunday menu runs from smoked mackerel pâté, ham-hock terrine, beetroot hummus and salt-and-pepper squid through to West Country beef topside, pork belly and chicken supreme. The bar keeps St Austell ales, Proper Job and Tribute among them, though the range can vary. Dogs are welcome everywhere except the main restaurant, and a few of the bedrooms take them too.

Church and Common

A short way along stands the Church of St John the Evangelist, rebuilt in stages across half a century: the nave in 1796, the tower in 1836, then the chancel, vestry and north aisle in 1846 at the expense of the Revd Walter Stevenson Halliday of nearby Glenthorne. Cherry and Pevsner recorded it as "very high up, with views on all sides." Over the porch a sundial reads TIS TIME TO SEEK THE LORD. Inside there is a carved chancel screen of about 1700 and a reset bench end showing a crowned swan; the screen came from Chittlehampton when Halliday rebuilt the chancel, and the swan may have been purchased with it, along with a Casson's Patent organ.

Countisbury occupies high coastal ground between the Bristol Channel and the deep, wooded East Lyn valley, and the walking moves between the two quickly. From Countisbury Common a level track runs out to Butter Hill and back, under two miles, with Exmoor ponies grazing the open ground and the view reaching across to Wales, Lynmouth and the coast. The shorter approach from Barna Barrow is barely a mile. Despite the name, no barrows have ever been confirmed there; it may simply describe the rounded shape of the hill.

From Woodland to Wind Hill

A longer figure-of-eight of three miles drops off the tops into sessile-oak woodland and down to the East Lyn riverside, using Winston's Path, cut in the 1970s by the Watersmeet warden Winston Singleton. The tougher Lynmouth circular takes in Watersmeet itself, where the East Lyn meets Hoar Oak Water and a fishing lodge built in 1832 now pours tea. The old path down to Sillery Sands is closed for good after a landslide, with no way off the beach but back along the promenade and a tide that can cut you off, so it is not a shortcut.

The A39 reaches the village by cutting straight through the rampart of Wind Hill, an Iron Age promontory fort also called Countisbury Castle. Sea cliffs and the valley defend three sides; a single bank and ditch, still thirteen metres from floor to crest, close the fourth around some thirty-five hectares. This has been suggested, though never settled, as Arx Cynuit, where in 878 the Viking leader Ubba, brother of Ivar the Boneless, was defeated. In the Domesday survey the place is Contesberia, held before the Conquest by Ailmer and after it by William Capra, with thirty-four households. Henry de Tracy later gave it to Forde Abbey, which kept it until the Dissolution.

Reaching Countisbury

Barnstaple, twenty miles from the start of the Countisbury walk, is the nearest railway station. In summer the Stagecoach 300 stops at the Blue Ball three times a day, seven days a week, from 23 May to 31 August, running the Minehead–Lynmouth section and changing at Lynmouth for Ilfracombe.

Back to the Blue Ball

After the common and the cliff paths, the Blue Ball waits at the bottom, fire lit, ready for wet boots and a dog on its lead.