There is no road to Culbone. You arrive on foot, along the South West Coast Path through a deep wooded combe, to a church small enough to seat about forty people. St Beuno's has a good claim to be the smallest complete church in England, and it does not strain for the title.
The nave and chancel are built of random rubble. A slender spirelet was added around 1810; the porch is thirteenth-century. Inside there is a Norman baluster font, a three-bay screen from around 1400, a seventeenth-century box pew, and bench ends that may predate the Reformation. One of the bells is said to be fourteenth-century. In a two-light window on the north wall, someone carved a leopard's face in low relief. The reredos behind the altar was designed in 1927 by C. F. A. Voysey and made by a Mr Huish.
The church is commonly named for Beuno, a sixth-century Welsh saint, though the official record lists the dedication as unknown. It is normally open daily, though it is worth checking before making the journey. In the churchyard stands a fifteenth-century calvary of red sandstone and Ham stone, restored in 1966.
Culbone itself has no pub, shop or other visitor facility. The nearest place for food, drink and parking is Porlock Weir, at the other end of the coast path. The Ship Inn there, known locally as the Bottom Ship, has a stone-floored bar and a fire in winter; the menu runs to a Scotch egg with fennel ketchup, smoked haddock chowder, beer-battered cod and chips, hake with a chorizo-and-butterbean stew, and a Little Oak Farm gammon chop, with Otter Amber and a weekly-changing Exmoor Ale on the bar. Porlock Bay oysters have been grown in the bay since 2013. The Harbour Gallery and Cafe does homemade baking and a thick smoked chowder with crusty bread.
The wood you walk through to get here is worth slowing down for. Culbone Wood is mostly sessile oak, damp enough to count as temperate rainforest, its branches carrying ferns, mosses and lichens. It was coppiced for centuries to make charcoal, and you can still pick out the old multi-stemmed stools and the level platforms where the charcoal was burned. The wood forms part of one of the longest unbroken stretches of coastal woodland in England, running between Porlock and Countisbury, and from higher ground the view opens across the Bristol Channel to south Wales. Culbone Hill reaches 433 metres, on what is billed as the highest coastline in England and Wales.
Near the church, Ash Farm is traditionally held to be the house where Coleridge was writing Kubla Khan when he was interrupted by "a person on business from Porlock," though whether it was this exact farm is not certain. The path from Porlock Weir also passes the remains of Ashley Combe, a house first built for Peter King around 1799 and turned in the 1830s by his son William and William's wife, the mathematician Ada Lovelace, into an Italian villa with terraced gardens and tunnels. It was demolished in 1974; arches and tunnels survive among the trees.
The full circuit from Porlock Weir through Culbone and Hawkcombe is ten miles and takes four to five hours, looping past Ashley Combe and the church before climbing through woodland and moor to Porlock. No mainline railway reaches Exmoor; Taunton is the practical gateway, and the A39 brings you to Porlock and the Weir. In summer the seasonal 300 bus runs between Minehead, Porlock, Culbone and Lynmouth, though its Culbone stop is up on the road, not down in the combe with the church.
In 1086 the Domesday surveyors found four households here — two villagers, one smallholder and one enslaved person — with a hundred acres of woodland, and valued the whole place at fifteen shillings. You walk down through the oaks, and if the church is open, let yourself in.