Cutcombe

Wheddon Cross and the Cutcombe landscape

The Rest and Be Thankful Inn sits at the crossroads in the middle of Wheddon Cross, an early-nineteenth-century country inn with log fires, a skittle room and a patio that faces Dunkery Beacon. It was a coaching inn once, and the name reads like something travellers meant literally. The kitchen does freshly battered cod and chips, a homemade 8oz prime beef burger and a Sunday carvery, with banoffee pie, pineapple cheesecake, sticky toffee pudding and bread-and-butter pudding to follow. Dogs are welcome. There are eight en-suite rooms upstairs, and darts and quiz nights when there is a crowd in.

Wheddon Cross is one of the higher settlements on Exmoor, open to the weather, the ground falling away toward the moor's tallest hill. The parish is really two places: this high crossroads, and the older core of Cutcombe a short way off, gathered around St John's Church. The A396 runs down Cutcombe Hill along the side of the Avill valley, deciduous woodland on the southern slopes, pasture on the northern, and farms tucked into the side combes.

Supplies and high-moor walks

For supplies there is Central Wheddon Cross, which is convenience store, Post Office and filling station in one. It carries groceries, newspapers, fresh bread, hot food from the counter, fresh local meat, flowers and seasonal stock, with an ATM, fuel, PayPoint and the Lottery — the kind of shop that does several jobs at once.

The walking starts more or less at the door. Dunkery Beacon, the highest point on Exmoor at 1,705 feet, is a mile and a half up a stony track, gently climbing to a summit marked by a beehive-shaped cairn added in 1935 and, beneath it, a scheduled group of round cairns. A 1687 map shows a round-tower beacon up there; an 1807 dig found nothing at all. In February the second walk opens: Snowdrop Valley, a seasonal route down into the privately owned Avill valley, a mile down and a muddy mile back up, dogs on leads. The rest of the year the valley is privately owned, with access generally limited to that February event, so the timing matters.

Market and medieval church

On sale days Cutcombe Market fills with the noise of a working livestock centre rather than a preserved one. New facilities opened in August 2010 — office, canteen, sale ring and pens — and it runs cattle and sheep sales, including Exmoor suckled-calf and Exmoor Horn sheep events that draw stock and buyers from well beyond the moor.

St John's Church holds the older ground. The tower is thirteenth-century, the north aisle much the same age, its east wall rebuilt in 1713, and the whole given an extensive restoration by C. E. Giles in 1862. Inside there is a Norman font, its base, stem and pillars original and the bowl a nineteenth-century replacement in Italian marble; a Beer-stone pulpit carved with biblical scenes; a stone Last Supper behind the altar; and Clayton and Bell glass in the south aisle, which Philip Pleydell Bouverie and his wife paid for and were commemorated in after their deaths in 1890 and 1892. When the fabric needed major work in the late 1990s, General Beckett set a target of £150,000 and, with grants and donations, reached it by early 2001.

Domesday roots and onward travel

Domesday found the place already occupied: forty-five households, a mill worth five shillings, valued at £7 15s 5d a year, up from £4 15s 5d when its owner had acquired it.

No railway crosses Exmoor; Taunton and Tiverton Parkway are the mainline InterCity gateways, and you drive the rest. The 198 bus links the Wheddon Cross shelter with Dulverton, Exford, Dunster and Minehead, Monday to Saturday except public and bank holidays, which puts Dunster Castle and the coast within reach without the car.

A parish memory

Eileen Webber, who grew up in the parish, remembered the version of it that came before any of that was easy: "We used to walk the 3 miles to school in all weathers and were never late once."