The only public light in Hawkridge is a five-watt LED bulb inside an abandoned telephone box. There is no street lighting anywhere else, and the village makes a plain offer to anyone arriving after dark: "No street lights – bring a torch or teach yourself to see in the dark, by starlight."
The village sits high on a ridge above the River Barle, about four miles north-west of Dulverton and less than half a mile from the Devon boundary. The parish council glosses the name as "the ridge visited by buzzards" and counts a community of just over fifty people, some from families settled here for generations. Look south and east from the top of the village and the land opens over the pale-gold grass of Anstey Common and Molland Moor, the greener Danesbrook corridor and a small dark patch of forestry. Exmoor ponies, red deer, brown hares and kestrels are among the wildlife recorded here.
It helps to be clear about what Hawkridge does not have. There is no pub, no shop, no café and no public toilet, and parking is very limited. The village once supported its own school and post office; both have gone. What remains is a church, a village hall, a scatter of stone houses that an account from 1867 already described as good, with gardens and allotments, and quiet roads.
The church is St Giles, and it is the reason to stop. Its south doorway is Norman, carved with zig-zag moulding above incised capitals, and the font is a Norman baluster with cable moulding and an incised grid. In 1877 a thirteenth-century coffin lid was found behind the pulpit, probably cut for William de Plessy, lord of the manor, who died in 1274; it was taken out, then returned to the church in 1931. A painted royal arms of Queen Victoria carries the same date, 1877. The building is graded II*.
For food and drink you go out to the water. Tarr Farm Inn stands beside Tarr Steps in a seventeenth-century building by the Barle, with a bar, a restaurant and a garden that looks over the bridge. It does local-meat Sunday roasts, cream teas and recurring seafood, curry and steak evenings, and made the UK's Top 50 Gastropubs in 2017. Dogs are welcome.
The other way brings you to Withypool, which keeps a village shop, a Post Office and a seasonal tea room, plus the eighteenth-century Royal Oak. The Royal Oak has run a dedicated canine menu alongside the human one: Bark Burgers, Bark Bangers, a roast dinner bowl, a fish-and-chips bowl, Bark Brew and a Paw Star dog martini. The tea room's cakes run to coffee-and-walnut, lemon drizzle and a cream tea it calls the "Withybig".
Tarr Steps itself is the landmark. A seventeen-span, fifty-four-metre clapper bridge, it is the longest surviving in Britain, first recorded in Tudor times and possibly much older. Floods have carried its slabs, some weighing two tonnes, fifty metres downstream. Local folklore holds that the Devil built it and keeps the right to sunbathe on it. There is a car park and toilets at the top and a gentle path down to the water.
Walkers have plenty. The Two Moors Way passes through both Hawkridge and Tarr Steps, and the Hawkridge and Tarr Steps Circular makes an eleven-mile moderate loop down to the Barle and back over the moor. Local ground is steep and often wet underfoot, so boots matter. Willingford Bridge, on the Danesbrook, has a small picnic place and a shallow stretch where children and dogs can paddle.
Getting here takes some doing. The nearest mainline station is Tiverton Parkway, no regular bus runs through the village, and you arrive by car along quiet lanes. Once a year the hill fills for the Hawkridge Revel and Gymkhana, with show jumping, a dog show, Mountain and Moorland classes and stalls; the 2025 event, its seventy-ninth, drew a record crowd.
At the top of the village stands a copper beech, and in 2016 a Victorian workshop beneath it was still in use. Tom Lock, then ninety, and his grandson Rob Follett were working red-deer antler there, described that year as the last of Exmoor's antler men.