Horner

Bridge and Woodland Setting

The packhorse bridge at Horner is a single span of red sandstone, barely wide enough for one loaded pony, with a cobbled way, a low segmental arch and parapets that sweep back at each end. It is late-medieval, largely unaltered and closed to anything on wheels. Historic England counts only around sixteen medieval single-span bridges of this kind still standing in England, and this is one of them. Locally it is also called Hacketty Way Bridge. Horner Water runs under it.

The place itself is small: a scatter of buildings where the lane meets the water at the mouth of Horner Wood, on the National Trust's Holnicote Estate. There is no pub here; the parish church, St Mary's, stands at Luccombe, in whose parish Horner lies. The wood is the reason to come.

Tea Gardens and Ancient Oaks

A few steps from the bridge, the Horner Tea Gardens open through the season with indoor and covered seating, cream teas, scones, locally made cakes and ice cream, and trays of summer plants for sale. The tables take card, and children and dogs are welcome. In 2022, ploughman's lunches came with Somerset cheddar, honey-glazed ham and local chutney.

The wood behind is one of Britain's largest unenclosed ancient oak woods, part of the Dunkery and Horner Wood National Nature Reserve. About nine hundred acres of it are Atlantic oak — temperate rainforest, fed by more than eighty inches of rain a year, which keeps the branches under moss, ferns and lichen. More than 440 species of fungi have been recorded here, along with heath fritillary butterflies and fifteen of Britain's seventeen bat species. Some of the oaks are over five hundred years old.

Woodland Walks and the Holnicote Estate

The main walk is an easy two-mile loop from the Aller Combe meadow, with steep opening sections followed by good paths. It passes deer wallows and ancient pollarded oaks, climbs to the heath at Cloutsham Ball, and opens out to views across Porlock Bay to Hurlestone Point. Dogs are fine under close control. For something flatter, the Easy Access Trail from Webber's Post runs a level mile suitable for off-road buggies, past wooden sculptures carved at a 2004 festival and the Jubilee Hut, built in 1897 for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. There is pay-and-display parking at the wood, with toilets and level access to the tea garden.

The estate came to the National Trust in stages. In 1917 the Acland family leased eight thousand acres of Exmoor, the Horner valley among them, to the Trust for five hundred years — the largest area it then managed and its first conservation land on Exmoor. Sir Richard Dyke Acland added nearly ten thousand more acres of Holnicote in 1944. Horner Mill, a three-storey corn mill probably built around 1839 on the site of an earlier fulling mill, ground its last flour in the 1920s or 1930s and became a house in the early 1990s.

Reaching Horner and Nearby Stops

You reach Horner on minor roads off the A39, following the signs from about seven miles south-west of Minehead; the nearest railway station is Taunton. Buses run the A39 corridor between Porlock and Minehead, stopping at Allerford and Selworthy Turn, but not into the hamlet; it's worth checking times before you rely on the last stretch on foot. Porlock has the pubs and tearooms — the Top Ship among them, a former coaching inn with log fires in winter — while Selworthy and Bossington make a longer coast-and-woods day out.

Horner Farm

Horner Farm, a National Trust tenancy worked by Mark and Holly with their sons Fergus, Moss and Lachlan, opens its gates four times a year for markets and open days, when a wood-fired oven turns out pizzas topped from the farm's own beef and lamb. The rest of the time it raises beef, lamb, eggs and apples at the edge of the wood.