Luxborough

Inside the Royal Oak

In the second bar of the Royal Oak there is a radiogram, and customers are invited to bring their own vinyl to play on it. There is a pool table and a dartboard in the same room, and a fireplace with an inglenook in the next. The floors are flagstone and cobble, worn by the kind of traffic a building acquires over centuries; CAMRA dates the original features here at more than six hundred years old. This is Luxborough's only pub.

The bar keeps cask ale, real cider and two changing beers, so what you drink depends on the week you arrive. The kitchen reaches further than a village pub usually does: lobster bisque, buttered sweetbread with truffle and bacon, pan-fried scallops with mini chorizo, black pudding and pea shoots, and a twice-baked souffle of cheese and leek made with Somerset cheese. Dogs are welcome, and there are drying facilities for the walks that leave them wet. Outside, a courtyard and river garden take the overflow in warm weather, and there are eight bedrooms above if the evening runs long.

Three hamlets in the hills

Luxborough is not one village but three hamlets — Churchtown, Kingsbridge and Pooltown — strung within about a mile of each other in the Washford River valley, below Croydon Hill and around six hundred feet up in the wooded Brendon Hills. The river rises close by and threads the whole valley; Pooltown is named for its pools. Many of the cottages are thatched. Farming and forestry run the place now, though it was mining that built it.

The walking is the reason most people find it. The Coleridge Way passes through, and the stretch from Churchtown to Cutcombe covers four and three-quarter miles with 248 metres of climbing — up an old congregational route through a beech avenue, over Colly and Lype hills past a trig point and a barrow, then across open ground and down. One bedrock lane on the way turns slippery in the wet.

The Coleridge Way and St Mary's

St Mary's stands in Churchtown with a squat three-stage saddleback tower. Its chancel is thirteenth-century, the lower tower fifteenth, and in 1861 the nave was largely rebuilt, a north aisle added and the tower's upper stages raised. Inside there is a fifteenth-century octagonal font, open wagon roofs and an east window given in memory of Lieutenant Lethbridge, who died in 1899. The Lethbridge name recurs at Chargot House, built in 1826, which imported its staircase from a farmhouse at Withiel Florey and an overmantel in the Grinling Gibbons manner from Wiltshire.

From Domesday to the mineral railway

The Domesday surveyors found two holdings here, twenty-one households, a hundred sheep and sixty acres of woodland, and valued the lot at thirty-five shillings. The iron ore came later. The West Somerset Mineral Railway was built between 1856 and 1861 to haul Brendon Hills ore down to Watchet. It closed when the mines failed in 1898, reopened briefly in 1907 and shut for good in 1916; a station once stood in the village. In Chargot Wood the Langham Engine House still keeps the ventilation flue that once drew the poisonous gases out of the mine.

The farming year

The parish still measures its year by the farm. "We celebrate our close connection with the timeless rhythms of the seasons, lambing, calving, foaling."