Nettlecombe

The hidden valley and the vanished village

On the northern approach, a pair of gate piers from the 1790s carries a lead sculpture: the head and forelegs of a rearing white horse. Beyond them the drive drops into a secluded valley on the eastern edge of Exmoor, closed in by the steep, rounded, wooded Brendon Hills, and arrives at Nettlecombe Court — a many-gabled red-sandstone Tudor and Georgian mansion standing beside its church. The garden writer John Claudius Loudon, recalling the place in 1842, wrote that "the scenery on every side is looked up to, instead of being looked over."

What you will not find is a village. There was one, south of the Court, until the 1790s, when the road was closed and the houses cleared to make South Park and the residents rehoused in specially built estate houses at Woodford. What remains is spread thin among Woodford, Yarde, Torre and a scatter of farms, which is why the parish today has no pub or school of its own.

Cider at Torre, food in Roadwater

A short drive away, in the hamlet of Torre, the cider farm presses craft cider and apple juice on site, using wild yeast and fruit from an unsprayed orchard of more than twenty apple varieties. The kitchen does stone-baked pizzas and seasonal food; entry is free, there is a play area and an orchard "Sprite Sanctuary" walk, and pigs, goats and chickens that children can feed. Dogs are welcome on leads throughout.

For a pub, Roadwater has The Valiant Soldier, an inn of 1720 with an inglenook and log fires. The menu — offered as a guide, and subject to change and availability — runs from a hunter's chicken stack with gammon and smoked cheddar to grilled sea bass with lemon-and-dill butter, a beetroot and butternut squash Wellington, cod and chips, homemade fish pie, and a vegan aromatic garden burger; Sunday lunch offers a choice of roasts. The beer garden has a children's play area, and the pub supports breweries including Exmoor and Cotleigh. Roadwater also keeps a community shop and café, with barista coffee, local cakes, cream teas in summer and soup in winter, and a patio over the recreation ground.

Brendon Hills walking and the medieval church

Walking is the real reason to stay. The Roadwater and Brendon Hills circuit, an official Exmoor Classic, runs about eight miles over roughly four hours: out of Roadwater on the Coleridge Way, up for views towards the Bristol Channel, and back along the course of the old West Somerset Mineral Railway, whose iron ore once came out of the ground nearby. The rights-of-way are dense enough to build a shorter loop, and one route brings you to the front of the Court.

The church, St Mary the Virgin, is Grade I and mostly thirteenth and fourteenth century. Inside are a rare late-fifteenth-century octagonal font carved with the Seven Sacraments, reset sixteenth-century bench ends, and the effigy of a mail-clad knight from about 1260. The Court itself has been the Leonard Wills Field Centre since 1967 and is not a general drop-in visitor attraction.

Reaching Nettlecombe and nearby Cleeve

Taunton is the practical railhead, and the 28 and 28A buses run the coast road through Williton, about three and a half miles from the Court — there is no scheduled bus to the Court itself. The lanes through Torre and Woodford are narrow and without footways, so you take them slowly. Cleeve Abbey at Washford, among the most complete monastic cloisters in England, is close.

The Nettlecombe cabbage

Loudon admired the kitchen garden on that same visit, and noted a cabbage the gardener, Mr Elworthy, had bred by crossing Paignton and Cornwall stock. They called it the Nettlecombe cabbage.