Inside the Church of St Mary, set into the wall, is a stone piscina carved as a man's head clasped between two hands. It is possibly fifteenth-century, and it sits among the church's other historic fittings: a Norman circular font, eighteenth-century box pews, a reader's desk and pulpit, and painted slate tablets to the Spurry family. A wooden panel names Peter Spurrye as churchwarden in 1718 and is thought to show Moses. The nave and inner chancel are fifteenth-century; the tower was rebuilt in the mid-nineteenth.
This is the church where, in fiction, Carver Doone shoots Lorna at her wedding to Jan Ridd. R. D. Blackmore's grandfather was rector here from 1809 to 1842, and the boy's visits gave him the country and the stories that became Lorna Doone in 1869. The novel opens with its narrator introducing himself: "I, John Ridd, of the parish of Oare, in the county of Somerset." The church still draws visitors as the setting for the novel's wedding scene.
Oare is barely a village in the usual sense — Somerset's westernmost parish, scattered across the steep, secluded valley where Oare Water and Weir Water run down to meet Badgworthy Water and form the East Lyn River. The settlement takes in Oareford and the hamlet of Malmsmead, where the café, gallery and waymarked walks are based. A humpbacked single-span bridge of rubble stone, thought to be eighteenth-century, carries the road over Oare Water; it is both a listed building and a scheduled monument.
At Malmsmead, the Buttery Café sits by the river with a garden you can walk straight down into to paddle. Chef Ella Lancaster's kitchen does breakfasts, pasties, sandwiches, homemade cakes and Devon cream teas, with bean-to-cup coffee and picnic tables; dogs are welcome, and there is an adventure play area for children beside the water. A seventeenth-century packhorse bridge is visible from the garden. Next door, in a Grade II-listed farmhouse, the Doone Valley Gallery sells contemporary and fine art alongside smaller gifts.
The walking is the reason to base yourself here. A three-mile National Trust circuit links woodland, riverside and St Mary's before returning to the café. A gentler two-mile walk follows Badgworthy Water to the Blackmore memorial stone. The longer Doone Valley Explorer runs to five miles, climbing about 150 metres to the deserted medieval settlement of Badgworthy, where house outlines and cultivation terraces still show in the turf; its last recorded residents were a grandfather and granddaughter in the nineteenth century. Exmoor ponies range loose across the valley, and there are red deer on the moor. Take stout boots — the paths turn to mud after rain and are no place for a pushchair.
Getting here means narrow lanes. From the A39 the signed turn drops onto New Road for Oare and Hookway Hill for Malmsmead, five miles east of Lynmouth and thirteen west of Minehead. There is no railway in Exmoor; Tiverton Parkway is the nearest mainline station. The seasonal 300 bus stops at County Gate, about three-quarters of a mile's walk away, three times a day between 23 May and 31 August — worth checking before you travel.
For an evening meal, the family-run Staghunters, nearby in Brendon, sets its tables beside the River Lyn; a recent menu has included burgers, beer-battered cod, wholetail scampi, West Country ham with free-range fried eggs and chips, and a trio of deep-fried cheeses with chilli jam.
The Domesday surveyors knew the place as Are, meaning boundary, and counted sixteen households, twenty cattle and a hundred sheep. They valued the whole parish at thirty shillings. In the evening, the light goes off the moor and the streams run loud at the bottom of the valley.