Church, moor and running water
Oare
A scattered Exmoor parish where literary history, old stonework and valley walks meet around Oare and Malmsmead.
- Best for
- Church history and valley walking
- Give it
- A half-day visit or a longer walking day
- Don't miss
- St Mary’s carved piscina and Oare Bridge
The Fox verdict
A small parish with a deep sense of place
Come for St Mary’s and the Lorna Doone connection; stay for Badgworthy Water, Malmsmead and the routes into the moor.
Oare is a scattered settlement rather than a conventional village centre. Its strongest visit combines the historic church and bridge with the facilities and walks at Malmsmead, within the wider parish.
Where to go
Places in Oare
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesChurch of St Mary
A Grade II* church with a Norman circular font, 18th-century box pews and a possibly 15th-century piscina shaped as a man’s head clasped between two hands.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Oare
The Buttery Café & Riverside Gardens
An independent riverside café serving breakfasts, coffee, pasties, sandwiches, homemade cakes and Devon cream teas, with a riverside garden, picnic tables and a children’s adventure play area.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 1 hour
- Locality
- Malmsmead, within Oare parish
Lorna Doone Valley
A National Trust-managed countryside site with waymarked walks, Badgworthy Water, medieval-village remains, a 17th-century packhorse bridge, play area, toilets and parking.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Malmsmead, within Oare parish
Walks & outdoors
1 placeDoone Valley Explorer
A 7.8km/5-mile route with roughly 150m of ascent, following Badgworthy Water to deserted medieval Badgworthy.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 2.5 hours
- Locality
- Lorna Doone Valley
- Access
- The route begins with a steep lane and includes natural dirt and stone paths, mud after rain, and narrow, uneven sections unsuitable for pushchairs or mobility scooters.
History & heritage
2 placesOare Bridge
A narrow, humpbacked, single-span rubble-stone bridge with a semicircular arch, splayed abutments and an 18th-century date.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 20 minutes
- Locality
- Over Oare Water
Badgworthy Deserted Medieval Village
An abandoned medieval village where house outlines and cultivation terraces survive; the community was largely abandoned in the 15th century.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Badgworthy
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Three ways to explore Oare
Signature outings
Find the carved piscina
Inside St Mary’s, a possibly 15th-century piscina is shaped as a man’s head clasped between two hands.
Read the old bridge
Oare Bridge is a narrow, humpbacked, single-span rubble-stone crossing over Oare Water with an 18th-century date.
See Badgworthy in the turf
At deserted medieval Badgworthy, house outlines and cultivation terraces still survive in the landscape.
The village story
Oare: church, valley and the Doone country
The source-locked story moves from St Mary’s literary and architectural detail through Malmsmead and the valley walks to Oare’s Domesday record.
St Mary’s and Lorna Doone
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.
A scattered parish and Malmsmead
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.
Walking and getting here
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.
Brendon supper and Domesday Oare
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.
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- Church of St Mary — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Oare Bridge — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- The Buttery Café & Riverside Gardens — buttery-cafe.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Lorna Doone Valley — nationaltrust.org.uk national body or asset manager record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Doone Valley Explorer — exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Badgworthy Deserted Medieval Village — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access