Parracombe

Millpond exchange and valley setting

A red K6 telephone box stands beside the millpond. Inside are books and jigsaws, left and borrowed by whoever passes.

Parracombe sits near the head of the Heddon Valley, about a hundred metres below the open common that rings it. Narrow lanes drop from the A39 to a close-built centre on the valley floor, most of it nineteenth-century in appearance, with the older clusters of Churchtown, Prisonford and Bodley set slightly apart. Barnstaple, the nearest station, is some ten and a half miles off; the 309 and 310 buses run through from there towards Lynton and stop at the pub.

The pub and community shop

The pub is the Fox & Goose, an imposing Victorian building with a contemporary interior and four rooms upstairs. The kitchen works on site, using local ingredients where possible; a recent sample menu has included confit ham hock with homemade piccalilli and green apple, beer-battered haddock or halloumi with hand-cut chips, Exmoor venison haunch with blackcurrant sauce, and Devon-caught skate wing with lemon-and-caper butter. Two local real ales are usually on, with cider alongside. Book ahead for both food and rooms. The car park earns its keep: a weekly Post Office session runs from the pub, and Passmore's fish van pulls in once a week.

For the rest of the shopping there is the Pavilion Stores & Café on the Coronation Playing Field, open since May 2022 and run by three part-time managers and more than forty volunteers. It stocks as much local produce as it can.

Walks, earthworks and Domesday

Walking starts at the door. A moderate circuit from the Fox & Goose covers 5.9 miles in about two and a half hours, climbing 270 metres onto the moor and back. Gentler is the two-mile there-and-back to Heddon's Mouth, following the River Heddon through old woodland to a pebble beach and a restored nineteenth-century lime kiln; the graded path takes all-terrain pushchairs, and dogs should stay on a close lead.

Above the River Heddon are the earthworks of Holwell Castle, a Norman motte-and-bailey with a mound around forty metres across and building platforms still legible in the grass. The Domesday surveyors valued the whole manor at two pounds a year, and it had not changed since William of Falaise took it on.

Two churches, two eras

Christ Church, built in 1878 as the replacement parish church, is the one still in use; from its porch you look across the valley to those same earthworks.

The older church, St Petrock's, stands up on the hill and is no longer used for regular services. It was left alone when Christ Church took over, and so it escaped Victorian restoration. The interior is close to intact: box pews, tiered seats for the musicians, a three-decker pulpit, a fifteenth-century screen, and panels painted with the Lord's Prayer, Creed and Commandments. One pew has a hole cut to take the bow of a bass viol; this is thought to be the last church in Devon where a band rather than an organ carried the hymns. In 1879 it was nearly pulled down over fears it might collapse, until John Ruskin argued against it and sent ten pounds, and it stood.

A visitor's quiet verdict

Someone recently wrote in its visitors' book: "Worth the walk up. Very peaceful - ideal for contemplation."