Porlock Weir

At the Harbour's Edge

The Ship Inn stands low and thatched at the head of the harbour, log fires inside and tables set out on the front where the water comes almost to the door. Locally it is the Bottom Ship, named to separate it from the Top Ship up in Porlock village a mile and a half inland; both are under the same ownership, but only this one sits on the weir. It is an old pub, four centuries by one telling and a little over two by its own, and the kitchen runs to a Ship Inn Scotch egg with fennel ketchup, smoked-haddock chowder, salt-and-chilli squid, and beer-battered cod with chips and crushed peas. There is Little Oak Farm gammon, a venison and red-wine ragù with tagliatelle, chicken Kiev, and a changing homemade pie, with a fish ploughman's or filled focaccia at lunchtime. Otter Amber pours alongside a weekly-changing Exmoor Ale, and the ciders include Porlock Vale and Thatcher's. Dogs are welcome in the rooms above; whether they can join you at the bar is worth asking on the day.

Step outside and you are at the western end of Porlock Bay, facing north-east, with steep wooded slopes rising behind to around 250 metres and cutting off the weather from the south and west. Hurlstone Point and Bossington close off the view to the east, and on a clear day the Welsh coast shows across the water. The beach is shingle rather than sand, the harbour is tidal and shelters small craft, and a squat Second World War pillbox sits beside it, a reminder that this stretch of water has always been watched. The whole place became a conservation area in 1973, protecting the harbour's historic buildings and character.

The buildings around the harbour are old and few. Turkey Island is a short row of early-eighteenth-century rubble cottages, once all thatched, though only the right-hand one keeps its thatch now; with the quay warehouse it forms the backdrop to the water. Gibraltar Cottages, probably seventeenth-century, are built of cob and rubble under thatch. Beach Cottage keeps a seventeenth-century three-cell cross-passage plan under later work. The house now called The Kiln still contains two nineteenth-century limekilns, where Welsh limestone was once burned after being landed at the quay.

A Working Waterfront Table

For a settlement of this size the food is unusually concentrated. Porlock Bay Oysters is a working oyster farm with a restaurant, The Kitchen, opened in autumn 2023. The oysters grow on trestles out in the bay, feeding on Atlantic plankton, and the farm holds a Category A classification for its waters, which it says makes Porlock the only site in England and Wales with that top grade for Pacific oysters. You can eat them raw or cooked, dressed with Exmoor-cider jelly and apple, or cucumber, crème fraîche and dill, or crab butter and pickled samphire, and the kitchen also does moules marinière, potted crab, lobster with wild-garlic butter, and a changing fruits-de-mer platter of shellfish and oysters. Dogs are allowed inside and out. The food writer Martin Hesp gave the revived oyster a short verdict: "A connoisseur's oyster."

The Porlock Weir Hotel, a seventeen-room waterfront hotel reopened in spring 2019, has a terrace, a bar and a wood-fired oven turning out pizza alongside local oysters and fish and chips. The head chef, Miguel, was raised in South Africa and cooks with both British and South African leanings picked up first from his mother and grandmother. The hotel keeps a resident dog called Cody and welcomes visiting ones. Down on the harbour, Ziangs at the Weir is an outdoor noodle bar run by Choo Taylor, cooking her family's Chinese, Malaysian and South-East Asian street food from a spot with tables out in the open air. Locanda on the Weir, a boutique guesthouse set up by the Naples-born Pio Catemario and Cindy, now leans towards breakfast and light bites rather than a full dining room, with overnight oats, sautéed mushrooms with sour cream and chives, boiled eggs with truffled soldiers, packed lunches and cheeseboards.

The Harbour Gallery and Café hangs changing work by local makers, shifting its display roughly every ten weeks, and does homemade baking and a thick smoked-fish chowder with crusty bread, with tables on the harbour wall looking over Turkey Island. The Harbour House Coffee Shop, family-run and dog-friendly, has indoor, conservatory and outdoor seats and pours barista coffee, deluxe hot chocolate and speciality teas. Harbour Stores is the practical shop, carrying local produce, ice creams, jams, chutneys and, importantly, crabbing gear. Exmoor Glass sells studio glass and dichroic jewellery, though the days of watching a piece being blown here have passed. Kay Waite works in porcelain and fine bone china, making bowls shaped by Exmoor light. And in the old boat shed, the fisherman, historian and photographer Derek Purvis has assembled a small museum out of the harbour's own artefacts.

Paths, Marsh and Water

The walking begins the moment you leave the car park. The South West Coast Path runs straight through the settlement, and arriving on foot from either direction is a genuine way to reach the place: 8.9 miles east from Minehead over woods, farmland and cliffs reaching about 250 metres, or 12.1 miles west to Lynmouth, which starts with a steep climb into Yearnor Wood and does not let up. Gentler than either is the walk to Culbone, reachable on a five-mile circuit that uses the coast path and wooded lanes and climbs back past the Ada Lovelace tunnels and the remains of the Ashley Combe landscape. Culbone Church itself, Grade I and probably pre-Norman, seats an exceptionally small congregation and has a fair claim to be the smallest complete parish church in England. For a full day, Exmoor's classic sixteen-kilometre loop threads Ashley Combe, Culbone and the wooded combes before returning by Hawkcombe. Shorter options run from a mile-and-a-half woodland loop to an eight-mile outing over Hurlstone, where a coastguard lookout built in 1902 kept watch until 1983.

The flatter walking is out on Porlock Marsh, a boardwalk-and-shingle route of about three and a half miles. It crosses ground that has changed within living memory. A shingle ridge built up over some six thousand years used to hold the sea back from the low land behind; a severe storm in 1996 breached it, and the regular tides that followed drowned the freshwater ground into the saltmarsh and lagoon you see now, with bare tree trunks still standing where the change caught them. At high tide the boardwalk is the sensible line, not the beach. The coast here is not fixed and is not managed to stay so, which is part of what makes the marsh worth the walk.

Down at the harbour the low-key business is crabbing. You buy a line and bait from Harbour Stores, drop it over the wall, and wait; the village has even hosted an Exmoor World Championship in the sport. Porlock Weir Charters runs the Morgan M for coastal and angling trips, skippered by Mike Richardson and taking up to ten. The Porlock Weir Gig Club, founded by Ben Allerton in 2018, passed forty members in its first year and welcomes people who want to try pilot-gig rowing. Exmoor Adventures, led by Dan French and based here, lists coasteering, kayaking, paddleboarding, archery and climbing among much else, all of it weather-dependent.

Port, Oysters and the Louisa

The harbour is far older than any of this. Porlock appears as Portloca in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 918 and as Portloc in Domesday, when it sat in Carhampton Hundred with fifteen recorded households and was valued at £1 5s, down from the £4 it had been worth when its holder acquired it. Harold Godwinson and his brother are thought to have come ashore somewhere in the Porlock area in 1052 with nine ships, met resistance, and left with booty. A bailiff's roll records the making of the Weir of Porlock in 1427, and by the eighteenth century maps were calling the place Porlock Quay. Small ships carried out flour, corn, tanning bark, bricks and oysters and brought back Welsh coal and limestone, and in 1682 the customs man William Culliforde noted the bay as "a very deep Bay and a good harbour for small vessels."

The oysters have their own long story. A 1946 interview with the eighty-seven-year-old William Pollard traced the commercial beds to about 1836, when his uncle John dredged oysters near the Mumbles and, without meaning to, carried stock into Porlock Bay. By the 1850s the holding pens mattered, and when the railway reached Minehead in 1874 oysters caught in the morning could be on London tables that evening, until outside dredgers stripped the beds in the 1890s. The farm you can eat at today grew out of trials backed from 2013 by a Parish Council initiative and figures including Tony Kenyon and David Salter, before Mark Pendarves bought the venture in 2019. The Oyster Perch is still visible at low tide.

One night in January 1899 the place produced a piece of pure endurance. The 1,900-ton Forrest Hall lost her steering in a gale, and with a launch impossible at Lynmouth, coxswain Jack Crocombe had the ten-ton lifeboat Louisa hauled thirteen miles overland through the night. Something like a hundred people, eighteen horses and a team of road-wideners moved her over the hills; she launched from Porlock Weir, and all eighteen aboard the ship were saved.

Arriving and Staying Late

Getting here now is easier than hauling a lifeboat over a moor, though not by much in a hurry. The village lies about a mile and a half west of Porlock, off the A39 by the B3225; drivers wary of the famous 1-in-4 Porlock Hill can take the gentler Worthy Toll Road, which tops out around 1 in 14. AtWest's route 10 minibus links the Weir, Porlock and Minehead most days except Sundays and holidays. Taunton, the nearest mainline station, is reached from here by a chain of bus 28 and route 10 services through Minehead. A large car park serves the harbour, and beyond it the marsh, the coast path and the wooded slopes take over.

Most evenings, once the boat trips are in and the last walkers have come down off the cliff, the tables outside the Ship fill up while the tide slides back out. Down along the wall, someone is usually still working a crabbing line, checking the bait, and dropping it patiently back into the water.