Porlock

The Top Ship and the village threshold

The Top Ship stands at the foot of Porlock Hill, where the A39 begins its climb, and inside there are flagstones, an open fire and settle seating that has clearly been sat on for a long time. Royston and Caroline Connor have run it since 2006. The bar keeps Otter Ale, Otter Amber and St Austell's Proper Job and Tribute, with up to eight ales and local cider, depending on the time of week, and Somerset CAMRA named it its Pub of the Year in 2025. The kitchen does a farmhouse Scotch egg with piccalilli, crispy whitebait with homemade tartare, a smash burger and beer-battered haddock; on Sundays there is striploin of beef, pork belly, roast chicken and a butternut-squash-and-nut roast. It is a very old inn — the surviving fabric is sixteenth or seventeenth century, and local accounts push the origins back further still.

Step outside and you are on a High Street that does more work than a village this size usually manages. Porlock lies about a mile inland, in a low, broad vale between the Bristol Channel and the steep edge of Exmoor. Moor and wooded combe close around it on three sides; to the north the land flattens into marsh, shingle and the bay. West of the last houses the A39 rises 725 feet in under a mile and reaches a gradient of one in four, which is why towing traffic is pointed at the gentler four-mile toll road instead.

The Castle, further along the High Street, is a smaller family-run pub with a pool table and a jukebox, two permanent and two changing cask ales, and home-cooked food with daily specials; dogs are welcome in the bar. The Royal Oak, under landlord Stuart Leggat, buys from nearby farmers, growers and fishermen and pours ales from On The Level, a father-and-son brewery on Exmoor. Leggat's aim, in his own words, is that "a pub should feel like a second living room," and the beamed bar — hung with plates, brasses and old photographs, with a skittle alley through the back — is arranged to make good on it. Dogs doze under the tables.

Cakes, shops and a rare spire

For the daytime there is the Whortleberry, a tearoom on the High Street run by Helen and Shaun. The signature is a warm apple-and-whortleberry cake with clotted cream, and the whortleberry jam comes from the same wild moorland fruit that gave the building its name. Whortleberry House was a fruit-and-vegetable shop from the mid-nineteenth century, held by the Westcott family from 1923 to 1999, and behind it local pickers once packed wild whortleberries to send to London and the Midlands for food and dye. It became a tearoom in 1999. Round the corner, Eduardo's makes twelve-inch pizzas from Italian 00 flour — the Greedy Meady piles on pepperoni, ham, barbecue chicken and spicy meatballs — and does full English breakfasts and smoked salmon on focaccia in a dog-friendly courtyard.

The shops are the surprise. D. J. Miles roasts coffee in Vale Yard and blends tea a few doors from where it is sold. Henry Miles started the business in Birmingham in 1888; his grandson Derek brought it to Porlock in 1961 and began blending small batches at home, and the firm moved into Vale Yard and installed a roaster in 1980. John Halls runs it now and is teaching the tasting to Nathaniel, who joined as a school-leaver in 2025. The teas carry names like West Country Original and Smugglers' Gold. Richard Little is the butcher; Bake Me Crazy does the cakes, specialising in buttercream and ganache; Handmade Exmoor sells wool and tweed spun from a flock of Jacob, Devon Closewool, Poll Dorset and Exmoor Horn sheep on a sheep-to-shop model. The Exmoor Rambler pairs walking boots and waterproofs with the Post Office. There is a hardware shop, a gallery or two, and the Bagatelle, where a man named Dave keeps the second-hand vinyl in order alongside Simon Drew prints and handmade dog-walking bags. Two small stores, One Stop and SPAR, cover the self-catering basics; there is no full-size supermarket.

Above the roofs stands St Dubricius, the only Grade I building in the Porlock conservation area and one of very few churches anywhere dedicated to the sixth-century Welsh saint. Its oak-shingled spire is truncated — flat-topped — and tradition blames the Great Storm of 1703, though a rival local story holds that the flat top was a beacon platform. The tower clock was made somewhere between 1400 and 1450 and for centuries had no face and no hands; it simply struck the hour on the tenor bell until 1897. Inside there is a fifteenth-century octagonal font, a fragment of a pre-Norman cross carved with interlace, and the alabaster tomb of John, fourth Baron Harington, and Elizabeth Courtenay, built in 1474. The chantry attached to it was served by monks who lived in nearby Chantry Cottage, which still stands.

Manor, writers and the overland rescue

Porlock has been legible for a long time. The Domesday commissioners recorded fifteen households, five hundred acres of pasture and three hundred of woodland, and valued the manor at a pound and five shillings — down from four pounds when its Norman owner had taken it on. A short walk from the church, Dovery Manor is a late-fifteenth-century house with a great hall, a stone newel stair and an upper solar; it holds the village museum, where volunteers called the Museum Players perform local history in story, song and poetry.

Writers kept coming to the vale. Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge all walked it, and it was somewhere near here, at a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Lynton, that Coleridge said he was writing down Kubla Khan when he was "called out by a person on business from Porlock" and could not recover the rest of the poem. The village has been a byword for interruption ever since. Ada Lovelace spent summers above Porlock Weir at Ashley Combe, the Italianate house her husband enlarged for her in 1835; the mansion is gone, but its tunnels and terraces survive in the woods beside the Coast Path.

The village's best story is a rescue that mostly happened on land. On the night of 12–13 January 1899, with the sea at Lynmouth too rough to launch into, the coxswain Jack Crocombe had the lifeboat Louisa hauled thirteen miles over Exmoor so she could go out instead from the shelter of Porlock Weir. Around a hundred people and eighteen horses started the haul; twenty men held the boat back down the one-in-four of Porlock Hill, taking down part of a garden wall to get her round the bends. She reached the water after nearly eleven hours, and all eighteen crew of the stranded Forrest Hall were saved.

Marsh, harbour and the wider vale

What most people come for, though, is the ground around the village. The flattest walk is the marsh: a boardwalk circuit of about three and a half miles loops out through saltmarsh, along the shingle ridge and back through Bossington, with about 45 metres of ascent and descent across the whole route. The marsh is recent, in landscape terms. A storm breached the shingle bank in 1996 and, rather than rebuild the defence, the choice was made to let the tide come in; daily flooding has since turned the fields behind the ridge to saltmarsh. Behind the village, Hawkcombe Water runs down a long oak combe toward the open moor, and the visitor centre keeps the bones of an aurochs, exposed by the sea in 1998 and dated to around 1500 BC, from a time when the coastline sat well out from where it does now. From the higher slopes you can see across the marsh to Bossington Hill and the rocky snout of Hurlstone Point, and on a clear day the Welsh coast across the channel.

Porlock Weir is about two miles west, reached by the B3225 or a softer woodland path that joins the Coleridge Way past Greencombe Gardens. It has a working harbour, a pebble beach, a second Ship Inn — the Bottom Ship, kept firmly distinct from the Top one up in the village — and Porlock Bay Oysters, which grows Pacific oysters in water clean enough to have made it the first site in England and Wales classified for the purpose. From the Weir the Coast Path climbs to Culbone, whose tiny church sits in a deep wooded combe and can be reached only on foot. Closer to hand, Bossington is a National Trust hamlet of thatched cottages with a pebble beach and a tea room; Allerford has a medieval packhorse bridge; Selworthy shows off a white church above the vale; and Dunkery Beacon, the highest point on Exmoor and in Somerset, is a stony walk up to broad moorland views, best in late summer when the heather is out.

Getting here and village life

Getting here without a car takes some planning. The nearest mainline station is Taunton, twenty-eight miles off, from where bus 28 runs to Minehead and service 10 carries on to Porlock and the Weir, Monday to Saturday year-round — worth checking times before you travel; in summer the Exmoor Coaster adds a slower, more scenic run along the coast to Lynmouth. By road, Porlock is on the A39 about six miles west of Minehead, and the toll road offers a second, quieter way up onto the moor above the Weir.

It is a village that still works for the people who live in it — the butcher, the baker and the hardware shop among them, the Post Office standing behind a rack of walking boots, water bowls set out on the pavement by the shop doors. At the Whortleberry the resident golden retriever, Willow, will have registered your arrival long before the tea does.