Roadwater

Food, fires and the river garden

The Valiant Soldier stands beside the river, with wooden beams, an inglenook fireplace and log fires going through the colder months. Mike has run it for more than thirty years, and the building itself dates to 1720. The menu lists a range of dishes: freshly battered cod and chips, homemade fish pie, grilled sea bass with lemon-and-dill butter, a hunter's chicken stack with gammon, smoked Cheddar and maple-and-bourbon barbecue sauce, and, for anyone off the meat, a beetroot-and-butternut-squash Wellington or a vegan aromatic garden burger. Sunday roast comes with a choice of meats. The beer is Cask Marque certified, with support for local breweries such as Exmoor and Cotleigh, and Dartmoor Jail Ale as the regular cask. Dogs are welcome.

The garden runs down to the water, where there is a children's play area and, if you sit quietly, ducks and the occasional kingfisher. In winter the pub fields nine skittles teams, and there are quiz nights, pool and darts. Five letting rooms sit above.

Community life in the wooded valley

In the valley is the community shop, café and post office, which the villagers bought in 2018 and reopened, renovated, in December 2019. It now has more than three hundred shareholders. Named suppliers include Hawkridge cheeses, Kendle Farm meats, Common Loaf bread, Brazier coffee and Porlock Bay cider, alongside milk in refillable glass bottles and household cleaners you top up yourself. The café has a patio over the recreation ground and does toasties, cakes and, in summer, cream teas; in winter there is usually homemade soup. The High Sheriff of Somerset called it "not just a shop – it's a community centre that sells food."

Roadwater is a linear village, following the Washford River through a narrow wooded valley at the foot of the Brendon Hills, on the northern edge of Exmoor. The valley opens out around the shop, the recreation ground and the pub. The Coleridge Way, the 51-mile path from Nether Stowey to Lynmouth, runs straight through, waymarked in both directions with a quill.

Mills, mineral rails and getting here

The village once ran on water and iron. Mills lined the Washford River, many of them fulling cloth; the 18th-century Manor Mills, a red sandstone former corn mill, still keeps its rear waterwheel. The West Somerset Mineral Railway reached Roadwater in 1857 to carry ore down from the Brendon Hills to Watchet, and passengers followed in 1865. Ordinary traffic stopped in 1898, a brief mineral revival came and went, and the line closed for good in 1910. The old station is now a private house called Station Bungalow; its grassed platform, a bridge base and three original level-crossing gates survive. At Pitt Mill, Two Rivers Paper made paper by hand until production moved to Watchet in 2021.

You reach Roadwater from the A39 at Washford, about three miles south-west of Williton; Taunton, some fourteen and a half miles off, is the nearest mainline station. There is no regular bus, though Atwest runs a Friday shopper minibus to Minehead if you book ahead.

The hall and recreation ground

The recreation ground was given to the village in 1928 by Captain John Bridges of Croydon Hall, the same year the hall was endowed by its architect, Norman Reckitt. Between them the hall hosts a varied programme: cricket and youth club, art and drama, Pilates and yoga, singing, sewing, spinning and weaving, and a community cinema.

The red telephone boxes

Two of the old red telephone boxes still stand, decommissioned but not removed. One is now a book exchange. The other holds jigsaws and children's books.