Rockford

Inn, River and Oakwoods

The East Lyn runs so close to the Rockford Inn that guests cross a little bridge to reach the woodland walks on the far bank. The river comes down a wooded gorge of rapids, waterfalls, fern-lined pools and boulders, and the inn sits directly beside it: low-beamed, with real fires and fabric said to be more than four hundred years old. Pete and Jess took it on in 2026 as its latest custodians.

Rockford is small, about ten dwellings strung along the valley floor, deep in the oakwoods that give this stretch of Exmoor its protected status. Some of the riverside houses sit within the flood zone. Above the trees the open Brendon Hills rise.

Food, Rooms and Supplies

The inn is the village's main pub and accommodation. It has seven en-suite rooms, a garden, parking and a fire, and the kitchen works from a changing chalkboard supper menu built on local, seasonal ingredients. At the bar you can buy a pint of Black Bear's Rockford Ale, the house beer, or RCH Pitchfork, and pick up a permit to fish the river outside. Well-behaved dogs are welcome in the bar, though not in the rooms. Booking.com guests rate it highly for location and staff; one January visitor, Toby, called it "very quiet" and praised the locals, the hosts and the walks straight across the little bridge.

There is no shop or bakery here. For groceries you drive the 4.5 miles west to Lynton and Lynmouth, which also have a harbour and the cliff railway, opened in 1890 and billed as the world's highest and steepest fully water-powered railway.

Woodland Walks and St Brendan

Walking is the reason to be here. The signed river path runs west to Watersmeet, where the East Lyn meets Hoar Oak Water below a run of waterfalls and a National Trust tea garden occupies an 1832 fishing lodge. A moderate 2.2-mile circuit from Watersmeet to Ash Bridge takes under an hour through East Lyn woodland, passing a Victorian mine adit, a restored limekiln and the bluebells of Barton Wood, with otters and herons on the water if you are lucky. The ground has steps, slippery sections and unguarded edges. One bridleway north of Hillsford Bridge is closed after a landslip until November 2026; the signed diversion via Myrtleberry Cleave is steep.

The Church of St Brendan stands away from the water, built in 1738, its tower rebuilt in 1828 and a north aisle and transept added in 1873. Pevsner thought the 1738 builders reused stone from the abandoned twelfth-century church at Cheriton, and some Romanesque work survives in the font and an ornate pillar piscina assembled from two parts.

Reaching the Valley

Getting here means the A39 and then the single-track lanes into the valley; the nearest practical railhead is Barnstaple, eighteen miles from Lynmouth. There is no direct bus to Rockford.

Rockford Lodge and the Hostel Years

The long riverside building now called Rockford Lodge spent twenty-three years as a youth hostel. Converted from two or three cottages, it opened in 1931, stayed open through the war, and logged three thousand overnight stays in 1946. Flood damage closed it in August 1952, but it reopened and finally closed on 12 September 1954. Walking up in June 1950, Mabel Pratt found it "standing on the edge of a wide hurrying stream, and peeping at me from behind a thick screen of trees." It is a holiday home now.