Selworthy

Ochre cottages and the Green

Seven houses stand around Selworthy Green, all rendered in stone and limewashed the same yellow ochre. The colour is not decoration. The estate found that the pale wash helped the sun pull damp out of the walls, and so the whole cluster glows faintly on a grey day. Look closely and you will see the other details that mark these cottages out: thatched roofs, tall chimneys, heavy wooden lintels, and the bulbous projections on the outside walls where the bread ovens push through. Above them all, white against the wooded slope, stands the church of All Saints, looking out across Porlock Vale towards Dunkery Beacon.

The village is small and sits in a sheltered combe below Selworthy Beacon, with streams, woods and open moor closing it in on every side. There is a National Trust car park at the top, reached by a signed turning off the A39 and then a steep lane, and public toilets beside the Green. Benches and meandering paths lead down to a lower picnic area. Dogs are welcome on close control, since there is livestock about; the Trust rates the place two pawprints.

Tea room, shop and walking routes

You will not find a pub. Selworthy has never had one, and residents go to Porlock, Minehead or farther afield for shopping and a night out. What it has instead is the Periwinkle Tea-room, in a thatched, Grade II listed cottage on the Green, with a full-height porch, leaded casements and an oriel window. It does hot food, light bites, cakes and bakes, and a cream tea is the thing to order. At the north end of the Green, the National Trust shop occupies Clematis Cottage, part of which is the hall and cross-passage of a late-medieval house.

Most people come here to walk. The short circuit up to Bury Castle is three miles and about an hour, easy but steep and stony in places, climbing to an Iron Age earthwork of around 400 BC before dropping back through woodland to the Green. For a longer day, an eight-mile route runs from Allerford through Selworthy Woods and over Selworthy Beacon, then descends sharply by Hurlstone Point to the pebble beach at Bossington. The Holnicote Estate as a whole carries 150 miles of paths, and nearby Horner Wood, an 800-acre nature reserve, holds veteran oaks including one named the General, reckoned to be more than five hundred years old.

An estate village remade

The village you see is largely the work of Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, who acquired Selworthy in 1802 and remodelled it as a settlement for estate workers, in the manner of Blaise Hamlet near Bristol. He reused older farmhouses, cleared the yards and outbuildings, added the cottage-ornée touches and laid out the Green. He also planted Selworthy Woods after 1815, sowing one block for the birth of each of his eight children. In 1944 Sir Richard Dyke Acland gave 9,848 acres of Holnicote to the National Trust, alongside the Killerton Estate, wanting it enjoyed by everyone rather than a single owner.

Inside All Saints

Inside All Saints, one of the finest churches in the county, the wagon roofs carry carved angels and bosses; the north-aisle roof was cut in 1890 by a local woodworking class. There is a Norman font, a squire's pew of 1804 shaped as an oriel, and monuments by Chantrey.

The puppeteer's plaque

Outside the Tithe Barn, a plaque set in the ground remembers Walter Wilkinson, a travelling puppeteer who spent his last years here.