The Exmoor Forest Inn sources much of its produce locally. Most of the beef, lamb and venison on its daily-changing menu comes off the inn's own organic hill farm, the fish arrives by day-boat from Bideford, and the gaps are filled with garden produce and foraged ingredients. It has held a Michelin Green Star for 2024 and 2025. An October 2025 sample menu included Exmoor venison haunch steak with braised shallots, red-wine and rosemary gravy and pavé potatoes; homemade mushroom and ricotta ravioli; day-boat fish with fennel confit, scalloped potatoes and creamed leeks; and a blackberry fool with hazelnut biscuits — dishes that change with what's in season. One well-behaved dog per table is allowed, and there is a fire-lit lounge to settle into afterwards.
The present building dates from the 1850s and has included both temperance and licensed phases. For a while it was split into an alcohol-free Temperance Hotel and the William Rufus Inn, and an early visitors' book records complaints about the lack of drink — among the guests was Winston Churchill. The brothers Edward, Freddie and Alexander Greenall bought it in 2021 and refurbished it the following year.
Down the road, Boeveys Tearoom keeps flowered tablecloths, traditional china and loose-leaf tea. It serves an all-day breakfast, a bacon, Brie and cranberry panini, seasonal quiche and soup, and stocks Exmoor Tea, Dunster Coffee, Besshill sausages and local ales and ciders — it's worth ringing ahead to check it's open. "Our homemade Lemon Drizzle is the most popular cake," say Claire and Louise, who run it. Simonsbath House is another local option, where the Barle Valley Restaurant's sample menu has included slow-roasted pork belly with apple-and-cider jus, pan-fried sea bass with spinach and an apricot-and-fennel marmalade, and a pear, Devon Blue and walnut tart.
For a village this small — a scatter of farms and cottages in a sheltered fold of the River Barle — three kitchens is a lot. Simonsbath earns them by being where the walking starts. From Ashcombe car park, which has toilets and sits at the junction of the B3223 and B3358, the Wheal Eliza Explorer runs two and a half miles there and back along the upland Barle to a ruined copper and iron mine. The longer archaeology circuit follows the Two Moors Way seven miles through Birchcleave Wood — thought to be Britain's highest beech plantation, at over a thousand feet — past Cow Castle, an Iron Age hillfort above the river, and on towards the old Royal Forest boundary.
The nearest railway is Tiverton Parkway, close to thirty road miles south, with no direct connection, so many visitors arrive by car across slow moor roads.
The former Royal Forest shaped the village's development. The Royal Forest of Exmoor was sold in 1819 to the Midlands industrialist John Knight for £50,000, and he set about dividing the moor with banks, walls and beech hedges into farms. His planned mansion behind Simonsbath House ran out of money and got no further than one wing. His son Frederic carried it on; by 1852 the estate held 281 people, thirty children at the school and fourteen new farmhouses.
St Luke's, built in 1856 for the new parish, is a compact Early English church with a slate-hung bell-cote and a harmonium inside. Its acoustics make it the main venue for the Simonsbath Festival. In the churchyard a stone remembers Anna Maria Burgess, murdered by her father in 1858 and hidden in a mine shaft on the moor.
The sawmill still works. It lost its water power after the 1952 Lynmouth flood, but the National Park restored the leats, sluices and turbine and set it running again in 2004, cutting the park's own signs, stiles and gates.