Stoke Pero

A church between combes and moor

The church at Stoke Pero stands at 1,013 feet, on thin pasture at the northern edge of Exmoor, with a single farm for company. A notice in its porch calls it "the most isolated and highest church of Exmoor," and on a clear day the churchyard gives you the Bristol Channel and the hills of Wales beyond it. The dedication remains unknown.

You reach it up a narrow hedged lane sunk between banks, in a slim band of enclosed ground where the wooded combes give way to open heather moor. The lane crosses a farmyard. There is no scheduled bus into Stoke Pero. The A39 brings you through Minehead and Porlock, and after that it is minor upland roads and farm approaches the rest of the way.

Romanesque traces and a rebuilt nave

The church has a squat saddleback west tower, thirteenth-century, standing beside the red-sandstone farm buildings. Inside, the font and the round tower arch are Romanesque, older than most of what surrounds them. There is an undivided nave and chancel of three bays, a late-Victorian wagon roof carried on carved bosses, pews that incorporate some seventeenth-century bench ends, and a north door, restored, marked with lettering nobody has fully explained. In 1897 the decayed body of the church was pulled down and rebuilt, reusing whatever stone was still sound. Digging the new foundations, workmen found three sets of human remains directly beneath the old north wall. The churchyard was older than the church.

Priest's Way, Horner and Dunkery

This is walking country before it is anything else. The path from the church to Luccombe is the Priest's Way, part of a twenty-nine-mile pilgrim's trail that links nine Exmoor churches and chapels through oak woods, meadow and high moor. A harder day is the circuit from Horner over Cat's Scramble and Granny's Ride, across Horner Water to the church, then out over open moor to Dunkery Beacon and back by Webber's Post: about eight miles, seven hundred metres of climb, four and a half to five hours with the fords and the gradients. For something gentler, the level mile at Webber's Post suits buggies and dogs and runs into Horner Wood, one of the largest unenclosed ancient oak woods in Britain, where one pollard is over five hundred years old.

Porlock food and supplies

For food and supplies you go to Porlock, three kilometres off as the crow flies. The Ship Inn, the "Top Ship," was CAMRA's Somerset Pub of the Year in 2025; Royston and Caroline Connor run it, and the evening menu runs to a farmhouse Scotch egg with piccalilli, beer-battered haddock with mushy peas, pork chop with bubble and squeak, and duck breast with orange-and-ginger glazed carrots. Robert Southey wrote his sonnet "Porlock" in the pub in 1798, kept there by the rain. Porlock also has a SPAR that sells farm eggs and Somerset honey, a tea and coffee roastery, and a cakery.

Domesday, plague and spunkies

Stoke Pero was a manor in Domesday, held by Roger of Courseulles, with three recorded households, sixty acres of woodland and land for two plough teams that only ever had one. Three of its rectors died in 1348, as the Black Death was spreading through Somerset. On St John's Eve in 1942 a carter took the folklorist Ruth Tongue up to Ley Hill to watch the marsh lights below. The old name for them was spunkies, said to gather at the church to guide the ghosts of everyone who would die in the coming year.