The roof of St Peter's is made of Treborough slate. The same quarry worked here for roughly five hundred years, and in 1426 it sent two thousand tiles to Dunster Castle. It kept going, on and off, until 1938, when the tramlines and wagons were carried away for wartime scrap. The deepest part of the old workings later became a council rubbish tip.
Treborough sits high in the Brendon Hills, on the eastern part of Exmoor, reached by narrow lanes that turn and dip and hand you a different arrangement of fields, farms and woods around each bend. The hills are rounded and often wooded, cut through by combes with fast streams in them. Most of that water ends up in the Washford River, which runs north-east to the sea at Watchet. A car is the practical way in and out.
This is walking country, and for many people that is the point of coming. The Coleridge Way is now fifty-one miles from the Quantocks across the Brendon Hills and into Exmoor. The stretch between Roadwater and Wheddon Cross climbs through Langridge Wood with views out to the Quantocks and the Bristol Channel. A classic circuit from Roadwater runs about eight miles over the hills and combes and comes back along the former West Somerset Mineral Railway corridor.
Treborough has no pub of its own. Nearby options lie down the lanes.
The Royal Oak at Luxborough is a fourteenth-century inn with flagstone floors, an inglenook fireplace and three dining rooms; the back bar keeps a radiogram and a stack of vinyl, with Fleetwood Mac and Johnny Cash among it. The Valiant Soldier at Roadwater has been run by Mike for more than thirty years and stands beside a small river where you can sometimes see a kingfisher. Its kitchen turns out changing dishes such as hunters chicken stack with gammon and smoked cheddar, grilled sea bass with lemon-and-dill butter, and a beetroot and butternut-squash Wellington, with Dartmoor Jail Ale as the regular cask beer and a play area in the garden for children.
Roadwater also has the shop. A community benefit society bought it in July 2018, and it now has more than three hundred local shareholders; it runs a Post Office and a café doing freshly ground coffee, cakes and light lunches, and sells refillable milk and cleaning products alongside the groceries. The High Sheriff of Somerset once called it "not just a shop – it's a community centre that sells food."
Back in the church, there are seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bench ends, an octagonal font carved with angels holding scrolls, and a half-life-size wooden figure of someone praying, cut by Rachel Reckitt in 1965. The building is in fair condition, with high vulnerability and a declining trend, and things have slipped away from it over the years: an early-nineteenth-century west porch, and the accuracy of the slate sundial, which drifted out of true when the tower wall began to bulge.
Above the village, on Treborough Common, an American camp of tents and shower blocks stood for a while in 1944, before the D-Day landings. Nothing of it is left on the ground. And in the churchyard lie bones dug up from Langridge Wood in 1820, a burial disturbed by men cutting road-stone.