Slate and the Brendon Hills
Treborough
Treborough pairs a five-century slate story with high, rounded hills, wooded combes and walking routes across eastern Exmoor.
- Landscape
- Rounded, often wooded hills cut by narrow combes
- Walking
- An 8-mile Exmoor classic starts at Roadwater
- Village services
- Treborough has no pub; nearby villages provide food and shopping
The Fox verdict
A high Brendon Hills base for walking
Come for the hills and combes, then use Roadwater, Luxborough and Washford for nearby food, heritage and family stops.
Treborough's strongest threads are unusually specific: five centuries of slate working, a church roof made from that slate, and routes that cross the Brendon Hills through woods, farmland and combes. The village has no pub, shop or café, so a visit works best when its local history is paired with nearby options in Roadwater, Luxborough and Washford.
Where to go
Places in Treborough
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesRoadwater and the Brendon Hills Walk
Exmoor National Park's classic circuit follows part of the Coleridge Way over hills and combes with Bristol Channel views, returning along the former West Somerset Mineral Railway.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 4 hours
- Locality
- Roadwater and the Brendon Hills
Cleeve Abbey
English Heritage describes Cleeve Abbey as England's most complete and unaltered set of roofed, two-storey monastic cloister buildings, with an angel-roofed refectory, painted chamber and a c.1270 tiled floor.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Washford
Tropiquaria
A small zoo and sanctuary in a repurposed 1933 BBC transmitting station, with a reptile house, aquarium, nocturnal house, outdoor enclosures, restaurant and indoor and outdoor play.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 2 hours
- Locality
- Washford Cross
Food & drink
3 placesThe Royal Oak Inn
A 14th-century country inn with original flagstone and cobblestone floors, rugged stone walls, beams, an inglenook fireplace, three dining rooms and a planted summer courtyard; its menus change daily.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Luxborough
The Valiant Soldier
A traditional food-serving inn with beams, an inglenook fireplace and log fires, locally sourced food, real ales and a beer garden with a children's play area.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 60 minutes
- Locality
- Roadwater
Roadwater Community Shop and Café
A community-owned shop, café, community hub and Post Office with more than 300 shareholders, selling groceries and refill products while the café serves coffee, tea, cakes and light lunches.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 30 minutes
- Locality
- Roadwater
History & heritage
3 placesChurch of St Peter
A Grade II* church begun in the early 14th century, with a local Treborough-slate roof, a foliage-carved pillar piscina, an angel-carved font, historic bench ends and Rachel Reckitt's 1965 wooden praying figure.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Treborough
- Access
- Check local access arrangements before visiting.
St Peter's Churchyard Cross
The scheduled cross retains a late-13th-century three-step octagonal base and socket stone; the shaft and lantern head showing St Peter are 19th-century additions, while the canopy may be original.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 20 minutes
- Locality
- Treborough churchyard
Langridge Wood Cist
One of only seven documented cists on Exmoor and one of two surviving, with a slate-lined chamber and displaced capstone; remains exposed in 1820 were reburied in Treborough churchyard.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 30 minutes
- Locality
- Langridge Wood
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Three ways to explore Treborough
Signature outings
St Peter's Treborough roof
The church roof uses local Treborough slate, while the interior holds a rare pillar piscina, an angel-carved font, historic bench ends and Rachel Reckitt's wooden praying figure.
Flagstones, fire and vinyl
The Royal Oak combines original floors, stone walls and an inglenook fireplace with a back-bar radiogram and records by Fleetwood Mac and Johnny Cash.
A slate-lined cist in Langridge Wood
The scheduled cist is one of only seven documented on Exmoor and one of two surviving, with a slate-lined chamber and displaced capstone.
The village story
Treborough Village Guide
Slate history, Brendon Hills walking, nearby inns and the layered fabric of St Peter's shape this eight-paragraph guide.
Slate and the Brendon Hills
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.
Walking Country and Practicalities
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.
Nearby Inns and Roadwater's Shop
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."
Church, Camp and Buried History
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.
Stay around Exmoor
Make a longer stay of it
Travel Fox holiday homes around Exmoor, linked directly to their property pages.
A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- Church of St Peter — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- St Peter's Churchyard Cross — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Langridge Wood Cist — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Roadwater and the Brendon Hills Walk — exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- The Royal Oak Inn — royaloakinnluxborough.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- The Valiant Soldier — thevaliantsoldier.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Roadwater Community Shop and Café — roadwatercommunityshop.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Cleeve Abbey — english-heritage.org.uk national body or asset manager
- Tropiquaria — find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk statutory register or public authority