Wheddon Cross

At the crossroads and under Dunkery

The Rest and Be Thankful Inn stands at the crossroads where the A396 meets the B3224, and it has been taking travellers in off the Dunster-to-Dulverton road for close to two hundred years. It started as a staging post. Today it is an inn, restaurant and B&B, and a recent reviewer found the Sunday carvery busy. The kitchen's menus have featured prawn cocktail, white crab meat on toast, fish and chips, and baked Brie with cranberry, and one recent diner called the homemade banoffee pie "absolutely sublime." Sticky-toffee pudding has appeared on the menu too, and there are free public toilets beside the car park.

That is more or less the centre of Wheddon Cross. The village sits at around 300 metres, in farmed pasture hedged into small fields, with wooded valleys cut in below and the open moorland of Dunkery Hill rising above. Older houses gather around the junction. From the top of Dunkery Beacon, Exmoor's highest ground, you can pick the village out.

The village shop and Exmoor pork

Next to the garage is the shop, which does more than a village this size has any right to expect: a Post Office with banking, petrol and LPG, an off-licence, PayPoint, the National Lottery, and the ordinary run of bread, milk, newspapers and groceries. It also sells local maps and booklets. For meat, Little Oak Farm Pork raises rare-breed Middle White pigs born and reared outdoors on Exmoor, all from its own pedigree herd.

Snowdrop Valley and moorland walks

Most people come for the walking. Wheddon Cross is the way in to Snowdrop Valley, a privately owned valley the Badgworthy Land Company opens to the public when the snowdrops flower, usually in February. The usual route runs about a mile downhill and another mile looping back up; the paths are muddy in winter and dogs must stay on leads. The Coleridge Way passes straight through the village on its 51-mile course between Nether Stowey and Lynmouth, marked by a quill. The travel writer Ruth Luckhurst described walking it eastwards as heading "away from the busy open coastline into the secretive hinterland." From here it is a short drive to the foot of Dunkery Beacon, where a stony track climbs about 70 metres over a mile and a half there and back, past Bronze Age barrows and cairns, with red deer and the odd merlin for company. Roadside parking is at TA24 7AT.

Cutcombe church and Domesday

The older part of the settlement is Cutcombe, and its church, St John's, is the Grade II* here. The tower is thirteenth-century; inside there is a Norman font base carrying a nineteenth-century Italian-marble bowl, a Beer-stone pulpit carved with biblical scenes, and five bells cast by William Evans of Chepstow. The parish still holds a 1573 chalice and paten. In 1086 the Domesday surveyors recorded Cutcombe as 45 households with a single mill worth five shillings, valued at £7 15s 5d a year.

Livestock sales and village breakfasts

Cutcombe Market is a working livestock auction, run by farmer-owned Exmoor Farmers, selling store cattle, suckled calves and sheep on the moor. On the first two Sundays of October, the village serves breakfast in Moorland Hall.