Clovelly

Stand at the top of Clovelly and look down. A single cobbled street falls away beneath your feet, dropping four hundred feet through hanging oak woods to a small stone harbour and the grey shimmer of the Bristol Channel. There are no cars here. There is only the street, the flowers spilling from every windowsill, and the long way down.

This is one of the most famous villages in all of England, and one of the most unlikely. Clovelly clings to a steep cleft in the cliffs of the wild Hartland coast, where folded Carboniferous sandstones and shales, the rocks the geologists call the Culm Measures, plunge toward the water. The harbour was first built in the fourteenth century and rebuilt in stone, and for centuries the village lived on the silver harvest of herring. Since 1738 it has belonged to a single family estate, the Hamlyns, and that unbroken ownership is the reason it survives so little changed. No developer redrew it. No road was cut through it. Writers came instead. Charles Kingsley spent his boyhood here and carried the place into his books; Charles Dickens described it to the wider world. What you are walking through is not a museum. It is a living village that simply refused to modernise.

Now, as you descend, look for the details that make Clovelly unique. First, the street itself: it is not paved but cobbled, laid from beach stones set on their edges, worn smooth and slick by centuries of feet. Watch your step, especially in the wet. Second, look for the sledges. With no cars and a slope this severe, goods have always been dragged down on wooden sledges, and for generations donkeys did the hauling. You may still see both, and you will certainly see the grooves the sledges have worn. Third, notice the cottages. They are whitewashed, close-packed, and almost every one is decked with flowers, baskets and climbers tumbling from the walls, a display kept up with real pride. Fourth, when you reach the bottom, turn and look back up the street from the quay. That view, cottages climbing away above the harbour, is among the most photographed in England, and it is finest in the morning when light pours straight down the cleft. Fifth, look up and behind the village to the wooded cliffs and the Hobby Drive, the great hanging oak woods alive with birdsong, gulls wheeling over the harbour and seabirds working the cliffs beyond.

There is a particular magic to arriving here on foot. For most of Clovelly's life, that is exactly how visitors came, or by boat into the little harbour. Picture the herring fleet of the old days, dozens of small open boats crowding that fourteenth-century quay, the whole village turned out to gut and salt and pack the catch by lantern light, the smell of fish and woodsmoke hanging in the cleft. The money from herring built these cottages. When the shoals thinned and the fishing faded, it was the beauty of the place, and the care of the estate, that kept Clovelly alive. The flowers you pass were planted so that the village might endure. In a sense, you are walking through a act of preservation four centuries in the making.

From the harbour, the Coast Path climbs back into the hanging woods and on toward the wildest cliffs in the whole of Devon, the raw and lonely Hartland coast where the land buckles into the sea. But linger a moment first. Stand on the quay, watch the tide breathe against the old stones, and look one last time up that impossible cobbled street, flower-hung and car-free, falling four hundred feet from the woods to the water. Few places you will ever walk feel quite so completely themselves. Walk safe.