Motorhome travel: Exmoor
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As we left home heading for a week away in the ‘van on Exmoor, Sarah’s voice was again ringing in my ear, ‘You’ve been working too hard, it’s time you had a proper holiday so let’s just have a nice week away without you writing any articles’.
To be honest I’d been brainwashed by this message over the previous few weeks and I had played along with it to the point that I’d even started to give in and accept that I would have to have a ‘proper’ holiday.
But then we arrived at the aptly named Sunny Lyn campsite. The sun was indeed doing its best to raise the temperature above freezing during this, the coldest March on record for fifty years, and on the outskirts of Lynton we were camped beside a beautiful fast flowing river in a beautifully wooded valley.
My resolve to have a proper holiday was well and truly broken before I’d really stepped off the site. Dippers and grey wagtails on the river were the first encouraging sign and, walking into Lynton, I watched a raven displaying over the woodland and, whilst listening to the delightful song of siskins, I noticed a herd of red deer on the opposite side of the valley. A short reconnoitre took us as far as the famous Valley of the Rocks where we bumped into a few of the feral goats and had two cracking views of a peregrine flying beneath us along the cliff line.
I agreed a pact with Sarah. I could write an article but only if I agreed not to drive the ‘van except when it came to moving site. I like a challenge and I liked the idea so that is what we did.
There are plenty of options for walking from Sunny Lyn, crossing the bridge at the bottom of the site opens up a whole new world of paths, all of which seem to end at Watersmeet where there is a National Trust café. The paths are ever so slightly up hill and down dale so don’t come expecting a gentle amble. But on our way down to the East Lyn Valley my spirits were lifted, not only by the beautiful views but also the full-on singing of nuthatches, chaffinches and robins as well as the gentle calls of a pair of bullfinches. We could almost have thought spring was in the air if it wasn’t for the easterly blast from Siberia in our faces.
Down in the valley bottom, the woodland floor still looked a little lifeless, but there were some flowers doing their best to add some colour. A few lesser celandines and primroses were very colourful; more numerous but less vivid was the opposite-leaved golden saxifrage which flourished in the damper spots, along with the understated dog’s mercury which carpeted the ground in places. It was clear that in a month or so the wild garlic would be as pretty as a picture and there was evidence of some patches of bluebells.
Being on the coast we wanted to make sure we explored in both directions. The
Not far from County Gate is a village called Malmsmead, which sits at the foot of Lorna Doone country in the valley of the Badgworthy Water. This is a great spot for the whinchat, one of the special breeding birds of Exmoor, but since this is a summer visitor it wasn’t worth us making a detour on this occasion. Whinchats breed on moorland where there are tufts of grasses, it is at the base of these tufts that they make their nest.
Having stayed at Minehead Caravan Club site a couple of years ago, we decided to pass by this busy seaside resort and, after stopping briefly at the quaint village of Dunster, complete with its castle and several ‘ye olde tea shoppes’, we headed for the much quieter small town of Dulverton, which has its own Caravan Club site.
Dulverton is situated on the southeast side of the National Park, it too is very quaint and the campsite is close to the shops. For pie lovers, there is a cracking bakery and for naturalists the churchyard is of interest, as here there is a noticeboard giving the species of each tree, of which there are several, and scattered around the gravestones are masses of wild or semi-wild flowers including crocuses, snowdrops, lesser celandines and primroses. There is even a pair of nuthatches nesting in the sycamore near the entrance.
From Dulverton, it is a six-mile walk to Tarr Steps, a famous clapper bridge, which was destroyed by flooding in 2012 and reassembled thanks to a big digger. Instead of taking a linear walk we decided to catch a bus to Exford and walk back along the valley...
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