Easter on Dartmoor

What a fabulous place to visit in the Spring – lambs frolicking, daffodils and spring flowers in abundance, wild ponies wandering across the road, panoramic views across the Moors and Tors - Dartmoor really does offer great British countryside at its best!

Staying in a little cottage in the village of Buckland Monachorum, meant we were able to leave the car parked at the cottage and enjoy some lovely walks and mountain bike rides from the house and also walk to the village pub and playground!

The public footpath took us past the church, piglets, horses and lambs and out of the village a short distance before passing through part of the wonderful gardens of the ‘Garden House’ – a walled garden surrounding the romantic ruins of a medieval vicarage. We took this walk several times during the week. Geoff also planned a fabulous walk for us up Sheep’s Tor and we enjoyed fantastic views of the Burrator Reservoir and the surrounding moors and villages as well as a picnic in the sunshine.

We took our mountain bikes with us to Devon and enjoyed two very different rides during the week. One afternoon we rode from the cottage into a stunning valley, cycling alongside babbling brooks, the river and sheep grazing in the woods. Another day we drove to a car park close to the Burrator Reservoir and cycled across the moors…it was a slow, tough ride up to the top of the moor but well worth the effort (aided by warm breezes and sunshine) and then a, well deserved, exciting and bumpy ride back down. We sat by the river eating ice creams whilst wild ponies drank from the river!

We are members of the National Trust and we were not disappointed by the number of properties (all very different and interesting in their own way) that were within easy reach of our cottage: • Buckland Abbey – the 700-year-old home of Elizabethan seafarers Francis Drake and Sir Richard Grenville. Beautiful buildings and gardens and interesting exhibits make it an enjoyable visit. • Coathele - a Tudor house. The walk down through the valley garden (very lush and pretty) to the quayside on the River Tamar was quite different and we enjoyed some delicious Cornish pasties in the café for lunch. • Lydford Gorge is a lush oak-wooded steep-sided river gorge (the deepest in the South West) with a 30m waterfall. We walked the whole gorge and can thoroughly recommend it for an interesting, varied and quite challenging (in places) walk. Definitely a highlight of the week.

We drove to Plymouth on one rainy afternoon and walked around the Hoe and the shopping centre before going for a swim in the public pool in the very nice market town of Tavistock.

All in all a fabulous week away from it all….and we look forward to heading back to Dartmoor again in the future.