Exmoor

Exmoor is the moor that meets the sea. Its sandstone upland — softer-edged than Dartmoor's granite, rising to 519 metres on Dunkery Beacon — runs straight to the Bristol Channel and stops in the tallest sea cliffs in England: the hog-backed profile of Great Hangman falls 244 metres to the water, and for thirty-odd kilometres between Combe Martin and Porlock the South West Coast Path performs its hardest work, pitching in and out of wooded combes where rivers like the Heddon and the Lyn reach the sea through what feel like private ravines. The oddest passage is the Valley of Rocks near Lynton, a dry valley of frost-shattered pinnacles patrolled by feral goats, with the Victorian water-balanced cliff railway of 1890 still hauling between Lynmouth on the shore and Lynton on the hill.

Inland is England's deepest countryside: heather commons grazed by Exmoor ponies — the closest thing Britain has to its original wild horse, a couple of hundred of them still bred on the hill — and the largest wild red deer herd in England, some three thousand strong, whose October rut echoes through the oak woods of the Barle valley. That valley holds the park's emblem, Tarr Steps, a seventeen-span clapper bridge of stones the legend says the Devil laid, periodically dismantled by floods and rebuilt to the same design. The southern moor around Badgworthy Water is Doone Country, the setting R. D. Blackmore lifted almost unaltered for Lorna Doone in 1869; the farmhouses, the waterslide and the medieval village earthworks are all findable on the ground.

Exmoor's marginality has become its asset. In 2011 it was designated Europe's first International Dark Sky Reserve, and its literary pedigree predates Blackmore: Coleridge, living below the moor's eastern edge, wrote Kubla Khan at a farmhouse above Culbone in 1797 and lost the rest of the poem to the person from Porlock — the walk from Porlock Weir up to Culbone's tiny church, the smallest complete parish church in England, retraces the territory. The moor's capacity for violence surfaced in August 1952, when a night of extraordinary rain sent the East and West Lyn through Lynmouth, killing thirty-four people and rearranging the village — the flood is still the reference event of British hydrology.

What's worth knowing before you go

There is no railway: the practical approaches are Taunton then bus toward Dulverton and the Brendons, or the Tarka Line to Barnstaple for the western moor, with Minehead — the start of the South West Coast Path — as the eastern base. Dunster, Porlock, Lynmouth and Dulverton are the character villages; Simonsbath is the empty centre. September and October are the connoisseur's window: heather still on, the deer rut starting (dawn at Cloutsham or along the Barle for the bellowing), and the coast path quiet. Book a stargazing night around new moon, and don't drive the Porlock Hill hairpins with worn brakes — the 1-in-4 toll road through the woods is the graceful alternative.