Narrow lanes, roadside ponies, wetsuited Brits and a pub 50 metres from the front door. Brian Crisp is in Devon, the birthplace of the cream tea, the scone is just the start.

Let me tell you about the lanes.

Nobody warns you about the lanes. They tell you about the scones, the clotted cream, the moors, the cathedral, the sea. They show you photographs of thatched cottages and fat cows and a sky the colour of a well-washed sheet. What they do not tell you is that to reach any of it you must first drive down a road roughly the width of a Labrador, walled in on both sides by a hedge that wants to kill you.

We were staying in Chittlehampton, a village in North Devon so pretty it ought to come with a warning, and we had decided, as you do on a Sunday in early November, to drive to Dartmoor for a cream tea. Seventy minutes, said the phone. Seventy minutes, it turned out, of the most concentrated motoring of my life.

The Devon lane is not a road so much as a moral test. It is single track, high-banked, bramble-lined and frequently built over a stone wall that some Saxon farmer put up in a bad mood. Corners are blind. Passing places are theoretical. And every few minutes a tractor, a four-wheel drive or a delivery van the size of a semi-detached house appears around the bend, and one of you has to go backwards.

It is always you. The locals have the stare. They simply stop, engine idling, and wait while you reverse 200 metres uphill, round a bend, wing mirror folded in, the passenger side of the hire car so close to the hedgerow that the brambles are actively scraping the paintwork and my wife is picking blackberries through the window. Then they raise one finger from the steering wheel, the famous Devon thank-you, and are gone.

By the time we reached Widecombe-in-the-Moor, I needed a cream tea the way other men need a defibrillator.

A scone with a view

Widecombe sits in a bowl in the middle of Dartmoor, a handful of granite cottages gathered around a village green, with the moor rising brown and bronze on every side. Its church, St Pancras, has a tower so tall and so improbable for a village this size that it’s known as the Cathedral of the Moor. In 1638, during a service, it was struck by a ball of lightning in what became known as the Great Thunderstorm, which the locals, being Devonians, blamed on the Devil. It has since recovered. So, eventually, did I.

The Cafe on the Green is exactly where its name says it is, looking out over the green and that preposterous tower, and it has been feeding walkers, riders, bikers, dog owners and shaken Australian motorists for the best part of a century. It’s family run and unpretentious, the sort of place where your boots are welcome and so is your dog, and where nobody minds if you sit for an hour watching the light move across the hills.

And the cream tea? Two scones, still warm, split by hand. A pot of strawberry jam. A dish of clotted cream, thick, yellow-crusted and so dense it could hold up a teaspoon on its own. A pot of tea, strong enough to trot a mouse on. I’ll be honest with you: I have eaten in some fancy places, and I have rarely been happier.

This matters, because Devon claims to have invented the cream tea. The story, which nobody can prove and everybody in Devon believes, is that in the 11th century the Benedictine monks of Tavistock Abbey, on the western edge of Dartmoor, fed the workmen rebuilding their abbey after a Viking raid with bread, clotted cream and strawberry jam. The Cornish, who live next door and would like you to know that they also make clotted cream, dispute this furiously. Which brings us to the war.

Cream or jam: a peace-keeping mission

In Devon, the cream goes on first, spread on the scone like butter, and the jam is spooned on top. In Cornwall, it’s the other way round: jam first, with the cream dolloped on top like a cloud. Each side considers the other not merely wrong but slightly unwell.

I have thought deeply about this, at length, over several scones, and I can tell you the Devon method makes perfect sense if you think of clotted cream as butter’s richer cousin. The Cornish method makes perfect sense if you want to see your cream. Both taste glorious. Neither will be accepted in the other county, and I would advise any visitor to keep their preference to themselves until they’ve confirmed which side of the River Tamar they’re standing on.

While we’re at it, the British cannot agree on how to say “scone” either. Some rhyme it with “gone”, some with “cone”. An Australian should just point.

Ponies, tors and a sky that almost committed

We walked it off, or tried to. Dartmoor is 954 square kilometres of open moorland, granite tors, bogs, streams and ancient stone rows, and on a cool, almost-sunny November Sunday it’s about as close to wild as England gets. The bracken had turned the colour of a fox. The tors, those great stacks of weathered granite on the hilltops, stood about looking prehistoric, which they are. The sun came out, thought better of it, went back in, came out again. A November sky in Devon is a committee that cannot reach a decision.

And everywhere, the ponies. Dartmoor ponies are small, shaggy, stocky and entirely unbothered by you. They graze on the verges, wander across the roads and stand in the middle of the car park as if they have paid for the space. They look wild, and they live wild, roaming the open moor all year, but each herd is actually owned by a local farmer. You are asked not to feed or pat them, which takes considerable willpower when one of them looks at you like that. The roads across the open moor have a 40mph (64km/h) speed limit, partly for their sake, so drive slowly and give them room.

Not quite Bondi

Now, as an Australian, I approached the subject of English surfing with a certain amount of national arrogance. I was wrong to. North Devon is the heart of English surf culture, and Croyde, Woolacombe and Saunton Sands, all within easy reach of Chittlehampton, have long, wide, honey-coloured beaches backed by dunes and Atlantic swells that roll in properly.

It is, however, not surfing as we know it. For one thing, the water in November is around 13 degrees, which is the temperature at which an Australian’s soul leaves the body. For another, everyone wears a thick wetsuit, boots, gloves and occasionally a hood, so that the line-up looks less like a surf break and more like a seal colony.

But it’s what happens after the surf that got me. The Brits emerge from the sea, purple and grinning, and immediately wrap themselves in gigantic changing robes, vast, fleece-lined hooded coats that reach the ankle, like a Jedi who has let himself go. They stand around the car park in them, drinking tea from flasks and steaming gently, talking about how good it was out there. It’s not Bondi. It might be better. It’s certainly cosier.

Two coasts and a cathedral

It helps to understand where Devon sits. It’s in England’s south-west peninsula, the long arm of land reaching out into the Atlantic, with Somerset and Dorset to the east and Cornwall across the Tamar to the west. It’s the only county in England with two separate coastlines, the wild, surfy north and the softer, sunnier south, with Dartmoor in the middle and part of Exmoor in the north.

And it has Exeter, the county city, and Exeter Cathedral, which is one of the great buildings of England and which you must see even if you are not, as I am not, a cathedral person. Work began in 1112, the Gothic rebuild was largely finished by around 1400, and the result is staggering. Its nave has the longest uninterrupted medieval stone-vaulted ceiling in the world, about 96 metres of carved stone ribs fanning out overhead like the inside of a vast stone palm forest. You stand at one end with your mouth open, and an elderly volunteer wanders over to tell you about it, and you are very glad they did.

Look out for the minstrels’ gallery, from around 1360, with its 12 carved angels playing medieval instruments, and the 15th-century astronomical clock. Below the clock is a small hole cut in a door in the 17th century, so that the bishop’s cat could get in and catch the mice that were drawn to the fat used to grease the clockwork. That’s the sort of fact that makes me love the English.

Fifty metres to the Bell

But the heart of our week was back in Chittlehampton, a village built around a square, with the soaring tower of St Hieritha’s church on one side and, on the other, the Bell Inn. The Bell is 50 metres from our front door. I have measured it. Repeatedly.

This is a proper village pub, run by the same family since 1975, with a real fire, sporting memorabilia on the walls, skittles and darts downstairs, and a place in CAMRA’s Good Beer Guide every year since 1997. It’s the sort of pub that exists in every Australian’s imagination of England, and almost nowhere in real life any more.

Which brings me to the walking. England doesn’t have a general “right to roam” like Scotland’s, where you can walk almost anywhere. What it has is something arguably more charming: a vast web of public footpaths and bridleways, centuries old, that cross private farmland, through gates, over stiles and along the edges of fields, with the farmer’s sheep looking on in mild disapproval. On top of that, mountain, moor, heath and down are open access land, where you’re free to wander off the path. Dartmoor goes further still. It’s the only place in England where you have a legal right to wild camp in many areas, a right the UK Supreme Court upheld in 2025 after a landowner tried to challenge it.

So every afternoon we’d set off from the village, follow a footpath sign across a field, through a gate and down a lane, over a stile and past a farmhouse, and loop back, muddy-booted and pink-cheeked, as the light went at about half past four.

And every afternoon, the walk ended in the same place. The fire. A pint of heavy for me (what the locals insist on calling bitter) and a half of local cider for my wife, who claims to be a light drinker and has never once been seen to leave a drop. The Bell does five ciders from Sandford Orchards, Devon’s oldest cider maker, ranging from dry to very sweet, and she’s working through them methodically, as a scientist would.

There is no finer end to a day. You come in out of the cold, with the dark falling and the church bells going and the hedgerows dripping, and you sit by the fire with a drink, and you think: the lanes were worth it. The lanes were absolutely worth it.

Just don’t ask me to reverse up one again.

Getting there

Flying in. Qantas flies non-stop from Perth to London Heathrow in about 17 hours. From the east coast, you’ll fly one-stop via Asia or the Middle East with Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Qatar Airways and others, in 22 to 24 hours. Exeter Airport has flights from parts of the UK and Europe, but not from London.

By train. Great Western Railway runs fast trains from London Paddington to Exeter St Davids in about two to two and a half hours. For Chittlehampton, change at Exeter onto the scenic Tarka Line to Barnstaple and get off at Umberleigh, about 5km from the village. You’ll need a taxi from there, and a car for the moor.

By car. Exeter is about three hours from London on the M4 and M5 motorways, traffic willing. Chittlehampton is about an hour north-west of Exeter, and Widecombe-in-the-Moor is about 40 minutes west of Exeter. Hire the smallest car you can live with: your nerves, your paintwork and the hedges will thank you.

Lane survival tips. Drive slowly and watch ahead for passing places (wider spots in the lane). If you meet another car, whoever is closest to a passing place reverses into it, and in practice, that’s usually the visitor. Fold your mirrors in, take it slowly and give the locals a one-finger wave of thanks. On the open moor, the speed limit is 40mph (64km/h), and ponies, sheep and cattle wander onto the road.

Where to eat and drink

Cafe on the Green, Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Dartmoor TQ13 7TA. Family run, open daily, and dog friendly.
The Bell Inn, The Square, Chittlehampton EX37 9QL. Real ales, Sandford Orchards ciders, pub food and a real fire. Opening and food times vary, so check before you go.

What to see

Exeter Cathedral, Cathedral Green, Exeter. There’s an entry charge for visitors. Check exeter-cathedral.org.uk for times and prices.
Dartmoor National Park. Free to explore, and walking routes are at dartmoor.gov.uk.
North Devon’s surf beaches: Croyde, Woolacombe and Saunton Sands, about 40 minutes from Chittlehampton. Surf schools hire out wetsuits and boards.
When to go. Summer is busy, and the lanes are at their worst. Spring and autumn are quieter, and November brings golden bracken, empty footpaths and log fires in the pubs. Pack a waterproof jacket and boots whenever you go: this is Devon, and it will rain.

If you want help planning your trip to Devon, contact the team at Travel at 60.

Do you put the cream, or jam, on your scone first?