Exmoor holiday experience ideas

Exmoor offers each individual visitor, a wide range of opportunities for experiences on your holiday, either alone or together with family and friends.

Here are some of the best ideas for experiences on Exmoor, gathered together for your choice. We hope these ideas will wet your appetite and feed your imagination.

For a ‘shared experience’

Enjoy a cream tea at Watersmeet – National Trust, Stable Cottage – Triscombe, Mortimers – Dulverton or Periwinkle Cottage – Selworthy
Enjoy a wildlife safari by landrover (with Exmoor Safaris or Barle Valley Safaris)
Climb Dunkery Beacon at midnight / to see the sun rise (with guide)
Go Coasteering at Watermouth Cove (with guide)
Go rockpooling at Dunster Beach, Lynmouth or Combe Martin
Find England’s tallest tree at Nutcombe Bottom
Go butterfly hunting in Heddon Valley / find a rare heath fritillary on Dunkery Beacon
Make a basket on The Somerset Levels – Willow and Wetlands Centre

To get away from it all and just ‘contemplate’

View the night sky through a telescope from your own cottage garden at West Withy Farm
Walk the Coleridge Way – follow in the steps of romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth – from West Withy Farm to Coleridge’s Cottage at Nether Stowey perhaps?
Watch the sun set from North Hill
Feel ‘the past’ at Hoaroak Cottage
Go bird watching at Porlock Marsh
Visit St Beuno’s Church, Culbone – Exmoor’s remotest place of worship
Touch the Longstone at Chapman Barrow
Explore the Mineral Line (engine house / incline plane) on the Brendons

Exmoor’s top ‘physical challenges’

Experience the Exmoor Cycle route – 60 miles on the route of the Pros.
Walk the Exmoor part of the South West Coast Path – the start of England’s longest footpath
Experience organised endurance challenges – Ironman or Exmoor Beast
Cycle Porlock Hill (both ways) – ‘driving is enough of a physical challenge for most’

Exmoor’s top places to ‘escape’

Great Hangman Point (highest sea cliffs in England
Pinkery Woods
Horner Woods (native oak trees, mosses, lichens – and no wind)
Heddons Mouth (and hidden beach)
Molland Moor (just to stare in all directions)
Dure Down (for the birth of the River Exe)

I want to help Exmoor National Park

Complete the ‘eye spy’ in the National Park visitor newspaper
Spend a day without the car – walk Wimbleball Lake circular from West Withy Farm
Visit local village shops, spend time at village shows and local markets.
Volunteer to collect litter or remake a path or count wildlife. Find out more: Exmoor National Park – Volunteering
Reduce, reuse, recycle at West Withy Farm

What will be your memories of Exmoor?

An Exmoor ‘traffic jam’ – two farmers blocking a country lane while they chat – landrover to landrover – for 20 minutes
The fresh, clean air – that’s why mosses and lichens grow on Exmoor trees
The silence – the bird song – the noise of a hedgerow of sparrows at dusk as they argue over ‘who sleeps where’ – the bellow of rutting stags
Chatting to a fourth (or more) generation local in a pub and understanding one word in three.
The taste of fresh food eaten in fresh Exmoor air – freshly grown, freshly picked, freshly cooked