South Devon Guide: This Picturesque English Coastline Is Where You Should Be Beach-Hopping This Summer

The rural setting of Glebe House, a restaurant with rooms surrounded by a 15-acre smallholding, is crucial to the spell of the place, which is heavy on Devonshire air and the scent of baking porridge bread. The Georgian vicarage is a hilltop eyrie in the rolling, sparsely-populated Coly Valley, necessitating a circuitous drive for anybody who isn’t staying upstairs. But the set four-course menu, which leans Italian (soft cheese with walnuts, marjoram, and honey; tagliatelle in wild garlic pesto; porchetta and beans; brown butter cake with blood oranges) is a winning lure. As a reward for making it, have a glass of the thirst-slaking sparkling from Castlewood Vineyard, a winery a few miles east of Glebe House.

Photo: Marco Kesseler

Vines belonging to Sandridge Barton winery, a decorated vineyard with sustainable practices in place (air-source heat pumps and rainwater harvesting, as well as solar panels, are integral to the business), rake the hills in the Dart Valley. The winery restaurant, Circa, opened in a redeveloped stone dairy parlor in the summer of 2022, and flies under the radar given the first-rate cooking. Ingredients travel as little as possible, many grown or foraged from the estate, and include winemaking by-products like fermented grape skins. A rich plate of lion’s mane mushrooms over milk bread, with Caerphilly cheese and cep foam (“a fancy version of mushrooms on toast,” says the server), brings the house down everywhere it lands.

This indie bakery sells the sourdough loaf to beat in South Devon, as well as croissants, chocolate rye cookies, and a sugar-crusted, bay and orange morning bun worth setting an alarm for (they sell out—everything sells out, but the buns really fly). At the bakery headquarters, in an industrial park in Dartington (there are two other shops, one in Totnes and another in Plymouth), coffee is on offer, and there are folding tables next to the stacks of proofing baskets where you can take a load off.

What to Do

Beach Hopping

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