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Even for locals, many of the tropical-looking beaches in South Devon—a seaside county about four hours by car from London—are word-of-mouth tip-offs. Some are sandy coves, washed out of the schist coastline by the English Channel, while others are tidal, emerging along estuary creeks and river valleys. Depending on your priorities—privacy, accessibility, views—you might favor one stretch over another on any given day. In a landscape of high green ridgelines and deserted combes, it’s hard to go far wrong.
Much of South Devon is a protected Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, sandwiched between Dartmoor National Park and the sea, less populated and more dramatically formed than most of the UK. The region is a hothouse for green businesses: organic farms, zero-waste shops, and environmentally-minded vineyards are thick on the ground. The riverside market town, Totnes, has become a byword for an outdoorsy, artistic community—catnip to the tourists who bunch around the estate agent windows.
Here, find our guide to the best places to stay, eat, and visit in South Devon—and why you should make a beeline for its beaches this summer.
Where to Stay
Set on a hillside immediately above the eastern bank of the River Dart (it’s a five-minute walk to the water through private grounds), two miles upstream from the sea, Leopoldina sleeps up to 10 people in pared-back, modern interiors, behind a 19th century Picturesque façade. In its first incarnation, the building was a coach house and stables built by John Nash—the architect to King George IV—intended to bunk the grooms and animals serving the Italianate country house, Sandridge Park, next door. There are still metal rings hanging on either side of the extra-high entrance for tethering horses.
Inside, sash windows overlook the lawn, down to the ha-ha and the curving Dart beyond, which is tidal and offers a constantly changing view. The bookshelves are full of crime novels, including a near-complete collection of Agatha Christie; the author kept a holiday home, Greenway, a 15-minute drive away, set on a sharp rise above the same tides. At the very top of the house, in a former dovecote with oxeye windows, there’s now a yoga studio and a roof deck with a hair-raising view of the river valley.
In a shell-pink building at the top of the high street in Totnes, The Bull Inn is a locally revered organic pub, with rooms upstairs and a focus on sustainable operations. Hot water for the nine bedrooms is heated via solar panels on the roof, and the restaurant is kept warm by a recapture system that pulls excess heat from the kitchen.
Bed linens and mattresses are made from organic materials, as are the bath products, while the furniture is vintage, often hauled back from antique shops by the owner, Geetie Singh-Watson. The restaurant serves meat but is known for its palmy vegetables—roasted, smoked, fermented, braised; dished out with plenty of nuts, herbs, seeds, and cheeses. Eat them with sourdough (from The Almond Thief bakery—see below) and a glass of biodynamic wine.
Where to Eat
Set on the village quay in Stoke Gabriel, surrounded by crabbers and kayakers, The River Shack is a waterside café where you can moor your boat at the door (and they’ll sell you a crabbing kit too for that matter). Wooden picnic tables are feet from the Dart, busy with locals who pack the place out. Don’t miss the pizza nights from Thursday to Saturday, which draw the whole village (get the pepperoni with hot honey).
There’s one seating for lunch and one for dinner at the Riverford Field Kitchen, a bright canteen hung with dried flowers, surrounded by acres of its own organic vegetable plots (visitors are encouraged to walk around, and there are grow-your-own workshops on offer). Everybody eats the same set menu, with accommodations for dietary requirements, which allows the kitchen to keep the costs down and gives the impression that you’re all guests at the same party.
Steam fogs the windows at one-room Emilia, which has an open kitchen serving Northern Italian dishes, chalked on the door of an old vault (the building used to be a bank). Candlelight flickers over bowls of things like cannellini beans in saffron, and mutton chops beside piles of bitter cime di rapa. There’s an offal of the day, priced generously to reflect the cheaper cut. It’s intimate and rose-tinted and you should probably leave your small children at home, unlike me. Order the cherry brandy and almond bark for pudding. Take someone you’d like to rub ankles with.
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.
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
To get your eye in, start with a sure thing: Blackpool Sands is located right beside the A379, near Dartmouth, with a designated car park, bathrooms, and a café selling cream teas. On top of that, it’s a shingle-sand beauty hemmed by pine trees, with craggy cliffs at either end. You can rent a kayak. It couldn’t be more civilized.
At Great Mattiscombe Sands, 10 miles south of Blackpool along the coast, cars can be left in the Start Point Lighthouse car park. The walk to the beach takes around 15 minutes, and the sight of the ocean ahead, in a dip between two green hills, will light a fire under anybody. The modest slog means the beach is usually quiet, though there are no organized facilities to speak of, beyond a portaloo back in the car park. A two-mile circular hike from the beach, on the South West Coast Path, will take you up the spectacular, rocky headland and past the Start Point Lighthouse, a Victorian Gothic beacon and the southernmost point in Devon. That walk alone is worth the beach day.
To reach Gara Rock Beach, drive seven miles further west along the Channel, and you’ll find an honesty box car park on the cliffs above the sand. The descent is steep, but you can have your towel spread out in around 10 minutes. There are rock pools to poke around in, and like Great Mattiscombe, the odds are good that you’ll have the place to yourself.
At 630 miles from end to end, this coastal hiking trail is the longest in Britain, edging around the entire southwest peninsula of the country. The path through South Devon is about 100 miles, beginning in Plymouth and wrapping up in Starcross, a small village downriver from Exeter. The charity that maintains the trail, the South West Coast Path Association, runs a website that recommends shorter walks along the main path. If you’re only going to do one, I’d choose the Dartmouth Greenway Round, a circular walk along the lower portion of the Dart Valley Trail that skirts the astoundingly pretty estuary and involves two ferries across the river.
If you do the walking loop above, you’ll pass Agatha Christie’s riverside holiday home, Greenway, which she bought in 1938 and kept until her death in 1976. It’s now operated by the National Trust and arranged to look as though Christie has just stepped out—her unexpectedly glamourous clothes still fill a walk-in closet; a straw sunhat sits on the head of a marble bust beside the front door. There are stacks of post on the side tables, apparently real, from Christie’s literary agents, addressed to her daughter Rosalind, who lived at Greenway until 2004. A second-hand bookshop operates from an outbuilding, with proceeds supporting the running of the house (£867.50 so far this year, at the time of writing). The crime section is booming.
