A Saxon Village Below Porlock Hill

Porlock sits in a green vale between the high ground of Exmoor and the Bristol Channel, in the far west of Somerset. The Saxons knew it as Porteloca, an enclosure by a harbour, and the village earns a line in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: in 1052 Harold Godwinson, the future king who would fall at Hastings, landed with a force from Ireland, fought his way across the marshes and put the settlement to the torch. What survives today is gentler: a long, winding main street of thatch and colour-washed cottages, narrow lanes that climb towards the moor, and the truncated spire of St Dubricius church rising above the rooftops.

Much of what you need is within an easy stroll, and the shops here are almost all independent. There is a long-standing village butcher, a couple of art galleries hung with local work, a chocolate shop, an outdoor shop for those bound for the high moor, and family-run cafes and tearooms serving cream teas, little of the high-street sameness you find elsewhere. The wooded combes rise steeply behind the chimneys, sheep graze the slopes above, and the sea lies a mile or so out across the marsh, often glittering beyond the fields.

Our Porlock cottages run from snug boltholes for two in the heart of the village to larger houses with room for the whole family, a good number with views out over the vale to the water. Many welcome a well-behaved dog, and the village wears its dog-friendliness lightly: water bowls outside the shops, dogs allowed in several of the pubs and tearooms, and a beach you can walk a dog along all year. Flexible start days and short breaks are available, so you need not commit to a full week to settle in.

Porlock Hill, the A39 and the New Road Toll Route

The climb out of the village to the west is the steepest A-road in England. Porlock Hill carries the A39 up onto the moor by way of two tight hairpin bends, rising roughly 1,300 feet in under two miles, with gradients reaching one in four. It is a memorable drive in a car with good brakes, and no place for a caravan or a heavy vehicle, which are firmly steered elsewhere. If the bends are not to your taste, the privately run New Road toll route, laid out by a local landowner in the 1840s, winds up the wooded slope at a far steadier one in fourteen and rewards you with views across the Bristol Channel much of the way to the top.

History: Saxons, Vikings and Harold Godwinson

Porlock's past runs deeper than its quiet streets suggest. Danish raiders struck this coast in 918, beaten back so hard that only a few escaped to their ships, before the burning of 1052 set the village down in the chronicle for good. Two buildings carry that long history into the present. The thirteenth-century Church of St Dubricius is Grade I listed, its oak-shingled spire unusually truncated, the tip said to have been lost in the great storm of 1703. Close by, the fifteenth-century Dovery Manor is now a small museum of local history, with a physic garden of the herbs an Exmoor household once grew for the kitchen and the medicine chest.

Walks, Beaches and the Coast Path

The South West Coast Path runs along the edge of Porlock Bay, where a storm in 1996 breached the great shingle ridge and the farmland behind it has since returned to salt marsh, now a haven for curlew, egret and other wading birds. At low tide the blackened stumps of a submerged forest, drowned some six thousand years ago as the ice melted and the sea rose, emerge on the foreshore. Westward the path leads to Porlock Weir, about a mile and a half off, a small harbour with a long pebble beach and a handful of pubs and galleries gathered round the water; vessels have sheltered there for centuries, and in its working days the quay sent out flour, tan bark and pit-props for the Welsh mines and took in coal and limestone from across the Channel. For higher ground, follow the lanes and bridle paths up to Dunkery Beacon, at 519 metres the highest point in Somerset and on Exmoor, where Bronze Age cairns crown the summit and the view on a clear day reaches over the water to the hills of Wales. Nearer at hand, the steep oak combes around the village are threaded with old packhorse routes that make for gentle half-day rambles within sight of home. If a dog will be coming along, you can filter our dog-friendly cottages to the ones that take pets.

Pubs, Tearooms and the Person from Porlock

The Ship Inn at the foot of Porlock Hill is a thatched, thirteenth-century pub where Coleridge and Southey are said to have drunk, the latter leaving his name to a corner of the bar after the weather kept him there in 1798. Down at the Weir a second old inn sits right on the coast path, a welcome sight at the end of a day on the cliffs. Porlock holds a quiet place in literary legend, too, as the home of the unnamed caller on business whose visit interrupted Coleridge mid-poem and is blamed for leaving Kubla Khan forever unfinished. Whether you come for the history, the walking or simply a slow pint by the fire, the village rewards an unhurried stay and a good pair of boots.

If you would rather wake by the water, browse our Porlock Weir cottages a short way along the shore, or take in the open moor, the wooded valleys and the rest of the coast with our wider Exmoor cottages collection.