RogueRunners Devon IV - Day 1

We were up early – it was still niiight tiiime, but I prepared the car & loaded it up & at very early o’clock we set off for a refuelling stop at Popham. While we were there both Brian & Mark went past & when we arrived at the breakfast stop in Andover at a Travelodge in Hawker Siddley Way (which the SatNav entirely failed to pronounce), the gang was pretty much all there.

Having had breakfast, we set off back towards London briefly before turning south towards the A30.

We didn't encounter much traffic through Salisbury & managed to all stay together, we passed through Wilton where the carpets come from & at shortly afterward we branched off the A30, heading for the B3081 & ZigZag Hill. The road runs along an open ridge before plunging into the bends & there was a car about 1/4 mile ahead, "no problem" I thought, "I'll just rumble along slowly & have the curves to myself. But I hadn't realised just how slowly the car was going along a wide, open A road. When a car came up behind me I thought I'd better speed up a little or it will overtake giving me the same car-in-front problem, but the actual car in front was now going really really slowly, so I caught it at the top of the hill & it actually STOPPED twice on the way down (sigh).

But shortly after SHAFTSBURY there was a coffee stop at “The Udder Farm Shop”, which is a very nice place indeed & has slogans such as this on the walls.

Refreshed & back on the road we headed mostly south & a bit west, at this point we were in deepest Dorset, so the villages were few, far between & mostly double barrelled. we enjoyed some wriggly A roads as we headed north back to the A303 & M5 via “Beech Barn Café” for another coffee stop.

We weren't at all sure what to make of this as we drove in, it was a little way off the road & appeared to be a complex of renovated farm buildings each with a different company name over the door, we weren't sure where to park, so parked in a line in a small car park & I went off searching for the café in the obvious place near the parked cars I'd seen when I got out of the Stylus. Having confirmed the location I returned to find the Rogues ambling off in another direction - they're useless without a SatNav.

The place turned out to be a bit of a find, very nice, very quiet & very nice cake.

Beyond Ilchester there was a refuel stop on the A38 & we were soon on the proper Exmoor roads we’d come for, the roads improving all the way to Dulverton, then it got really good all the way to the coast. But before that there was some confusion about a last coffee stop at Withypool – it was a nice looking little café in a 1930s petrol station – the pumps were still there, the website gallery had photos of classic cars & old bikes outside, 

so I thought it may be a photo op, but in the event there were quite a few cars parked around the tiny village green, a couple of us went over the town bridge to a car park that was mostly full, at which point someone said they'd rather go on to the hotel & everyone except Mark & me followed them. They missed a bit of a treat really, almost as soon as we got into the café, most of the customers left (this often happens - can't think why), so I moved the Stylus next to the old pumps & took an atmospheric photo or two.

So it was just Mark & I that rumbled serenely up to the coast & round the hairpins on the road into Coombe Martin, re-fuelled in Hele Bay, then after a mile or so, into the hotel.

That evening we sauntered down to the harbour & "The Smugglers" for tea as the sun went down.