Travel: Exmoor Ecstasy

In lockdown, Londoner Ivo Dawnay moved to Somerset’s coombes and moors. Now he never wants to leave this Garden of Eden

- Artokoloro/David Noton/Alamy

There is an absolutely fail-safe way of finding the remotest and most beautiful places to escape to in England – they are anywhere that is at least 50 minutes from a motorway. Now take a look at the map: there are precious few of them.

Most of the Lake District, for example, doesn’t qualify. Almost nothing in the south of England and nothing at all in the Midlands or the industrial North. In fact, leaving Scotland and Wales out of it, you are pretty much left with a little patch of north-east Yorkshire and Northumberland, a smidgeon of the East Anglian coast, the bit of Dorset furthest away from Bournemouth and Exeter and the parts of Cornwall that lie west of Launceston – which is pretty much all of it.

Not even Dartmoor qualifies – 45 minutes from the southernmost point of the M5. Which is why I live in Exmoor, and boast about it. I’ve become an Exmoor bore.

‘We are the first bit of real countryside outside London,’ I smugly tell my arriving visitors, exhausted in turn by the A303 Stonehenge traffic jam, hours of queasily winding lanes and finally shaken (not stirred) by the foot-deep potholes that lead to our broken-down farmhouse – a mile and three-quarters from a tarmac road.

Our house – a duplicate of Uncle Monty’s tumbledown cottage in Withnail and I – used to be an occasional retreat from the metropolis. Now, over a year into the COVID pandemic, it has become home and a catalyst for a personal revolution; a cerebral and visceral rediscovery of the lost Gardens of Eden of my childhood – in my case, Hampshire before the advent of the mini-roundabout.