A feeling of time standing still (Atlantic Village)

Member Name: Tupps

Product:	Atlantic Village
Date:	03/06/09 (11 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Charming; picturesque

Disadvantages: Inaccessible for those in wheelchairs or with pushchairs

I want to review the village of Clovelly but, being a newbie, I don't know how to start a new review topic off! So I've tagged it onto the Atlantic Village reviews!

Clovelly is a tiny village in north Devon; uniquely, the whole village is private owned and the villagers are, in effect, tenants. It's a beautiful place and very interesting but very tiny, you'd be hard pressed to spend all day here. However, for a few hours it's a good place to visit.

Cars are not allowed in the village (and frankly they wouldn't fit anyway!) so you park in the car park at the top and go into the Visitor Centre to pay your entrance fee (I think it's about £5.75 at the mo) which goes towards the upkeep of the place since the houses are all maintained using local, traditional materials and methods. The Visitor Centre has a few shops in it but it also shows a short film about the history of Clovelly; a good introduction to the place itself.

Exiting the visitor centre, you walk past the donkey stables where young children can have rides; a pottery shop which sells local artists' wares and where you can also have a go yourself if you fancy recreating the scene from Ghost (!) and then you start walking down to the village itself. There's a small memorial park with a war memorial to Clovelly's Great War dead and a fountain dedicated to Queen Victoria which is situated right at the top of the main street. This is where the actual village begins and this is where you'll realise why cars aren't allowed!

The main street is cobbled, steep and narrow. It's very easy to fall over but if you think walking down's difficult, you're in for a treat on the way back up! Along the main street you will find shops, cottages, a hotel, a fisherman's cottage which you can walk around (it's been set up as a sort of "how fishing families in the village used to live"), and the Charles Kingsley museum. I didn't know who Charles Kingsley was but I certainly remembered reading the book he's most famous for, The Water Babies, when I was at junior school. It's available in pretty much every shop in Clovelly as the author spent some years here during his childhood. The Charles Kingsley museum sounds rather grand but remember, Clovelly is a tiny place, and so is the museum. It's just another cottage really housing a few bits and bobs about him. Though there is also a lifesize, waxwork model of him sitting at a desk, writing; something that made me jump because I first saw it out of the corner of my eye! There's an accompanying recorded recital of a poem he wrote about a fishing boat tragedy in Bideford Bay; this plays on a loop as you walk about the small rooms.

Clovelly has a tiny chapel, St. Peter's, which was constructed to enable the elderly villagers to still attend services; they could no longer manage the walk up the hill to the main parish church and so it became apparent that something else would have to be done.

Sadly, Clovelly no longer has it's tiny post office; like so many others these days, it's disappeared from the village and the villagers have to travel into Bideford or Barnstaple.

At the 'bottom' of the main street, as you walk down further towards the sea, the street becomes much more steep and is fashioned into steps of a sort to make it that little bit easier to navigate. Right at the bottom is the Red Lion hotel which dates from the 1700's and Crazy Kate's cottage, the oldest cottage in Clovelly (Crazy Kate was the widower of a fisherman who left her house and just walked out into the sea one morning to drown herself; bit cruel calling her crazy!)

A walk along the coast is challenging to say the least; it's all cobbled rather than sand and some of the stones are HUGE; some are tiny. They are very smooth and therefore very slippy due to the constant tidal movements and as a consequence I fell over twice as did most other people! (We went to Clovelly on a warm, dry, sunny day; I cannot imagine walking around here in the rain.)

There's a waterfall just a bit further up the coast; local legend has it that it is the birthplace of King Arthur's wizard, Merlin, and he apparantely appears from time to time!

Now for the walk back up - as anyone who's been to San Francisco will know, those streets are hilly. Well, they ain't nothing on Clovelly! No matter how fit you are, you will have to stop and get your breath back once or twice and your thighs will pound. It's good though, looking around there were plenty of old folk on walking sticks who managed it so I was absolutely determined to! You can pay around £3 each for a Land Rover to take you back up to the top, via some sort of back roads, but where's the fun in that?

The last thing we did in Clovelly was stop at a quaint little tea shop for a good old fashioned pot of tea - and not just for the romance of it. We needed the sugar!

Summary: A good place to while away a few hours