CLOVELLY

There is surely no other village like Clovelly. A narrow cobbled street, with steps and far too steep for traffic, zig-zags between whitewashed cottages down a little valley cut into an otherwise forbidding coastline. At the bottom a massive stone pier protects a section of beach and a line of small boats, grounded on the shingle at low tide.

People have lived here since the iron age, but in its present form the village dates from the construction of the pier in the sixteenth century. Clovelly remains the only harbour on a twenty-mile stretch of the north Devon and Cornwall coast.