Ashburton

This appealing little town lies just inside the boundary of the Dartmoor National Park, surrounded by lovely hills and with the River Ashburn splashing through the town centre. Municipal history goes back a long way here, to AD821 in fact, when the town elected its first portreeve, the Saxon equivalent of a mayor. The traditional office continues to the present day, although its functions are now purely ceremonial. But each year, on the fourth Tuesday in November, officials gather in the St Lawrence chapel to appoint not just their portreeve, but also the Ale Tasters, Bread Weighers, Pig Drovers and even a Viewer of Watercourses.

In medieval times, Ashburton’s prosperity was based on tin. As one of Devon’s four stannary towns, it benefited from the trade generated by the Dartmoor tinners who were obliged to come here to have their metal weighed and stamped, and to pay the duty. Later, the cloth industry was the town’s main money-spinner, with nine fulling mills along the banks of the Ashburn producing cloth that the East India Company exported to China.

The town is characterised by its many attractive houses and shops, with distinctive slate-hung front elevations. Housed in the former home and workshop of a brushmaker, Ashburton Museum offers a fascinating insight into the history of this stannary town as well as the domestic and rural life of Dartmoor down the centuries. The collections include old farming implements, Victorian toys, a model of the old Market Hall and Native American artefacts donated by Paul Endicott, whose parents had left Ashburton for Oklahoma at the beginning of the 1900s.

Ashburton’s Italianate Town Hall provides the main venue for the Ashburton Blues Festival over the last weekend in May.