Lustleigh

Lustleigh is one of Dartmoor’s most popular and most photographed villages. Placed at all angles on the hillside are a ravishing assortment of 15th and 16th-century deeply-thatched, colour-washed cottages, picturesquely grouped around the church. Appropriately for such a genuinely olde-worlde village, Lustleigh keeps alive some of the time-honoured traditions of country life, enthusiastically celebrating May Day each year with a procession through the village, dancing round the maypole, and the coronation of a May Queen. From the village there are some delightful walks, especially one that passes through Lustleigh Cleave, a wooded section of the steep-sided Bovey valley. Also close by is the Becky Falls Woodland Park, with its waterfalls, rugged landscape and attractions for all the family. Here, too, is Yarner Wood Nature Reserve, home to pied flycatchers, wood warblers and redstarts.