East Devon Way - Part Three

Saturday 29 July 2023

Now my car is fixed (and I'm much the poorer) we were able to return to this walk.  There appeared a reasonable gap in the showery weather so we drove to Colyton and dropped my car, then went to Knapp Copse Nature Reserve where we left JC's.

It was only a short walk today, just shy of 12 km, but it was good to be out.  We skirted Farway Hill and descended into the small village of Church Green enjoying the view across the Coly Valley.

We had hoped to stick our head in the 14th Century church there but there was a wedding on.  Nice stained windows though, and magnificent yew trees which are estimated to be a similar age to the church, ~1000 years.

Then across fields into Farway and its aged petrol pumps.  

We traversed quite a few fords on this walk, and lots of cute bridges over ditches and streams following our pink guide arrow.

Northleigh was the next village. This too has a 14th Century church but it had certainly been significantly modernised (by the Victorians by the looks of it) when we popped in.  Not much to write home about.

We then had a couple of km of road to kill which was made duller by the fact that the hedges on either side were too high to see over.  But it wasn't too long before we were off the tarmac and back onto meadows, this time walking directly by the River Coly.  This is dairy land and many fields had cows resident.  If you look at the black smudge in the photo below you'll see it's actually a cow party: they were all crowded in one small patch (must have been a good meal going on).  

I managed to be reasonably big and brave with my cow encounters yesterday.  I'm getting better with them but still have quite an aversion to bullocks.  

The remainder of the walk was flat beside the meandering river. We arrived in Colyton too late for any tea shop or pubs to be serving food so we had a quick drink and headed home.  Day Three done - last leg is 15 km to Lyme Regis.