Dartmoor Days Out : Lustleigh Cleave

This year we tried a new walk, straying over to a side of Dartmoor we don’t know so well. The day started fairly hysterically, as we (I say we, I do of course mean ‘him who does the driving’) decided to take a road marked as a track between North Bovey and a place I have now wiped from my fearful memory. I think the sign at the top, ‘unfit for roach vehicles’, probably should have been a warning, but we pressed on regardless and our poor Citroen C8 tried out life as an off roader/tractor. It was up to the task, but only just and at one point, the ruts, pits and furrows almost pitched us over on our side. The atmosphere is the car was not so much tense as hysterical and as Dartmoor lanes are not ones you can really turn on, we had to keep going. The look on the face of the farm local who met us at the top told us all we needed to know – cars do not emerge from that lane very often! 😆

However, having survived, we made it to the gorgeous and apparently thriving little village of Lustleigh, used the conveniences, grabbed some biscuits and headed off to the start of the walk. There are several around here, of easy, medium and hard natures, but as we were aiming to fit this in before a lunch, we took the low level ramble suggested in our book. (I’ll add some details here, Max does the navigating!) This is a walk you can do, although not the one we did in the end.

It was beautiful.

A fair bit of the walk was a shady, dappled riverside meander, there were sheep (and lambs) and in the meadow area, we came upon this gorgeous tree.

At this point we happened to meet a Woodland Trust butterfly patrol, who noticed the girls had spotter guides out talked to us about what they were doing. They do set walks, surveying the butterflies and seeing what is around. The netted us a rarity to look at and talked to the girls about what helps or hinders the butterflies (cold, wet springs not ideal apparently). it was really interesting.

We spent a fair bit of time admiring this once great dragon who has been petrified by Merlin and stands beside the river in permanent reminder to those who might try to bedevil innocent folk on riverside walks. (I may have made that up.)

We had a snack at the medieval cart bridge.

It’s proper picture-skew there, as they say – and then turned up the hill and headed back through the forest on the other side to get back to the car.

The colours were gorgeous, but in among all the lush green, woken up by a couple of days of much needed rain, I loved the bleakness of the forest under the pines too.

Of course we had to take the obligatory “all our girls” picture in a mildly perilous pose.

So that was half a day. We fitted a lot into the week and I can’t remember the order but I took a lot of lovely pictures, so I’ll have to do a random set of posts worked out from my phone and ex-brain and then try to put them in order at the end!!!