Chulmleigh

Chulmleigh spent seven hundred years being somewhere on the way to somewhere else, then a turnpike road went round it in 1830 and the railway ignored it in 1854, and it has been quietly getting on with things ever since. The hill is the point. Everything worth having sits at the top of it, which is fine for the view and a nuisance for anyone carrying shopping, and the surrounding villages have names that sound invented by someone who ran out of ideas at Zeal Monachorum. It is the sort of place where the nearest station is in a different parish and nobody minds, because the people who would mind moved to Exeter years ago.