Umberleigh

Umberleigh is a railway station with a village attached, and the village is losing. It sits in a valley where the Taw does the deciding, the trains stop when they feel like it, and the manor that gave the place its name got absorbed into a parish on the other side of the river, which tells you roughly how much say Umberleigh has had in its own affairs over the last thousand years. What it does have is quiet, the deep and total kind, and the sort of Devon lanes that turn a five-mile trip into a negotiation with a hedge. Come for the salmon, stay because the road out is genuinely quite difficult.