The small village of Meavy is tucked away down a quiet country lane just a short distance away, and you can find the Royal Oak opposite the village green where there is an 800 year old oak tree from which the pub gets its name.

This 15^th century Free House is a traditional pub with flagstone floors, old beams and an open fireplace. Some of the seats are pews from the adjacent St Peter’s Church, which is not surprising really, as the pub was originally known as the Church House Inn. Church House Inns are ubiquitous in Devon and I’ve yet to find one that isn’t a gem. If you ever come across one take a look for yourself.

The Royal Oak may not be quite as off the beaten path as it once was, but, as with so many Dartmoor pubs, come here if you can on a winter’s evening when the ambience is at it its most convivial.

The next pub I’m taking you to is very different from the Royal Oak, it’s so different in fact that it doesn’t even sell any beer, and here’s why.

The Valiant Soldier was a pub in the small market town of Buckfastleigh which lies just inside the Dartmoor National Park boundary near Buckfast Abbey, and although technically it can no longer be called a pub, it’s definitely worth a mention.

The story begins in 1965 when Whitbread Brewery thought that there were too many hostelries in the area and decided to withdraw the Valiant Soldier’s licence. When the landlord, Mark Roberts, closed the doors for the last time on September 27^th he didn’t even call ‘Last Orders’. Instead he downed tools and left half-empty glasses on the bar, ashtrays full of cigarette butts on the tables and a till with money still left in it.

Although the landlord and landlady purchased the property from the brewery, the Valiant Soldier never re-opened its doors as a pub again. Everything in the bar was left as it was, and the couple moved everything, lock stock and barrel upstairs. Even after Mark Roberts died, his wife Alice carried on living upstairs until the mid-90s, when it was finally put up for sale.

Fortunately, the local community realised that the Valiant Soldier had become a time capsule, and with the help of Teignbridge Council, a Trust was formed in order to save it as it was for posterity and opened its doors again, but this time as a museum.

Not only has the bar been left untouched, upstairs is an Aladdin’s Cave of how life was lived by the Roberts Family. Unfortunately, Whitbread left behind a covenant which prevents the Valiant Soldier from selling beer again, and although you may not be able to get a pint of Watney’s Red Barrel here anymore, it’s worth paying the price of a pint to see what a small town pub was like in the post-war years.

This pub crawl is not just about pubs, but also about showing you different parts of Dartmoor, and the next one is situated on the gentler eastern side of the moor in the village of Lustleigh.

The Cleave is a cosy 15^th century thatched pub named after the nearby valley (cleave) that takes the River Bovey down to Bovey Tracey and the River Teign. There’s nothing historically interesting or quirky about The Cleave: I’ve included it because it’s just a lovely old pub in a picturesque village in a beautiful area. What other reason do you need to come here?

Continuing in an anti-clockwise direction, the next pub is an absolute gem – or at least it was, as what happens to it next is anybody’s guess.

The Drewe Arms in Drewsteignton lies above the Teign Valley close to Castle Drogo, and is worth a visit just for the location alone. I have to confess that I haven’t been here for a while, mainly because the pub could never be the same after ‘Aunt Mabel’ Mudge died in 1996.

The Drewe Arms and Aunt Mabel have been inextricably linked ever since the time her husband, Ernest, took over his brother’s pub in 1919. It remained a typical Dartmoor pub even after Ernest passed away in 1951, and stayed that way until Aunt Mabel retired in 1994 at the age of 99.

Apart from the introduction of electricity and running water, nothing changed while it was in Aunt Mabel’s hands. There was no bar as such, as the beer was kept in a separate room and poured straight from the barrel. We used to sit on benches that surrounded the nicotine-stained walls, but if it all sounds a bit basic, the atmosphere was anything but. Those who were there were bound to indulge in convivial conservation around the log fire, and if you were peckish, you could knock back a hunk of bread with cheese or home-cured ham – the perfect accompaniment to a pint of ale brought to you straight from the barrel by Aunt Mabel.

After Aunt Mabel’s retirement, the locals rallied round to allow her to stay at the pub while they tried to keep it going in the same manner as she was accustomed – without losing too much money. Of course, it couldn’t continue like that indefinitely, and as it stands now, the pub is ‘temporarily closed’. Time doesn’t stand still in today’s world, but as we seen in the Valliant Soldier, there are ways to help keep the memories alive. It would be fantastic if something similar could be done here – but I’m not holding my breath.

I’ve written about the next pub before in my post about Lydford, but I couldn’t possibly leave it out on our tour of Dartmoor pubs as it’s been named as “Britain’s Most Unusual Pub”. So, rather than force you to go looking for it, I’ve re-created the section about the Highwayman Inn at Sourton below.

“You know as soon as you pull up into the car park that this pub is like no other you’ve been into. When I first set foot inside The Highwayman back in the 1970s, I’d never come across anywhere like it before – and I still haven’t.

As soon as you walk through the old ‘Tavistock to Launceston Stagecoach’, which doubles up as the front door, you’ll be amazed at what there is in here.

It was 1959 when Buster Jones and his wife Rita took over the pub and transformed it into an Aladdin’s cave of artefacts that would put the Antiques Roadshow to shame, but it doesn’t end there. If you think that the bar and the ‘Hideaway’ are unusual, make your way along the narrow passageway to Rita Jones’s Locker, where it resembles an old ship’s galley with all the nautical paraphernalia you could imagine. The bar top is a piece of timber dragged out of a nearby Dartmoor bog by Buster, with a ‘serpent’ on the end of it – and so it goes on.

Buster and Rita have now passed on, but the pub is run by their daughter Sally with her husband Bruce. A nicer person you couldn’t wish to meet and she follows in her parents’ footsteps with a quirky friendliness that won’t fail to win you over.

Over 50 years have passed since this unbelievable place was transformed, and as Sally and Bruce get nearer to the age of retirement themselves, I can’t help but think that the place won’t stay the same forever”.

As it stands at the moment, I’m pleased to say that nothing has changed.

Some things have changed at the Rugglestone Inn though, but that’s only to be expected really. The Rugglestone (which is named after a local logan stone) is located just outside Widecombe-in-the-Moor, probably the most visited village on Dartmoor. Its fame comes from the old folk song called Widecombe Fair, and each year the fair attracts tourists from far and wide.

I’ve never been to Widecombe Fair, but I’ve often been to the Rugglestone. Most visitors to Widecombe opt for the Old Inn (see featured pic at the top of the page), and to be fair (sorry!) it’s a half-decent pub, but the Rugglestone is different. Just to give you an idea, the first time I came in here, a local farmer came in for a pint with a dead sheep hanging over his shoulder, and they were both still here about three hours later. There’s another story I could tell you about what happened at the time, but discretion is the better part of valour as they say.

Needless to say, this is another one of those rustic pubs that have all but disappeared, and not that much different to the Drewe Arms really. The pub has had to move along with the times to keep afloat, but the last time I was here, it seemed to have done it pretty successfully without destroying the pub’s inherent character.

For my final pub I’ve chosen the Warren House Inn. It’s a well-known pub, simply because people pass by (or drop in) the Warren House all the time, so why include it here? Mainly because it’s inevitable that if you’re travelling across the moor, you’ll do exactly the same, and so you may as well know something about its background.

The pub lies at 1424 ft (434m) above sea level, which makes it the highest inn in Southern England. The original building though was located just across the road and called New House. It was built when there was a resurgence in tin mining in the area and also had a huge rabbit warren (a common enterprise in these parts at the time), so you don’t need to be Einstein to work out where the Warren House Inn gets its name from. The pub eventually fell into disrepair, and in 1845 was re-built across the road and re-named.

One of the legends associated with the inn originates from this time. Apparently the open fire has never gone out since. I’m not sure that can be true somehow, but I can vouch for the fact that the fire’s always burning when I’ve been in here – and I’ve been in here a fair few times over the years. It can be a heatwave outside, but there is still a log or two crackling away.

No doubt this would have been a necessity in years gone by when winters up here were generally harsher than they are now, but this pub is still in the middle of nowhere and even today it has to rely on electricity from a couple of generators, gas in the form of LPG, water from a spring and sewerage discharged into a septic tank. In other words, don’t come here wondering why lobster thermidor isn’t on the menu. That said, you’ll be well catered for if you like pasties.

The picture above shows the bar, and if you look carefully, you’ll be able to make out some photographs on the left showing the pub when it was cut off by snow for 3 months in the winter of 1963 and supplies were sent in by helicopter. It doesn’t get any bleaker than that, not in England anyway.

Most sensible people will come here when the weather’s a bit kinder, and if you’re one of them, you might want to wander over to the pub garden across the road and take in the view.

This pub garden was where the New House used to be, and I couldn’t possibly leave here without recounting another typical Dartmoor tale. It involves a traveller who, on a snowy winter’s night, stayed at the New House. His room included an old chest which aroused his curiosity so much that he just had to take a quick peek, but I bet he wished that he’d kept his chunk out, because when he lifted the lid, it wasn’t a chest full of treasure that he was staring down at, but a corpse instead.

Needless to say he didn’t get much sleep that night, but when he went down for breakfast in the morning he bucked up enough courage to mention it to the innkeeper. The woman’s son put his mind at rest by telling him that “Tis nothing at all, tis only fayther… the snow being so thick, and making the roads so cledgy like, when old fayther died two weeks ago we couldn’t carry un to Tavistock to bury un, so mother put un in the old box, and salted un in”.

The moral of the story is not to poke your nose in where it isn’t required, but if only I would listen to my own advice sometimes. One day, I was in the Devonshire Arms in Sticklepath when something similar occurred. There was a massive chest in the bar (I’m talking about a wooden one now) and I asked an old boy if he knew what was in it. He told me that while the landlord was alive it was kept locked and nobody knew what was in there, but when the landlord died he and a few other locals decided to take a look. So what’s in there? I asked. “You don’t want to know” he replied, with a look on his face that suggested I really didn’t. What bothered me the most though was that they locked it back up and still left it in the bar.

We’ve now reached the end of our tour, but it has to be said, that this is just a selection of pubs that I think may be of interest. I don’t visit these places as much as I used to, and inevitably many of them would have changed from the time when I did. With pubs closing down at an ever increasing rate, we’re in danger of losing an asset that is vital to the local community, not just on Dartmoor, but everywhere, and it’s incumbent on anyone who comes up here, to visit at least one of them before they change – or disappear for ever.