We arrived home from Lydford after a trouble-free five hour drive - which was exactly one hour less than the outward-bound journey. Even the bit by Stonehenge wasn't too bad this time.
We thoroughly enjoyed our week of walking in Devon. We did at least one walk each day and clocked up 80 miles in all, most of which was on the moors and up to the tors of Dartmoor.
It's true that we did get a little frustrated with the roads and traffic we encountered. All but two of the walks I'd planned before we went involved a drive to a car park somewhere, but it hadn't occurred to me that even a 20 mile drive would take much longer than expected. It wasn't so much the number of single-track roads that was the problem, but the amount of traffic on them. We've spent many happy walking holidays on Scottish islands and other places where single-track roads are the norm (we even have quite a few here in Kent!), but the constant squeezing past oncoming cars (as on the A382!) became a bit too much for our liking. So in the end, we did all but two of our walks directly from Lydford and left the car behind.
From the high moorland, we often had wonderful views over the farmland below.
At first, the patchwork of small green fields separated by stone walls looked like an idyllic English rural scene, but we soon realised that almost all of the fields contained either cows and grass... or just grass, and during the whole week we didn't see a single arable crop or orchard or... well, anything that wasn't grass. I'm certain that Devon has a much greater variety of landscapes than what we saw, but sadly, driving to find them was too much like hard work!
Our favourite things in the area around Lydford were the spectacular tors and the wonderful paths, bridleways and byways.
To be honest, we didn't even know about Dartmoor's tors until we got there, but we found them totally irresistible (well, I did anyway!) and had to climb every one we passed - and pose for a photo...
We didn't see a lot of natural woodland, but we loved what we did see - with gnarled and moss-covered trees which are quite unlike our local woods. Every public right-of-way path we walked was well-maintained too...
We also really liked the great many bridleways and byways - many of the latter being wider than the official roads! And although our routes occasionally took us across fields and past cattle, most of the tracks seemed to be between and separate from fields, which makes for nice, easy walking.
So, niggles aside, we really enjoyed our week in Devon.