Features

BRITAIN’s photos of the week: Delightful Devon

Thatched cottage in Crediton, Devon. Credit: Adam Burton/Robert Harding World Imagery/Corbis

With its history of illicit trading and connections to crime writer Agatha Christie, the beautiful county of Devon is a place of intrigue and boasts not one but two stunning coastlines…

Cocooned between the southwesterly counties of Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset, Devon is a land of striking contrasts. In the southern half of the region you’ll find some of the prettiest beaches in Britain, framed by the picture-postcard villages of the English Riviera, which still evoke the old-school glamour of the 1920s and 30s, brought to life so vividly in the stories of Agatha Christie.

Dartmoor National Park, in the middle of the county, is a sprawling area of untamed moorland, dotted with ancient sites, which led another crime writer, Arthur Conan Doyle, to write in The Hound of the Baskervilles: “The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one’s soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm.”

Finally, Exmoor and the north Devon coastline is the wilder cousin of the south coast and is home to hidden coves that make you wonder about the murky undertakings that once took place here.