Simmons Park is lovely though, with its ornamental tree collection, contemporaneous to a Victorian shopping arcade with an arched glass roof from 1906. The Museum of Dartmoor Life has an exhibit chronicling Okehampton’s years in railroad wilderness, while the impressive castle is a motte-and-bailey fortification of the 14th-century Earl of Devon, executed in 1539 by Henry VIII (who wasn’t?) but is disappointingly closed throughout winter. I find solace munching a sandwich at Toast Coffeehouse, built within the town’s old Edwardian Cinema (eattoast.co.uk).
Yet what Okehampton certainly offers is spectacular moorland access. The 108-mile circular Dartmoor Way walk and cycleway starts here – a hard hilly route immersing you in ground-wobbling expanses of moorland peppered with Jenga-like granite tors. And National Cycle Network Route 27 passes through Okehampton, Devon’s own 99 mile-long coast-to-coast. Its southern segment follows the Drake’s Trail around Western Dartmoor to Plymouth, where you can connect with trains back to London.
For confident navigators, there’s a challenging moorland yomp to the truly Heathcliffian wilds of Belstone, which has an excellent pub, The Tors, where in Summer you can enjoy a pint and burger al fresco with breathtaking views. Yet in late Autumn’s thrall, I settled for Okehampton’s most popular cycle, the 11-mile Granite Way, hiring a bike from Okehampton station. “The Dartmoor Line will be fantastic for us. We deal with lots of schools, who stay at the YHA and hire cycles,” enthused Paul Elson, owner of Granite Way Cycles. “We’re now getting enquiries for schools as far as Bristol who can reach here completely by rail”. By summer 2022 he expects to have doubled his fleet of bikes.
