The Devon Visitors' Guide

Welcome to the Devon Visitors' Guide!

If you don't yet know Devon, many unexpected delights await you. If you've been before, you'll need no reminders about the beauty and delights that the county holds.

North Devon includes the delightful area of Exmoor and the wonderful North Devon coast. It's an unspoilt area, and relatively unpopulated, with imposing coastline and wide sandy beaches, great for family holidays as well as surfing, sailing and boating. You can visit tranquil Lundy Island, walk across beautiful moorland on Exmoor and explore lush river valleys. Follow the Tarka Trail, based on the locations made famous by Henry Williamson in his book "Tarka the Otter", cycle along miles of peaceful cycle routes and enjoy the superb hospitality of this area.

East and West Devon make up the rural centre of this diverse county. From the bustling and exciting city of Exeter, to the tiniest of villages, across rolling hills and lush woodlands in the valleys, central Devon is a delightful area - an agricultural landscape with small patchwork fields, offering traditional farms in which you can stay, luxury country hotels, and modern cafes. The blend of tradition and modernity will suit all holidaymakers, from the most sophisticated to those who wish for a simple holiday, taking in the bed and breakfasts of the area or camping as they trek across this traditional English landscape.

South Devon is a place of great contrasts, from the World Heritage coastline, where you can enjoy the delights of beaches, cliffs, rock pools and coast paths, through traditional seaside resorts such as Torquay and Paignton to the busy town of Plymouth with so many maritime links. And the charming estuaries and valleys of the South Hams will delight even the most experienced traveller, while the grandeur of Dartmoor National Park thrills all who venture there, its moods changing with the seasons, yet always thrilling with an imposing magnificence.

To begin your exploration of this amazing county, look at the menu bar to the left and click on the area of interest which you'd like to explore. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please let me know: email me, Rod, on the following email address:  info "at" devon-visitor-guide.co.uk
 

These are the areas used in the listings on this website

World Heritage Sites are places of "outstanding universal value"' chosen by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. The Dorset and East Devon Coast is one of the most speactacular of England's World Heritage Sites. Known as The Jurassic Coast, this area comprises more than 90 spectacular miles of truly beautiful coast which stretches from East Devon to Dorset. The rocks along this coast encompass a period of more than 185 million years of the Earth's history.

World Heritage status was granted because the coast offers a unique insight into a geological "time line" spanning the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of the Earth's history. Very different sections of this coast formed over millions of years through massive geological events, later assisted by coastal processes which you see as you walk through this truly beautiful area.

Orcombe Point marks the west edge of the World Heritage Site, and you can start your journey by seeing the Geoneedle, unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 2002 to commemorate granting of World Heritage Status to the Devon and East Dorset coast. The Geoneedle is constructed from stones in a sequence which mirrors the order in which the rocks were deposited in the development of the coastline.

The rocks of the Dorset and East Devon Coast record the period known as the Mesozoic era - the Middle Ages of Earth's history - which is broken down into the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods of geological time. These represent the period from 250 million years ago to 65 million years ago. All along the coast, this amazing geology is clearly exposed and easily accessible.

In Triassic times, which were between 250 and 200 million years ago, the World Heritage Site was an element of the super-continent called Pangaea, a landmass which later divided into the continents of our current world. Dorset and East Devon was somewhere in the desert-like, dry centre of this unimaginable super-continent. The Triassic was a crucial period of the evolution of life on Earth. Those sea-going animals which were able to survive a mass extinction at the end of the previous geological period evolved and developed; for example, the dinosaurs evolved around this time and later became dominant during the Mesozoic Era. By the end of the Triassic, most of the groups of four legged animals which we know today had evolved, including the first true mammals.

Pangaea started to split up during the Jurassic Period between 200 and 140 million years ago. The Atlantic Ocean formed to the west of Britain and the Americas moved away from Europe. The Earth was warm and sea levels were high, with almost no polar ice caps. The Jurassic rocks of Devon and the Dorset coast show these marine conditions as varying from deep to shallow coastal swamps. The geology of this area indicates that sea levels rose and fell in cycles, with the deposition of deep water clays, then sandstones and last of all shallow water limestones. The oceans were relatively shallow in the middle of the Jurassic, which created a series of islands raised slightly above the shallow shoals, rather like the Caribbean of today. The oceans deepened as the Jurassic time period progressed, though they again became shallower at the end of the Jurassic. This change created a tropical-type swamp environment. Though you may find that hard to believe right now!

Jurassic animals included Ammonites, a type of mollusc related to the squid, but with hard spiral shells. These are one of the most common fossils you can find on the Dorset and East Devon Coast; and in fact, Portland and its limestone and chalk is where the giant ammonite is found. As the shallow seas expanded, there was an explosion of life during which many animals evolved rapidly. Dinosaurs were abundant on Earth and the dominant animals in the oceans included ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and crocodiles.

During the Cretaceous Period, which extended from 140 to 65 million years ago, America continued to drift away from Europe, and the Atlantic became more like it is today in form. The landscape on the World Heritage Site was somewhat like the Gulf of Arabia today, with lagoons. As the rocks underneath south-west England tilted to the East, the nutrient-rich waters of the Atlantic expanded, allowing huge blooms of microscopic algae to form in these waters. As their exo-skeletons sank to the sea floor, they gradually formed the pure, white chalk we see in the area today.

Right across the World Heritage Site you can see the "Great Unconformity", a time gap between rocks of different ages. In the mid-Cretaceous the rocks tilted eastwards, and were then gradually eroded by seas and rivers, especially in the west of the area. And so, all the Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous rock history is absent from the geological timeline in this "fault", and the Cretaceous rocks are deposited on the eroded rock surfaces of the Triassic period. As you walk along the coast, this makes interpretation of the time line more difficult, because the oldest and the youngest rocks on the coast are found near each other in East Devon.

The Cretaceous saw the largest and most fearsome dinosaurs on the Earth, but it was also the period when the first flowering plants evolved. A mass extinction took place at the end of the Cretaceous period which was critical to the form and animal population of the modern world (although this is not explicitly recorded in the World Heritage Site). Certainly it was around this time that the reign of the reptiles - including dinosaurs - as the predominant life on Earth came to an end; dinosaurs, marine reptiles and ammonites were some of the species which became extinct. After their time, the present style of life on Earth evolved, dominated by mammals, flowering plants and grasses. The earliest Cretaceous rocks in the World Heritage time line are the Purbeck Beds, which form one of the most complex rock sequences along the entire coast. They have given us many fossils including dinosaur footprints and the microscopic animal teeth. Chalk - calcium carbonate - is the youngest Cretaceous rock in the Heritage area of the Devon and Dorset coast - it is located all through the area, and usually has millions of fossils of animals such as the sea urchin. The varied geology of this remarkable coast has formed an intriguing laboratory for geomorphology - the science of the land and the geological processes that made it what it is. Coastal land is never stable; it changes as the sea and frost mould it, as rain and human activity subtly alters it. But geomorphology is looking at longer time periods than that which represents the hand of man, even though small changes, repeated often enough over long periods of time, can be powerful agents for change as well. As we all know, storms and landslips have both formed the shape of the coast and revealed millions of fossils, which are abundant and easy to find in this astonishing natural laboratory of geomorphology!