South Devon historic pub walk

Two of these three buildings were not built as pubs and were built for drinking, which is a distinction worth keeping hold of. Historic England records the type in its own words here: Rattery and Harberton are both entered as public houses, originally the church house, both at Grade II*, and both were listed on the same day, 9 February 1961. What a church house was for is set out in a short history of the British pub. A fourth survives at Stoke Gabriel, too far east to join this route on foot.

The Church House Inn at Rattery carries AD 1028 painted in black on its front, a year traditionally tied to the monks or masons who built St Mary’s next door. The register is long on this building and silent on that century: a rectangular plan of eight bays, a stair turret at the south-west corner with slate treads cut into the newel, seven axial beams every one of them with step stops, and nine roof trusses with cranked feet and morticed apices over three intact tiers of threaded purlins. All of it sixteenth-century. The painted year stands five hundred years beyond anything an inspector has found in the walls, which is why the grade is C.

The Church House Inn at Harberton claims the least of the three and is the only one the record agrees with. Its entry dates the house circa mid to late sixteenth century, the century the house claims, and describes a four-light moulded window frame of that date in the front, with four-centred arched heads and roundels in the spandrels and a doorway later cut through two of its lights. Eleven roof trusses, probably raised crucks. A screen whose butt stops sit high up where a bench has been taken away. A church house was built for the parish’s ales, so drinking here is plausible from the start; nothing traced records it, and the twelfth- and thirteenth-century origins that circulate have nothing behind them. That is grade B.

The Cott Inn ends the walk under its thatch, and its c. 1320 with the story of the merchant Johannes Cott is the date the surveyor declines. Entry 1291403, listed on 11 November 1952, reads the house as early seventeenth century or of earlier origins, remodelled later that century and extended at both ends in the eighteenth to make the long range a walker sees from the lane. The plan is three rooms and a through passage, and the bar went into the middle room in the twentieth century. The entry then weighs whether that middle room was once an open hall and finds no evidence for one — while the list’s own index of monument types files the building as an open hall house. Nothing in it reaches 1320.

Three buildings, three surveyors’ entries and not one document about drink: how a house is dated from its joinery and its roof is in how historians date an old pub, and the rest of the county is at the oldest pubs in Devon. For a walk of much the same length on pavement the whole way, there is London.