Exmoor

Exmoor National Park
      "Exmoor ~ Still England but another world"

Exmoor is unique in that it has the greatest concentration of Red Deer in England and  they have lived there since pre-historic times. There are a few thousand in North Devon and West Somerset, living on the moor and using the woods as a place of safety. Red Deer are the largest wild land animals in England these days, adult stags stand 115 cm at the shoulder and grow antlers which they shed in April and early May. During the rut in October and November you can hear the stags belling or roaring, the hinds give birth to their calves the following June & July.

Exmoor has the highest coastal cliffs in England, the "Great Hangman" coastal hill is 318 metres (1043 ft) high with a cliff face of 244 metres (800ft) while Hollow Brook at Martinhoe is amongst the highest waterfalls in Britain, it drops 200 metres to the sea in a series of cascades over a horizontal distance of 400 metres and includes two nearly vertical leaps of 50 metres each. 

Exmoor covers an area of some 267 sq. miles/69,280 hectares, has over 745 miles/1200 kms of way marked "Rights Of Way" with it's highest point being Dunkery Beacon at 1704 feet/519 metres.

Exmoor has the longest stretch of naturally wooded coastline in the British Isles, woods stretch along ten miles of cliff from Countisbury to Porlock and beech trees grow at greater altitudes than anywhere else in Britain.

The Bristol Channel or Severn Sea has the second highest tidal range in the world after the Bay of Fundy in Canada. The difference varies considerably with the phases of the moon, the weather and along the coast with mean spring tides on the Exmoor coast ranging from 8 to 9.6 metres, the highest tides are greater and can reach well over 10 metres, especially if backed by strong winds.

Most of Exmoor's rocks were formed in the southern hemisphere about 350 million years ago with continental drift has causing them to gradually move thousands of miles to the north since then. Parts of the surface of Exmoor are amongst the oldest landscapes in the world, the surface of the Chains and the Vale of Porlock are thought to be at least 200 million years old, in fact older than most continents and far older than most of the world's mountain ranges.

Exmoor ponies are a unique species, the closest breed to the original wild horses which roamed Britain in prehistoric times. There are only a few hundred on Exmoor, they are rarer than the giant Chinese panda.

Exmoor has species of plants which are found nowhere else and over a 1000 different flowering plants and grasses flourish there.

Britain's longest national trail, the South West Coast Path, goes all along the Exmoor coast, the start is in Minehead and the finish is at Poole in Dorset, about 613 miles away. It takes roughly 40 days to walk the entire route and the Exmoor section includes the highest and remotest parts of the path. It takes two or three days on average days to walk and includes ascents totalling more than the height of Ben Nevis.

Exmoor is defined as a "Heritage Coast", the shoreline is the most remote in England and because of the height and steepness of the cliffs, there is no landward access to the six mile stretches of shoreline from Combe Martin to Heddon's Mouth and Countisbury to Glenthorne, there are very few places where you could even land a small boat.

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