Devon Luxury Itinerary: The Perfect 7-Day Guide

The morning light is coming in sideways off the estuary, turning the water the colour of old pewter, and you are eating a crab that was pulled from the sea approximately six hours ago. There is good bread. There is cold butter. There is a view that makes you briefly resent every other holiday you have ever taken. This is Devon – not the postcard version, though that exists too, all red cliffs and cream teas and lanes so narrow they require a level of optimism bordering on recklessness. This is the real thing: a county of extraordinary range, where the food has quietly become some of the best in England, where two separate coastlines offer two completely different moods, and where the moors – wild, unhurried, faintly prehistoric – sit at the middle of it all, available whenever you need reminding that the world is older and larger than your inbox. Seven days here is not quite enough. It is, however, a very good start.

Before you dive in, it is worth reading our full Devon Travel Guide for a broader overview of the county, its seasons, and how to approach it.

Day 1: Arrive and Exhale – The South Devon Coast

Theme: Arrival and orientation

Morning / Afternoon: The instinct on arrival day is to plan too much. Resist this. If you have based yourself in South Devon – which, for the purposes of this itinerary, we will assume you have – spend the first afternoon simply orienting yourself with the landscape. The South Devon coast is gentler than the North, more sheltered, its estuaries wide and silver and dotted with sailing boats that appear to be going nowhere in particular with great contentment. Drive the coastal road between Dartmouth and Salcombe if you can, allowing for the fact that the lanes are confidently sized for one vehicle and two will occasionally need to negotiate. The views over the Salcombe estuary are worth the mild cardiac exercise.

Salcombe itself is the kind of town that knows exactly what it is – prosperous, nautical, well-dressed – and has made peace with it entirely. Walk the waterfront, get your bearings, and resist the temptation to check off any particular sight. Today is not a ticking-boxes day.

Evening: Dinner at a harbourfront restaurant in Salcombe or Dartmouth. Both towns have establishments that take their fish seriously, which is the correct attitude when you are twenty minutes from where it was caught. Book ahead, particularly in summer – the secret has been thoroughly out about South Devon for some time now.

Practical tip: Arrive with a car. Devon without a car is theoretically possible and practically miserable. A good sat-nav and a willingness to reverse for long distances are both assets.

Day 2: Dartmouth and the River Dart – History on the Water

Theme: Heritage, river life and exceptional food

Morning: Dartmouth rewards an early start. Before the day-trippers arrive, the town – its timber-framed houses stacked up the hillside, its castle guarding the estuary mouth with considerable self-assurance – has a quality of quiet that is genuinely rare. Walk up to Dartmouth Castle, one of the earliest purpose-built artillery fortresses in England, and take a moment to appreciate that people have been standing on this exact spot worrying about what might come in from the sea for nearly six hundred years. Some things do not change.

The Dartmouth Steam Railway runs along the coast to Paignton and is far more than a tourist curiosity – it is one of the most scenically dramatic short rail journeys in the country, following the Dart estuary with the kind of views that cause passengers to go very quiet and stare out of the window.

Afternoon: Take the passenger ferry across the Dart to Kingswear, simply because the crossing takes approximately three minutes and is disproportionately satisfying. From there, explore the Greenway Estate – Agatha Christie’s holiday home, now managed by the National Trust, sitting in grounds that roll down to the river with an air of deep, unhurried Englishness. Book tickets in advance; it sells out.

Evening: Return to Dartmouth for dinner. The town punches well above its weight gastronomically. There are several restaurants within the centre that have earned genuine reputations – the kind that are discussed in London food circles with the specific envy reserved for places that require a drive to reach.

Day 3: Dartmoor – The Moor in All Its Severity

Theme: Wilderness, walking and proper pubs

Morning: Set aside any assumptions you have arrived with about Dartmoor. This is not gentle. It is a high, open plateau of granite and bog and big weather, where the ponies look at you with frank assessment and the views extend in every direction to the sort of horizon that recalibrates your sense of scale. Drive up onto the moor early, before the car parks fill, and walk from one of the classic starting points – Haytor, Hound Tor, or the area around Dartmeet, where two rivers combine with more drama than their modest size should really allow.

The tors – those peculiar outcrops of exposed granite that punctuate the skyline – are the defining feature of the landscape and worth climbing if you have sensible shoes. The views from the top of Haytor, on a clear day, extend south to the coast. On a less clear day, you get atmosphere instead. Both are valid.

Afternoon: Explore Widecombe-in-the-Moor, which is the sort of village that has a church nicknamed the Cathedral of the Moors and entirely earns the comparison. Lunch at a good moorland pub – Devon’s pub culture is excellent and deserves engagement. Stone floors, local ales, menus that treat a ploughman’s lunch as the serious culinary proposition it is when the cheese is made locally.

Evening: If you are staying in a villa with kitchen facilities – which, in Devon, you really should be – this is the evening to visit a farm shop or local produce supplier and cook. The county’s larder is extraordinary: Dartmoor-reared beef, local cheeses, river-caught fish. To be in Devon and eat at a chain restaurant would be a particular kind of sadness.

Practical tip: Dartmoor weather changes with a speed that is almost personal. Bring layers regardless of what the forecast says. This is not a caveat – it is a rule.

Day 4: The English Riviera and Brixham – Class and Catch

Theme: Coastal towns, fish markets and the faded glamour of the English seaside

Morning: The Torbay coast – Torquay, Paignton and Brixham – has had a complicated relationship with its identity over the decades. Torquay spent some time as the English Riviera with genuine conviction (the palm trees are real; the climate does have a case to make), then weathered several decades of comparison with sunnier places, and has recently been finding its feet again. There are good independent hotels, decent restaurants and a waterfront that, in the right light, does not require much imagination to see what the fuss was about in 1920.

Brixham, however, is the real destination here and has the advantage of not trying to be anything other than exactly what it is: a serious working fishing port. The harbour at Brixham is one of the best in Devon – colourful, purposeful, smelling of brine in the best possible way. The fish market operates at extraordinary hours (substantially before most people are awake), but a morning visit to the harbour finds the boats returning and the quayside busy with the specific energy of people doing real work.

Afternoon: Berry Head Nature Reserve sits just outside Brixham and offers clifftop walks with views down the coast that are – there is no avoiding it – genuinely breathtaking. Guillemots nest on the cliffs in summer. The lighthouse at the tip is one of the shortest in Britain, which it can afford to be given that it stands on the highest point of the headland. A small architectural joke at no one’s expense.

Evening: Back towards Dartmouth or Salcombe for dinner, or – if you have found a harbour restaurant in Brixham that has caught your attention – stay. The fish, as previously noted, has not travelled far.

Day 5: North Devon – The Atlantic Coast

Theme: Big surf, wild coastline and a completely different Devon

Morning: Cross the county to the north coast and understand immediately that you have arrived somewhere quite different. Where the south coast is sheltered and gentle, the north faces the full Atlantic and is correspondingly more dramatic, more exposed and considerably more exciting if you have any interest in waves. Croyde is the centre of Devon’s surf culture – proper surf, not the polite rolling variety – and even if you have no intention of getting into the water, the beach and the dune system behind it are among the finest in England.

If you do wish to surf, instruction is available and the experience of catching even a modest wave in this setting is one of those physical memories that tends to stay. Book a lesson in advance; the good schools fill up in summer.

Afternoon: Drive the coast road to Saunton Sands – an enormous, west-facing beach backed by the Braunton Burrows dune system, which is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and one of the largest sand dune systems in the country. Walk the dunes. Take your time. There is an absence of crowd here, even in summer, that the south coast cannot always promise.

Barnstaple, inland, is the market town that serves the north coast and has a good weekly market worth exploring for local produce, pottery and the sort of artisan goods that make excellent gifts for people you want to impress with your discernment.

Evening: The north Devon coast has a number of establishments with genuine culinary reputations – gastropubs and small restaurants that have quietly attracted serious attention. Ask at your villa for recommendations; local knowledge is almost always better than any aggregator.

Day 6: Exmoor and the Devon-Somerset Border – The Quiet Frontier

Theme: High moorland, ancient woodland and restorative solitude

Morning: Exmoor sits partly in Devon and partly in Somerset and considers this border arrangement with complete indifference. It is less visited than Dartmoor – smaller, quieter, softer in its contours – and rewards those who make the effort with landscapes of genuine, unhurried beauty. The combination of heather moorland and steep, wooded river valleys is unlike anywhere else in England.

Lynton and Lynmouth, twin villages connected by a Victorian cliff railway that still operates on hydraulic power alone, are the practical base for exploring this part of the county. Lynmouth sits at the foot of the cliff at the mouth of the East Lyn River; Lynton sits at the top, connected by the railway and by a road that is testing by any standard. The cliff railway is not merely a novelty – it is, genuinely, the most logical way to get between the two.

Afternoon: Walk the Valley of Rocks, just west of Lynton – a dry valley full of extraordinary rock formations and feral goats who have developed a posture of mild contempt towards visitors. Follow the South West Coast Path in either direction from here for views over the Bristol Channel that, on a clear day, extend to Wales.

For the afternoon, drive east along the coast to Porlock Weir – a small harbour village below the extraordinary Porlock Hill (gradient: attention-demanding) – and walk along the shingle ridge to the ancient oak woodland of Porlock Bay. This is the kind of landscape that makes serious photographers put their phones down and simply look.

Evening: A quiet evening is appropriate after a day at this elevation and pace. Return to your villa, open something local – Devon produces several good wines and ciders that deserve more attention than they typically receive – and eat well without going anywhere at all. This is one of the great luxuries of a villa stay.

Day 7: Slow Last Day – Plymouth, Cream Teas and Farewell

Theme: Culture, ceremony and the proper Devon goodbye

Morning: Plymouth is a city that has had, historically, a complicated relationship with its own image – partly because a great deal of it was rebuilt after the Second World War with a confidence in concrete that the subsequent decades did not entirely vindicate. But Plymouth’s history is extraordinary, its waterfront is genuinely compelling, and the National Marine Aquarium is among the best in the country. The Barbican, the historic old port area where the Mayflower sailed from in 1620, retains something of its original character: cobbled streets, independent galleries and the kind of fishmonger that makes you want to rethink whatever dinner plans you already had.

Afternoon: On a final day in Devon, a cream tea is not optional. It is structural. The debate about whether the jam or the cream goes on first (Devon says cream first; Cornwall says jam first; the disagreement has the intensity of an ancient grievance) is one you are now entitled to have an opinion on. Find a good tearoom – there are excellent ones throughout the county – and do the thing properly: proper leaf tea, proper scones, clotted cream of the kind that holds its shape on a spoon. This is not indulgence. This is participation in local culture.

After tea, if time allows, a final walk somewhere on the coast – a point of your choosing, any point, because Devon has approximately 200 miles of it and all of it is worth standing on – is the correct ending.

Evening: Final dinner somewhere that has meant something during the week. Return visits are a form of appreciation that good restaurants understand and value. If you made a booking that worked particularly well – return. Order something different. Tell them you’re back. Devon is that kind of place.

The Best Base: A Luxury Villa in Devon

There is a version of this itinerary that involves hotels, and it is perfectly good. Then there is the version where you have a kitchen full of things you bought at a farm shop, a garden where you can take your morning coffee without putting on shoes, and enough space that seven days feels like recovery rather than logistics. The best way to experience Devon at this level is to base yourself properly – in a house that gives you the county on your own terms, at your own pace, without the pressure of a restaurant reservation for breakfast.

For the right property, explore our full collection of luxury villas in Devon – from clifftop properties on the south coast to moorland retreats with the kind of views that would have made Thomas Hardy stop walking and get out a notebook.