Exmoor Paintings #art

As described in the posts Quantock Paintings – Part 1 and Quantock Paintings – Part 2, our summer holiday in 2025 was a multi-part affair. A short stay at Crowcombe on the Quantock Hills in June was followed a month later, by a few days a little further west in an AirBnB in Malmsmead, Exmoor. Malmsmead is a location that is well known for being at the head of the so-called ‘Doone Valley’, which is an interesting example of a landscape feature that (now) takes its name from a work of fiction, R.D. Blackmore’s 1869 tale of romance and villainy: ‘Lorna Doone’. However, despite having made many trips to Exmoor over the years, it wasn’t somewhere that I had explored much before.

In Exmoor we were fortunate to be blessed with generally fine and warm weather, and were able to complete several great walks, including, naturally enough, one that took us all the way up the Doone Valley and west over open moorland, before returning north, with great views (see below) towards the Bristol Channel, via the village of Brendon and a nice drop of Exmoor Ale in The Staghunters Inn.

Our accommodation was only a 15 minute walk from the village of Oare, and so we also visited Oare Church, where (in the story) Lorna Doone was shot through a window by the evil, jilted Carver Doone as she stood to marry John Ridd. [Spoiler alert: Lorna survives, and John chases Carver Doone across the moor and watches him sink slowly to his death in a boggy mire, and they all (well all but Carver of course) live happily every after.]

We also completed a walk from Malmsmead towards the coast on what was perhaps the hottest afternoon of the year. This made the walk rather tough going, and this was not helped by the fact that the warm weather seemed to encourage what seemed to be every fly in the entire region to nip and nibble at me along the way.

In between the walks, I found time for some painting of course, producing the various pictures that illustrate this post. The final painting I produced whilst away was of the view across Porlock Bay, where we had walked on the first day of our holiday, from Bossington Hill. As it’s a sunset view, it seems like a good picture to use to draw this post to a close…