Pubs with Rooms in Dartmouth

Dartmouth sits where the River Dart widens into a natural deep-water harbour, which is why the town has been a working port for the better part of a thousand years and why Britannia Royal Naval College still looks down over it from the hill above. The quay is the town’s spine — narrow streets of slate-hung and timber-framed buildings running back from the water, with the pubs clustered right on it.

The Royal Castle has stood on the quay for around 400 years and is the largest of the three, with 24 en-suite rooms and harbour views from most of them. The Seven Stars, a few streets back on Smith Street, is Dartmouth’s oldest pub — a proper, small town local with six rooms above it. Bayards Cove Inn is the newest addition in spirit if not in building: three fishermen’s cottages on the cobbled quay at Bayard’s Cove, the same stretch used in Poldark, done up as a gastro pub with boutique rooms.

There’s no railway station in Dartmouth itself — the town grew around a harbour, not a line — so most visitors arrive either by car, by the passenger ferry from Kingswear (which does have a station, on the heritage steam line to Paignton), or on the river boat up from Totnes, a genuinely pleasant way to see the estuary before you’ve even checked in.