Pubs with Rooms in Lynton & Lynmouth

Lynton and Lynmouth are two towns doing the work of one destination: Lynton sits on the clifftop, Lynmouth sits in the harbour directly below it, and the two are joined by the Lynton & Lynmouth Cliff Railway — a Victorian funicular that runs on nothing but the weight of water, still one of the more genuinely unusual ways to move between two parts of an English town. Both sit on Exmoor’s northern edge, where the moor drops straight into the Bristol Channel.

The Crown Hotel is up in Lynton itself, a 17th-century coaching inn on Market Street a short walk from the cliff railway’s top station. The Rising Sun is down in Lynmouth, on the harbourside where the Lyn rivers meet the sea — former fishermen’s cottages with crooked staircases and low beams, about as characterful as this style of building gets. The Blue Ball Inn is the outlier: it’s actually in Countisbury, a mile and a half east along the coast road, but it’s the nearest pub with rooms to both towns and a genuine 13th-century coaching inn on Exmoor’s edge in its own right, so we’ve included it here rather than leave it off entirely.

There’s no railway station in either town — the nearest is Barnstaple, about 18 miles away — so this is very much a car-and-bus destination, or a stop for anyone walking the South West Coast Path.