There's a category of pub that Devon does better than anywhere else in England, and most people drink in them without ever asking about the name. Look at a village map of the county and they keep appearing: Church House Inn, Harberton. Church House Inn, Rattery. Church House Inn, Stokeinteignhead. Marldon, Holne, Churchstow — the list runs on. It isn't coincidence and it isn't branding. A "church house" was a real institution: a building put up hard against the churchyard in the medieval period, where the parish brewed ale, baked bread and held its feast days — the profits going to the upkeep of the church next door. When the Church later pushed the merriment out of consecrated ground, the church houses kept the ale and became inns. Devon, which never saw the point of demolishing a perfectly good building, kept an extraordinary number of them.
Which means that in this county you can drink your pint in the same room where the parish has been drinking it for five or six centuries. Here's where to do it properly.
The one the whole country is talking about
Church House Inn, Harberton. Two miles out of Totnes, squeezed so tight against St Andrew's churchyard that the approach lane runs between the church wall and the pub's front door, this is the church house pub in its purest surviving form — a building dating from around 1450 that has, as the Good Food Guide puts it, serviced its parish for the best part of 700 years. Inside it's everything the setting promises: dark panelling, low beams, open fires, tapered candles, two pianos and a pool table, with communal dining at long tables positively encouraged.
What's put it on the national map is the kitchen. Tim Blanchard — who cooked at St. JOHN in London, the restaurant that taught Britain to eat nose to tail — took the place on as chef and proprietor, and brought that same produce-led, minimal-fuss style to a daily-changing menu built from South Devon's larder: potted duck with charred sourdough, grilled lamb chops with anchovy chard, a smashed-patty cheeseburger for the unrepentant, porchetta on Sundays. This year the Good Food Guide named it one of Britain's 100 Best Pubs — at number 16 in the country, the highest-ranked pub in Devon, with the Michelin Guide listing it besides. If you fancy testing that verdict on someone else's tab, we've currently got a three-course dinner for two with a bottle of wine there up for grabs on the site.
The one with a thousand years under the flagstones
Church House Inn, Rattery. A few miles west, Rattery's church house makes Harberton's look almost modern. Records note a building on this site as far back as 1028 — before the Norman Conquest — and in the 1100s it housed the stonemasons building the stone church it still stands beside, with ale brewed on the premises to keep them going. Most of the fabric you see today dates from a 16th-century overhaul, which in Rattery terms counts as the recent work. It comes with the full complement of village legend: a resident ghost, and persistent talk of a tunnel running to the church crypt that nobody has ever managed to find. It makes a regular appearance in lists of the oldest pubs in Britain, and sitting by the fire with a pint it is very easy to believe.
The thatched one above the combe
Church House Inn, Stokeinteignhead. The third of our church houses sits in a deep green combe a mile or so back from the coast between Teignmouth and Torquay — a thatched pub that has stood by the village church for some 800 years. It's the least famous of the three and all the better for it: low ceilings, local ales, and the kind of Sunday trade that arrives on foot, from the coast path via the lanes.
And these three are only the start. Marldon and Holne keep their own ancient church houses in business on either side of the Dart, and completists can carry on to Churchstow's — each one still standing in the shadow of its church, each still doing the job it was built for. Half a day's unhurried driving through the South Hams links five of them, though we'd argue the better plan is one pub, one walk, and no schedule at all.
The wider medieval family
The church houses have cousins — Devon inns that came at antiquity from different angles and arrived just as deep in the past.
The Cott Inn, Dartington. A 14th-century thatched Devon longhouse on the old packhorse route near Totnes, and one of the oldest thatched inns in Britain — a building that has been feeding and watering travellers more or less continuously since the reign of Edward II. The thatch alone is worth the detour; the fireside on a wet Dartmoor-edge evening settles the argument.
The Oxenham Arms, South Zeal. On Dartmoor's northern edge stands the strangest origin story of any pub in the West Country. In the 12th century, Benedictine monks built a small monastery here — around a granite standing stone raised by Neolithic hands some 5,000 years earlier. The menhir is still there, built into the fabric of the building; you can put your hand on it on the way to the bar. It has been an inn since 1477, when John Oxenham took the licence, and the family later produced a Captain John Oxenham, born in the house in 1542, who sailed with Drake. Monastery, manor, menhir and pub in one granite package — nowhere else has anything like it.
The Bridge Inn, Topsham. The youngster of this list and it still predates most of Britain's pubs — a salmon-pink landmark by the River Clyst that has been in the hands of the same family, the Cheffers, since 1897. Its claim to fame is more recent: in February 1998, Queen Elizabeth II came to the Bridge in what was reported as her first official visit to a pub, toured the building, and left with a commemorative case of ale, remarking that Prince Philip would enjoy it at the Palace. The beer still comes straight from casks in the back room, and the place remains gloriously unmodernised — a pub the 19th century would recognise at a glance.
Why Devon kept them
Elsewhere in England the church houses were mostly sold off, demolished or absorbed into cottages centuries ago. Devon's survived for the unglamorous reason that its villages stayed small, its buildings stayed useful, and nobody ever had the money or the inclination to knock them down and start again. The result, centuries on, looks like foresight: a county where the building next to the church is still doing roughly what it was built to do in 1450 — feeding the parish, pouring its ale, and giving everyone somewhere warm to argue about the cricket.
Go on a weekday if you can, when the fires are lit and the locals outnumber the visitors. Order whatever the kitchen is proudest of. And spare a thought, somewhere into the second pint, for the medieval churchwardens whose fundraising scheme worked so well it's still running six hundred years later.