Clyst Hydon

Clyst Hydon is a small East Devon village and civil parish four miles from Cullompton, ringed by the parishes of Plymtree, Payhembury, Talaton, Whimple, Clyst St Lawrence and Broad Clyst. The lanes between them make for short, quiet drives rather than a single obvious walk from the door.

The parish church, dedicated to St Andrew, sits at the centre of the village alongside the Five Bells Inn and Restaurant and a primary school. Between 1971 and 1974 the village was home to an artists’ colony that published the Beau Geste Press, a small press working in the lineage of the Fluxus and mail art movements, an unlikely chapter for a farming parish this size.

The Aunk estate lies within the parish boundary, one of several historic landholdings that shaped the pattern of fields and lanes around the village. Clyst Hydon was historically part of the Cliston Hundred, an old administrative division that also took in several of its neighbouring parishes. There is no railway station or main road through Clyst Hydon itself; a car is the practical way to reach it and to reach Exeter or the coast from it.

Use Clyst Hydon as a base if you want farmland quiet close to Cullompton and the M5, with a single village pub rather than a wider choice on your doorstep.