The best cycling routes in Dawlish Warren National Nature Reserve

Look out for an entrance onto a footpath on your right, which follows beside the railway tracks on your left, and the exe estuary on your right. The path is too narrow for cycling but great for walking and running.

Harnessing the power of moving water to drive a mill wheel is an ancient invention of human ingenuity, whose origins can be traced back to ancient times. Thanks to such a design, a watercourse – natural or artificial – made it possible to simply replace human or animal muscle power with the power of natural elements, for example, to grind grain into corn or press oil from fruit. There are essentially two drive variants for watermills: * Either the flowing water simply hits the blades of the water wheel from below to set it in motion; or * the water is guided above the wheel – usually through a so-called "mill channel" – and falls onto the blades. This design utilizes natural gravity to achieve greater efficiency.

Stop for an ice cream or a coffee and enjoy

this road becomes flooded would avoid when on yellow 🟡 weather warning cause you might need a boat, but otherwise it's very pretty and worth a visit great pubs for food nearby and air BnB places

Gardens offer a superb view along Sidmouth beach. The clock tower within the gardens is perfect for great coffee, yummy cakes and even better sandwiches 😀

Connaught Gardens is a sheltered and in part walled garden of about 1.25 hectares, opened as a public park in 1934 and featuring mixed borders and municipal bedding. Rare and tender plants are also featured. Until the late C18, Sidmouth was a small fishing village at the mouth of the River Sid. In 1792 the lord of the manor, Thomas Jenkins, commissioned the architect Michael Novosielski, who had worked in London as a developer and theatre designer, to build Fortfield Terrace, a seafront crescent which was intended to provide accommodation for fashionable visitors; the scheme was never fully realised (Cherry and Pevsner 1989). By 1796 the Copper Plate Magazine commented that, 'the town is of late tolerably frequented in the bathing season', and a group of cottages ornés was constructed around the edge of the old town in the first two decades of the C19. These cottages were illustrated in Butcher and Haseler's Sidmouth Scenery published in 1816-17, and a collection of lithographs published by Rowe in 1826. A grand public mall 'railed and rolled in very good style' existed adjacent to the beach by 1810 (Cherry and Pevsner 1989), and in 1835-8 The Esplanade was constructed to designs by G H Julian. During the C19 the resort developed slowly, partly constrained by its location between cliffs to east and west and partly by the absence of the railway, which arrived only in 1874. Modest development continued into the early C20, with the resort generally catering for older visitors. In about 1820, Emmanuel Lousada of Peak House, Sidmouth, constructed a detached marine villa known as Cliff Cottage on a headland west of The Esplanade, overlooking Chit Rocks; this headland is shown on a panorama of Sidmouth painted by Hubert Cornish in 1814 (Sidmouth Museum). This house was occupied in the 1830s by the Kent family, who were followed by a succession of private owners, the last, Mr Jemmett, being eccentric and reclusive (Creeke 1992). The property, which from the late C19 was known as Sea View, was placed on the market in 1930; it was bought by Sidmouth Urban District Council for £3500 in order to create public gardens. The house, which was found to be in a dilapidated condition, was demolished, and some of its walls were incorporated into the layout for the public gardens. These were designed by the Gardens Department of Dartington Hall Ltd, which was based at Dartington Hall, Devon (qv). An illustrated publicity brochure published by the Dartington Gardens Department in 1935 (private collection) notes that it was responsible for the design, construction, and planting of the gardens. The gardens were opened on 3 November 1934 by Field Marshal HRH the Duke of Connaught, in whose honour they were named.

A very beautiful cycle route along the Exe

A beautiful area and great for cycling right on the Exe