Eastward Bound - Devon and its roads

 

I'd arranged to meet an old friend from school in the North Devon village of Lifton. She was in Devon house hunting with her husband and it was too good an opportunity to turn down. Devon is England's second largest county, although in terms of size it obviously pales into insignificance when you compare it to Ontario or Quebec, but sometimes a journey across it can be quite convoluted, especially when you're trying to cross its interior. The big issue is the large chunk of granite that rises up between Plymouth and Exeter called Dartmoor, and it's that which causes straightforward trips to become quite awkward.  Trying to cross Dartmoor's wild and windy eminence can mean some pretty scary roads; not high mountain passes or deep valleys, but narrow and twisty roads that take a special kind of patience to deal with.

I'm no stranger to narrow and twisty roads in Devon; those highways that are only wide enough for one vehicle, and are bordered on both sides by eight-foot high hedges. Those roads where your wing-mirrors touch the hedges on both sides, and there's a strip of grass down the middle of the ashphalt. Those country lanes than can have you backing up for a quarter of mile as you meet a tractor coming your way. They are not fun, and I am not ashamed to admit that I'll avoid them if I can.

Our trip to Lifton, sadly, meant us going from one side of the moor to other. Thankfully, though, we have Google Maps.

Google offered me three practical routes. The first one was an east-west straight line across Dartmoor. I say straight line, but few roads are straight here. The time estimate was 1 hour and 5 minutes, but that was a wildly optimistic estimate in my opinion. A direct route maybe, but comprised of many miles of those roads. Those roads are very pretty to drive along, of course, but constantly wondering who or what is around the next bend does not make for a pleasant drive.

The second route offered was a run along the eastern edge of the moor, through the Dartmoor town of Moretonhampstead, on onward to the A30 at Whiddon Down, before a sharp left and a run on the semi-motorway that runs to the north of the moor. That route looked better, but earlier in the year we drove the Mortenhampstead route and I decided then that it was best avoided. It runs for miles as a virtually single-track road, despite it being a classified "B" road, and every corner hides a potential meeting between cars going in different directions. 

The third route looked a bit insane, if you ask me. It involved driving ten or more miles heading east in the wrong direction on the A38, going as far as Exeter, then doing an about turn and heading west to Okehampton on the A30. This route was almost all on the semi-motorway roads, which would mean faster speeds, and not having to creep along hoping that nothing was coming the other way. This third route was 56 miles long, as opposed to the 31 miles calculated for the direct route, and yet was ten minutes faster. This, dear reader, is the reality of driving in Devon, and why I chose to use the insane route in the end.

I will get to drive some of those roads while we're here; it's inevitable. But for pure comfort and peace of mind, I'm always going to opt for the better roads. Clearly I am not a true Devonian.