... so reads a gnomic white placard nailed to a post in a field in north Devon, UK (writes Jim Alexander). You’ll find it at the head of a toll road leading through the grounds of the magnificently ruined Lee Abbey towards Lee Bay – the final edge of Exmoor, its bonelike humps of prehistoric rock sticking out into the Atlantic.

Rolling pastures slope down to a cleft in the land where the UK’s westernmost National Park (home to bands of roving ponies, wild stags and the legendary Exmoor Beast – locally believed to be some kind of panther) meets the sea: an honesty box sits stumpily outside the grand shell of the Abbey, trusting that travellers will deposit coins in its wooden mouth. There’s no indication anywhere of how much a person is expected to pay.

I recently overheard a conversation in which this sign figured prominently. The conversation took place between a bemused couple who’d gotten lost trying to find the chocolate-box tourist honeypots of Lynton and Lynmouth – paired ex-fishing villages connected by a funicular that sell cream teas for about a million quid in the summer. “If nothing happened there,” he asked her plaintively, “why put the sign up?” 

Because (the answer, though bubbling at the back of my throat, never found its way out) this is Devon. Not so much a county which time forgot as a place that chose to ignore the modern world. The sign isn’t even a subtle joke, but a statement of purpose. While the rest of the world rushes from A to B and back again, inventing, progressing, marking its passage with placards, monuments, buildings: Devon is sitting happily in a field, cogitating the sea and the sky and probably drinking cider. 

The attraction, of course, of Devon is its otherworldliness (think generally of a place that stopped developing about 90 years ago and you’re on the right track) – but with the flypaper of tourist destinations drawing thousands of socked-and-sandalled ramblers to gorge on clotted cream in predetermined destinations, no-one actually gets to experience it.

The golden sands of Woolacombe, for example, are wonderful, the homely fronts of Victorian buildings speckling the edges of walking country that takes in two stunning headlands and miles of glorious inlets: but when they’re covered with hundreds of determined trampers they might as well be Piccadilly Circus. In Devon, like everywhere, tourists go where they’re told.

That’s precisely antithetic to the real feel of the place, which disregards convention as a matter of course. You wouldn’t catch a Devonian doing what he or she was told for all the cream teas in the world.

Consider, for a moment, the things that do happen here. There’re the Devon Duck Trials, held at agriculturally-themed amusement park The Big Sheep – in which African Running Ducks (your guess is as good as mine) are rounded up by sheepdogs. Or the annual cider harvest, where people throw toast at trees. Then there’s my personal favourite:  the Gnome Reserve, the promotional literature for which features an astonished-looking child, surrounded by gnomes, exclaiming “I didn’t want to come here – but it’s great!” Which, of course, it is. Where else in the universe can you go to what is basically someone’s (very large) back garden/museum of china pixies, and be loaned gnome hats and fishing rods so as not to “embarrass” its inhabitants? The place is so weird it ought to be in Tokyo. 

The tourists round here don’t get this, and they don’t find it, any more than they get the sign. And they’re missing the point. What city sophisticate wants to watch a load of ducks (African Running Ducks, forsooth: there is of course no such thing, they’re common or garden farm ducks some crazy farmer has tried to jazz up to haul unsuspecting grockles off the road) being chased by a dog? They want the “real” Devon – cream teas and unspoiled coastline – and so they descend on it en masse, guidebooks waving, and bury the only places they’ll ever find under an antlike swarm of pinking skin and suncream. And they’re wrong. What more joyful experience could a tired city-dweller have, than watching a bunch of loopy locals unwind with a spot of competitive duck-herding? 

On this spot – 1st April 1780 – who knows what happened? Anything, probably. Fall in love with the hidden way of life and you’ll get it: the date, everything.  1st April, of course, is April Fool’s – the day when reality falls prey to the jester: and 1780 is fixed in the past, where Devon whiles away her time. Like the sign, you’ll drive past most of it; and like the bay, half-hidden behind the curve of a toll road that asks you for money without telling you how much, what you do see you may never understand.  But that’s the joy of travelling, right? 

In another trip, a whole lot hotter and half a world away, I met a man who carried a pack of calling cards in his wallet. The cards read:  “F*** Lonely Planet – I’d rather be lost”.  A little in-your-face, but the sentiment was valid. You can find these things. Throw your guidebook away, aim yourself at the sea, take the roads that look interesting. Lend out a gnome hat and a fishing rod. Live a little.

About the author

Jim Alexander is a writer and roadie who has been travelling Europe and the rest of the world for the last ten years. He currently calls a little village in Devon (UK) his home – for now, at least...