Dartington

Dartington is a parish in the South Hams of Devon, near Totnes, outside Dartmoor National Park. Wikipedia calls it a village and gives 876 residents in 2011, but the parish council says there never has been a village of Dartington: the manor was made up of scattered farms and hamlets such as Week, Cott, Venton and Allerton. The earliest record of the place is from 833.

Dartington Hall was built from 1388 for John Holland, Duke of Exeter, and the great hall dates from 1388 to 1400. The Champernowne family held the manor from 1554 for about 400 years. Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst bought the run-down estate in 1925 and began an experiment in rural reconstruction. It produced Dartington Hall School (1926 to 1987), Dartington College of Arts (1961 to 2010) and a music summer school that ran for over 70 years. The Dartington Hall Trust now runs the estate.

The Cott Inn, in the hamlet of Cott, is a thatched inn of medieval cob and stone, Grade II listed since 1952. Its Wikipedia page dates it to 1307 and the Dartington page to 1320, so the date is not settled. It stood on the packhorse route between Ashburton and Totnes.