North Bovey

North Bovey is a village and civil parish on the south-eastern edge of Dartmoor, near the River Bovey. It first appears in a list of rectors from 1279. The village took shape from the mid to late fifteenth century, with farmhouses and cottages loosely set round a green. The parish had about 600 people in 1850. The 2001 census recorded 274, down from 418 in 1901. In 1890 W H Smith bought the village from the Earl of Devon, and Bovey Castle nearby was built between 1905 and 1907.

A granite cross on the green was thrown down in the Civil War and found in a stream. It was retrieved and put up on the green in 1829. The church of St John the Baptist is granite. The chancel is from the original church, and most of the rest is fifteenth century. It has a fifteenth century rood screen and a roof boss of three hares with joined ears, the tinners' rabbits motif.

The Ring of Bells stands by the green. It began as a farmhouse, put by one source in the late fifteenth century and by two others in the thirteenth century. Its stables were used for breeding steeplechasers. The thatch caught fire in 2016, about 75 firefighters attended and the pub was rebuilt, reopening in July 2018 after two years closed. The sources differ on the month of the fire.

The parish takes in Bronze Age remains at Grimspound and the medieval Bennett's Cross, which marks a parish boundary. Longhouses survive at Lettaford and Westcombe.