After having a Cornish Pasty in Cornwall, the next logical step was to have a Devonshire Cream Tea in Devon.

The only thing standing in our way was time. We’d already driven all the way from St Ives, I needed to be at Exeter Central train station by 4pm, and we still had all of the Dartmoor National Park to cross.

We stopped at Tavistock for some local advice on which roads a caravan shouldn’t attempt (having learnt through recent experience not just to rely on our TomTom). There wasn’t time for a cream tea there. In fact, it was the tourist information officer himself telling us to hurry or we wouldn’t make the train.

So we drove on through Dartmoor National Park. It’s a rather bleak place, kind of like Desert Road in New Zealand, but without the mountains. Just openness and scrub, and sheep with spray-painted markings who sometimes choose to lie in the middle of the road.

In Princetown, there was a prison but no obvious sign of cream teas on the the road through town. In Postbridge, we stopped and parked, but we could only find a place which sold ‘takeaway cream teas’, which we thought might detract from the experience somewhat.

We continued driving, and as we did, I saw a small sign advertising a castle where you could have cream tea on the ’south-facing terrace’. Of course, by the time I told Dad, we’d already driven past. So he pulled into a small lane, turned around, and back we went. The path to the castle was through a golf course. Through stone gates, and we arrived at a large manor house. The carpark obviously wasn’t intended for caravans, and we were all feeling a bit scruffy after two days of travel – so it was back through the golf course, and back on the road.

We finally found our cream teas in the little village of Moretonhampstead. The epic struggle over many miles faded from our memories as we were presented with individual pots of tea, strawberry and raspberry jam and clotted cream. Yum.

Tash