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Combe Martin

Beaches of DevonUse British English from June 2016Villages in Devon
Combe Martin Panorama
Combe Martin Panorama

Combe Martin is a village, civil parish and former manor on the North Devon coast about 4 miles (6.4 km) east of Ilfracombe. It is a small seaside resort with a sheltered cove on the northwest edge of the Exmoor National Park. Due to the narrowness of the valley, the village consists principally of one single long street which runs 2 miles (3.2 km) between the valley head and the sea. An electoral ward with the village name exists. The ward population at the 2011 census was 3,941.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Combe Martin (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Combe Martin
High Street, North Devon Combe Martin

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 51.2 ° E -4.025 °
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Address

High Street
EX34 0ED North Devon, Combe Martin
England, United Kingdom
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Combe Martin Panorama
Combe Martin Panorama
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Pack o' Cards
Pack o' Cards

The Pack o' Cards is a historic house built about 1690 in Combe Martin in North Devon. Today it is a public house and hotel. It is listed Grade II* on the National Heritage List for England.Located on the long High Street in Combe Martin, the building was constructed in about 1690 by local squire George Ley, who, it is said, celebrated his good luck at card games when, after winning a large sum of money, he built a house to represent a house of cards on a plot of land measuring 52 × 53 feet, representing the cards in a pack plus the joker. It has four floors representing the four suits, with 13 doors and fireplaces on each floor equaling the number of cards in each suit, and fifty-two stairs. Before the imposition of the window tax, the panes in all the windows added up to the total value of a pack of cards. Eventually the house passed out of the hands of the Ley family, but it is not certain when exactly the building became an inn. Records show that it was serving that function early in the 19th century, when in 1822 it was called the King's Arms Inn and a Jane Huxtable was the landlady. It was offered for sale in 1831 by the same name. The hotel is said to have been visited by the author Marie Corelli, who supposedly wrote part of her novel The Mighty Atom (1896) in the "Corelli Room" on the third floor, at a desk still preserved in her room. The inn was renamed the Pack o' Cards on 1 June 1933, but it had probably been known by that name for many years before that date. In spite of 20th-century alterations, much of the joinery and moulded cornices in the ground floor have survived. The first and second floors are largely original and untouched, with decorative plaster ceilings to the main first floor room in the left-hand wing and to the through-corridor. Both corridors are panelled, as is the central room on the third floor, where Marie Corelli is said to have stayed. All the principal rooms have moulded plaster cornices, while good quality panelled joinery survives throughout the building. Nikolaus Pevsner describes it as the only noteworthy building in the village, being "a rare folly, built on a cruciform plan with a towering display of symmetrically grouped chimneys, eight together". The hotel featured on The Paul Daniels Magic Show on BBC television in 1987. The Pack o' Cards remains an inn and has been a Grade II* listed building since 1953.

Hangman cliffs
Hangman cliffs

Hangman cliffs, consisting of Great Hangman and Little Hangman, are near Combe Martin on the north coast of Devon, England, where Exmoor meets the sea. Great Hangman, with its summit at grid reference SS601481, is 1,043 feet (318 m) high with a cliff face of 800 feet (244 m). It is the highest sea cliff in England and the highest point on the South West Coast Path. Little Hangman is 716 feet (218 m) high and overlooks the village of Combe Martin at the western boundary of Exmoor National Park. Both cliffs lie on the South West Coast Path and are in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The cliffs are formed from a considerable thickness of sandstone known as the Hangman Grits (or more formally the Hangman Sandstone Formation) laid down during the Devonian Period. They were subsequently folded during the Variscan Orogeny and the strata are seen locally to dip southwards at between 25 and 35 degrees. There is an abandoned working for iron ore below Great Hangman at Blackstone Point.No early forms of the place-name Hangman there are recorded: its first mention, as Hangman Hill, was in 1792. However, there is a fanciful derivation of the name, based on a local legend. The story goes that a sheep stealer was walking over the hill carrying a stolen ewe slung over his shoulder. He stopped to rest on a rock and the struggling sheep caused the cord tied around its legs to tighten and slip round the man's neck, strangling him. In all likelihood the name Hangman is a mixture of Celtic and Germanic languages. Mynydd in Welsh means "mountain" and hang is the Germanic word for "slope". There are other examples of hills being called man from Celtic origin, e.g. Old Man of Hoy or East/West Man in Purbeck. The literal translation for Hangman would be "sloping hill".In fiction, Great Hangman is part of the setting of Meet the Tiger, the first in a long series of novels by Leslie Charteris featuring "The Saint". Simon Templar stays on Great Hangman in an abandoned World War I pillbox so he can find out about a Chicago gangster staying in Baycombe aka Combe Martin.