St Mark's Church

The moment you step inside St Mark's Church near Exeter, you're struck by how quietly it sits in the Devon landscape. It's a proper parish church - medieval bones with the kind of weathered charm that comes from centuries of Sunday services and village life. The stonework tells its own story if you're willing to look: carved details, old gravestones, the sort of thing that gets under your skin if you're into architecture or local history.

What you get here depends entirely on what you're after. If you're a church tourist ticking off Perpendicular Gothic windows or hunting medieval fonts, you'll find the usual things done well enough. Walk around the churchyard and you'll see graves dating back generations - proper village history laid out in stone. The interior has that particular quiet that only old churches manage, the kind where you can actually think.

It won't keep you for hours. Plan on thirty to forty-five minutes, maybe longer if you're thorough about reading every plaque. There's no café, no visitor centre nonsense, just a church that's been doing its job for about seven hundred years.

If you're based at Devon Heaven Hideaways - the glamping spots just five miles away - this makes a gentle morning outing before heading back for the hot tubs. It's the sort of thing that works perfectly alongside a quieter holiday in Devon, somewhere to slow down rather than rush through. Free admission, naturally, though you might want to pop something in the collection box.