Top 7 Natural Monuments around Gittisham

Stop for an ice cream or a coffee and enjoy

This enchanting woodland on the slopes of Fire Beacon Hill is filled with gnarled trees and twisted branches creating a mystical atmosphere.

Gardens offer a superb view along Sidmouth beach. The clock tower within the gardens is perfect for great coffee, yummy cakes and even better sandwiches 😀

Connaught Gardens is a sheltered and in part walled garden of about 1.25 hectares, opened as a public park in 1934 and featuring mixed borders and municipal bedding. Rare and tender plants are also featured. Until the late C18, Sidmouth was a small fishing village at the mouth of the River Sid. In 1792 the lord of the manor, Thomas Jenkins, commissioned the architect Michael Novosielski, who had worked in London as a developer and theatre designer, to build Fortfield Terrace, a seafront crescent which was intended to provide accommodation for fashionable visitors; the scheme was never fully realised (Cherry and Pevsner 1989). By 1796 the Copper Plate Magazine commented that, 'the town is of late tolerably frequented in the bathing season', and a group of cottages ornés was constructed around the edge of the old town in the first two decades of the C19. These cottages were illustrated in Butcher and Haseler's Sidmouth Scenery published in 1816-17, and a collection of lithographs published by Rowe in 1826. A grand public mall 'railed and rolled in very good style' existed adjacent to the beach by 1810 (Cherry and Pevsner 1989), and in 1835-8 The Esplanade was constructed to designs by G H Julian. During the C19 the resort developed slowly, partly constrained by its location between cliffs to east and west and partly by the absence of the railway, which arrived only in 1874. Modest development continued into the early C20, with the resort generally catering for older visitors. In about 1820, Emmanuel Lousada of Peak House, Sidmouth, constructed a detached marine villa known as Cliff Cottage on a headland west of The Esplanade, overlooking Chit Rocks; this headland is shown on a panorama of Sidmouth painted by Hubert Cornish in 1814 (Sidmouth Museum). This house was occupied in the 1830s by the Kent family, who were followed by a succession of private owners, the last, Mr Jemmett, being eccentric and reclusive (Creeke 1992). The property, which from the late C19 was known as Sea View, was placed on the market in 1930; it was bought by Sidmouth Urban District Council for £3500 in order to create public gardens. The house, which was found to be in a dilapidated condition, was demolished, and some of its walls were incorporated into the layout for the public gardens. These were designed by the Gardens Department of Dartington Hall Ltd, which was based at Dartington Hall, Devon (qv). An illustrated publicity brochure published by the Dartington Gardens Department in 1935 (private collection) notes that it was responsible for the design, construction, and planting of the gardens. The gardens were opened on 3 November 1934 by Field Marshal HRH the Duke of Connaught, in whose honour they were named.

Beer Quarry Caves are former underground limestone quarries near Beer in the county of Devon on the English Channel coast. The village of Beer is about two kilometers west of Seaton and 13 kilometers east of Sidmouth. The caves can only be visited with a guide. Entrance fee 11 pounds. Afterwards, it is worth taking a walk through the village of Beer and having a coffee or tea on the beach.

Jacob's Ladder is the beach on the west side of Sidmouth and gets its name from the steep wooden steps leading down to the sand. At the top of the stairs is Connaught Gardens, a public park since 1924.

On top of a cliff on Sidmouth's western edge are the Connaught Gardens with a tearoom and a white staircase to the beach, the Jacob's Ladder. It is a wonderful place to enjoy a coffee with carrot cake.

Beer Quarry Caves is a man-made limestone underground complex located about a mile west of the village of Beer, Devon, and the main source in England for beer stone. The tunnels resulted from 2,000 years of quarrying beer stone, which was particularly favoured for cathedral and church features such as door and window surrounds because of its colour and workability for carving. Stone from the quarry was used in the construction of several of southern England's ancient cathedrals and a number of other important buildings as well as for many town and village churches, and for some buildings in the United States.