Honiton's Place on the Exeter to Plymouth Turnpike

The old coaching road between Exeter and Plymouth once carried the lifeblood of Georgian and Victorian England. Honiton, a market town famed for lace, pottery and antique shops, sat almost halfway along this artery, and the turnpike era shaped its streetscape, economy and rhythm for over a century. The story is not simply about engineering milestones, but about how a small Devon town became a necessary pause for travellers, horses, mail coaches and merchants.

For visitors arriving from Australia, the very idea of a turnpike can feel curiously familiar. Australian settlers built their own network of toll roads in the nineteenth century, and anyone who has driven the old Pacific Highway from Sydney to Brisbane, or the inland route from Melbourne to Adelaide, will recognise the pattern: long distances, simple inns at regular intervals, and small towns that grew wealthy on the traffic passing through. Honiton played exactly that role on the Exeter to Plymouth turnpike, and the traces of that period still define the approach to the town.

The turnpike system was a pragmatic response to roads that had become almost impassable in winter. Local trusts were granted powers to collect tolls at gates along a route, and in return they kept the surface usable all year round. The Exeter to Plymouth road was one of the most heavily used in the West Country, and the stretch through Honiton was among the earliest to be upgraded, because the alternative routes over the hills were too steep and boggy for the coaches that connected the Admiralty dockyards and the merchant houses at either end.

Before the turnpike, the road from Exeter to Plymouth followed a tortuous line that hugged the contours of the land and was often reduced to a muddy track in winter. Once the trust took responsibility, the route was straightened, levelled and causewayed across low-lying ground. Those improvements made Honiton a town that travellers reached on schedule, and that reliability mattered enormously to the mail coaches, post horses and private carriages that used the road every day.

The Birth of the Exeter to Plymouth Turnpike

The turnpike trust for the main road from Exeter to Plymouth was established by an Act of Parliament in 1753, bringing together landowners, merchants and magistrates who were tired of seeing commerce stalled by bad surfaces. The remit was simple: collect tolls from road users, and spend the income on raising the causeway, clearing ditches and laying stone. Similar trusts were soon set up across Devon, but the Exeter to Plymouth route remained the most significant, because it linked two of the most important towns in the West Country.

For Australian readers, the language of turnpike trusts will ring a bell. The first toll roads in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia were set up under similar principles, and the old toll house at Parramatta, or the surviving gate lodge on the Mount Alexander Road near Castlemaine, tell the same story of communities pooling resources to build a reliable road. The Devon trust, like its Australian counterparts, was a private body answerable to its shareholders.

The tolls themselves were modest but specific. A coach with four horses paid a higher rate than a light gig, and drovers paid per head of cattle. The trust published its accounts regularly, and the records from the Honiton stretch show a steady flow of income throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That money paid for the gang of roadmen who worked the section, the surveyors who checked the surface, and the gatekeepers who manned the toll bars on the edge of the town.

Honiton's Strategic Position on the Route

Honiton's location made it indispensable to the trust. It lay where the road from Exeter began to climb towards the Blackdown Hills, and it also marked the junction where travellers heading to the Jurassic Coast at Sidmouth could turn south. Inns, stables, blacksmiths and farriers clustered around the High Street, and the town was ideally placed to offer a midday meal, a change of horses, or a stop between the cathedral city and the naval port.

Travellers from Australia may well appreciate how this mirrors their own road networks. A trip from Sydney to Melbourne in the early days of the railways still relied on coach stops at Goulburn, Gundagai and Albury, just as a journey from Brisbane to the New South Wales border once depended on towns like Tenterfield and Glen Innes. Honiton occupied a similar place in the West Country hierarchy, which helps explain why the town developed such a strong identity as a stopover rather than a destination in its own right.

The geography of the surrounding land reinforced Honiton's position. The River Otter ran to the south, and the Blackdown Hills to the north meant that a coachmaster who ignored the town would face a steep climb with tired horses. By stopping at Honiton, the mail coach could change teams, take on water and let passengers stretch their legs, and still reach Exeter or Plymouth in good time. That practical advantage kept the town on the main route even when later turnpikes were built to bypass it.

Toll Houses, Milestones and Roadside Architecture

The physical remains of the turnpike era are still visible in and around Honiton, rewarding anyone who takes time to look closely. A handful of toll houses survive along the old A30 corridor, recognisable by their single-storey form and small windows facing the road. Milestones of the period are dotted along the route, their distances measured not from Exeter but from Honiton itself, showing the town's role as a reference point.

For visitors from Australia, the appeal of this kind of heritage landscape is well known. The old toll houses along the Hume Highway, the wooden mile posts that still appear on back roads in Tasmania, and the restored coaching inns of country Victoria all speak to the same pride in transport history. Honiton's milestones and toll houses are part of that same story, and they make a walking tour of the old route surprisingly evocative.

Architecturally, the inns of Honiton grew to meet the turnpike's demands. The largest establishments expanded their courtyards to take a dozen coaches at a time, and their stables accommodated teams of matched horses. The façades were rebuilt in the polite Georgian style that wealthy travellers expected, and the result is a High Street that still feels composed and orderly, even though most of the traffic has long since moved to the bypass.

Coaches, Commerce and the Rhythm of Daily Life

The coaches that used the Exeter to Plymouth turnpike were the lifelines of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Flying Machine, the Telegraph and the Royal Mail all passed through Honiton, and timetables were arranged so that passengers could make connections at either end. For local businesses, the arrival and departure of the coaches was a daily event that brought news, money and visitors, and the inns paid close attention to the published schedules.

Honiton's market thrived on the passing trade, and the town's reputation for lace and pottery grew because coaches paused there long enough for passengers to browse. Stalls near the inns sold local produce, and the High Street became a place where farmers, drovers, merchants and aristocrats all crossed paths. The market tradition that Honiton still celebrates, much like the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, is a direct continuation of that rhythm. Current listings of market days and antique fairs are kept on the Visit Honiton home page.

The turnpike also shaped the social calendar. Posting days, hiring fairs and seasonal markets were timed around the arrival of the coaches, and the local gentry arranged their engagements to travel to Exeter or Plymouth and return within a single day. The town became a stage on which West Country society performed its weekly routines, and that role gave Honiton a confidence and a public face that smaller settlements on the route never quite achieved.

Decline of the Turnpike and the Long Afterlife of the Road

The turnpike trusts of Devon were wound down in the 1870s and 1880s, as the railway network expanded and the new county authorities took responsibility for road maintenance. For Honiton, the arrival of the railway at the station on the eastern edge of town was both a liberation and a blow. It made travel faster and more comfortable, but it drew the coaching trade away from the High Street, and the great inns gradually lost their central role in the town's life.

The road itself did not disappear. The A30 and the A35 still trace the same alignment that the trust chose, and modern traffic uses cuttings and embankments first shaped by the turnpike engineers. Building a bypass in the late twentieth century moved through traffic away from the historic core, giving Honiton the chance to rediscover its earlier pace. A useful comparison for this kind of heritage work is the Les Cheires tourism portal, which takes a similar approach to a small French commune and emphasises walking routes, local produce and the layering of history over a single road.

The legacy of the turnpike is not confined to a museum case. It lives on in the milestones, the surviving toll houses, the names of local farms that once served the road, and the layout of the streets themselves. Visitors who want to understand the town properly should look at the approach roads before the centre, because it was the road that gave Honiton its shape and decided where the inns, stables and market stalls would stand.

Following the Old Route Today

Exploring the old Exeter to Plymouth turnpike from Honiton is straightforward, and there are several ways to do it. The simplest is to follow the modern A30 west out of the town and watch for the milestones and former toll sites on the verges. A more rewarding approach is to use the minor roads that run parallel to the main route, where the original line of the turnpike can still be traced as a hollow way or a track across a field.

Route option	Surface	Distance from Honiton	Heritage interest	Best for
A30 dual carriageway	Tarmac, fast traffic	Whole route west	Limited, but milestones visible	Short, quick journey
Old A30 parallel lanes	Tarmac, quieter	Full stretch to the border	Toll houses, milestones, inns	Heritage driving
Footpaths along old coaching track	Mixed, often uneven	Short sections	Highest, with original surfaces	Walkers and ramblers
Cycle route via minor lanes	Tarmac	Whole route	Toll houses, inns, views	Cyclists and day trippers

For Australian visitors, the experience of tracing a turnpike route will feel natural. Australian heritage trails, from the Old Great North Road in New South Wales to the bullock tracks of the Victorian goldfields, have a similar combination of road, camp and town, and Honiton fits neatly into that pattern. If you are planning to spend more than a day in the area, the Honiton peak season tips will help you time your visit around market days and museum openings, saving the frustration of arriving when smaller attractions are closed.

The old inns are still open for a meal, the antique shops are still arranged along the High Street, and the milestones are still waiting for anyone who knows where to look. Pack a notebook, give yourself a full morning on the parallel lanes, and let the old road do the rest of the storytelling.