A small village in mid Devon, England, about four miles from the nearest market town, Crediton. There are records of the village under various names as far back as 1242 when it was known as Ioweford, but it really seems to have sprung to life after 1854 when the Tarka line railway was built, bringing the railway station, the village's only pub - the Mare and Foal - and a few cottages. Church services used to be held in the railway station until the tiny Holy Trinity church was built in 1891.

Despite a couple of mishaps, especially when its wooden steeple was blown down, the church is still in use today. Its centenary celebrations were notable for the construction of a set of new stained glass windows by the children of Yeoford Primary School. About 20 of us were cutting coloured glass and wielding welding irons at the ages of 10 or 11, and the results can still be found in the back wall of the church. (A small religious crisis was narrowly averted when someone noticed just before the glass was to be cut that the designer of one of the windows had sketched out a six-pointed Star of David by mistake).

The primary school was built in 1877, when girls and boys were taught separately and played separately, which can still be seen by the presence of a boys' gate and a girls' gate to the playground, though the wall that used to go down the middle was torn down long ago and only the boys' gate is still used now. The playground leads uphill to a playing field where maypole dancing (I'm not sure whether this has survived recent health and safety regulations), traditional broomstick dancing and summer fayres took place not so long ago, and I believe that the summer fayres still do.

Further down the road from the school is the village hall (home of youth clubs, school discos, jumble sales and mysterious Women's Institute activities), and at the bottom of the hill is a tiny humpback bridge over the River Troney, a little streamlet or even just a collection of pools in summer but a racing torrent in winter when it often rises a couple of metres and bursts its banks, blocking the road and generally causing chaos.

A little further along, the bridges over the railway and the River Yeo are the ideal place to be at sunset on a fine day, looking out west towards the next village, Colebrooke. Where Yeoford lies in the valley, Colebrooke is on a hill about three miles away, and its church (many centuries older and more picturesque than Yeoford's) silhouetted against the sunset with the fields and the railway in the foreground is little short of idyllic.

And beyond Yeoford, the world. More specifically, in one direction lies Crediton and further on the lovely city of Exeter. In the other, wild and beautiful Dartmoor.

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