‘People were furious when I started charging to visit my Devon village’

On the north Devon coast there’s a stunningly beautiful, authentic village frozen in time. But while England is not short of such places, the difference with Clovelly is that there are no cars, second home owners are banned – and you have to pay to enter.

Since 1983, the Clovelly estate, which has only been owned by three families since the 13th century, has been the home of the Hon John Rous.

At the centre of its 2,000 acres is an 80-cottage, car-free village on a 400-foot cliff, complete with visitor centre, car park and gift shop. The model is, as Rous puts it, an “estately village”.

Yes, there is a big house – Clovelly Court, where Rous lives with his family – but this is “not an architectural masterpiece, just a nice home”, and isn’t open to the public. Instead, it is the village that takes the lead.

And it is the fees – £9.50 for adults and £5.50 for children aged seven to 16, which includes entry to the gardens at Clovelly Court – that maintain the village.

At first, he admits, it didn’t go down well – the Western Daily Press declared it a “tax on tourists”.

“When I announced it everybody jumped up and down because everybody in England hates any change whatsoever,” he says. “The coach companies threatened to blackball us.”

He weathered the storm, and while people do still complain from time to time, he believes that it works well.

“It reinforces the connection between going to visit the village and contributing towards it staying unspoilt.”

Rous, 73, became the first male custodian of Clovelly in 120 years when he took over in the 1980s. A century earlier, his great-great-aunt Christine Hamlyn Fane inherited Clovelly after her only brother Nevile died. Back then, the houses were damp and small, and the village had been subject to a recent cholera outbreak.

Christine was the making of Clovelly – capitalising on its burgeoning tourism industry, she redeveloped the village for her tenants, renovating the houses, knocking the smallest together and building on others. Seeing how popular Clovelly had become by the turn of the century, she bought a patch of land at the top of the village on which she built a carpark, with some tin buildings with basic facilities in.

This car park was the beginning of Clovelly’s journey to becoming a fully paid-for attraction, and it proved popular – in 1936, the year of Christine’s death, nearly 50,000 cars and 3,600 charabancs used the car park.

After her death, the estate passed to Christine’s niece the Hon Betty Asquith, who in 1919 had married Arthur “Oc” Asquith, third son of former prime minister H H Asquith. Betty agented the estate, and when she died in 1962 it passed, agents intact, to her daughter Mary, who had married the Hon Keith Rous, later, for four days, 5th Earl of Stradbroke.

When Keith Stradbroke died in 1983, his son John, a chartered accountant by trade, inherited Clovelly and has run it himself ever since. He has two daughters with his wife, Zeenat, and when Clovelly next passes on “it will revert to type”, he says, and pass again to a woman, likely his eldest daughter, Maha, since “you can’t split it in two”.

It is slightly surreal to be talking to someone whose great-grandfather was H H Asquith, since somehow he seems too distant a figure for that to be possible. Even more extraordinarily, Rous says, is that his paternal great-grandfather, John Rous, 2nd Earl of Stradbroke, was born in 1794 and fought in the Peninsula campaign.

Today’s John Rous grew up close to his Asquith cousins, and to the adjacent Bonham Carter family. “My mother was delighted when Mark Bonham Carter became MP for Torrington in 1958,” he says. “I guess if I’d had a political affiliation at that time it was to the Liberals – and [the former Liberal leader] Jo Grimond married [Rous’ first cousin once removed] Laura Bonham Carter.”

But he feels as Rousian as he does Asquithian. “I have great respect for my Rous ancestors, as well as admiration for prime minister Asquith, and for my grandfather who won the DSO and two bars in the First World War.”

His second cousin is former MI6 Moscow station commander Raymond Asquith, 3rd Earl of Oxford and Asquith heads up that side of the family today, while Henham, the Stradbroke estate in Suffolk is run by his nephew Hektor, one of his half-brother Keith Rous, 6th Earl of Stradbroke’s 13 children.

Oc Asquith described Clovelly as a place where “life tastes of fresh milk and smells of hay”.

It is an extraordinary place – when Telegraph Money visits in the summer, the sun is out and it looks like an Instagram post.

Rous interviews all prospective tenants personally, all of whom must commit to living there full-time, since second homeowners are banned, as are cars, so residents use sledges to move things up and down the hill – the food shop included. Before sledges, donkeys were used for this purpose.

He warns them from the outset that the 150,000 visitors to Clovelly each year are “part and parcel of living here. If you love the sweep of the bay and if you’ve always wanted to live in a traffic-free zone, and next to the sea, but you can’t stand tourists, then it won’t work for you. They’re here every day”.

The landlord-tenant relationship is a close one; they call Rous, rather incongruously “JR”, which doesn’t quite suit him but which one suspects he secretly enjoys. One resident who has lived in Clovelly for most of her adult life says that he is like a father to many of them.

It really is a very nice place to visit, with a handful of businesses to peruse, from Clovelly Silk to the four-star Red Lion Hotel on the quay, to the Clovelly Soap Company in the Lower Yard. For visitors who don’t fancy the walk back up the cobbled hill, for a fee the estate runs a fleet of Land Rovers up the hill via the scenic route.

Still, it is a slightly unworldly place. It’s a bit like the Postman Pat village at Longleat, in Wiltshire – Clovelly has the same feel of being a kind of toy town. It’s a permanent showroom, albeit a very charming one; an estate doing what it must to survive in today’s world.