Clovelly is located within Torridge local authority area. Historically it formed part of Hartland Hundred. It falls within Hartland Deanery for ecclesiastical purposes. The Deaneries are used to arrange the typescript Church Notes of B.F.Cresswell which are held in the Westcountry Studies Library. The population was 714 in 1801 621 in 1901 . Figures for other years are available on the local studies website. In the valuation of 1334 it was assessed at £03/05/00. The lay subsidy of 1524 valued the community at £05/10/02. In 1641/2 83 adult males signed the Protestation returns. A market is recorded from 14 cent..

A parish history file is held in Bideford Library. You can look for other material on the community by using the place search on the main local studies database. Further historical information is also available on the Genuki website.

Maps: The image below is of the Clovelly area on Donn's one inch to the mile survey of 1765.

On the County Series Ordnance Survey mapping the area is to be found on 1:2,500 sheet 17/12,18/9 Six inch (1:10560) sheet 17SE,18SW
The National Grid reference for the centre of the area is SS318248. On the post 1945 National Grid Ordnance Survey mapping the sheets are: 1:10,000 (six inch to a mile: sheet SS32SW, 1:25,000 mapping: sheet Explorer 126, Landranger (1:50,000) mapping: sheet 190. Geological sheet 292 also covers the area.

Illustrations: The image below is of Clovelly as included in the Library's Etched on Devon's memory website. Other images can be searched for on the local studies catalogue.

Extract from Devon by W.G.Hoskins (1954), included by kind permission of the copyright holder:

CLOVELLY is one of the most notable of the many" beauty spots" in Devon. On either side there are tremendous hanging cliffs, with long and thickly wooded slopes; and the village street-so steep that it is stepped for the greater part-occupies the bed of an old watercourse, a mere cleft in this formidable coast. Seven generations of the Carys lived at Clovelly, from Robert (c. 1457-1540) to Robert (1697-1724), who died childless. It was George Gary (1543-1601), a Middle Temple lawyer and sheriff of Devon in 1587, who really created the village by building the massive stone pier we see to-day, so making the only safe harbour between Appledore and Boscastle in Cornwall (plate 58).

Until the middle of the 19th century Clovelly remained quite unknown to the outside world. In 1855 Charles Kingsley, whose father was rector here 1830-6, published his Westward Ho!, in which Clovelly and the Carys figured much. Then Dickens wrote of it in A Message from the Sea (1860), and it became known. Soon there were "artists and dustbins in every corner." Its subsequent history as a "tourist centre" has already been given in Part I. Clovelly Court, situated above the village, was built c. 1740 by Zachary Hamlyn, who had bought the manor from the Carys. It was remodelled c. 1790-5 to make what Baring-Gould called "the present absurd Cockney Gothic erection," but it still contains a core of the Tudor house. Sir James Hamlyn landscaped the coast E. of the village before his death in 1829, making the 3 m. Hobby Drive, which is deservedly famous.

Clovelly church (All Saints) is somewhat restored but still very attractive. It is almost entirely 15th early 16th century in date, with a Norman font, and 17th century benches and pulpit. The latter was given by William Carr in 1634, to whom there is a mural monument in the chancel. He is the Will Carr of Westward Ho!; the youthful Kingsley must often have gazed at this memorial. There is a good series of 17th century mural monuments to the Carys and later monuments to the Hamlyns, besides floor slabs to the earlier Carys. Some of the windows are by Kempe and Comper. Clovelly Dykes, on the plateau behind the coast, is one of the largest and most impressive Early Iron Age hill-forts in Devon. It is a complex series of earthworks covering more than twenty acres.