Nowadays, Totnes has mellowed into a residential market town, enjoying an esoteric fame as a centre of the New Age crowd.

The town centres on the long main street that starts off as Fore Street, where the local museum occupies a four-storey Elizabethan house at no. 70. Showing how wealthy clothiers lived at the peak of Totnes's success, it is packed with domestic objects and furniture, and also has a room devoted to local mathematician Charles Babbage, whose "analytical engine" was the forerunner of the computer.

Fore Street becomes the High Street at the East Gate, a much retouched medieval arch. Beneath it, Rampart Walk trails off along the old city walls, curling round the fifteenth-century church of St Mary. Inside, an exquisitely carved roodscreen stretches across the full width of the red sandstone building. Behind the church, the eleventh-century Guildhall was originally the refectory and kitchen of a Benedictine priory. Granted to the city corporation in 1553, the building still houses the town's Council Chamber, which you can see together with the former jail cells and courtroom.