A Designation History - East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural ...

oundary included the resort of Budleigh Salterton, and the secluded
coombe and picturesque village of Branscombe. Inland the boundary
extended as far north as the edges of the towns of Honiton and
Axminster, and encompassed much of the typical Devon pastoral and
wooded landscape of hills and vales, and largely unspoilt villages.
The designation process had, in effect, started in June 1956, when
Brigadier Acland, a local resident and a National Parks Commissioner,
had successfully urged his fellow Commissioners to pursue the
possibility of designating East Devon as an AONB at the same time as
the similar proposals for North and South Devon. The proposal was
first considered as the Devon section of the much larger Blackdown
Hills and Sidmouth Bay Hobhouse Conservation Area, but by 1960, with
the stated opposition of the two County Councils, Somerset and Devon,
to an extensive designation covering the Blackdown Hills, the NPC
confined the proposal to East Devon, leaving the Blackdown Hills as
unfinished business. (Indeed the Blackdown Hills were not formally
considered as an AONB until 1982, when the NPC’s successor, the
Countryside Commission, started preliminary work on the designation,
with the AONB eventually being confirmed by the Secretary of State
for the Environment in 1991.) From 1960 onwards the designation of
East Devon progressed with the support of all the local authorities, apart
from Honiton RDC, to the eventual confirmation of the Designation
Order in September 1963. The designation process had taken over
seven years, two years longer than the process for the two other mainly
coastal AONBs, North and South Devon.