The landscape round The Secular Retreat is spectacularly beautiful with long views out from an eyrie of Scots pines north for twenty miles or so of fields and farmland towards Dartmoor, of which one gets no sense driving through deeply banked, narrow lanes, and west across a wooded valley towards Salcombe, with the sea invisible not far to the south.

This is where The Retreat sits, high up on a hill above Chivelstone:-

And the views from it:-

And as dusk comes:-