The Otter rises in the Blackdown Hills and runs quietly through east Devon's red-sandstone country — Honiton, Ottery St Mary, Otterton — before reaching the sea at Budleigh Salterton. It is a wild brown trout river of modest scale and modest pretensions: small fish, sober hatches, sparsely fished beats through woodland and water meadow. The Lower Otter Restoration Project, completed in 2023, returned the lowest reach to its natural tidal channel and the river now finishes in a proper estuary again. The famous reintroduced beavers — the River Otter Beaver Trial ran 2015–2020 and the population is now naturalised — are part of the modern character of the place; they have shaped some of the upper-river habitat in ways that have been good for fish as well as for the beavers themselves. Sea trout (peal) push up to the middle river from mid-June; salmon are rare and incidental.

• Sandstone