It is located within the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, overlooking Lyme Bay.

The manufacture of flints for early guns and the cooking of limestone to make fertiliser were short-lived but important local enterprises in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Aethelweard (c.880-922), the youngest son of King Alfred the Great and his wife Ealhswith whom he married in 868, inherited Branscombe by his father's will of 899, a copy of which is now in the British Library.

The village straggles along narrow roads down steep-sided valleys, terminating at a shingle beach, Branscombe Mouth, which forms part of the East Devon and Dorset Jurassic Coast.

There are two public houses in the parish, the Fountain Head and the Mason's Arms, both of which were included in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide 2008.

July 2013 saw the inaugural Branscombe Music Festival, hosted by BBC Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawny.

Performers included the Carducci String Quartet, Philip Higham (cello), Ailyn Pérez and Stephen Costello with Iain Burnside (piano), the Leo Green Experience jazz band and the Trelights Brass Quintet.