[1] It is a small rural village 64 kilometres (40 mi) west of Launceston in northern Tasmania, Australia.

The town has a privately run wildlife park, a shop selling and making honey products, and a few other stores.

Lobster Rivulet, a tributary of the Mersey River, flows through the locality from west to east, where it forms part of the north-eastern boundary.

[6] The town is in the fertile Chudleigh Valley that is bounded by the Gog and Magog ranges, to the north, and the Great Western Tiers, to the south-west.

The fertile flats are of alluvial origin with Permian period sediments that have formed mudstone and sandstone.

The earliest archaeological evidence for Aboriginal habitation of Tasmania is from the valley of the Forth River, 35,000 years before the present.

[12] Prior to European settlement, Chudleigh was part of the lands of the Pallittorre Aboriginal tribe.

[13] The Pallittorre people lived in the area and used to have a camping ground, where the Church of England cemetery was established later.

[14] During the early 1820s the Van Diemen's Land Company created a track or stock route from Deloraine to Emu Bay (now Burnie) that ran via Chudleigh and Mole Creek.

The route enabled them to move grazing livestock from the higher rainfall areas in the west of Tasmania, to the population centres further east.

Vaughan sold the land in 1837 to Henry Reed, merchant, who was later briefly a member of the Tasmanian Legislative Council.

The town was laid out to hold a population of 5,000, as it was intended to be a railway junction on a line from Launceston to North West Tasmania.

[22] Dan Picket, an ex-convict who has been granted a ticket of leave, built the first hotel, the two-storey Chudleigh Inn, around 1850.

The school was extended in 1936 and remained in operation until closed, by the Tasmanian education department due to low student numbers, on 30 September 1965.

The Chudleigh Agricultural and Horticultural Society has run the show annually since, except for breaks from 1914 to 1928 and 1939–45 due to the two World Wars.

[29] Chudleigh's town hall was completed in 1895, and opened during a public event on 11 April that year.

It was funded by public subscription and built local builder Davis Brothers on donated land.

It was built as a 46 by 26 feet (14.0 by 7.9 m) weather board building set on stone foundations, with a corrugated iron roof.

[41] A small Salvation Army citadel, comprising a number of buildings, was established in Jones street in 1878.

[41] A Wesleyan chapel was built prior to 1877, around 4 to 5 miles (6.4 to 8.0 km) from Chudleigh, next to Lobster Rivulet.

[46] Throughout its existence, the line was primarily used to carry timber to the paper mill at Burnie and, in later days, woodchips to Bell Bay.

[38][47] Chudleigh serves as a service centre for the surrounding area, whose main industries involve farming and timber.

There is a shop producing and selling honey related products, a service station, general store,[19] There are a large number of roses planted in the main street as part of a beautification drive, begun in 2001, to make the town a "village of roses".

[49] At the south-east corner of the town, on the main road, is a restored building that was made for the Van Diemen's Land company in 1827–8 as a grain store.

[51] The main street has a surveyor's cottage that was built around 1840[5] The Chudleigh show, run by the Agricultural and Horticultural society, is held each February.

[53] Trowunna Wildlife Park is a 65-acre (26 ha) private sanctuary a short distance on the main road towards Mole Creek.

[58] Tasmania has an oceanic temperate climate characterised by cool summer and mild winters, with a small maximum temperature variation during the year.