They do not build ocean liners at Galmpton, but they have had for some seventy years past a very fine steady business in the building of trawlers for the Brixham and Lowestoft fisheries; and sometimes a smart sailing yacht leaves these sheds. Here, for example, as I write, a teak-built yacht of one hundred tons, to cost £4000 is on the stocks, and will leave Galmpton fully rigged. The average output of this yard is twelve trawlers a year, and it gives employment to between sixty and seventy men, who live mostly at Dittisham, taking boat to and from work each morning and evening.
Aish, that spot historic in connection with the landing of the Protestant Defender in 1688, is not so easily discovered by the stranger in these gates, and its very remoteness was its chief recommendation in the times when it became historic. It is reached most easily by breaking the steamboat trip up the Dart at Duncannon Quay, which is also the landing-place for Stoke Gabriel, tucked away in its own shy creek. Stoke Gabriel is the least visited and most primitive place on the Dart, and headquarters of the salmon-fishery; as the nets, drying on long poles, and the strange jerseyed and booted figures of the fisherfolk proclaim. With every tide the salt water comes to fill the picturesque creek of Stoke Gabriel and to make a mirror for the woods to view their own loveliness, and with every ebb it flows out again in a murmuring cascade over the rude weir built of mossy boulders. It hushes the children of the village to sleep at night, and fills the ears on summer days with a lazy purr.
A SALMON FISHER.
There is a good deal of Stoke Gabriel when you come to know it well. Particularly pretty is the little street of cottages leading up to the church, where the “Church House Inn” by its sign seems to indicate that it was originally one of those houses provided by the church for the accommodation of parishioners coming from some distance to attend service. Such houses were often kept by the parish clerk, who brewed the “church ales.” In the course of centuries the custom of clerical ale-brewing and keeping a “church-house” fell into disuse, and the house itself generally became a village inn. In this manner the singularly close neighbourhood of village churches and inns, often curiously commented upon, originated.
The church contains one rather pretty epitaph:
It is “To the memory of Mrs. Tamosin, wife of Peter Lyde, Deceased ye 25 of Febru. MDCLXIII,” and is inscribed upon a heart-shaped mural monument:—
“Long may thy name, as long as marble, last,
Beloved Tamosin, though under clods here cast.