From the North Foreland to Penzance

by Clive Holland

Torquay is so charmingly situated, and presents, as one passes London Bridge, and enters the harbour, such a beautiful picture of tree-clad heights and foliage amid which the picturesque-looking villas are embosomed, that it is little wonder the town has been popular with both holiday folk and yachtsmen for many years, and has been often likened to towns on the Italian Riviera, and by the great Napoleon himself to Porto Ferrajo, Elba.

The harbour is a good one, and of considerable size, and in summer time there are many white-winged craft within its basin which can lie snug enough in any save strong easterly or southerly gales, when a nasty sea outside makes an uncomfortable swell within.

From a beautiful watercolour drawing by David Cox (reproduced as a print at the end of the eighteenth century) one is able to see that even then the wooded heights above Meadfoot Sands and the present harbour and the lovely coves along that favoured shore from Daddy’s Hole to Hope’s Nose were being gradually dotted over with houses and villas set picturesquely amid the green.

It is claimed for Torquay that it is not only singularly beautiful (which is best and most speedily realized by those who approach it from the sea) but that it is favoured by so equable a climate that it is difficult to say positively when the town is seen at its best. Those, indeed, who, like ourselves, have visited it at various seasons of the year, cannot easily decide which is the most pleasant and beautiful. Whether in winter when a climate resembling that of Mentone for mildness ensures astonishing vegetation, and flowers almost unknown at that season at other similar towns on the south coast; in spring, when the hills take on the tender green of oaks, beeches, and birches to supplement by their beauty the “evergreens” which have done so much to make the scene charming throughout the winter months, and when spring flowers gem the hillsides, meadows and lanes with blossom; in summer when the sky is deep blue, and the waters of Torbay scarcely less so, and the red-sailed trawlers out of Brixham show up blots of colour in contrast to the white-winged yachts which come into the bay from the east, and south, and west, “things instinct with life upon a painted sea,” and ashore all is sunlight and brightness; or in autumn when the sea takes on more sombre hues, but the hillsides, bright with the exquisite dying tints which blaze forth from the branches of oaks, beeches, chestnuts, sycamores, copper beeches, and elms, and the creepers on the houses, supply a yet more vivid note of crimson, gold, and brown. It was doubtless of this wealth of beauty in each succeeding season that caused a great writer to say, “of all places on the coast of England I would, if condemned to pass my days in one spot, choose Torquay.”

From the deck of a yacht in harbour many, though truly not all, of its attractions are speedily obvious, and a short time ashore reveals most of the rest. On all hands, when once the commercial part of the town is left behind, one is charmed by shady roads, pretty gardens and equally delightful vistas (not alone from Chapel Hill and other well-known vantage points) which appear on almost every hand.

Anciently, Torquay formed one of the most important manors into which in those days the district round about was divided. The manor was known as that of Tor or Torre, and the earliest direct reference to it is found in Domesday. At the time of the Conquest it was bestowed by William of Normandy upon one Richard de Brewire or Brewer, whose descendant, William, Lord Brewer, in 1195, bestowed a portion of the manor on the Church, and founded the monastery afterwards to become famous, and known as Tor Abbey, the ruins of which, set amid fine avenues of elms, chestnut, and limes, look out over the green and gently sloping fields once forming the Abbey grounds, and lead down to the seashore. The Manor ultimately passed into the possession of the Mohuns by the marriage of Lord Brewer’s daughter Alicia with Lord Mohun.

The Abbey, on account of other grants of land made to it by pious benefactors, as the years sped by ultimately became the wealthiest of all the Premonstratensian monasteries in England, which Order had been founded in Picardy in 1120 by Norbert (afterwards canonized by Gregory XIII in 1584).

It was not only—as were most of the religious foundations in the Middle Ages—the centre of the ecclesiastical, but also of the social and industrial life of the district round about. The chief rules of the Order related to the leading of a pure and contemplative life, and provided that the monks should themselves labour for the common weal. This Order of Premonstratensians, also known as the Norbertines, was noted for its industry, and for the fact that the brethren were skilful cultivators of the soil. Those at Tor Abbey were evidently no exception to the rule, as their wide and perfectly cultivated lands of the past bore witness; they are also generally supposed to have been the founders and promoters of the woollen industry, for which the West of England was afterwards destined to become famous. In addition to the many duties of their Order they undertook the teaching of the children, and were always generous patrons of art and learning. Some of the most saintly and wise of men in the Middle Ages in England sprang from the Premonstratensians, who were noted for their boundless charity and good works.

It was from the civil community which gathered round the Abbey, and the people who built their homes within the shadow of its patronage and protection that the beginnings of what is now known as Torquay undoubtedly sprang. These spread first along the shore to the north-eastward, as fishermen came and settled down here and built their dwellings, and a small trade with other villages along the coast was gradually built up.

The history of Tor Abbey, though interesting as reflecting the life of those far-off times, was comparatively uneventful. It was chiefly made up of the coming and going of travellers, occasional alarms of possible marauders, and the simple pleasures and events of life and death. It need not, therefore, detain the general chronicler. About 1540 the Abbey shared the fate of all other institutions of the kind, when King Henry VIII brought about the Dissolution of the religious houses, and it probably deserved its hard fate much less than many of its neighbours. The King promptly granted the fair lands—he had stripped the building of its possessions, sacramental vessels, and doubtless the much revered altar cloth made of the famous “cloth of gold”—to his favourite, John St Leger, from whose family it passed in time once more into that of the Mohuns. Finally, in 1653, it was sub-divided into two portions. The Abbey domain went to Sir John Stowell, by sale, who resold it to Sir George Cary in 1664, in the possession of whose family it remains. The Manor of Tormoham passed into the hands of the Earls of Donegal by marriage, but was sold a little more than a century later to Sir Robert Palk, an ancestor of Lord Haldon, whose family continued to own it until recently.