Past Berry Head, with its crown of golden gorse, its cave known as Ash Hole, supposed to have been the burial place of soldiers of Cæsar’s legions, and the house upon its lower slopes which, during the great French Wars with Napoleon, was used as a hospital, and was afterwards given to the poet Lyte by King William IV, one is soon in sight of the rugged pinnacle rock or islet known as the Mewstone, which stands like a sentinel on guard, just outside the entrance to the Dart. The scenery from Berry Head southward is of a very different character from that which distinguishes the coast from Sidmouth to Brixham. The calm loveliness of red cliffs, rich with vegetation, hung with creepers, thick with ferns, and gently fissured, is replaced by rock scenery which grows grander and more beautiful as it becomes more sombre and rugged, whilst in the background are the fertile heights of Devon sloping steeply to the cliffs and many groups of outlying rocks off shore, against which the emerald and indigo sea laps in summer and roars in winter.
As one draws in closer with the land, one is not slow to realize the popularity and importance of Dartmouth and the Dart estuary as a haven and as a port in the strenuous days of old. Even nowadays one might be within a mile or so of the entrance, and yet remain in ignorance of the existence of a town of any size, and only suspect it by the presence of vessels inward or outward bound. The Dart provided just such a quiet and secure haven as in the days when the Channel was infested with privateers and even less reputable craft was essential to the sea-going community of these shores.
Around the river which, rising in the centre of wild and lovely Dartmoor, then wandering across bogs, plains, and fertile valleys, and past picturesque towns and villages, finds ultimately so lovely an outlet into the sea, poets and novelists have woven their webs of song and fancy, whilst famous artists have recorded its wonderful charm and beauty upon their canvases. If not one of the most historic rivers of the British Isles, the Dart may yet claim to be one of those around which romance and imagination have been most closely entwined. One cannot talk to Devonians long without becoming aware of the high place that this changeful river holds in their affections. “It is the most personal stream I have ever known,” a well-known angler has said. “I have traversed it from almost its source to its end, where at Totnes the fresh water meets the salt after a course through moorland bogs, wide-spreading uplands, and valleys where its brownish waters come rushing and leaping down, and where shady pools, fit homes of silvery trout and salmon, tempt the angler to pause. Throughout its often turbulent course there is nothing monotonous; almost every inch of it is lovely in its own peculiar way. It is, indeed, a Queen of rivers, though the native mind ascribes to it the gender of the opposite sex.”
The first glimpse one has of Dartmouth when approaching it from the sea is the ancient castle of St Petrox standing opposite the ruins of its mate of long ago on the Kingswear side. Then one catches a vista—how charming whether in sunshine or when the mists of early morning hang grey-blue above the houses, and have yet to be dissipated by the sun’s rays—of the old town which lies almost hidden behind a green slope of land ending in a cliff. Past the ancient castle, built on the edge of the cliff and surrounded by the most delightful woods, where a picturesque old church seems as though almost about to fall into the water from its apparently perilous site on the very edge of the precipice, past villas nestling amid the trees, and rocky shores, past tiny coves, and slaty cliffs, bare except where trees, saplings, or ferns cling to make them beautiful, one comes at last on jade-coloured water, to the town, grey-looking and sheltered by high cliffs and downs behind it, built sheer up from the edge of the river itself.
There, amid lofty hills on either side of the widening river or the arm of the sea (whichever one pleases to call it) lies what has been described as “the most beautiful and fascinating town in all Devon.” Prince, the famous vicar of Berry Pomeroy, whose book, so full of the Devonian spirit, if somewhat bombastic and ill-balanced in style, may yet be read with profit by those to whom the history of the past of “the fighting, glorious county of Devon,” has an interest, describes it thus, and the description save for a few minor details holds good to-day. Dartmouth, he says, is “a large and populous town, situated on the southern side of a very steep hill, which runneth east to west at considerable length of near a mile, whereby the houses as you pass on the water seem pensile (pendent), and hang along in rows like gallipots in an apothecary’s shop; so high and steep is it that you go from the lower to the higher parts thereof by stairs, and from the bottom to the top requires no less than a hundred.”
Seen from the water near the Britannia the old town is indeed charming, with the picturesquely irregular and weathered roofs of the older houses rising tier upon tier, and the grey-blue smoke of chimneys hanging like a perpetual and kindly veil softening crudities of architecture and adding pictorial charm. There are many quaint houses, more especially those built by Hayman about 1634–1640, in the Butterwalk, with the huge, pointed gables and overhanging upper stories wedded to modern fronted shops, in which are displayed “Paris fashions” and up-to-date goods that at first seem out of character with such surroundings. There is, indeed, much of interest for the artist and antiquarian in Dartmouth streets and by-ways, just as at almost every turn ashore and on the surface of the beautiful land-locked harbour there is something to arrest the attention of the casual observer.
Much of the history of this ancient and interesting town is obscured by the mists of the ages which have passed since the first settlement was made upon the western shore of the lovely river. But we know that the waters “upon which Roman triremes and Danish galleys, and later huge captured galleons swung with the tide,” saw also the assembling together, at the close of the twelfth century, of the Crusaders’ fleet, which sailed the long voyage through the Bay to the Mediterranean to join Richard Cœur de Lion at Messina.
Two centuries later the adventurous spirit which has always animated the men of Devon in general, and of Dartmouth in particular, found vent in one of those predatory expeditions against the coasts of Normandy and Brittany for which the place was afterwards to gain so renowned a name. In the last year of the fourteenth century one John Hawley, deciding upon an “enterprise against those pestilent rogues the French,” chartered all the shipping of which Dartmouth could boast for this purpose, and in retaliation for the depredations of “the French pirates upon the coasts of Devon,” set sail for the shores of Normandy and Brittany. How successful this enterprising merchant’s little private naval war turned out may be judged from the fact that he and his captains, or they for him, captured thirty-four French ships with their cargoes amounting to 1,500 tuns of wine. It is little to be wondered at that after the return of the ships Dartmouth “ran red with the luscious wines of France, and that none need go dry so long as they would drink success to the bold men of the Dart and confusion to the French.”
Such expeditions as that of Hawley, however, were sure to have their counterpart in retaliatory descents by the French; and the history of the town—during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries especially—if written, would be one long story of daring and piratical adventures on the part of the men of the Dart, and surprises and alarms from the French, who on several occasions visited the town and plundered it.
Nature herself would appear, however, to have given some excuse for these piracies (for to call them aught else would be but the merest euphemism) in that she had provided a haven so admirably adapted not only as a base from which to set forth upon such expeditions, but also as a refuge which though so commodious could yet, on account of its narrow entrance, be easily defended. In the reign of Edward IV the burgesses entered into an agreement with their Royal master for the provision of a “stronge and mightye and defensyve new tower” (now known as Dartmouth Castle) from which a chain was to be stretched in time of need to one on the opposite, Kingswear, side of the harbour’s mouth, for the purpose of keeping out the King’s enemies, the French pirates, and other marauders, the King agreeing to pay the sum of £30 per annum for ever for this service, a large amount, when one considers the difference in the value of money then and now.