Those who “know their Dart” will if possible leave this beautiful, sleepy old town, which is set so charmingly on the hillside amid rounded fertile uplands and many-tinted woods just before sunset. Then the passage back to Dartmouth down the river, from the brown water of the Dart to the gradually greening salt water of the estuary, is one of almost indescribable and unforgettable beauty. It lies past Sandridge where that intrepid explorer and much adventuring seaman John Davis was born; and Greenway, where Adrian and Humphrey Gilbert had their home. And then, just before reaching Dartmouth once more one passes the mid-river rock of sinister appearance and tradition, known as the Anchor, to which in former times scolding wives and disobedient daughters were ferried and left to encounter the rising tide, and (as we are told) if “when the water was up to their petticoats the same remained obdurate,” were left until obstinacy yielded to wholesome fear of a complete ducking, or worse.
As one leaves the interesting and lovely old town of Dartmouth, and drops the estuary astern, and approaches that long, low headland, Start Point, which lies eight miles to the south-west, one passes the stretch of white, sandy beach, near which took place that fierce fight of long ago between Du Chastel’s Bretons and the men and women of Dartmouth town. On these sands, too, had landed in the autumn of 1370, another adventurer, but of more noble kind, namely, the Earl of Warwick, the “King Maker.”
When once Start Point, with its lighthouse and lighthouse buildings hung upon the western side of the cliff two hundred feet in the air, and looking in the strong light as though cut out of ivory, has been left astern, one comes to the wild looking Prawle Point, with its signal station, and then into the estuary of Salcombe River, leading up to Kingsbridge of ancient renown.
Salcombe has been called “one of the prettiest havens in Devon,” and after a visit one is inclined to agree that the description is not unmerited. It is indeed a delightful spot, as yet largely unspoiled by “development”; picturesquely built beneath the shelter of well-wooded hills. These, clothed with verdure, form a remarkable contrast to the hills on the Portlemouth side which lie bare and open to the strong westerly and south-westerly gales which sweep up from the sea. This same Portlemouth is a straggling collection of ancient, grey-toned cottages, clinging to the sides of a steeply climbing road. In the churchyard is a tombstone to the memory of a farmer who was poisoned by his servant, which is interesting from the fact that the latter’s punishment of being burned at the stake is set forth upon the stone so that “all people warning take.” The girl was tried in 1782, and condemned to be first hanged and then burned; “which barbarous sentence was duly carried out at Exeter, and was the last instance in England of such a punishment being inflicted.”
Just before one reaches Salcombe, which nestles amidst its wealth of myrtles, Portugal laurels, Guelder roses, arbutus, orange and lemon trees, and sheltered even from the soft south wind by Lambury Point, one passes Fort Charles, one of the many isolated Royalist strongholds during the stirring times of the Civil War in the West Country.
Soon after the outbreak of hostilities this fort, which had been previously repaired and reclaimed from almost a state of ruin by Sir Edmund Fortescue “who was for the King,” was attacked by Colonel Weldon, Governor of Plymouth, “who approached with both horse and foot to the siege, and made a hell for four months of the little fisher town Salcombe.” That the place should have held out so long was a wonder, but the end was bound to come. Fort Charles capitulated, but Sir Edmund Fortescue was allowed to march out with his force with the honours of war, and to retain the keys of his castle. The latter, however, was dismantled (making the retention of the keys a somewhat empty form) and has never since been used or repaired. And thus fell the last place to hold out for the King in Devon.
Salcombe, with its narrow streets and ancient houses forming so great a contrast to the newer portions of the town and the villas dotted here and there amid the wealth of green upon its slopes, has an old-world atmosphere, and a picturesqueness which makes most who drop anchor in its fiord-like estuary reluctant to depart, and anxious to return again.
To lovers of English history Salcombe will always be a spot of fragrant and pleasant memory and pilgrimage, from the fact that it was here that the great historian James Anthony Froude lived for many years and did much of the work wherein “he clothed the story of stirring deeds and historic happenings, which had long since been dead, with flesh and blood so that it lives again in the minds and hearts of men.” Froude died here in 1894, and many pilgrims yearly make their way to the long, low house with a verandah running round it, and its casements opening out into the charming garden in which he loved to wander, and where Tennyson came to visit him. It was at Salcombe, too, that the poet received the inspiration for “Crossing the Bar,” whilst on Lord Brassey’s Sunbeam, and those who have slipped out of the estuary when the sun is dipping westward can appreciate the picture conjured up in the opening stanza:
Sunset and evening star:
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the Bar
When I put out to sea.
The tale of Salcombe as regards its former greatness and present-day comparative decay is similar to that of so many other little ports which we have visited and described. Leland refers to it in his Itinerary as a “fisher towne.” But anciently it was more than this. The records of the number of ships belonging to and trading with Salcombe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prove it to have then been a place of considerable importance. And in the middle of the former century the Customs returns amounted to a sum of about £5,000 per annum. In the latter half of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries Salcombe was a great smuggling place. Was not, indeed, the estuary made by Nature herself for such a purpose? And the smugglers, we are told, “gave much trouble to the riding officers and ‘preventive’ men of the coast from Dartmouth to Plymouth.”