More Devon Today.
Also trying to find an AirBnB in the Bournemouth Poole
area for Day 75/76 is proving tricky. Either they had no vacancies or they
were for group occupancy and ran into hundreds of pounds for one night. Never
mind we will find somewhere suitable. Tonight at least, we are sorted staying
on a small holding near Axminster.
But first of all the little town of Salcombe: the busy, crowded, Chelsea and Kensington-on-sea little town of Salcombe. Oh dear.
I thought it was
sad enough in St. Ives but here was possibly worse. In Estate Agency windows it
was hard to find anything for sale under £1.5million. A tiny 2 up and 2 down
cottage in need of renovation was £480.000 In a part of the country where work
is seasonal how was a local supposed to be able to buy? Quite simply they
probably can’t. All we heard around us were
‘Hooray Henries’ and their Charlotte, Caroline and Emma wives braying about
what a bore it was that they couldn’t park their 4x4 in the high street and had
to use the car park like the rest of us. The clothes shops said it all really:
Musto, Joules, Cath Kidston, Crew..... there was even a boat park in the
harbour for the rubber boat yacht tenders.
It was extremely
pretty and there were flowers everywhere. Ros remembered it well as she did a
lot of capsizing there when she was learning to sail in the early days of her
yachting but she remembered it as it was then and not how it is now.
Although it still has an active shell fishing industry, its main income is
from tourism: leisure boating, paddle-boarding
and kayaking. Salcombe has numerous regattas during the summer that must bring
visitors in their droves. I wonder where they all park? It also has wonderful walking routes as it is
on the South West Coast path, something else Ros has done in the past.
Dartmouth was a much bigger town, lots of shops, narrow
streets and the ubiquitous fudge.
This one is a franchise and we could see why it was
popular. You could watch it being made on the premises.
Dartmouth lies at the mouth of the River Dart guarded by
600 year old Dartmouth Castle. Although
it is a narrow estuary it is a deep one and well sheltered because of that very
narrowness and the town has been home to
the Royal Navy since the days of Edward III.
It’s harbour has seen many famous
departures from England from the Crusades to more recent times when the
Americans left here for the d day landings in France during World War 2.
It still has a famous Naval college but today it welcomes
tourists to enjoy the town, the countryside and the river. There are still a
few old timbered buildings in the town.
We just caught sight of the Dartmouth stream train that
takes travellers along the shoreline towards Totnes to visit the home of the
crime writer Agatha Christie. The Greenway estate is where she lived and it is now managed by the National Trust
and the easiest way to get to it is via the ferry from Dittisham. I would like to have done that too but once
more we had to move onwards.
We should have found our AirBnB easily, and indeed to be
fair to Unruly Sat Nav she did take us past it no less than four times!
Trouble was our host, brand new to AirbnB assured us it was on the left hand
side of the road and we could not miss it. Well you could miss it is you were
travelling from any other direction!
It was a lovely house where we had a self contained
studio flat above a freestanding workshop with a wonderful view across their
orchards and into a field where they kept. When we arrived our host was trying
to dig out some moles and Ros revealed to my surprise that she was a bit of a
Mole Whisperer. She suggested that he catch it, bonk it lightly on the nose and
tell it firmly to go away and never come back.
It didn’t work. There were several fresh mole hills
clearly in evidence on the grass the following morning.
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