Lydford - when is a castle not a castle?

As you may have gathered, we love a good castle. As the afternoon sun finally began to challenge the drizzle and greyness we decided to round off our day on Dartmoor with a visit to a little Motte and Bailey style affair in the picturesque village of Lydford. 

Snuggling cosily in the stage coach route between Okehampton to the North and Tavistock to the south the collection of pretty stone cottages sits on the site of "Hlidan", an Anglo Saxon settlement founded by Alfred the Great as part of his fortifications against the Vilkings, who were ravaging his kingdom from the east, and the Cornish, who were lying in wait on the other side of the Tamar, presumably waiting to overwhelm the Devonian locals with savoury baked goods.

Just slightly north of the village is the rather beautiful Lydford Gorge, a natural feature cut into the rock by the force of the river Lyd. This steep sided river gorge sports a pretty spectacular thirty metre high waterfall and "The Devil's Cauldron", a deep pothole. I don't know any of this from personal experience, mind you, because the site is owned by The National Trust, who would have charged us £5.90 each for the privillage of having a quick look. Earlier in the day we might have forked out, but we were not that far from closing time and after a quick discussion we decided that it probably wasn't worth it.

After all, we are from Yorkshire, which means two things. First of all, the Yorkshire Dales are literally ten minutes from our front door, which means that if we want river gorges, incredibly high waterfalls and deep potholes, we don't have to go all the way to Dorset to find them. It also means that, as Yorkshire natives, we're as tight as the proverbial duck's arse and as a result  there was no way we were going to fork out the thick end of twelve quid to see something we could see closer to home for free.

So, we pulled a U turn quicker than a cabinet minister with an unpopular policy and headed back to Lydford proper, pulling in to the ample (and free) public car park opposite the pub. Because we're all high tech and cutting edge, (and because it was free - I mentioned that we were tight didn't I?)  I'd downloaded English Heritage's audio guide onto my 'phone (thanks to the free WIFI in the pub the day before - sometimes I bloody love living in the future) so we didn't cross the road to the castle immediately.

Instead the guide directed us to turn right out of the car park and down the road a bit to a little field on the right hand side of the road near the old post office. It's not an obvious landmark, and had the guide not directed us there we wouldn't even have noticed this unremarkable little patch of grass. Aside from a slight mound running through it seems to be completely featureless. That mound is important though - because it's the remains of Anglo Saxon defensive earthworks, which means it's a direct physical connection to the men and women who defended Alfred's kingdom of Wessex more than a thousand years ago.

An unimpressive bump in a field to some, perhaps, but to me it's basically time travel, and I love time travel!

Still, there is a limit to the amount of time even the most avid archaeology fan can spend looking at a bump in a field, so we turned ourselves around and ambled back towards the castle, which stands next to the pub on the northern edge of the village. The castle is administered and maintained by the fine folks at English Heritage, is free to enter and is open at all times. If you don't have the handy audio guide on your 'phone as we did, there are plenty of helpful display boards around the place. I'd recommend you watch your step, and probably don't go there in the dark - the hill that the castle stands on is smallish but reasonably steep, and the interior of the castle itself boasts steep staircases and some pretty hefty drops. 

As castles go, it's a reasonably modest affair - and this might well be because technically it isn't a castle at all. As I said at the top of the post, it looks like a pretty standard Motte and Bailey castle, a two storey square stone tower atop a small, steep hill. It seems to me rather likely that it's meant to look like that, but it is in reality something of an architectural fraud. It's certainly old - the castle we see today was built in the thirteenth century - but it wasn't  built as a castle, and it wasn't built on a hill.

The audio guide informs me that back when the structure was first put together it was in fact a three storey tower with the ground floor at what is now street level. The "hill" that the two visible storeys now appear to stand on was actually added later, basically by piling copious amounts of rubble and soil around the ground floor, so that the top of the mound effectively turned the first floor into the ground floor. It seems that at the time this was done, most of the former ground floor was filled in with rubble, leaving only a small "dungeon" type space. That rubble has now been cleared, and if you make your way down the steepish metal stairs and examine the walls you can clearly see where there used to be doors and windows.

For most of its active life this "castle" was a prison and courtroom, serving as an office of the royal Forest of Dartmoor, and also housed the "Stannery Court", which had jurisdiction over the Devonian tin mines, and the miners that worked in them. The Stannery Court made the place infamous for its ferociously hard line approach to "justice". The Lydford website gives this chilling example of the kind of punishment that could be meted out here:

" the penalty upon any miner found guilty of adulterating tin for fraudulent purposes was that three spoonfuls of molten tin should be poured down into his throat."

In other words, not just "death" but "really horrible and painful death".

The place was also used by the Royalists to imprison captured Parliamentarians during the Civil War. It's not all incarceration and misery, mind you. Lydford was also the site of a royal mint in Anglo Saxon times, and the silver "Lydford Pennies" were valid as currency throughout Wessex. Indeed, some of them made it to Scandinavia - perhaps pillaged by the very Viking Raiders that Alfred the Great founded Hlidan to defend against.*

We really liked Lydford and its castle. I suppose it helps that we visited the place in the sunny afternoon of what had been a pretty bleak and miserable day, but it really was a pretty little place, and it's always fun to have free reign of a "castle" - even a slightly fraudulent one. Should you find yourself on Dartmoor I'd recommend giving it a look. There's also a rather nice church that's also worth a look by all accounts, situated just next to the castle, and the earthworks of the original Anglo Saxon castle just on the other side of that.

Sadly we missed both of these landmarks because by the time we'd done with the castle it was starting to get a bit dark and we were keen to head back to the 'van. Maybe next time, eh?

*Oh, alright, it's equally possible that they were given as payment for goods the Vikings were trading - either way they have a rather nice collection of the little silver critters in the Stockholm museum...

Dartmoor part two: Stones and soaked feet.

There have been people on Dartmoor for about as long as there have been people on these islands, and old as it is, the prison at Princetown is far from being the earliest use the Moor's granite bones had been put to. Particularly ancient, and particularly prevalent are the stone circles that pepper the Moor's three hundred and sixty odd square miles. Indeed, fourteen of the sixteen such monuments to be found in the county of Devon reside on the moor - because the huge expanse of bleak, bog ridden moorland isn't eerie enough on its own, apparently.

As we left the Dartmoor Prison Museum we set off in search of one of them, turning left out of the Museum car park and heading for the B3357, the little hamlet of Merrivale and the collection of (probably) bronze age stones that bears the same name. We had directions from our trusty copy of the English Heritage guidebook, but I have to be honest, given that most of them lie within sight of the road they were devilish difficult to find.

In fact, we drove past them at least twice, and as the weather closed in (it was the summer of 2012, closing in was pretty much all the weather did) we pulled into the expansive car park at the top of Pork hill, a couple of miles to the west of the Merrivale hamlet and had lunch. We'd toyed with the idea of finding a pub somewhere, but in the end we'd packed a picnic, and spent a relaxing hour or so munching on sandwiches and cherry tomatoes, taking in the view - which was spectacular.

The Pork Hill carpark sits, unsurprisingly at the top of Pork Hill, a long steep hill that takes the B3357 down from the high moor on the way to Tavistock (or up onto the high moor coming out of Tavistock, if you're going the other way)and commands a view out over the Tamar valley - there's even a handy plaque to show you what it is you're looking at, which is helpful. There's a lot of history around this hilltop - with hut circles and disused tin mines within easy walking distance, as well as Pew Tor, allegedly the home of the Piskie King. There are, of course, also rumours of strange occult goings on - but you get those everywhere secluded spots are mixed with ancient sites and gullable people, so it doesn't do to take such things too seriously.

Indeed, for me the biggest mystery about the place is its name. I mean, "Pork Hill"? Seriously? I'm tempted to the straightforward conclusion that it has something to do with the buying and selling of pigs, but I know enough about places names to know that that's far too obvious. I'm going to hazard a guess that "Pork" doesn't relate to anything porcine related, but is in fact a corruption of a word from an ancient British language (this close to the Tamar, possibly Cornish?).

The truth is, I don't have a clue - and research so far has turned up not a drop of information on the subject. This is interesting in itself of course - after all, wherever there is a strange place name there is generally a huge body of bearded blokes and bespectacled intellectuals*doing all kinds of arcane research. Not here it seems. What can I say? I'll keep looking into it and get back to you.

As I said, it's a large (and free) car park blessed with spectacular views. It's also a starting point for several walks of various distance and difficulty to various points of interest - I guess you could walk to Merrivale from there if you were minded to. After a largeish lunch, however, we were minded to do no such thing, and so pointed the car back in an easterly direction along the B3357.

Having checked the directions again, and knowing that the stones we were looking for were only a mile east of the hamlet we kept our eyes skinned and this time we (well, Mrs Snail - I missed it totally) caught a glimpse of a stone sticking up in an unnatural manner on the right hand side of the road. This led to a hasty three point turn (during which a car stopped and asked us the way to Tavistock - which was lucky, because we were able to say "just keep going mate, it's at the end of this road...") and a quick retracing of our steps back towards the Merrivale hamlet, where we found a small layby which we'd somehow missed on our previous drivebys.

In our defence, I have to say that there was no signage, or any indication whatsoever that there were standing stones, hut circles or anything else of interest in the vicinity. We climbed out of the car and headed off up the hill.

I'd been expecting a stone circle, probably because I'd not really been paying attention when I read the English Heritage Guide. There is a stone circle at Merrivale, it's just not the first thing you see, and you certainly can't see it from the road. The stones we'd seen driving past were actually part of one of Merrivale's two stone rows.

The first one you get to from where we'd parked is known as the "North Row" and is the shorter of the two. Essentially it's two parallel lines of smallish standing stones (most are maybe a foot or eighteen inches high, but some are taller) with a sort of tombstone sized slab which blocks off the row at the eastern end. If you follow the trail of a hundred or sixty odd stones to the west they just  sort of peter out after about a hundred and seventy or eighty meters - I'd like to be more specific but I measured the rows by pacing them out, my stride was uneven, my feet were wet and I lost count twice, so if you're looking for archaeological accuracy, you're in the wrong place!

A short hop skip and jump to the south, and running more or less parallel with the northern row is the imaginatively named "Southern Row" which is remarkably similar to its northern cousin, although presumably it has a posher accent and doesn't understand the concept of mushy peas or chips with gravy. At a (very) approximate two hundred and fifty or so metres, starting with another large stone at the eastern end, a triangular one this time, it's bigger than the north row (the flash southern bugger) and has an odd sort of mini stone circle - officially known as a "ring cairn".

Initially, as I squelched my way along the southern row through the drizzle that was now beginning to soak its way through my jacket I'd thought that this was the stone circle, but that lies a few tens of meters further southwest. Before I go there though, I passed what I took to be a damaged Cist - a sort of stone lined hole covered by a large stone cap. Here, however, the capstone is cleft rather spectacularly in twain. Whatever was in there originally is long gone, and unsurprisingly in the summer of 2012 it was filled to the brim with water.

The stone circle itself is rather small, with perhaps a dozen smallish standing stones remaining, each between a foot and a foot and a half tall arranged in a circle perhaps twenty feet across. I suspect rather a lot has been lost over the years. I'll be honest, as stone circles go, this is no Stonehenge, although there is one large, slender standing stone just outside the circle of about ten feet or so which would hold its own somewhere like Avebury. 

Thinking about Avebury and Stonehenge does, perhaps, underline the real beauty of Merrivale. the big rocks of Sailsbury Plain are undoubtedly more spectacular, but visit either of them and you'll spend as much time looking at fellow tourists as you will the stones themselves. Out in the middle of Dartmoor, in spite of the fact that I was never more than a few hundred meters from the road, we didn't see a single other living soul until we were leaving. The tranquillity was so profound you could serve it in slices, which gave us a chance to soak in the history and the atmosphere.

Of course, while we were soaking in the atmosphere our feet were busy soaking up a lot of water. I don't know if that section of Dartmoor is always so soggy, but if I ever go again I'm taking wellies. Of course the summer of 2012 was a notoriously damp one, but my trainers were so wet they took over a week to dry out properly. Still, enough of the carping. Merrivale was a fantastic experience, which left us with all the usual standing stone questions - "who built them?" "what were they for?" "how did they do it?" and so on.

We will, of course, never know - but it's always fun to speculate.

*Insert academic stereotype of your choice here...

Dartmoor part one - Doing porridge

I first read Conan-Doyle's fabulous Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was nine, and although I've never been there, Dartmoor has loomed large in my imagination ever since. In my mind there are vast expanses of empty moor, shrouded in mist and punctuated with towering, rocky tors and trecherous, deadly bogs. You know what? In terms of the spirit of these three hundred and sixty eight square miles of mostly empty rock strewn hills Conan-Doyle got it pretty much right.

We were pitched up on a farm on the very edge of Dartmoor, and although when the sun came out the siren call of the coast rang loudly in our ears a day of exploration of this lofty expanse seemed equally attractive, so we directed the nose of the car in a northerly direction and set out to see what we could see. Actually, that's not true. The truth is that we'd come across a reference to what might be the ultimate hidden gem, and we were keen to go and see if it was as interesting as we thought it would be.

So it was that we found ourselves driving into the little town of Princetown, a frankly unprepossessing place that is totally dominated by what must surely be the moor's most famous landmark - Dartmoor Prison. This huge granite edifice looms - and that is the only word to use here - over the town, squatting on the skyline exuding menace, misery and dispair. It's hard to think of a less inviting place, and yet it was the prison that had brought us here.

Well, that's not quite true. We were actually there to  investigate the Dartmoor Prison Museum, which occupies buildings just outside the prison's fence which used to be part of the prison dairy. We drove up the hill, out of the town, past the main gate of the prison itself before turning in to the museum car park. I have to say, you don't get a real sense of the size of the place from there. As you get out of your car and approach the main entrance you  are confronted with what appears to be a smallish stone building, about the size of your average porta-cabin, with a vast array of brightly painted concrete garden ornaments clustered around the door.

Once through the door you find yourself in a fairly dark and haphazard space, surrounded by various handmade crafts and more of the brightly painted concrete garden ornaments.  Yes, like many museums, the Dartmouth Prison Museum has the visitor enter and leave through the gift shop. There are the usual mugs and keyrings which are presumably purchased at the "generic museum gift shop wholesale warehouse" but the craft items - many of which are exquisitely beautiful - are made by inmates. The museum houses many of the prisoner's creations in other areas as well, about which more later...

I have to say, the museum is one of the most fascinating I have ever visited - and we visit a lot of museums on our travels - well worth the three quid admission charge. The first displays outline the history of the prison itself - its origins as a Prisoner of War camp in the Napoleonic wars (it opened in 1809, and I guess that the prisoner made handicraft tradition started then) through the most well known phase of its existence as the ultimate high security gaol - the capacity in which it appears in stories by the likes of Conan-Doyle and Agatha Christie, to its current incarnation as a lower risk "Category C" prison. I hadn't known its security status had been downgraded, apparently because Her Majesty's Prison Service couldn't get planning permission to build a bigger fence.

I know. You couldn't make it up, could you.

There are also displays featuring the prison's more famous inmates and escapees - although most people in the latter category seem to have come to fairly sticky ends - as well as the methods employed by the prison regime to maintain security. I had no idea, for example, that as late as the nineteen sixties they'd had armed prison officers riding around the surrounding moorland on Dartmoor ponies.

There's also recognition of the strong connection between the Prison and the United States Navy, originating with the Prison's original role as a Prisoner of War institution. For two years between spring 1813 and spring 1815 around six and a half thousand American sailors taken prisoner during the hardly remembered "War of 1812" were held there. That's about ten times the number of men the place is currently permitted to hold - all I can say is that it must have been pretty cramped.

Towards the end of their tenure, on the sixth of April 1815, there was something of a massacre when guards opened fire on inmates trying to escape. Thirty-one men prisoners were wounded and seven were killed. They, along with two hundred and sixty four other of their comrades who also died during their incarceration are buried within the prison grounds. Their graves, and their memorial are tended by inmates and prison staff. The museum holds many letters and other items presented to the prison by various ships of the US Navy in recognition of these efforts and these symbols of reconciliation and comradeship are genuinely moving.

There is a much darker side to the museum though, because one thing it doesn't do is gloss over the point of the prison's existence. In its prisoner of war days the prison was a place of mere incarceration. Both French and American POWs had a fair degree of freedom and self determination within the confines of the walls. But once the POWs left and the place became a civilian gaol in 1851, things changed. Like all prisons, HMP Dartmoor is a place not just of incarceration, but also of punishment. As a rule, the men there would rather be elsewhere, and not all of them have been the type you'd happily introduce your sister to, or wish to meet in a dark alley.

To be frank, many of them have been criminals.

Historically, violent or uncooperative prisoners were dealt with in a brutal manner. In the centre of the museum's main room is a large wooden A frame, to which prisoners were once strapped and flogged. The museum also holds a rather gruesome Cat 'o Nine Tails with which these punishments were meted out. Obviously prisoners are no longer flogged in British Prisons, the practice having been banned in 1967 (which seems rather late, although hitting school children with sticks wasn't banned until the mid-eighties, which puts things in perspective a little). According to the internet flogging was discontinued before the ban, as early as 1962, but the museum seems to differ from this opinion, citing anecdotal evidence that prisoners were occasionally flogged at Dartmoor even after the ban.

Not that brutality has always been limited to the guards. The "black museum" section houses a wide variety of frankly ingenious but utterly terrifying weapons that have been discovered by prison staff during searches. Toothbrush handles sharpened to a point, or embedded with razor blades are only the star of it. There's everything from "shanks" to fake guns, knuckle dusters to coshes and all points in between.  My uncle was a prison officer for many years, and the two little display cases filled with such homespun malevolence made me realise the true nature of the risks he faced more than any of the hair raising tales with which he would occasionally regale us.

Downstairs from this section of the museum, in what I assume used to be cow sheds,  is a display of agricultural equipment from the prison farm, and room featuring a life sized recreation of a section of the prison's quarry - from which all of the stone to build the prison, and the buildings which house the museum was taken. Prisoners used to work in the Quarry, but it's been largely disused for many years - presumably because they can't get planning permission to build anything else!

The downstairs section of the museum also houses examples of truly impressive woodworking produced by prisoners. Very seriously high quality garden furniture and doors are available for sale at what would be insanely low prices were they in a garden centre or DIY store. I can't imagine why anybody from the locality would shop for such things anywhere else.  Obviously the manufacturer's circumstances preclude the possibility of any kind of delivery service, so you will have to collect, but if I ever find myself in the heart of Dartmoor again I can well imagine returning home with one of their finely crafted garden benches on my roofrack.

The final room of the museum is back up the stairs, and houses more of the prisoner's handiwork, both legitimate and otherwise. I was particularly impressed by the many boxes and containers made from matchsticks and other scraps. Most had been confiscated from the inmates who had created them because they also incorporated hidden draws designed to hide drugs, mobile phones and other contraband. I think my favourite of these was a coke can, the top of which had been made into a removable lid. The inside of the can had been lined with matchsticks to stop the items hidden inside making a rattling noise if the can was shaken. I found myself thinking that it was a crying shame that the men who had made these things, who were clearly possessed of great skill and ingenuity had not found some way to use their talents to enable them to live a law abiding life. It's sad, really.

Not every exhibit was so nefarious of course. My eye was particularly caught by a brightly coloured, fully functional electric guitar which I would have loved to have taken from its display case and had a bit of a strum on.

Because it is still part of the prison estate and - although this is not explicitly stated anywhere that I saw - I think staffed at least in part by inmates, all photography is banned, which is why there aren't any pictures in this instalment of the blog. I'm sad about this because I would have liked to have shown you some of the beautiful artwork and crafts on display. I guess you're just going to have to go and take a look for yourselves - it really is most highly recommended.

Dartmouth part two: Engines, gardens and little forts.

We didn't really spend much time in Dartmouth after lunch, but the place still had a few highlights to throw our way.

A stroll back along Lower Street led us back to the centre of the town which I have to say is a little unusual. Most English villages and small towns of any age at all have some kind of open space at the centre, whether it's the ubiquitous market place or the village green so beloved of poets and The Daily Mail. Dartmouth has "The Boat Float", a wonderfully sheltered mooring, separated from the harbour side by an embankment (indeed, it's on the other side of the road from the river proper, and connected to the Dart by a bridge/tunnel) where all manner of small craft were moored. This little pool was surrounded on two sides by a cluster of shops, on the other by a little park and of course on the other by the Dart itself. Somehow it seemed appropriate that town so identified with seafaring* should have water at its heart.

We made our way past the float to the small but well appointed tourist information centre, where we found what has to be the most unexpected hidden gem. Not only does the little brick built office on Mayor's Avenue supply the usual array of guide books and leaflets about surrounding attractions, it also houses a beautiful  example of a Newcomen Pumping Engine.

I did a project on Thomas Newcomen when I was in middle school, but if I'd ever known that he was from Dartmouth I'd forgotten the fact. If you're unfamiliar with the name, Newcomen was a pioneer of steam power. Born in 1663 this non-conformist preacher and iron monger was one of the fathers of the industrial revolution. In partnership with fellow Baptist Jon Calley he developed the pumping engine which was to make deep mining possible by preventing flooding. The first Newcomen Pumping Engine was established near Dudley Castle in the South Staffordshire Coalfield in 1712 - by the time of the great man's death in 1729 there were more than a hundred of his machines toiling away across Europe.

The example on display in the tourist information centre was built some time around 1725, and it really is magnificent. It had a long working life, being first erected at Griff Colliery near Nuneaton in Warwickshire, before being used by the Coventry Canal Company from 1821 (when some of the valve gear was replaced). It was donated to the Newcomen Society in 1963 by the British Transport Authority.

These days it stands proudly in a purpose built room, which is a polite way of saying it's in a room just about big enough to contain it - which is why the pictures I took are so poor, you just can't get far enough away from it to get the whole magnificent construction in the frame. There are no interactive video screens or computerised visualisations, just some explanatory display boards and a great big chunk of glorious two hundred and eighty three year old British engineering.

I confess that I love this stuff and I considered it a privilege to be able to stand in the same space as such a venerable industrial beast. Those of a slightly less geeky turn of mind might be less impressed than me by this iron and wood behemoth, but it's important to state here that anybody who was unimpressed would be wrong. It's a beautiful example of the machines that started this country's ascent to the top of the industrial tree, and while we might not now reside at such dizzy heights in terms of international industry, we'd be a damn sight further down the pecking order were it not for the head start that the likes of Newcomen gave us.

It seems to me fitting that this magnificent behemoth now resides in the great man's home town, but I can't help thinking it deserves a bit more of a fuss making of it. I mean, given the importance of Newcomen's engine to British industrial history, surely it merits a proper museum rather than being shoehorned into a tiny little room on the side of the Tourist Information Centre? Still, it was a hugely interesting and totally unexpected hidden gem.

We chatted with the very nice tourist information lady, who told us that the walk to Dartmouth Castle, which as we'd seen from the boat trip was situated at the mouth of the Dart, would take us about twenty minutes. We silently agreed that we couldn't really be arsed to walk that far - maybe next time. We're not totally lazy though, and on leaving the information centre we headed out through the rather delightful little park like area between the Tourist Information Centre and the Boat Float.

Royal Avenue Gardens, as they are known, really are fabulous. They don't cover a large area, but rather a lot has been packed in. They sport a recently refurbished bandstand, which on the day we visited was occupied by a couple of old blokes playing rather passable jazz, and a memorial fountain, first erected in 1887 to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of Her Royal Highness Queen Victoria, and restored this year to mark the Diamond Jubilee of our own dear Queen. The gardens are also home to a commemorative plaque in honour of Corporal Theodore Vale V.C. who earned the Victoria Cross by rescuing his Lieutenant during the battle of the Somme. It's a rather pleasant little spot, and we could happily have whiled away an afternoon sitting on a bench in the sunshine listening to the jazz.

But, as I said, we're not completely lazy, so we took off again, walking along the riverside in the vague direction of the Castle on the off-chance that we weren't as lazy as we thought we were and made it to the castle after all.

We didn't.

We did, however, get as far as the rather striking Bayard's Cove Fort. This is a surprisingly small Tudor "fort", although to be honest it's more of a gun emplacement, built at some point before 1534 as a final line of defence for the Dartmouth Port. If you think about it this really does underline how important the moorings at Dartmouth were in the sixteenth century. Any hostile vessel that came into the range of Bayard's Cove's cannon would already have had to get past the defences of Dartmouth Castle, and Kingswear. Indeed, I'm not sure how much of the opposite bank Kingswear occupied back then, but these days even a tiny cannon would easily take out vast chunks of housing. Those Tudors really weren't messing about.

It's an odd little fort really, the arches which would once have housed cannon are still there and frame the view of the boats and picturesque buildings on the opposite bank rather nicely, but it is a very little fort so we didn't linger too long. Leading up put of the fort is a longish and steepish flight of stone steps winding between the waterfront terraces up towards Upper Street. Had we been so inclined we could have followed them and strolled on to Dartmouth Castle.

But we didn't.

What can I say? It was starting to look like rain, and in any case it was starting to feel like a long, if massively entertaining day. As the last of the sunshine gave way to cloud we strolled along the side of the river back to the bus stop and headed off back to the car. Perfect timing as it turned out - as we drove out of the park and ride the rain begin to fall gently onto the windscreen.

Dartmouth was excellent, and we'll certainly be back.

*In spite of the fact that it isn't actually on the sea, as such...