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Heritage This walk is best begun and ended with the lovely little ferry trip from Whitestrand Pontoon, which gives a completely different perspective on the town and the land. From the ferry you can see the tiny waterside castle- shaped fort built on the Salcombe side during the Napoleonic wars to give the French the impression that the estuary was well fortified. From the sea it looks like a second fort but from the side more like a stage set! A little further along down by the water stands Fort Charles. This one is a real fort, probably built originally by Henry VIII. It was occupied by Royalist troops during the english Civil War in 1644. The fort withstood 5 months of siege, when Salcombe was the last place in England to hold out against Oliver Cromwell’s Round- heads. The ornate old boathouse at South Sands was built in 1870 to house the first of salcombe’s rowing lifeboats. When the alarm was raised, the crew had to run from salcombe to launch the 33 foot boat and row it out to sea. The National Trust property of Overbecks was known


as Sharpitor House until it was bought by an eccentric chemist, collector and inventor, Otto Overbecks. He invented the ‘electrical rejuvenator’; a contraption he claimed would be able to cure most maladies and allow people to live for 350 years. It didn’t do the trick for Otto himself, who died in 1937, leaving the property to the National Trust. The gardens and house are open to the public: ring 01548 842893 for opening times and admission prices. Vikings once landed and settled in the valley at


Starehole Bay. Centuries later the bay became the last resting place of the wrecked Hercogin Cecilie. This handsome four- masted vessel had an acre of sail and was one of the fastest sailing ships on the seas, out- stripping allcomers in the great grain races. The ship struck the nearby Ham Stone and was towed into Starehole Bay where she broke up in high seas. The wreck is still visible as a dark outline in the water and part of the vessel still


Fort Charles


The entrance to the estuary at Salcombe is notoriously hazardous to navigate.


appears above the water at very low tides. The old blockhouses perched on the rocks at Bolt Head are the remains of WWII observation posts. Landscape The entrance to the estuary at Salcombe is notoriously hazardous to navigate. A sandbar just below the water extends most of the way across the river mouth, leaving only a narrow channel close to the near shore. This reef inspired Tennyson’s famous poem ‘Crossing the Bar’. The spec- tacular jagged cliffs are formed of mica- schist, a relatively soft rock that weathers into the spikes and crags


you see here. The author Henry Williamson dubbed this little rocky wonderland ‘Valhalla’. Much of the land around Bolt Head is coastal heathland. The National


The coast looking east, from the garden at Overbecks


Salcombe and the estuary from Sharp Tor tart Bay from little Dartmouth


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