Walks and trails © Trevor Rickard Landscape
From the coast path looking south-east with Newfoundland Cove below
As you walk out of Kingswear, Dartmouth Castle can be seen across the water. It was built at the end of the 15th century, although the remnants of an earlier castle built in 1388 also stand just uphill. Directly below your route, close to the waterline, is the smaller Kingswear Castle, finished in 1503. The original iron cannon had to be replaced with brass guns after suffering severe corrosion from the salt water and wind. The fortification was abandoned once the development of more powerful cannon meant that the whole river mouth could be covered by guns from Dartmouth Castle across the water. The complex at Brownstone Battery was built in 1942 as a defence against German naval attack. The site was equipped with two six-inch guns taken from a First World War battleship. Each gun had a range of over 14 miles, and operated in tandem with a powerful searchlight situated close to the high water mark below. During the War, the Battery was manned by up to 300 soldiers, and the cliffs all around were strung with barbed wire.
The National Coastwatch Institute station is situated at Brownstone Battery. Visitors are welcome to pop-in and say hello at the lookout and to peruse the display house opposite. The hollow stone tower of the Day Mark was built in 1864 as a navigational aid to shipping. It is a grade 2 listed building.
View from Brownstone Battery
The landscape of this walk is built on Dartmouth Slate. This is a relatively durable rock which gives rise to the high ground here, and stretches in a band across the South Hams to Wembury in the west. Much of the land here is owned by the National Trust. The Trust works with its tenant farmers to manage the cultivated land for farmland birds and rare arable plants. Other areas are managed to provide a mosaic of open grassland and scrub habitats, along with the coastal woodlands. This manage- ment encourages a great variety of wildlife.
Wildlife
The conifers you pass on the coast path from Kingswear are Monterey and Corsican pines. These trees are tolerant of the salt winds and harsh weather and so thrive in coastal situations.
The swift and rare Peregrine Falcon can be seen from the coast path. With blue grey plumage above, and white with dark bars below, this bird-hunting falcon is one of the fastest animals on Earth. The Mew Stone, visible off the shore from
Brownstone Battery, is a rich site for seabirds, and is home to a large seabird colony. The rocky island is also the most easterly ‘haul- out’ for grey seals in the English Channel. Thanks to sympathetic management, many of the fields on the walk are home to the skylark, a species declining on farmland in many areas. The liquid song of this crested bird can often be heard from above as it rises in its characteristic song flight. The Linnet, a sociable ground-feeding finch, is also found here, as is the rare Cirl Bunting, with its yellow and black facial stripes and green- brown plumage.
© Tom-Jolliffe
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