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rabbit began to be regarded as a pauper’s food. The area around the Warren was
inhabited during prehistoric times. Flint tools have been found here, and there are traces of hut circles where families lived in round houses. There are also the remains of field systems from the Bronze Age, some 4000 years ago. Today the National Trust looks after
the area, and Dartmoor ponies are used to graze the cliffs, preventing scrub from smothering the more delicate species. Look out for grey bush crickets and their cousins the great green crickets (the largest in the British Isles). Ravens and buzzards fly over the rocky crags above. Fulmars and gulls breed on the cliff-faces, and cormorants and shags hunt from the rocks below. In spring and autumn migrating swallows and house martins pause on the headland at the start and end of their long journey south. The headland was the site of a
Second World War lookout until it was demolished in 2007. When the sea is still you can see the seaweed underwater marking the wreck of the German four-masted barque ‘Herzogin Cecilie’, which ran aground on Ham Stone Rock in 1936 and was towed to Starehole Bay and beached here. Vikings are said to have landed and settled in Starehole Bay sometime between the ninth and eleventh centuries when there were a number of Viking raids around south Devon.
Bolt Head
6. Cross the bridge to climb out of Starehole on the rough steps and narrow rock ledges that round the point at Sharp Tor. Carry on along the path through Fir Wood to emerge in the lane accessing the National Trust car park at Overbeck’s.
The path over the steps and ledges is known as the Courtenay Walk. It was cut in the 1860s by Viscount Courtenay, so that visitors to Salcombe could reach Bolt Head. You are now above the
treacherous Salcombe Bar of Tennyson’s poem. Stretching from here to Leek Cove, across the water, the Bar is less than two feet (60cm) below water as the tide ebbs and it is a notorious shipping hazard. It was the scene of Devon’s worst lifeboat loss, when the ‘William & Emma’ capsized as she was rowing back from a rescue in 1916. The lifeboat had been launched in south westerly gales to go to the aid of the Plymouth schooner, Western Lass, which had run aground in Lannacombe Bay. Shortly after it was launched, a message came through saying that all those on board the schooner had been brought
safely ashore by the Prawle Rocket Company. Tragically, there was no way of recalling the lifeboat, and the men arrived at the schooner to find that they were not needed. As they recrossed the Bar on their way home, a huge wave threw the crew across the boat and a second swiftly followed and capsized it, drowning all but two of the crew of 15. Overbeck’s, built at the end of the nineteenth century, was bought in the 1920s by inventor Otto Overbeck, after his pioneering electrotherapy machine ‘The Rejuvenator’ amassed him a small fortune. He lived there until his death in 1937, having bequeathed it to the National Trust, on condition that it was turned into a museum and youth hostel, and not a brothel!
7. Coming out of Overbeck’s, carry on ahead down the road and follow it downhill back to South Sands. Continue past the back of the beach, climbing the hill beyond and then dropping down on the far side to return to North Sands.
Middle Soar Cliffs
Details of this and similar walks can be found on the South West Coast Path website. See also the following information services. Local maps & publications: A-Z 1:25,000 map book: South Devon • Walks along the SW Coast Path - Dartmouth to Plymouth
www.southwestcoastpath.org.uk
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