Saturday 29th January 2022 • Promotional Content


T e Travel Guide 5


Coasting along


Modern-day cheesemakers, distillers and vintners may call Devon’s southeast coast home but the story of these shores stretches back millennia. The region is home to tales of smugglers, Roman ruins and well-preserved fossils. Words: Ben Lerwill. Photographs Richard James Taylor


View of Exeter and the rolling hills beyond F


rom a remote, sandstone ledge drops a bewildered man in a wetsuit. It’s taken an eternity for him to jump,


and he plummets through the air with an expression somewhere between elation and terror. T e rocks zooming past behind him are tens of millions of years old; the bay he’s arrowing into has witnessed visitors ranging from plesiosaurs to pirates. And, with the sun illuminating the red cliff s and ivied, coastal woodland, there comes an almighty splash as the October-cold sea rushes up to swallow him. For the man — who happens to be me — it’s an unutterable thrill. Tom Devey, the guide who’s just


patiently coaxed me into stepping off a 26ft precipice, gives a thumbs-up from the shore and gestures to a cove nearby. We’ve spent the past hour clambering over — and leaping from — the boulders and sea stacks of Devon’s southeastern coastline and it’s now time for a break.


T e streets around us


are fi lled with a mixture of timbered, medieval buildings and harsher, post-war architecture.


Gargoyles and grotesques glower down from the cathedral guttering


On Devon’s southeast coast,


the history is spread as thickly as clotted cream. I’m here to discover more about the area’s past and present — feet fi rst, in the case of this coasteering trip near the hill- hidden hamlet of Maidencombe — on a journey from the ancient city of Exeter to the Jurassic Coast, via the pub-dotted ports of the Exe Estuary. Before then, Tom — who works


for Rock Solid Coasteering — leads me through some further jumps. He tells a tale of three bootleggers blockaded into a sea cave by the authorities. “T ey were trying to drown them,” he explains, as we look east along a series of hefty headlands. “But when they unsealed it three days later, there was no sign of the bodies. People think the men found a way into the wider cave system and escaped inland.” T e busy quays and taverns of


Exeter, 15 miles to the north at the head of the estuary, would’ve been the obvious place to fl ee. Devon’s county town was no stranger to smugglers and seafarers during the 17th and 18th centuries, and they were far from the fi rst to fl ock there. Long before, its plum location had attracted Roman and Norman invaders, and, in between their arrival, Saxon settlers. “Some say that when the Normans


turned up, the medieval bishop of Exeter stood on the town gate, bared his bottom and farted at William the Conqueror!” says David Radstone, one of the city’s Red Coat guides, with palpable relish. I meet him


Tom Devey at Maidencombe Beach


on Cathedral Green for a free city tour, in the shadow of the one of the mightiest religious buildings in England. T e streets around us are fi lled with a mixture of timbered, medieval buildings and harsher, post-war architecture. Gargoyles and grotesques glower down from the cathedral guttering. Home to a large university, the


city is fascinating. In the centuries since the Normans arrived, David explains, Exeter has taken on various guises, from prosperous merchant city and hub of the UK cloth trade (in


Exeter Cathedral


1700, 80% of Exeter’s residents were employed in the wool industry) to ill-fated Luftwaff e target during the Baedeker Raids, during which 1,500 homes were destroyed in a single night in May 1942. As we wander, David ties together


the strands of the city’s past. We run our hands over the original Roman city walls, stand under imposing Georgian townhouses and stand agog in front of before-and-after photos of the bomb-damaged city. If there’s a sight that sums up the city’s adaptability, however, it’s T e


House T at Moved. T e three-storey medieval building, which looks wonky enough to topple over at any moment, was jacked onto wheels in the 1960s and transported 230ft down the road to its current location on West Street, near the quay, to avoid demolition. T at’s southeast Devon; spend time here and you eventually get drawn towards coast.


First published in the Jan/Feb 2022


issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK). Read the feature in full online at nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel


The House That Moved


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