A well known harbour town, Dartmouth, on the South coast of Devon attracts thousands of visitors a year. One of the things that makes the town so special is how its history has contributed to its uniqueness. With mentions in the Doomsday Book in 1086, where it is known as ‘Dunestal’ there is no shortage of fascinating stories to discover about the town.
For those visiting, there are numerous ways to explore the history of the town, from self guided tours to visits to the castle and Naval College, read on to find out more.
A Short History of Dartmouth
Dartmouth started as two separate hamlets, Hardness and Clifton, split by a tidal creek. A dam went in around 1243, roughly where Foss Street runs today, joining them into one town built around a mill pond. Most of the flat ground in the town centre was underwater until then. It is worth remembering when you’re walking the level streets near the embankment: you’re standing on reclaimed land, not the original shoreline.
The Harbour
The town’s real advantage was its harbour: deep, sheltered, and easy to defend. By the twelfth century it could hold up to 600 vessels, and that made it useful to people well beyond Devon. Fleets assembled at Dartmouth for the Second Crusade in 1147 and the Third in 1190, and Warfleet Creek, near where the castle now stands, is thought by some to take its name from the size of those gatherings. King John passed through in 1214 on his way back from France. Chaucer knew the port too. He visited in 1373, and the Shipman in The Canterbury Tales, “of Dertemouthe,” is widely believed to be modelled on John Hawley, a Dartmouth merchant, privateer, and mayor fourteen times over.
Medieval Dartmouth
Hawley is the figure who shapes the medieval town more than anyone else. Trade with Gascony had made Dartmouth’s merchants rich on wine, and richer still on piracy against French shipping, which made the town a target. When a Breton force of around 2,000 men landed at Slapton in 1404 to take revenge, Hawley raised an army of locals and beat them at the Battle of Blackpool Sands.
A few years earlier, in 1388, he’d been authorised by Richard II to build a “fortalice by the sea” to defend the harbour properly. That fortalice became Dartmouth Castle, one of the first coastal forts in the country designed with artillery in mind from the start, and it worked in tandem with a chain strung across the river to Kingswear Castle on the opposite bank, closing the estuary at night.
The town’s medieval wealth is still visible if you know where to look. St Saviour’s Church was consecrated in 1372 and holds Hawley’s brass, along with a fifteenth-century oak rood screen and a door decorated with the leopards of the Plantagenets. Smith Street, named for the smiths and shipwrights who worked there when the tide reached that far inland, is the earliest street recorded by name, appearing in thirteenth-century documents. The Cherub, a former merchant’s house on Higher Street, dates to around 1380 and has a decent claim to being the oldest building in town.
Image credit : Discover DartmouthA Royal Visit
By 1620, Dartmouth had a role in a rather better-known departure. The Mayflower and Speedwell put in at Bayard’s Cove for repairs before continuing to America, and the cove’s cobbled quay still looks much as it would have then. The seventeenth century also brought the Butterwalk, built between 1635 and 1640, its carved timber front held up on granite columns. Charles II sheltered there from a storm in 1671 and held court in a room that now forms part of Dartmouth Museum.
Dartmouth’s most significant export, in the long run, might be a person rather than a product. Thomas Newcomen was born in the town in 1663 and built the first practical steam engine in 1712, decades before James Watt improved on it. It ran in the coal mines of the Midlands and became one of the foundational technologies of the Industrial Revolution.
Naval History
The town’s naval identity, the one many visitors associate with it now, is more recent than the castle or the church. Royal Navy officer training arrived in 1863, when the wooden hulk HMS Britannia was moored in the river below Mount Boone. Land ran out for the hulks eventually, and the current Britannia Royal Naval College, designed by Sir Aston Webb (who also did the main facade of Buckingham Palace), opened on the hill above town in 1905. It’s where a young Princess Elizabeth first met Prince Philip, then a naval cadet, in 1939.
Dartmouth in The Great War and World War 2
Dartmouth’s naval cadets were mobilised as soon as the First World War began, and the cost was immediate and personal. Eight local men died on 1 November 1914 when HMS Monmouth was sunk at the Battle of Coronel, several of them cadets who’d been posted aboard only weeks earlier.
Seventy-nine names from the town are recorded on the war memorial in Royal Avenue Gardens for 1914 to 1919.
The Second World War drew Dartmouth in more directly. American forces took over much of the Naval College to plan the D-Day landings, and the surrounding countryside, including the villages around Slapton, was evacuated so troops could rehearse beach assaults on the coast nearby.
The college itself was bombed in September 1942, when Focke-Wulf aircraft scored a direct hit on the quarterdeck, killing Petty Officer Wren Ellen Whittal; staff and cadets relocated to Eaton Hall in Cheshire until 1946, while the college buildings were used first by Combined Operations and then as a US amphibious training base. Eighty-two more Dartmouth men are named on the memorial for 1939 to 1945, alongside thirty-five civilians killed in enemy action.
On Greenway and Agatha Christie
One of Dartmouth’s most famous residents, Agatha Christie bought Greenway in 1938 as a holiday home, a Georgian house on the River Dart she’d known since childhood. She called it “the loveliest place on earth” and used it as a retreat from writing rather than a place to work, though the house and gardens turn up in two of her novels, Dead Man’s Folly and Five Little Pigs, both set on locations modelled closely on the real Battery and boathouse below the house. Christie’s family gave the house to the National Trust in 2000, and it’s now set as it would have looked in the 1950s, a short ferry ride from Dartmouth.
The Best Historical Attractions in Dartmouth
Dartmouth Museum, in the Butterwalk on Duke Street, is the natural starting point. It’s compact but dense, with ship models in the King’s Room where Charles II sheltered, a collection tracing Newcomen’s engines through to Richard Trevithick’s, and material on the town’s role in D-Day. The Jesse Room, in the westernmost house of the Butterwalk, has a plaster ceiling depicting the Tree of Jesse in high relief, thought to be the only one of its kind. Check current times and admission on their website before you go, as hours shift between summer and winter.
Britannia Royal Naval College runs public tours through the Britannia Association, usually starting from the bandstand in Royal Avenue Gardens before a short minibus ride up the hill. You’ll see the chapel, where a small window is positioned so that light falls on the central figure of Christ at 4.15pm each 21st of October, the exact time Nelson died at Trafalgar, and the lawn where Elizabeth and Philip met. Tours need booking ahead, since they run to a schedule shaped around the working college.
Dartmouth Castle, run by English Heritage, sits at the mouth of the estuary and rewards the walk down from town. You can see the artillery positions added in the 1490s, the later Victorian gun batteries built during invasion scares in the 1850s, and the chapel of St Petroc, which the original fourteenth-century fort was built around. It’s an easy stop to pair with Dartmouth Castle car park or a walk along the coast path.
Guided walking tours cover the ground between the two. Local tours typically run around an hour to ninety minutes, taking in the Butterwalk, Bayard’s Cove, Smith Street, and St Saviour’s, and can usually be booked through the Dartmouth Tourist Information Centre. Self guided tours are also a wonderful way to see the town, start at the museum for the background and enjoy a leisurely stroll through the historic streets.
Dart Marina provides the perfect base for a historical foray around the town. Browse our website for more information on rooms, prices and availability.
