Budleigh Salterton

With its trim Victorian villas, broad promenade and a spotlessly clean beach flanked by 500 feet-high red sandstone cliffs, Budleigh Salterton retains its 19th-century atmosphere of a genteel resort. Victorian tourists “of the better sort” noted with approval that the two-mile-long beach was of pink shingle rather than sand. (Sand, apparently, attracted the rowdier kind of holiday-maker.) The steeply-shelving beach was another deterrent, and the sea here is still a place for paddling rather than swimming.

One famous Victorian visitor was the celebrated artist Sir John Everett Millais who stayed during the summer of 1870 in the curiously-shaped house called The Octagon. It was beside the beach here that he painted his most famous picture, The Boyhood of Raleigh, using his two sons and a local ferryman as the models. Raleigh’s birthplace, Hayes Barton, lies a mile or so inland and remains virtually unchanged.

The town centre has a good number of independently owned shops and the main street to the beach is bordered by a stream. Close to the seafront is the Fairlynch Museum, one of very few thatched museums in the country. Built in 1811 as a cottage orne, it houses numerous collections covering all aspects of life through the ages in the lower Otter Valley. There are weekly demonstrations of lace-making, a collection of locally-made Edwardian dolls, and an interesting collection of Victorian and Edwardian costumes.

The name Budleigh Salterton derives from the salt pans at the mouth of the River Otter, which brought great prosperity to the town during the Middle Ages. The little port was then busy with ships loading salt and wool, but by 1450 the estuary had become blocked by a pebble ridge and the salt pans flooded.