Dawlish

This pretty seaside resort, which boasts one of the safest beaches in England, has the unusual feature of a main railway line separating the town from its sea front. The result is, in fact, much more appealing than it sounds. For one thing, the railway keeps motor traffic away from the beachside, and for another, the low granite viaduct that carries the track has weathered attractively in the century and a half since it was built. The arches under which beach-goers pass create a kind of formal entrance to the beach, and the Victorian station has become a visitor attraction in its own right.

By the time Brunel’s railway arrived here in 1846, Dawlish was already wellknown as a fashionable resort. John Keats, with his convalescent brother, Tom, had visited the town in 1818. The great poet was inspired to pen the less-than-immortal lines:

Over the hill and over the Dale
And over the bourne to Dawlish
Where Gingerbread wives have a scanty sale
And gingerbread nuts are smallish.

Other distinguished visitors included Jane Austen (one of whose characters cannot understand how one could live anywhere else in Devon but here), and Charles Dickens who, in his novel of the same name, has Nicholas Nickleby born at a farm nearby. All of these great literary figures arrived not long after the first houses were built along the Strand. That had happened in 1803. Up until then, Dawlish was just a small settlement beside the River Daw, located about a mile inland in order to be safe from raiders. This is where the 700-year-old church stands, surrounded by a small group of thatched cottages.

At the time of John Keats’ visit, the town was being transformed with scores of new villas springing up along the Strand. Earlier improvers had already “beautified” the River Daw, which flows right through the town, by landscaping the stream into a series of shallow waterfalls and surrounding it with attractive gardens like The Lawn. Until Regency times, The Lawn had been a swamp populated by herons, kingfishers and otters. Then in 1808, the developer John Manning filled in the marshy land with earth removed during the construction of Queen Street. Today, both The Lawn and Queen Street still retain the elegance of those early 19th-century days and the brook that runs through the area is the home of the famous Black Swans.

In August, Dawlish really comes to life with its colourful Carnival Week. It includes amongst other events a lively town procession and a display by the Red Arrows.

A couple of miles northeast of the town is Dawlish Warren, a mile-long sand spit, which almost blocks the mouth of the River Exe. There’s a golf course here and also a 55-acre Nature Reserve, home to more than 450 species of flowering plants. For one of them, the Jersey lily, this is its only habitat in mainland England. Guided tours of the Reserve, led by the warden, are available during the season.

Sadly, the last surviving relic of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway at Starcross has recently closed. The great engineer had intended that the stretch of railway between Exeter and Totnes should be powered by a revolutionary new system. The train would be attached to a third rail, which in fact was a long vacuum chamber, drawing the carriages along by the effects of air pressure. His visionary plan involved the building of
10 great Italianate engine houses at three-mile intervals along the line. Sadly, the project was a failure, partly for financial reasons, but also because the leather seals on the vacuum pipe were quickly eaten away by the combined forces of rain, salt and hungry rats. The exhibition at Starcross used to display a working model, using vacuum cleaners to represent the pumping houses, and volunteers are even propelled up and down the track to demonstrate the viability of the original idea. 

Brunel had to fall back on conventional steam engines, but the route he engineered from Exeter to Newton Abbot is one of the most scenic in the country, following first the western side of the Exe estuary, then hugging the seaboard from Dawlish Warren to Teignmouth before turning inland along the north bank of the River Teign.