The chain that stopped ships in their tracks

Dartmouth Castle was built from the 1380s by John Hawley, a successful merchant and notorious privateer widely believed to have inspired Chaucer's burly Shipman in The Canterbury Tales, a character living, in Chaucer's words, "far out west," which fits Hawley rather neatly.

The castle's real party trick was more practical than literary though. In wartime, its defenders could stretch a 250 metre iron chain right across the mouth of the River Dart, raised just above the waterline. Any enemy ship trying to pass would be stopped dead, held in place, exposed to the castle's guns with nowhere to go. It's a wonderfully simple piece of medieval engineering, one chain doing the work an entire fleet might otherwise have to.

I painted Dartmouth Castle in watercolour and ink, that grey stone above the estuary mouth. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Dartmouth Castle, Devon · Travel Poster