The harbour with no river to feed it

Here's the Salcombe fact that catches people out. The water the town sits beside looks like an estuary, but no real river feeds it. It is a ria, a valley the sea drowned as the waters rose, which is why the tide pushes so far inland and the harbour feels less like a river mouth than an arm of the sea reaching up between the Devon hills.

For most of the nineteenth century this was a working harbour with a turn of speed. Salcombe built its own fast fruit schooners and sent them racing to Spain and the Azores, the whole point being to carry pineapples and oranges home before the cargo spoiled. Guarding the entrance is the Salcombe bar, a shifting bank of sand that Tennyson, anchored here and listening to the sea moan across it, is said to have turned into the opening lines of Crossing the Bar.

I painted Salcombe in watercolour and ink, that wide harbour mouth and the boats at anchor. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Salcombe Harbour, Devon · Travel Poster