Salcombe Harbour, Devon · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place, its hidden history, and the detail that never makes it into the guidebooks.

The water Salcombe sits beside is not, strictly speaking, an estuary at all. No real river feeds it. It is a ria, a valley the sea drowned as the waters rose, which is why the tide reaches so far inland and the harbour feels less like a river mouth than an arm of the sea pushing 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 bring pineapples and oranges home before the cargo spoiled. Nearly three hundred wooden ships slid off the town's yards before iron and steam brought the trade to an end.

Guarding the entrance is the Salcombe bar, a shifting bank of sand that has caught more than its share of vessels. The story goes that Tennyson, anchored here and listening to the sea moan across it, found the opening lines of Crossing the Bar. Whether or not the poem truly began in Salcombe, the town has quietly claimed it ever since.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.