This rocky foreshore is a Special Area of Conservation, home to a range of marine, bird, insect and plant life. Initially occupied in the early 1900s by the Wembury Point Holiday Camp, still visible is a tidal swimming pool, all that remains of the Heybrook Bay Lido of the 1920s, when 200 concrete and wooden holiday chalets sprawled across the Point.

The Great Mewstone

The striking wedge-shaped island has an interesting past, serving as a private home, a prison and a refuge for smugglers. Now a bird sanctuary and home only to many nesting seabirds. (‘Mew’ is the old name for a gull).

In 1744 the tiny wedge-shaped island of the Mewstone was the home of a local man ‘deported’ there after some petty crime. When he had served his seven-year sentence he returned to the mainland, but his daughter elected to stay on the island, raising her three children there, until her husband fell off a rock and drowned.

Subsequently, several other people lived on the Mewstone. The last was nineteenth-century warrener Sam Wakeham, who lived with his wife, Ann, in a turreted little house. From the coastpath, with binoculars, you can see Sam’s ruined cottage on the lower eastern slopes of the Mewstone. He created a garden that he fertilised with sand and seaweed, and kept poultry and a couple of pigs. He also ran a ferry service ‘to the Moonstone, for anyone on the mainland who holds up their white pockethanchecuffs for a signal’. 

The island was the inspiration for the Romantic artist Turner’s watercolour paintings ‘The Mewstone‘, now owned by the Tate Gallery, and ‘The Mew Stone at the Entrance of Plymouth Sound‘, National Gallery of Ireland

HMS Cambridge

An important defence site, Wembury Point has had a colourful military past, with the headland in continuous military use since 1911.

In 1940 a gunnery range known as the Cambridge Gunnery School was opened for the army and naval use.

In 1956 it was commissioned as an independent shore establishment under the name HMS Cambridge, the Royal Navy’s chief gunnery training school, named after a 1666 Man-o’-War ship belonging to King Charles II. This was exactly a century after the commissioning of the first HMS Cambridge – a second-rate vessel built in 1815 – as ‘the gunnery ship at Plymouth’, used for training naval ratings in the use of guns.

In 2001, HMS Cambridge finally closed, and The National Trust bought the land in 2006, with the help of 30,000 individual donations, working to reinstate a natural landscape with uninterrupted coastal views. All disused buildings were demolished by 2008, the roads were landscaped and fences were removed. You can still see some legacy of the 9 hole golf course greens from The Skelligs

Heybrook Bay

The photograph below shows Heybrook Bay as it looked in the 1930s.

The large building in the centre of the picture is what is now the ‘Eddystone Inn’ but back then was the “Heybrook Bay Hotel”. During the war years it was requisitioned by the Admiralty and became the WRNS Quarters for the Naval Camp at Wembury Point. After the war, when it was again in private ownership it became “The Seahorse Hotel”. Now the Eddystone Pub.

At the top of the hill, partially blocked by the telegraph pole on the right of the picture is ‘Pantiles’, which since the 1950s has been occupied by the Etchells’s.
The second house, going up the hill, on the lower side, is ‘The Haven’ where Mrs Trott ran her mission church “The Church of the Holy Nativity” until late into the 1970s. The large house at the bottom of the bottom of the hill was the “Heybrook Bay Guest House” which was also requisitioned during the war. Some of the houses at the top of the hill were flat roofed and in the Art Deco style. At the bottom of the slope in the foreground on the right hand side was the “Rendezvous Cafe”, where it was possible to buy ice creams and bottles of lemonade. This closed in the 1960s and is now a private house.

Lido

The pool was formed by a reinforced concrete wall spanning a small inlet between two small rocky outcrops, side walls were built later. There was no lining of any kind, the slope from the shallow to the deep end was the natural lay of the beach, and was floored with the natural shingle. There was an inlet/outlet pipe fitted in the wall which allowed the pool to be filled on the incoming tide and gradually emptied on the the falling tide. I would imagine that it would, at one time, have had a valve on it so that the pool would remain filled at low tide. The water was just ordinary sea water and not treated in any way.

The photograph below is quite an early one, as later on a filtration plant was added, and a three tiered diving board was built over on the far side at the deep end. Also further in towards the shallow end there was a slide for the children, and on the near side a paddling pool for toddlers was formed.

The photograph below shows the Lido as it was in about 1938, just before the whole area was requisitioned by the War Department. By this time, diving boards and a slide had been provided. A filtration plant had also been installed, the sloping side of which can be seen on the extreme left of the photograph.

At the outbreak of the Second World War the whole area was requisitioned by the War Office, as being of strategic importance. There had been an Army Observation Post just in front of the holiday camp for quite some time before the outbreak of war which was later equipped with the new revolutionary invention, Radar. Gun emplacements were built on the lower levels, which were manned by the Royal Navy. The swimming pool was used by them for recreational purposes.

After the war the pool gradually fell into dilapidation, but we had many happy hours there as children using the, by then, heavily rusted diving board framework which had long given up its springboards to the elements. Also by the diving boards was a reinforced concrete structure,which had contained the filtration plant, just a single compartment with a doorway, and sloping outside walls, looking a bit like something from an Egyptian tomb.

Langdon boathouse

In the census of 1881 it is recorded that James Hockaday, 32, a boatman, and his wife Harriet, 33, with a son, Raymond, 1 year old, lived there. He would have been obliged to provide fresh fish and shellfish.for the squire’s table, probably selling whatever he could on the side! He would also have been required to row out on occasions to the Mewstone to catch rabbits for the squire’s table. He would probably have rowed others out for a small fee as well! Another part of his job would be to provide craft for pleasure for the Squire and his family, taking them on boat and fishing trips into the bay, sometimes even rowing them as far as Newton Ferrers and Noss Mayo, or around to the beach at Bovisand.

This picture is from an 1885 painting by William Gibbons, showing the boathouse with the Mewstone brooding in the distance.

This photograph of the boat house from the field above was taken in the early 1900s. In the 1950s threshing machines were brought this field to thresh corn for Lewis Andrews of Langdon Barton. On particularly hot days, some of the men would go ‘skinny dipping’ in the sea during the lunch breaks to cool off! (there was not the number of casual visitors back then as there are now).

In the 1960s HMS Cambridge brought the slipway back into use, and extended it a few years later. The living accommodation used to go across top of the boathouse and was accessible by a flight of steps from the beach level.

The boathouse by this time was a roofless ruin but quite a good place for playing.

St Werburgh

The parish church of St Werbergh has tremendous views out over the Great Mewstone to the English Channel. The present church was built in 1088, on the site of a wooden Saxon church, and was refurbished in the 1880s. The tower dates from the early fifteenth century, and the 1552 Inventory records three bells. Two were added in 1909, and a sixth in 1948, donated in memory of parishioners who died in World War 2. At the front of the church is the St Werburgh Window, dating from 1886.

St Werburgh, the seventh-century Benedictine Abbess of Weedon and Ely and patron saint of Chester, was the daughter of King Wulfhere of Mercia and granddaughter of the King of Kent. Her great-aunt, St Etheldra, founded the Abbey of Ely. Renowned for her humility and her piety, Werburgh also became known as a miracle-worker, after she successfully ordered a flock of wild geese to leave the cornfields where they were causing havoc. When she died there was such squabbling over where she should be buried that her body had to be kept under lock and key. She was finally buried in Staffordshire, where she had been born. Her fame, however, carried on growing, so that her brother had her coffin moved to a more conspicuous site. When he did so, it was discovered that Werburgh’s body was still miraculously intact, nine years later.

Wembury Marine Centre

The Wembury Marine Centre, by the beach, was the brainchild of marine biologist Dr Norman Holme and it opened in 1994. Open throughout the summer, the centre organises rockpool rambles, guided walks, and a variety of arts and crafts events designed to celebrate the wonderful diversity of marine life that flourishes around the coastline here. It is managed by a partnership formed from Devon County Council, Devon Wildlife Trust, Plymouth University’s Marine Institute, South Hams District Council and the National Trust, with support from Wembury Parish Council and with guidance from the advisory group of the Wembury Voluntary Marine Conservation Area.

Seaweed Lane

This green lane travelling up from the shoreline, Spring Lane, is also known as Seaweed Lane. It is one of 191 ancient trackways restored in the South Hams as part of the District Council’s ‘Right Tracks’ project. Together the district’s green lanes cover a staggering 300km, and the same lanes have been in use for many thousands of years since people first started using them in prehistoric times.

Seaweed Lane leads to rich pastureland on the hillside above. Farmers used it to transport seaweed from the beach to spread this on the fields as a fertiliser. Some modern fertilisers are still based on seaweed, which has been found to contain high levels of potassium, as well as nitrogen and phosphates and trace elements such as iron, manganese, zinc, copper and boron. It increases a crop’s resistance to damage by frost and parasites, and the salt content deters slugs.

Smockpark Lane

Smockpark Lane is another green lane, or ‘holloway’, travelled by feet, hooves and wheels for many centuries.

Wembury ferry port

By the late 19^th century Plymouth’s commercial port was seriously outdated – to the extent that liners of any size had to anchor in Plymouth Sound and use tenders to land or embark passengers or goods. When attempts to resolve this problem by building new port facilities in Plymouth’s Cattewater were blocked by the navy, attention switched to Wembury Bay.

In 1908 a private company published plans to build here the country’s largest port. Stretching from the River Yealm in the east to Wembury Point in the west, and protected by breakwaters stretching well out to sea, this port would have totally transformed the bay. However, despite strong support from Plymouth’s commercial and political elite, and despite a complete absence of local opposition, when the company applied in 1909 for the necessary Act of Parliament to permit the project it was firmly refused by a House of Lords vetting committee. Under-capitalisation and the lack of backing by a major railway company were its Achilles’ heels.

Eddystone Lighthouses

Winstanley Light 1699

The first lighthouse on Eddystone Rocks was an octagonal wooden structure built by Henry Winstanley. The lighthouse was also the first recorded instance of an offshore lighthouse. Construction started in 1696 and the light was lit on 14 November 1698. During construction, a French privateer took Winstanley prisoner and destroyed the work done so far on the foundations, causing Louis XIV to order Winstanley’s release with the words “France is at war with England, not with humanity”.

The lighthouse survived its first winter but was in need of repair, and was subsequently changed to a dodecagonal (12 sided) stone clad exterior on a timber-framed construction with an octagonal top section as can be seen in the later drawings or paintings. The octagonal top section (or ‘lantern’) was 15 ft (4.6 m) high and 11 ft (3.4 m) in diameter, its eight windows each made up of 36 individual glass panes. It was lit by ’60 candles at a time, besides a great hanging lamp’.

Winstanley’s tower lasted until the great storm of 1703 erased almost all trace on 8 December. Winstanley was on the lighthouse, completing additions to the structure. No trace was found of him, or of the other five men in the lighthouse

RudyerD Light 1699

Rudyard’s lighthouse, in contrast to its predecessor, was a smooth conical tower, shaped ‘so as to offer the least possible resistance to wind and wave’. It was built on a base of solid wood, formed from layers of timber beams, laid horizontally on seven flat steps which had been cut into the upper face of the sloping rock. On top of this base rose several courses of stone, interspersed with further layers of wood, which was designed to serve as ballast for the tower. This substructure rose to a height of 63 feet (19 m), on top of which were raised four storeys of timber. The entire structure was sheathed in vertical wooden planks and anchored to the reef using 36 wrought iron bolts, forged to fit deep dovetailed holes which had been cut in the reef. The vertical planks were installed by two master-shipwrights from Woolwich Dockyard and were caulked like those of a ship. The tower was topped with an octagonal lantern, which brought it to a total height of 92 feet (28 m). A light was first shone from the tower on 8 August 1708 and the work was completed in 1709. The light was provided by 24 candles. Rudyard’s lighthouse proved more durable than its predecessor, surviving and serving its purpose on the reef for nearly 50 years.

In 1715 Captain Lovett died and his lease was purchased by Robert Weston, Esq., in company with two others (one of whom was Rudyard).

On the night of 2 December 1755, the top of the lantern caught fire, probably through a spark from one of the candles used to illuminate the light, or else through a fracture in the chimney which passed through the lantern from the stove in the kitchen below.^[9] The three keepers threw water upwards from a bucket but were driven onto the rock and were rescued by boat as the tower burnt down. Keeper Henry Hall, who was 94 at the time, died several days later from ingesting molten lead from the lantern roof. A report on this case was submitted to the Royal Society by physician Edward Spry, and the piece of lead is now in the collections of the National Museums of Scotland.

SMEATON Light 1699

Work began on the reef in August 1756, with the gradual cutting away of recesses in the rock which were designed to dovetail in due course with the foundations of the tower. During the winter, the workers stayed ashore and were employed in dressing the stone for the lighthouse; work then resumed on the rock the following June, with the laying of the first courses of stone. The foundations and outside structure were built of local Cornish granite, while lighter Portland limestone masonry was used on the inside. As part of the construction process, Smeaton pioneered ‘hydraulic lime‘, a concrete that cured under water, and developed a technique of securing the blocks using dovetail joints and marble dowels. Work continued over the course of the following two years, and the light was first lit on 16 October 1759.

Smeaton’s lighthouse was 59 feet (18 m) high and had a diameter at the base of 26 feet (7.9 m) and at the top of 17 feet (5.2 m). It was lit by a chandelier of 24 large tallow candles.

In 1877 it was resolved to build a replacement lighthouse, following reports that erosion to the rocks under Smeaton’s tower was causing it to shake from side to side whenever large waves hit. During construction of the new lighthouse, the Town Council of Plymouth petitioned for Smeaton’s tower to be dismantled and rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe, in lieu of a Trinity House daymark which stood there

Douglass Light 1882

By July 1878 the new site, on the South Rock was being prepared during the 3½ hours between ebb and flood tide; the foundation stone was laid on 19 August the following year by The Duke of Edinburgh, Master of Trinity House. The supply ship Hercules was based at Oreston, now a suburb of Plymouth; stone was prepared at the Oreston yard and supplied from the works of Messrs Shearer, Smith and Co of Wadebridge. The tower, which is 49 metres (161 ft) high, contains a total of 62,133 cubic feet of granite, weighing 4,668 tons. The last stone was laid on 1 June 1881 and the light was first lit on 18 May 1882.

Still in use today, its white light flashes twice every 10 seconds. The light is visible to 22 nautical miles (41 km), and is supplemented by a foghorn of 3 blasts every 62 seconds. A subsidiary red sector light shines from a window in the tower to highlight the Hand Deeps hazard to the west-northwest. The lighthouse is now monitored and controlled from the Trinity House Operations Control Centre at Harwich in Essex.