Kevin Dixon: The view from Waldon Hill

In 1838 the Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson was in Torquay, a place he called “the loveliest sea village in England”.

During his vacation he wrote the poem Audley Court. Inspired by Torre Abbey, the last lines describe the scene from the hill overlooking the Bay, “a star of phosphorescence made by the buoy appearing and disappearing in the dark sea.”

Tennyson’s viewpoint was Waldon Hill, atop the sheer cliff face of Rock Walk.

It is from Waldon Hill that can be seen the evolution of Torquay. This is a journey from the resort’s beginnings as a scattering of Anglo-Saxon hamlets to today’s urban conurbation by the sea.

We forget that the present-day centre of town and suburbs are built upon real earth, a prehistoric landscape. Under the roads and pavements are those mythical seven hills, the fast-flowing Fleet lies buried beneath Primark while Torre Abbey Meadows caps reclaimed marshland.

Prior to human intervention much of the Bay was wooded. However, by the beginning of the Iron Age, much had been cleared for farming. Tree cover remained only on the steep hard-to-cultivate slopes of our hills. In Old English Waldon means wooded hill.

We can still see in place names how an Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and then hybrid English identity overwhelmed a Celtic Dumnonian landcape.

What is now our modern town originated in the Saxon hamlet of Torre. Tor is a Celtic word for a rocky hill while Tormohun is the bringing together of that ancient appellation with the personal name of the Norman landlord Reginald de Mohun. Quay is a French term.

It took thousands of years for the terrain to be organised; with territories delimited and controlled by fences and stone walls; for the land to be surveyed, named and mapped.  But it only took a further few centuries for asphalt, brick and concrete to reach out from Torre to connect, then encompass and develop, the villages and  modern-day wards of Livermead, Cockington, Chelston, St Marychurch, Plainmoor, Babbacombe, Watcombe, Maidencombe, Hele, Shiphay, and the Willows.

From the sixth century the view from the hill was of a Christian landscape, the fields affixed by St Saviour’s Church, the enigmatic St Michael’s Chapel, and the medieval sprawl of the Abbey.

The Church of England’s near monopoly would remain until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the slopes of Waldon seeing the construction of: St Mary Magdalene in 1849; St Luke’s in 1861; and All Saints, Torre, in 1867. Yet, incomers would begin to arrive with new ideas about how to practice their religion.

In 1829 restrictions on the Catholic church were relaxed allowing the Assumption of Our Lady to be built on Abbey Road in 1853. Nonconforming congregations also flourished, the energetic Wesleyan Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, and Plymouth Brethren erecting their chapels in the interstices of the Anglican town.

Yet now, in these early decades of the twenty-first century, less than half of us describe ourselves as Christians. Many of the sixty or so churches and chapels that once bejeweled the town have been demolished or transferred to secular uses. 

In 1815 the poet TW Booker wrote a poem about Torquay entitled… well… ‘Torquay: A Poem’ predicting that “yonder hills all boasting purest air, Shall smile with villas and with mansions fair; Adorn’d with gardens or with paddocks green, These scatter’d round shall on the heights be seen.”

And so they were. Amongst the wooded slopes the first houses on Warren Road  were in place by the 1840s while the villas on Cary Road and St Luke’s Road South were constructed in the 1860s. Some are still there, while others have been replaced with apartments. 

In 1840 construction began on accommodation for visitors and residents at the base of the hill. Unexpectedly, a twenty feet wide road was uncovered, “consisting of large stones placed end to end and requiring gunpowder to break it up and remove it." Intriguingly, this road was referred to in Latin as the causeway, 'calcetum', suggesting a possible Roman origin.

That ancient causeway to the sea was known as Sand Lane but was renamed Belgrave Road in 1856. The area was designated as Belgravia after the capital’s fashionable suburb. Between 1860 and 1880 this Italianate style ‘Little London’ would establish Torquay’s reputation for luxury and high-class company. 

Beyond is Torre Abbey, the richest Premonstratensian abbey in England and for hundreds of years a national focus of culture and learning.  This preeminence abruptly ended in 1539 with the Dissolution. The much-reduced buildings were bought by Sir George Cary in 1662 and so the medieval was swept away and obscurity returned to the Bay.  

The Abbey is enclosed by public gardens, pleasure grounds and ponds, designed to present a fine first impression for the millions of visitors as they disembarked at Torquay Station. The Great Western Railway’s expansion, first to Torre in 1848 and then to Torquay in 1859, also gave us the 200 room Grand Hotel in 1881.

From its beginnings Torquay’s communities were forever divided by access to a view of the sea. Wealth could purchase a visa from the hill while the working classes lived below in the tenements of Pimlico, George Street and Swan Street.  Even today the hill defines life chances. The more you ascend life expectancy can increase by nine years.

As Torquay flourished, migrants filled the poorly constructed buildings. Gin and opium offered speedy but temporary relief from the anxieties of poverty, hunger, and abuse while rioting sporadically broke out. When the well-travelled Canadian visitor Isabella Cowen visited in 1892, she recorded, “I have seen more luxury since being in Torquay than in all my previous life.”

Inevitably, in 1849 cholera came to town, the disease claiming the lives of 66 people in six weeks. Eventually the worst of the slums were cleared and a broad highway from Castle Circus to the Strand constructed, while the odiferous Fleet was confined to a tunnel.

From the hill social divisions in the Victorian town were most evident at night. This is when for many the Fleet canyon became a gloomy pit with lanterns and candlelight the sole sources of illumination.

In October 1834 the darkness was banished by forty gas lamps installed in the main thoroughfares. This was modernity and it transformed the town. The richer classes could then act as both spectators and performers as they paraded Fleet Street and the Harbourside.

Yet illumination was the privilege of the upper and middle classes, the poor inhabiting a parallel social world. Street lighting certainly gentrified the commercial centre of the resort and allowed for ostentatious acts of consumption, though it relegated other areas, the intense pools of light emphasising the darkness beyond and the supposed physical and moral dangers it concealed.

Looking south from the hill is the Bay, that immense sheltered anchorage was once the home of the Channel Fleet. Before the construction of the Torbay Road, waves crashed against the limestone cliff. The main route from the quay to Paignton was via a lengthy journey around Waldon Hill and through Torre.

The riskier alternative was to use the ancient Fisherman’s Path along the cliff. In the 1890s this route was converted into a tourist attraction, the Royal Terrace Gardens, better known as Rock Walk, a serpentine network of paths, steps and wooden bridges. In the 1920s, floodlighting was added.

Geography creates history, how we act and how we see the world.

There were those visitors attracted by the Bay’s beauty, others who came to live, to work, to retire. All made decisions based on what the geography offered. Thousands of individual choices were made, some by powerful families such as the Carys, the Palks, and Mallocks, but many by those unremembered.

We transformed the landscape, whether consciously or by our mere presence; and in turn were shaped by the hills and limestone cliffs of Torquay.