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Clovelly, Devon

Clovelly is a village on the north Devon coast, with a fourteenth century harbour, and a number of cottages dating to that time. It is an estate village, and has been owned by only three families since the Norman Conquest.

The village is famous for its connection with Victorian writer Charles Kingsley. Kingsley was eleven years old when his father was appointed curate at Clovelly. The family lived at 104, The High Street, and Clovelly was to have a profound influence on young Charles. When he grew up Charles Kingsley was to become a prominent figure, a Christian socialist, professor of modern history at Cambridge, and a writer. His children's books were very popular. He wrote Westward Ho! in Clovelly, and echoes of the village can sometimes be heard in The Water Babies.

Clovelly became famous during Victorian times as a tourist attraction. Tourism was taking off at this time, and visitors would be brought in mainly by steamer from Ilfracombe, and south Wales. This was the age of the Industrial Revolution and villages like Clovelly seemed to offer a way back to a more innocent time. This image, inevitably, did not correspond with reality. Kingsley loved Clovelly, which is not surprising for such a lovely place, but he could also be realistic about life there. In one of his most famous poems, The Three Fishers, Kingsley wrote about a fishing tragedy out in Bideford Bay. Three young fishermen leave for their day's work, waved off by wives and girlfriends, but they are drowned in a storm. The village seems cold in its attitude to the deaths: "Men must work and women must weep." Life grinds on. People came here in the nineteenth century to escape the grind of the Industrial Revolution, but in reality fishing, Clovelly's industry, was a tough business like any other. And so was tourism. The idea of Clovelly as a survivor from a better, more community minded age is still played on in the information film that runs at the visitors centre. Personally I preferred visiting Charles Kingsley's house and hearing a recording of The Three Fishers. He gave me the feeling that he loved a real place, and not an idealised place, visited for a few days on a steam ship.

 

The idealisation of villages, and childhood, could be seen as a reaction against the mechanised order of the Industrial Revolution. There seemed to be a general search for a special, magical place, free of the rational industrial age, and villages and childhood were two of the places Victorian people looked. Clovelly was Kingsley's Vendale "a quiet, silent, rich happy place; a narrow crack cut deep in the earth, so deep and out of the way, that the bad bogies can hardly find it."

 

Opening Times: the visitor centre is open in the Summer 9am - 6.15pm and in the Winter 10am - 3.45pm.

Address: Clovelly Visitor Centre, near Bideford, Devon EX39 5TA

Directions: Clovelly is on the north coast of Devon, twelve miles east of Bideford off the A39. Car parking is available at the visitors centre, where an entrance fee is payable. Click here for an interactive map centred on Clovelly.

Access: The High Street is very steep, and the surface is cobbled, and can be slippery. The Visitors Centre, donkey stables and craft workshops are wheelchair accessible, as is Mount Pleasant, a picnic spot at the top of the hill offering good views. From Easter until the end of October it is possible to use a fare paying Land Rover service which runs from the visitor centre to the harbour, via a steep back road.

Contact:

telephone: 01237 431781

fax: 01237 431644

e-mail: visitorcentre@clovelly.co.uk

web site: http://www2.clovelly.co.uk/index.php