Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> By the nineteenth century there was a tradition in the large North Devon village of Braunton of ownership of coastal trading vessels. This arose initially from the need to transport local agricultural produce to market centres. From the 1840’s the fleet expanded with the purchase of one or two vessels almost every year. For the next thirty years most though not all of those were still small smacks plying locally. Thereafter the size of the vessels increased as they ranged further afield. The fleet continued to grow until the outbreak of the First World War. Between the wars unlike elsewhere there was little decline at Braunton; and after the Second World War most of the schooners and ketches that survived in the West Country were owned there. Why Braunton? Indeed why had this village two miles up a narrow creek (or “pill”) off the Taw / Torridge estuary and with only one small wharf become such a significant ship-owning centre in the first place? Braunton Pill is the outlet into the Taw of the River Caen. Originally the Caen had two mouths divided by Horsey Island a salt marsh. In the eighteenth century ships loaded grain in one or other of those mouths grain that will have been brought down the Caen from Braunton in small barges. Velator at the downstream end of Braunton village and at the tidal limit was above an awkward loop in the river. It was therefore easier for such ships as did come upstream to berth in the loop on the Wrafton side below Velator. In 1811 an embankment was built to enclose the land on the western side of the pill.