Introduction
We took a family holiday to Teignmouth, Devon. (The first part of the name is pronounced ‘tin’ in order to confuse tourists, but we foiled this plan by arriving by train with station announcements.) As the name suggests, the town is by a river mouth; we stayed in an old house near the river beach.
Sunday
The weather for the first few days ran kind of English in the morning, then sunny in the afternoons – convenient for us since that coincided with low tide and certain members of the party wanted to play on the beach.
Teignmouth has a pier – of course, it’s the Grand Pier, even though it was never that big and the seaward half is fenced off and looks ready to collapse at the next winter storm.
Monday
We stayed about a minute’s walk from the old quay, inevitably called New Quay, which used to be where they shipped granite, but now appears to mainly used for tying up the pilot boat. There is a much newer and much larger quay a little further up the river, with actual ships still loading aggregates, I think. I don’t know what they named that one, Old Quay maybe?
Again we went to the beach in the afternoon; before that, the tide was too high. Teignmouth’s beach is completely covered for quite a lot of the tide.
Tuesday
Another day with a rainy morning, but no worries because we went to the town museum. It’s a nice small museum in a fancy modern building.
The yacht club has a fancy building on the seafront.
Wednesday
We took the ferry across the river to Shaldon. The ferry claims to be England’s oldest passenger ferry (in terms of how long it’s operated, not the actual boat, which seemed seaworthy). It was a short, fun, and inexpensive trip.
On the other side, we climbed the Ness to visit Shaldon Zoo, which is a real zoo but is very small and consequently only has small animals, mostly monkeys.
There is a Smuggler’s Tunnel which goes down through the cliff face to the beach. It’s a very nice tunnel, although suspiciously well-constructed (and signposted) for smugglers. There’s an old lime kiln by the tunnel entrance; I’m not convinced it was ever profitable to smuggle lime…
We took the ferry back again, which didn’t take long even though we had to wait for it to go and come back (too many passengers).
Thursday
We embarked on a morning walk to Dawlish, which is the next stop on the railway line. This is less than six kilometres but the longest walk our 4-year-old had ever done (he was fine).
Sprey Point quay was built so they could bring in materials when building the railway. It now has a very large ‘Teignmouth’ sign (that you can see from said railway) and not much else.
The first part of the walk follows the sea wall right next to the railway line (there was a lot of waving at trains). After that it dips under the railway to go uphill on a small road called, obviously, Smugglers’ Lane.
After climbing all the way to the top of the headland, inevitably the route took us all the way back down again, through a public park, into Dawlish.
The sea wall in Dawlish looks new because in 2014 the railway (which is the only rail connection to the southwestern part of England) washed away in a storm, so they had to rebuild it.
Anyway, in Dawlish we had a very nice lunch at a Thai restaurant before playing on the beach a bit and then getting the train back.
We had cakes in a Teignmouth tearoom.
Afterwards, my son and I took a short walk near the house.
Later in the evening I took another walk before sunset.
The sun disappeared ahead of schedule behind low cloud in the west, but I took a few more photos before heading back.
Friday
I dragged our son out for an early morning walk again.
Later, we went out to play on the northern beach.
That’s all! It was a nice holiday; we all had a good time.