Coomb | Combe | Comb

A valley, often wooded and often with no river

From the Middle English Coumbe and the Old English Cumb. Related to the Welsh Cym.

I’m stood on the side of the road in the bright morning sun. It’s February in Exeter Devon and the weather is much warmer, dryer and brighter than popular culture had led me to expect of an English winter. It is exactly a year before pandemic will rip and tear at the physical and social health of the world. I have spent the night in the White Hart which says it dates from the 1400’s, a building archaeologist may quibble, but it certainly beats the Thistle Inn back home with its ‘ancient’ 1840 founding. The room I stayed in was firmly 1970’s rather than anything more antique.
I am happy and giddy as today I am visiting my ancestral lands. The only thing tempering my mood is a few meters up the road on a side street lie a line of rotting old mattresses and couches that form the open-air home for a community of homeless people. They are mostly sedated to the horror of reality one way or another. Austerity Britian working to design. My mood is the least important consideration at play here.
I am collected by Adrian and Joe, ‘beer people’ who are to host me around South Hams today. Our destination is Salcombe. Salcombe sits at the bottom of the southern peninsular of the county, an area known as South Hams. Just to the east the coast is known as the English Riviera. These seaside towns are now resort towns for the wealthy. When my ancestors left Salcombe it was a working port with a fishing fleet, and a sail propelled freight trade importing oranges and lemons from the Azores and pineapples, pomelos and rum from the Bahamas. Cider, malt, grain and slate were exported in return. Fruit tree diseases heavily dented the citrus and pineapple trade in the 1870’s pushing the port into decline.
My maternal great great grandfather was a ship wright and my great grandfather was a blacksmith, they took a punt on the antipodes.   We arrive in Salcombe and after driving around the narrow lanes a few times we find a park in the boat yards. We walk past the sheds which now service launches and yachts but once would have built and maintained working ships, once would have employed my ancestors. We walk along the waterfront; the Custom House is now a luxury holiday apartment, we pass a gin distillery and are weaving along Fore St when I get a rush of déjà vu and realise I have been here before.

Sort of.

Is there anywhere in Britian that hasn’t been written about, eulogised, demonised, and documented by literature, television and film? I know this waterfront as David Suchet waddles down it as Poirot in the 2001 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun. In my ancestor’s time Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote Crossing the Bar about the dangerous entry to the estuary at Salcombe, and of course about death. For some they were one and the same.
Our target today is the King’s Arms pub. According to my grandfather my ancestors used to run it. According to my uncle there is no evidence of this. Unsurprisingly I side with my grandfather. Salcombe was the last Royalist town to fall to the puritanical zealots in the English civil war. Downing a pint in the Kings Arms seems appropriate. Before the Kings Arms we stop at another pub for a beer and meet the landlord who was born in Blenheim, migration flows both ways.
We dine at the Kings Arms and as one with ancestral ties I am given a full behind the scenes tour by Christine the landlady. As we leave she puts a hand on mine and says “there are so many blow-ins in this town you are more of a local than most of them” In this context it’s a lovely sentiment, and it’s meant with affection but it’s not really true. For me the combes that form southern Pōneke are home, the combes of southwest England are but just part of my story.