The English Administrative County of Devon

Population and area summary of the County of Devon

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The County of Devon is located in The Far South Western Counties of England, it covers an administrative area of 6,564Km² and in 2001 was home to a population of 704,493 persons, that represents 1.43% of that of England and 0.01% of the population of the entire United Kingdom.

More detailed information including visitor attractions and event venues in Devon is available on this site by following the links below to the Boroughs and/or Districts or follow this link to select a different County.

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Boroughs/Districts of the County of Devon

Unitary Authorities and Metropolitan Areas are shown below as these locations are historically associated with this county. These areas today are self-governing and are no longer responsible to the County Administration.

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Historical notes about The English Administrative County of Devon

DEVON in 1950

"Devonshire" or "Devon"?

Except for certain special purposes, the two forms are interchangeable as nouns. Both are found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (e.g. "Defenascir," "Defenun"), and the county historians use them indiscriminately. Neither is therefore to be preferred over the other. "North Devon" and "South Devon" are, however, obligatory. In general the adjective is "Devonshire," though "a Devon man" is familiar and perfectly correct.

Devonshire ranks third among the counties of England in size: it is very little smaller than Lincolnshire. But whereas Yorkshire has for centuries been split up into three Ridings, and Lincolnshire into the Part of Holland, Kesteven and Lindsey, Devonshire remains undivided - the largest single unit in English local government today. This unity is deceptive. For the county falls into three regions, each with some special characteristics of its own. In the past the life of each of them was to a large extent separate from that of its neighbours; and even now the improvement in communications has certainly not broken down all the barriers between them or done away with their differences.

In the first place, there is the great division between north Devon and south Devon. This can be seen very simply in terms of physical geography. The general course of nearly all the main rivers of the county lies north and south. North Devon is therefore the region watered by the Taw and the Torridge, with their tributaries; south Devon is the country of the southerly rivers - Axe, Otter, Exe, Teign, Dart, Plym, Tavy and Tamar. No precise dividing line can be drawn between north and south Devon, but roughly the division may be said to run from Lifton on the Cornish border up the valley of the little River Thrushel, round the north-western edge of Dartmoor, over the watershed at Copplestone, thence to Tiverton and so to the Blackdown Hills and Somerset.

South Devon, thus defined, includes Dartmoor. But the moor is very different form the surrounding country, in appearance, in history, in the life of its people. It forms the third of the county's main regions.

North Devon

To most English people north Devon means the coast; Lynmouth, Lynton and Ilfracombe, motor-coaches up and down precipitous hills, the quaintness of Clovelly, golf at Westward Ho! But that leaves four-fifths of north Devon out of account. What is it like as a whole?

Windswept Grassland

To begin with, it is comparatively poor country. There are rich lands in the Taw - Torridge basin, and market-gardening round Ilfracombe; but on the whole north Devon is high, wind-swept grassland, with oats for it characteristic cereal crop - very different from the richer south and east, with their wheat and potatoes and apple orchards.

The type of its villages, too, is distinctive. Very often they are dispersed, the church standing by itself or with only a few houses round it, the rest of the parish comprising scattered farms or separate hamlets. An example of this on the largest scale is Hartland, where the "borough" is two miles from the "church-town," the hamlet of Stoke with the great church, and the out-lying farms are dotted all over the parish, which measures some four miles by six.

Again, the towns in the north Devon bear a much less important relation to the countryside than they do in the south. They are fewer in number, and it is worth noticing that four of them showed a falling population between the last two censuses. Though this decline may be only temporary, the drop at Ilfracombe and Lynton was extremely sharp, amounting to more than twenty percent in each case; and there was a similar trend, on a smaller scale, in the rural districts. Over most of England there is a steady drift away from the countryside and the small towns to the large centres of population; but here in north Devon if seems to be proceeding faster than elsewhere - certainly faster than in the rest of the county.

If most of the lesser towns in north Devon show some tendency to decline, Barnstaple fully maintains its position as the capital of the region. If you want to know what a traditional English market day is like, and that on a big scale, you should go to Barnstaple on a Friday. It has a large covered-in Victorian market-hall, where the goods for sale are displayed in great baskets called panniers. Early in the morning the town begins to fill with people from far and wide; countless buses jostle one another in the awkward streets; the place is brimming with activity. For this market is still a real commercial focus, one of the things that contribute most to the distinctive life of north Devon today. Exeter's radius as a shopping centre is large, and always growing, but Barnstaple market still holds its own.

Barnstaple has lost the great position it once held as a port, the herring fishery, the trade with Ireland and America remarked upon by Defoe. It has shared in the eclipse of the Devonshire woollen industry, and the pottery, which produces "Barum ware," has certainly not re-established it as an important centre of manufacture. Today it is a market and residential town, subsisting mainly on retail trade and to a small extent on visitors in summer.

Huguenot Settlers

But it has a definite flavour of its own. One or two of the shops display curious names, of French origin, for a considerable number of Huguenots settled here at the end of the seventeenth century. (Sometimes these names have undergone strange alterations: "De Boursaquotte" was too much for the tongues and pens of Barnstaple people, who sensibly transformed it into "Buzzacott.") The Huguenots were kindly received in the town. That is not surprising, since Barnstaple, like the whole of north Devon, has always borne a strongly Puritan, Nonconformist character, which endured today. Chapels abound, not only in the town itself, but in villages and hamlets, even in isolation by the roadside, as that you might almost be in Cornwall or Wales. And, as usual, Nonconformity expresses itself politically in terms of Liberalism: the Barnstaple division returned a Liberal member to the last Parliament, and in the debacle of the party in 1945 the Liberal candidate stood second in the poll with more than 13,000 votes.

The Nonconformity and Liberalism of north Devon point perhaps to a greater degree of independence in its people than you will generally find farther south. This is partly the natural consequence of a poorer soil and a harder life. But it is also due to the relative absence of great estates, with the influence that landlords can exercise over the opinions of their tenants. North Devon has its own gentry, of course, and many of its families show a long history - Fortescue, Chichester, Bourchier, Coffin. There are delicious valleys and combes, perfect sites for an Elizabethan or Georgian house; I think of the Taw valley, with its long, sweeping curves and Tawstock Court at its mouth, or Weare Giffard in the narrower valley of the Torridge, or the astonishing peace of Hartland Abbey, only a mile back from the open Atlantic and the wicked coast. But, as a whole, north Devon is too windy and bare: the eighteenth century landscape-gardener looked at it with horror as hopeless material for him to work upon. So it has remained, what it always was, pre-eminently a small farmer's country.

South Devon

If you drive from Barnstaple to Exeter, the last dozen miles of your journey lie through a country quite different from that farther north. You pass Crediton, ancient and sleepy, with its magnificent red sandstone church; then Newton St Cyres, which has somehow managed to keep its pink cob-walled cottages, even though it lies all along the main road; and then a few minutes later you are in the valley of the Exe, over Cowley Bridge and into the outskirts of the city. Everywhere here you will see mixed farming, fat cattle, timber trees, a park-like landscape: you are in the richest part of the county - the true "red Devon" in fact.

As you compare south Devon with north, more and more of these differences will strike you. Here in the south the villages are larger and more concentrated, like the villages of southern and eastern England. There are a great many more towns. Apart from the cities of Exeter and Plymouth and the string of holiday resorts on the coast from Seaton to Salcombe, the little market towns like Honiton, Tiverton and Kingsbridge are thriving places, often with some small light industry attached to them. Something of their spirit was caught and preserved forever by Trollope when he created the Devonshire town of "Baslehurst" in Rachel Ray. I have often wondered which of them he had in mind when he wrote it: Baslehurst may be a composite picture, a blending, say, of Totnes and Tiverton. It is one of his lesser novels, short, very quiet and gentle; but it provides a fascinating commentary on the close society of these little towns, their sectarian and political rivalries, the gossip, the huddled intimacy of their life. You can catch the same feeling still, walking about one of them on a market-day, or watching the religious activity of a Sunday morning, for things here are very slow to change - as slow as in the countryside, perhaps in some ways even slower. If these towns no longer return their own members to Parliament, most of them remain municipal boroughs. Their wool and serge industries have closed down, except at Buckfastleigh; but Tiverton keeps its big lace factory, and at Totnes they now bottle milk and cider. As for the people in the book - the weak, genteel Mrs Ray, her censorious elder daughter Mrs Prime, Mr Tappitt, the small-town brewer - their descendants are living her still.

South Devon Coast

It is hardly too much to say that south Devon nowadays is dominated by its coast. The south coast has always been much more important in relation to the interior than the north. For this, there are a number of reasons: the numerous valleys have made it more easily accessible; it is better provided with good harbours, in its estuaries and in Torbay, a splendid natural refuge from the south-westerly storms; the English Channel is a bigger highway of trade and war than the Bristol Channel ever was in its greatest days. In the past a good deal of the farm produce of south Devon went to the victualling of ships in harbour. Now it goes to the victualling of visitors, at Exeter and Plymouth, at Sidmouth, Exmouth, Torquay, Paignton. Of the old ports with their great history, only Plymouth is of real importance today, though it was exciting during the war to see some of the others coming to life again - French and English naval ships side by side at Dartmouth, un-accustomed American voices in the streets of Salcombe.

But if it revived these little towns, the war also brought them danger and destruction. All of them were bombed, at one time or another. Dartmouth suffered severely - the famous Butter-walk is only just standing, its rich, decorated font horribly mauled; and as for Plymouth, it is one of the most heavily blasted towns in the country, comparable with Coventry and Hull. Nor was it only the coastal towns that were attacked. I well remember the shock I got when walking down to the village of Aveton Gifford on the road from Plymouth to Kingsbridge and coming upon its fine church (the best Early English building in Devonshire) bombed into ruins, the walls cracked, the tower fallen, grass growing over the up-rooted grave stones. The houses in the village, too, were much destroyed. One became used to sights like that in the great cities; but here in the open country - miles from a town, away from the sea - the spectacle was altogether more dreadful and strange. It reminded one grimly that south Devon was once again in the front line of England's defence, just as it had been against the Spaniards in the sixteenth century.

Now that we are back at peace, the life of south Devon is settling down into its old ways. Once more the trains are crowded with holiday-makers bound for Exmouth, Torquay, and Paignton, the hotels full, the townspeople out to make up for the lean war years. In these coastal resorts during the years to come we may expect to see mile added to mile of concrete promenade and - unless we are much more careful that we have been in the past - mean suburbs spreading out, eating their way relentlessly into the countryside. But beyond their reach things will go on as before, in the quiet places that tourists overlook: in tiny towns like Modbury and Bradninch and Ottery St Mary, at Torbryan with its exquisite church, in the water-meadows of the Axe, under the great oaks in the part at Powderham.

DARTMOOR

Dartmoor can be defined in several different ways. The Royal Forest of Dartmoor (which forms part of the Duchy of Cornwall) covers only the centre of the moorland; its outer edge is divided up into commons held by the inhabitants of the bordering villages. These villages have always been an integral part of Dartmoor, and the term should therefore be held to include them.

The moor is like nothing else in England - except its smaller counterpart in Cornwall, Bodmin Moor, and that shows some important differences. It is a great mass of solid granite, high, wind-swept, bleak. It affords pasture for cattle and ponies in the summer, but agriculture is almost entirely confined to the shelter of the river valleys. On the other hand, Dartmoor is rich in minerals, which are hardly found elsewhere in Devon: they have made it from time immemorial and industrial area. The phrase "from time immemorial" is in this case literally true. We do not know where the tin on the moor was first worked, or by whom. The organization of the stannaries - that is to say, the mining districts of Devon and Cornwall - was already highly developed in the twelfth century, when its written records start. Nor was it only tin that was important. Copper and manganese used to be raised here, too. Most of this activity is now dying or dead, killed by the much greater supplies of these metals that have become available from other parts of the world; but you can still see the traces of tin-steaming and mining in many parts of the moor. And even now it has not lost its character as an industrial district. Dartmoor granite is still quarried, as it was for the building of London Bridge and Waterloo Bridge over a hundred years ago, and since 1834 china clay has been extensively worked in the south-west, particularly at Ugborough and Shaugh Prior.

But man has left his mark here in other ways as well: most obviously at Princetown, the one substantial settlement on the open moor. Its great prison was originally built to accommodate French and Americans captured in the Napoleonic wars. Since then it has been used for several purposes, and even at times altogether disused. It is surely, beyond competition, the grimmest building in England: one shudders to think that it once held nine thousand men. Princetown itself is as gloomy as you would expect. It caters, not very well, for tourists in summer, but its bleak position and the proximity of the gaol have effectively damped such spirit as it might have had. What a refreshing contrast to descend to one of the ancient stannary towns below the moor: to Tavistock, for instance, with its beautiful green stone houses, its memory of Drake and the great abbey and so many of the Russells.

A little industry, the business of the prison, some afforestation and agriculture in the sheltered places; these make up the life of the moor for nine months of the year. July brings the visitors, who have come to play almost the chief part in its economy, many farmers having found that they yield quicker and surer profit than the land. By the end of September they are almost all gone, leaving the moor to withdraw once again into the storms and long mists of winter.

These, then, are the three regions of Devonshire, and some of the contrasts they present to one another. Nevertheless, they have many features in common: I have already pointed to a few of them. It is time to turn now to the character of the county as a whole.

Looking at the four south-western counties of England together, you will often find that Devonshire is linked more closely with Somerset than with its other neighbours Dorset and Cornwall. Devon and Somerset are bigger than the others; their agriculture has always been more prosperous; they were the greatest centre of the south-western woollen manufacture from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.

It is not always easy, but it is very important, to understand how rich Devonshire once was, until the woollen industry moved north, to be near the Yorkshire coalfield, a change that occurred less than two hundred years ago. In 1700 Exeter was indisputably the fourth city in England for wealth and trade; and as late as 1792 an acute political observer could remark of the county that "the extensiveness of its territory, the number of its inhabitants, and its weight of property, give it a capacity for the importance of a state equal to some of the American governments."

This past prosperity has left many marks upon the county today, upon its house and towns and villages, upon the landscape itself. You get the sense of it immediately in such a church as St Saviour's at Dartmouth, with its brasses and screen of the fifteenth century, its gorgeous Tudor pulpit, its great Jacobean gallery, where the centuries are, as it were, piled in layers, one on top of another. Or look, again, at the lovely Georgian terraces of Exeter: those that is, which escaped the German bombs.

The triple foundations of this wealth were the woollen industry, the shipping at ports, and agriculture. By 1850, as we have seen, the first of these had decayed. The second also showed a marked decline in commercial importance, though this was largely compensated for by the great development of Plymouth as a naval base during the Napoleonic wars. Plymouth had been a considerable town since its incorporation in the fifteenth century, but it has become a great town (and ultimately a city) only in the last hundred and fifty years. You can the evidence of its rapid expansion still in the decent plain Regency houses - street after street of them - in Devonport and Stonehouse, with churches and civic buildings to match. But Plymouth was, and is, primarily a naval port. Some ocean liners call there, but far fewer that at its rivals Southampton and Liverpool; and the same is true of its cargo shipping. In this respect the Devonshire ports have never recovered lost ground.

The county's agriculture, on the other hand, retained its full prosperity much longer, until the great depression of the 1870's. A steady fall in the acreage of arable land then set in, checked only in the war years. By 1907 the area under wheat was little more than a third of what it had been forty years earlier; by 1937 it fallen lower still.

Yet thought the ancient trades and the agriculture of Devonshire are slowly declining, they are not by any means dead. Small colliers still lie by the quay at Bideford; lace-making goes on in east Devon, even if Honiton is no longer its centre; cider-orchards cover many acres round Exeter and in the south - the county contains 8 percent of the orchards of all England. You cannot understand the modern life of Devon without taking these things into account.

But what, you may ask, is coming to replace them? Or is the story simply one of a slow, almost imperceptible decay? Certainly not. During the past century and a half Devonshire has been going through an economic revolution, comparable in local importance to the far greater industrial revolution that has changed the whole life of the Midlands and the North. The Devonshire coast and Dartmoor have become one of the greatest holiday areas in England. The tourist industry has arrived, putting the county's economy on a new basis, raising it to perhaps a higher level of prosperity than it has ever reached before.

It began on the south coast at Sidmouth, Exmouth, and Torquay, which became watering-places early in the nineteenth century. Torquay was much the biggest of them, steadily developed by its wise, and lucky, owners. The result is a typical Victorian English town. It owes a great deal to its lovely site, but much also to good planning; the harbour with its fine quay and the Regency terraces behind it, the roads winding leisurely upwards, the handsome villas on Park Hill among their trees, the spire of Holy Trinity church precisely punctuating the landscape.

But Torquay, alas, is an exceptional town, and its outer edges are as dreary as those of any other. The general level of modern building in Devon is, I am afraid, more truly represented by its next-door neighbour, Paignton. Here the old village lay close under its fine red church and the Bishop's palace, of which a wall and a tower remain. It was a village within living memory; but in the last fifty years it has expanded into a town of nearly twenty thousand people. This development, as usual, has been very little development, as usual, has been very little controlled. Houses have sprawled into the countryside along the main roads towards Brixham and Totnes; they have joined up with Torquay, and threaten to engulf the village of Stoke Gabriel on its quiet creek of the Dart. All this development takes its origin from Paignton's popularity with holiday-makers.

The same problem appears, over and over again, on the coast, not only near the large towns, but at small places like Hope Cove in the south, Combe Martin and Instow in the north. It happens everywhere in England, this slow destruction of the countryside, and it is deplorable. But here in Devonshire it must in the long run prove suicidal, for the beauty of the landscape is the staple of the county's main industry. Happily, however, we may now be able to redeem some of the mistakes of the past. The Ministry of Town and Country Planning has adequate powers to prevent undesirable building, and they will be rendered much more effective if Dartmoor and some parts of the coast can be declared National Parks - though the prospects, at least as far as Dartmoor are concerned, get gloomier every month. It is clear, in spite of all the protests that have been made, that the War Office intends to keep a tight hold on a large part of the moor, and on Braunton Burrows too.

The cities of Exeter and Plymouth face a great opportunity. The devastation of the air-raids not only forces them to rebuild whole streets and even quarters; it will allow them, in some measure, to re-design their lay-out, each within the limitations of a difficult site. Mr Thomas Sharp, in his plan for Exeter, has laid particular stress upon the triple function of the city. It is the capital and the great market of the county, an important residential town, and - to quote his words - "probably the most important touring centre (as distinct from mere holiday-making centres) in the whole country." How vital, then, to the city's prosperity that its development should not destroy its own character.

We need not be altogether pessimistic about the future. For even between the wars, while the worst attack was being made upon the English countryside, here in Devon there was some good building, to intelligent general designs. I am thinking, for instance, of the very pleasing estate just across the Exe at Tiverton. Let us have more of such houses, concentrated, not dispersed. Let us keep the coast free from further damage, if necessary by drastic restrictions, such as have been imposed with success at Clovelly. There is still time to do it now: in another twenty years it may be too late.