Come over the cliffs from the west and the view opens all at once — a deep blue inlet crowded with white sails, and a town of pastel houses tumbling down the steep hillside to meet it.
This is Salcombe, South Devon's most fashionable sailing resort, and above its harbour mouth, half-hidden in greenery, stands an Edwardian house wrapped in a garden of palms and exotic flowers that has no business thriving this far north. Yet here it is, warmed by the sea, looking out over the water.
Say the name gently — Salcombe, with a soft middle, SAWL-kum. What looks like an estuary is in truth a ria: a drowned valley, flooded long ago by rising seas, with no real river running down it. That flooding cut deep, sheltered water into the schists and slates of the South Hams, and it is this natural harbour that made the town.
Salcombe grew as a fishing and shipbuilding place and a port for the fruit trade, its schooners running to the Azores and the West Indies. Guarding the harbour mouth stand the ruins of Fort Charles, sometimes called Salcombe Castle, held for the king in the Civil War and slighted — deliberately wrecked — after it surrendered in 1646.
And above the water sits Overbeck's, the house and subtropical garden created in the early twentieth century by the scientist and inventor Otto Overbeck, who left the whole property to the National Trust in 1937.
Here is what to look for. First, the town itself — those tiers of pale-washed houses climbing the western shore, boats moored thick in the blue channel below. Second, Overbeck's garden, where palms, agaves and tender exotic plants flourish on the mild slope, framing sudden views out to sea.
Third, the harbour mouth, and the low ruined walls of Fort Charles on the shoreline, all that remains of the Civil War stronghold. Fourth, the two fine beaches — North Sands and South Sands — tucked into the estuary's edge, pale crescents beneath the cliffs. And fifth, watch the water at the harbour entrance for the Salcombe Bar, a shifting bank of sand across the mouth where the swell can heap up and break. Along the estuary itself, look for waders and wildfowl on the mud, and seals and seabirds working the harbour mouth.
Let me tell you about the man behind the garden. Otto Overbeck was a chemist and inventor of restless curiosity — he even patented an electrical device he believed could restore youth and vitality. He bought this house above the estuary and turned its steep, sheltered acres into a subtropical dream, gathering plants from warm corners of the world and trusting Salcombe's gentle climate to keep them alive.
When he died he gave it all to the nation, house and garden together, so that anyone climbing up from the town could stand among his palms and look out over the sailing boats to the open sea — exactly as you can today.
A quiet note of care on this stretch: keep an eye on the tides and on that Salcombe Bar at the harbour mouth, and give way to the busy harbour traffic that crosses the estuary all summer long. The water here is always working.
The Coast Path does not bridge this drowned valley — it takes to the water. From Salcombe you cross by ferry to East Portlemouth on the far shore to pick up the path again, and the little South Sands ferry can spare your legs at this end too.
Before you leave, take one last look down at the harbour: the pastel town, the forest of masts, and up on its warm green slope the improbable garden of palms — a soft, sheltered, southern corner of Devon that feels a whole latitude further south than it really is.
Walk safe.
