Qualla: Clovelly

Clovelly: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a single cobbled street in Clovelly, called Up A Long going one way and Down A Long going the other, and you cannot drive on it. No one can. The street is too steep — descending one hundred and fifty metres in less than half a mile to the harbour — and the cobbles are too irregular, and the houses crowd in too closely for any wheeled vehicle wider than a wheelbarrow to pass. Deliveries are made by sledge. The sledges are wooden runners with metal shoes, dragged uphill by hand or, in earlier centuries, by donkey. The donkeys still live in the village, though they are mostly retired now, used for petting and posed photographs. The sledges still work. The street is unchanged since the fourteenth century.

Read more: Clovelly on Qualla

Clovelly: Three Families

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Clovelly has been continuously owned by three families since the middle of the thirteenth century, which makes it one of the longest-held private estates in England. The Cary family bought the manor in the late 1300s under Richard II and held it for four hundred years. The Hamlyn...

Read more: Clovelly on Qualla

Clovelly: George Cary's Harbour

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Clovelly was an agricultural parish for most of its history. Then in the late sixteenth century the squire George Cary spent two thousand pounds — a small fortune at the time — building a stone breakwater out into Clovelly Bay and turning the cove into the only safe harbour betwe...

Read more: Clovelly on Qualla

Clovelly: Christine Hamlyn

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Almost everything you see when you walk through Clovelly today is owed to one woman. Christine Hamlyn, who inherited the estate in 1884 and ran it until her death in 1936, spent decades restoring and rebuilding the cottages along the main street — keeping them in seventeenth-cent...

Read more: Clovelly on Qualla

Clovelly: Charles Kingsley and the Tourist Boom

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The novelist Charles Kingsley lived in Clovelly as a child from 1831 to 1836 — his father was the rector. In 1855, by then a famous author, Kingsley published Westward Ho!, a swashbuckling Elizabethan novel set partly in Clovelly and partly in the broader West Country. The book s...

Read more: Clovelly on Qualla

Clovelly: The Storm of 1838

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the 28th of October 1838 — a Sunday — twelve Clovelly fishing vessels left the harbour with twenty-six men aboard. A ferocious storm caught them at sea. One vessel returned. The other eleven, and the men who had been aboard them, did not. The village's official population at t...

Read more: Clovelly on Qualla