Qualla: Kingswear

Kingswear: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony Vosper, CC BY-SA 2.0. There are three ways to get to Dartmouth: a long road around to Totnes and back, the Higher Ferry, the Lower Ferry, or a passenger ferry barely wider than a rowboat. Two of those ways start at Kingswear, on the east bank of the River Dart. The village climbs steeply up the hillside from the water - terraces of pink and yellow houses stacked above the slipways, the slate roofs slipping down toward the river like a deck of cards. At the bottom, the steam railway from Paignton arrives in a hiss of coal smoke and stops at a wooden platform that has been the end of the line since 1864. For 160 years, Kingswear has been the place where you change from train to boat to get to Dartmouth. It is also, less obviously, the place where men sailed to found a city in Maine.

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Image: Anthony Vosper | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kingswear: Pilgrims, Saints, and a Murder in Canterbury

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Kingswear does not appear in the Domesday Book of 1086, but Stone Age tools have come out of the soil at nearby Kingston, and the Anglo-Saxons certainly knew the place. The first written record is from around 1170, when a man named William de Vinci gave the local church half the ...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kingswear: The Kittery Crossing

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shaun Ferguson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Kingswear's most consequential export was probably not its wool or its fish. By 1365 a ferry was operating from Kittery Point, the westernmost tip of Kingswear, across the river to Dartmouth - the same crossing the Lower Ferry now makes. In 1636, a group of settlers boarded ships...

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Image: Shaun Ferguson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kingswear: Wartime Secrets

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Derek Harper, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Royal Dart Hotel, a tall Victorian building right at the railway terminus, became HMS Cicala during the Second World War - headquarters of the British 15th Destroyer Flotilla. From the moored launches and motor torpedo boats tied up below the hotel, Allied agents and Free Fre...

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Image: Derek Harper | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kingswear: A Village That Stayed Itself

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Herbythyme, CC BY-SA 4.0. The 2011 census recorded 1,217 people in Kingswear, modestly down from 1,332 a decade before. By Devon village standards it is small. By the standards of what such places usually become - second-home enclaves with no shops and no children - Kingswear has held its shape surprising...

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Image: Herbythyme | CC BY-SA 4.0