Qualla: Plymouth Hoe

Plymouth Hoe: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Atkin, CC BY-SA 2.0. The story is probably not true, but it has refused to die for four hundred years. On a July afternoon in 1588, with the Spanish Armada sighted off the Lizard and the English fleet straining at its anchors in the Sound below, Sir Francis Drake was playing bowls on the green grass of Plymouth Hoe. Word came that the Spanish were almost upon them. Drake, the legend says, looked at the rink, looked at the messenger, and replied that there was plenty of time to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too. Then he played out the end, walked down to his ship, and sailed out to do precisely that. Historians have been politely sceptical for centuries; the story does not appear in the contemporary sources. But every guidebook still tells it, every statue gestures toward it, and on a sunny afternoon when the bowls clubs are out on the Hoe greens, you can almost believe it.

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Image: Tony Atkin | CC BY-SA 2.0

Plymouth Hoe: The Sloping Heel

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit jeff collins, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name is older than England, older than Drake by a thousand years. Hoh in Anglo-Saxon means a sloping ridge shaped like an inverted foot and heel, the form a person makes when lying on their stomach. Sutton Hoo, the great Suffolk burial site, takes its name from the same word....

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Image: jeff collins | CC BY-SA 2.0

Plymouth Hoe: Smeaton's Tower

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah Charlesworth, CC BY-SA 2.0. The tallest landmark on the Hoe is a lighthouse that does not light anything. Smeaton's Tower is the upper third of John Smeaton's Eddystone Lighthouse, built in 1759 on the Eddystone Rocks fourteen miles south in the open Channel. Smeaton's design revolutionised lighthouse const...

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Image: Sarah Charlesworth | CC BY-SA 2.0

Plymouth Hoe: The Royal Citadel

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rarb, CC BY 3.0. In the late 1660s, just after the Restoration of Charles II, the new king ordered the construction of a massive star-shaped stone fortress on the eastern end of the Hoe. It replaced an earlier Tudor fortress and was built to do two things. The first was straightforward: defend th...

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Image: Rarb | CC BY 3.0

Plymouth Hoe: The Memorials and the Tinside Lido

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E Gammie, CC BY-SA 2.0. Along the northern edge of the Hoe stands the great Naval War Memorial, its central obelisk designed by Robert Lorimer and unveiled in 1924 to commemorate the Royal Navy dead of the First World War. Edward Maufe added the sunken garden of names in 1954, after the Second World War...

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Image: E Gammie | CC BY-SA 2.0

Plymouth Hoe: What Plymouth Looks At

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Johnson [1], CC BY-SA 3.0. From the cliff edge of the Hoe, on a clear day, you can see most of the city's reasons for existing. Plymouth Sound opens out below, the breakwater two miles offshore lying across its mouth like a punctuation mark. Drake's Island sits in the middle distance. The Hamoaze runs to t...

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Image: David Johnson [1] | CC BY-SA 3.0