The Kingsbridge Estuary is not really an estuary - it is a ria, a drowned river valley flooded after the last ice age and held by steep cliffs on both sides, running inland nearly nine kilometres from the sea between Bolt Head and Portlemouth Down. There is no river worth the name flowing into it, just creeks - Batson, Shadycombe, Southpool, Frogmore - each one its own quiet anchorage. The name Salcombe comes from the Old English saltcumb, the salt valley, a description of where the saltwater came inland. People have lived around it since the Bronze Age. Three Bronze Age shipwrecks are known in British waters; one of them lies off Salcombe, with weapons and jewellery made in what is now France. The Salcombe Cannon Wreck, a 17th-century vessel, lies deeper - she carried 400 Moroccan gold coins. The seabed off this coast is a museum no one will ever fully inventory.

Salcombe's wealth was built on oranges. In the 19th century its fleet of fast little Salcombe schooners ran the Iberian coast, the Azores, the Caribbean and the Bahamas, bringing back oranges and lemons, pineapples, sugar and rum, mahogany for furniture, shaddocks for the curiosity market. The town's shipyards launched at least 200 vessels between 1796 and 1887. By 1871 the parish had thirty-four shipwrights, thirteen ship's carpenters, four blacksmiths, three sail makers and a tin plate worker - a small port industrially complete unto itself. The Victorian houses on the steep streets up from the water were built by shipowners and masters. The trade did not last. Orange disease in the Azores, pineapple disease in the West Indies, and the arrival of bigger steam ships ended the fruit fleet in the 1870s. Worse, almost half the Salcombe vessels were lost with all hands - seven in a single Azores storm in November 1851. A mutual marine insurance association formed in 1811 paid out and paid out again.

Two wars left clear marks on the town. Henry VIII had a small castle built on the rocks below the cliff at North Sands - Fort Charles - to defend the estuary. During the English Civil War it became the last royalist stronghold to hold out, garrisoned through January to May 1646 against the Parliamentarians, and was slighted on Parliament's orders when it finally surrendered. Three centuries later Salcombe filled a different uniform. From September 1943 it served as a US Navy Advance Amphibious Base, with 137 officers and 1,793 men billeted across requisitioned hotels and Quonset huts on the hill. On 4 June 1944, sixty-six American ships sailed from Salcombe and other Devon ports as Force U, the contingent that landed on Utah Beach two days later. Damaged landing craft came back into Shadycombe Creek and Mill Bay for repair. A plaque in Normandy Way still remembers them.

The lifeboat station opened in 1869, the year after the wreck of the Gossamer off Prawle Point cost thirteen lives. On 27 October 1916 the open pulling lifeboat William and Emma was coming home over the bar in worsening seas when a single breaker pitchpoled her. Thirteen of her fifteen volunteer crew drowned within sight of the town. The other two washed ashore alive. Salcombe rebuilt. The crew came forward again. Today the station has a Tamar class all-weather lifeboat with a 250-mile range and an inshore boat next door, the museum and shop in the Unity Building on Union Street. It is the moaning of the bar Tennyson heard on a visit in the 1880s - the noise of water breaking over that same sandbank - that inspired Crossing the Bar. The lifeboat goes out across it still.

Walk Fore Street on a Saturday in August and you can buy gin distilled in the town, watch the Sea Tractor wade out to ferry tourists ashore at South Sands, and pay more for a holiday cottage here than almost anywhere else in the United Kingdom. The winter population is around 1,900. In high summer it can swell toward 25,000. The harbour holds about 1,600 resident yachts and powerboats and welcomes 6,000 visitors a year; the Salcombe Yawl, a class of wooden racing dinghy still built in the town to traditional patterns, fills the regatta course in August. Twenty shellfish boats - the largest under twenty metres - work out of Shadycombe Creek where the schooner yards used to stand. Cranches, said to be the oldest sweetshop in Devon, is still on Fore Street. The mahogany and Moroccan gold are long gone; the bar, the lifeboat, the moaning, the wind from the west - those remain.