INTRODUCTION
Hele
Bay is on the north coast of Devon. From the main road it appears to be a 19th
century suburb of Ilfracombe - hardly obvious material for a history website !
But just off the main road are signs of human occupation going back thousands of
years - and perhaps Ilfracombe was once a suburb of Hele !
This aerial view shows Hele Bay in the foreground and Ilfracombe in the background. In between is a 135 metre high (447 feet) promontory known as Hillsborough (1). Hillsborough is now a Nature Reserve (2), but way back in the Iron Age, it was an important hillfort, the local centre for trade and probably the seat of the local chieftain.
I moved to Hele Bay in 1997 to run the Holiday Park beside the beach. I like to 'ramble' along the foreshore, where there are many relics (caves, quarries, bits of ships, bits of guns, a Mini) that I wanted to know more about. I have often searched the local caves (in vain) looking for the entrance to the smuggler's tunnel said to run to Chambercombe. Charlie Galliver told me the caves were called Samson’s, Joe Moon's, and Tom Norman’s Hole and I wondered why they had these strange names.
I thought that it would be interesting to find out, with the idea of publishing a small website. I also wanted to learn a little about prehistory and believed (wrongly) that I had some spare time on my hands. In 2001 I started to collect local information and then read about the Tarka Country Millennium Awards in the local Journal. I was fortunate enough, after filling in the ubiquitous forms, to be awarded a grant by the Millennium Commission, funded by the Lottery, to research and publish this Illustrated Timeline of the history of Hele Bay.
My principal sources were the Ilfracombe Museum and the Candar Library. I particularly wish to acknowledge Sue Pullen, Curator of the Museum, who gave me free access to the Museum's records. I also surfed the internet and talked to many local residents and several local historians. Because my memory is so poor, I recorded all these references into a computer, in a chronological list, which, after about six months, had grown to over 100 images and 100 pages of text.
I divided this into different web pages, roughly corresponding to historical periods or themes, and then wrote the text as a summary of the references available. In earlier periods I had to consider a wide geographical area, since there isn't much known about Hele, In some cases (e.g. Ilfracombe Castle, Mining in Combe Martin) the digressions are entirely my own indulgence. But it has not been all fun - the Holiday Park left me little spare time and a hard-disk crash wiped out 10 GB of information which had to be professionally recovered !
This website is my way of learning about local history. I'm not qualified as an Historian, regretfully I haven’t had time to trace obscure references or do any original research. I'm not even a local ! I realise now that such a project is never finished. Although I was kindly allowed to let the deadline slip several times by Tarka Country, I still had to draw the line somewhere. Despite these limitations, I am sure there is something new in these pages for even the most ardent Heleite.
USE THE LEFT MENU TO CHANGE THIS WINDOW CONTENTS: USE THE TOP MENU TO CHANGE THE LEFT MENU, or follow the hyperlinks below each page:
(1) Aerial photographs
In 2001 Beachside Holiday Park commissioned a series of aerial photographs which unfortunately were not taken until October. Above is shown a detail from one of these which shows Hele beach, Hillsborough and Ilfracombe in the background.
(2) Protected areas, designations, awards
The coastline at Hele is designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and a Coastal Preservation Area. The coastal slope to the east of the beach is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and Hillsborough to the west of the beach became a Nature Reserve in 1993. The South West Coastal Path passes through Hele Bay and across Hillsborough. Hele Beach won a Seaside Award in 2006 for clean bathing water and good beach management.