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| Genealogical and historical information and links for anyone researching their ancestors in England and the British Isles |
Home ==> County Links ==> Devon
<== Derbyshire
Dorset ==>
| Themes | Explorers and Adventurers | Nobel Prize Winners |
| Actors/Actresses and Directors | Famous People | Places of Interest |
| Anglo-Saxons and Danes | Historic Events | Prime Ministers |
| Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty | Inventors and Scientists | Royal Consorts and Heirs |
| Artists and Architects | Monarchs | World Heritage Sites |
| Composers | National Parks | Writers and Poets |
| Devon |
Devon lies in south-western England between the English Channel to
the south and the Bristol Channel to
the north.
Towns include the county seat of Exeter.
The
island of Lundy
lies off its northern coastline. |
|
Anglo-Saxons and Danes |
Together
with its westerly neighbour Cornwall, Devon formed part of the Celtic
kingdom of Dumnonia. It later became
the last part of Britain to be conquered by the Anglo-Saxons when
it became a part of the West Saxon kingdom of Wessex.  |
| Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty |
|
The North
Devon AONB was designated in 1959 to protect the county's northern
coast and runs west from the village of Combe Martin down as far as
the neighbouring county of Cornwall taking in some of the most spectacular
coastline in England.
The South
Devon AONB was designated in 1960 to protect the coastline in
the south of the county. Stretching from Torbay in the east to the
city of Plymouth in the west the area includes the Dart and Kingsbridge
estuaries, the South Hams and famous beauty spots such as Bolt
Head and Slapton
Sands.
The East
Devon AONB was designated in 1963 covering the distinctive and
largely unspoilt southern coastline stretching east from Exmouth to
near Lyme Regis.
The Blackdown
Hills - a range of hills running along part of the county's eastern
border with Somerset - were designated an AONB in 1991.
The Tamar
Valley AONB includes three river systems: the Tamar and Tavy
rivers to the north of Plymouth and the Lynher
to the west of the city. All three rivers enter the sea in one of
England's last unspoilt estuaries. The east of the AONB lies in the
neighbouring county of Devon and was designated in 1995. |
| Artists and Architects |
The
portrait painter
Joshua Reynolds was born in Plympton Earls in 1723. He
died in 1792 and is buried in St
Paul's Cathedral.
Joshua Reynolds
Famous
people buried at St Paul's Cathedral |
| Explorers and Adventurers |
Francis Drake was born at Crowndale
near Tavistock in 1540. In 1577 he set sail from Plymouth in the Pelican
(later renamed the Golden Hind), returning to Plymouth in 1580 and
becoming the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world. From 1581
he lived at Buckland
Abbey in the county until 1596 when he died of fever off Porto
Bello in Panama. He was buried at sea.
Francis Drake
Walter Ralegh was born about 1552 in Hayes Barton, growing up
near the Devon coast.
Walter Ralegh
Poetry Archive
The
sailor
Martin Frobisher died in Plymouth in 1594. He set out on the first
of three attempts to find the Northwest Passage round Canada in 1576,
the first Englishman to do so since John
Cabot
and his son had failed to find the elusive route to Asia. Frobisher
had reached as far as Labrador and named the area he found Frobisher
Bay. Later in his life he sailed with
Francis Drake
and also fought against the Spanish
Armada.
It was during a later battle against the Spanish off Brest in France
that Frobisher was mortally wounded, dying on his return to port at
Plymouth.
Martin
Frobisher
Spanish Armada
William
Bligh was born in 1754 in Plymouth. He sailed on Captain
James Cook's third and last world voyage from 1776-80 and in 1787
took command of "The Bounty" to Tahiti. After the infamous
mutiny in 1789 by the ship's first-mate Fletcher Christian and his
men, Bligh was set adrift with 18 other crewmembers in an open boat
on the the Pacific Ocean. They survived, sailing over 5,800 kilometres
to reach land at Timor.
William
Bligh
Richard Francis Burton was born in Torquay in 1821. In 1856 he
set out with John Hanning Speke to find the source of the Nile and
in 1858 they became the first Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika.
Burton, suffering from malaria, had to turn back and it was Speke
travelling on alone who discovered the river's source which he named
Lake Victoria. Burton died in 1890 in Trieste which then lay in the
Austrian Empire, now in Italy.
Richard Francis Burton
Burton's companion John
Hanning Speke was born near Bideford in the county in 1827. In
1856 he set out with Richard Francis Burton to find the source of
the Nile and in 1858 they became the first Europeans to reach Lake
Tanganyika. Burton, suffering from malaria, had to turn back and it
was Speke travelling on alone who discovered the river's source which
he named Lake Victoria. Speke died in 1864 when he accidentally shot
himself during a partridge shoot in Wiltshire.
John
Hanning Speke
Robert
Falcon Scott was born in Devonport in 1868. He died in 1912 after
reaching the South
Pole after the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Scott and his team were
caught in a blizzard and died in their tents. Their bodies were not
discovered until eight months later still in their sleeping bags with
diaries recording their last days.
Robert
Falcon Scott
Race to the South Pole |
|
Famous People |
|
In
1650 the Duke
of Marlborough
was born as John Churchill
in Ashe. During a long military career he would be at the centre of
events which changed the course of British history. In 1685 at the Battle of Sedgemoor he led the forces which put down the Monmouth Rebellion against the Catholic James II. In 1688 when the Protestant William of Orange landed in Dorset, Churchill promptly changed sides, abandoning James II who was forced into exile. In 1692 he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for six weeks. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) he commanded the British forces gaining an important victory at Blenheim in 1704, a victory which altered the balance of power in Europe. Later he would be forced into exile himself before finally - towards the end of his life - falling back into favour with the country's ruling elite. For his victory at Blenheim he was given the former royal palace at Woodstock in Oxfordshire. This he had rebulit and renamed Blenheim Palace and it was here that his descendant Winston Churchill would be born over a century and a half later.
Duke
of Marlborough
Famous
people imprisoned at the Tower of London
The
double-agent Guy
Burgess was born in Devonport in 1910. While studying at Cambridge
University he joined the Communist Party together with three friends
and fellow students: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt.
The four - who became known as the Cambridge
Spies - would later divulge many secrets to the Soviet Union and
become one of the most notorious and damaging spy rings to operate
in Britain during the
Cold War. Burgess died in Moscow in 1963 where he had fled to
in 1951 after he and Maclean were warned by Philby that they had been
uncovered.
Guy
Burgess
Cambridge Spies
Cold War |
|
Historic Events |
||
|
|
Inventors and Scientists |
|
The
mathematician Charles
Babbage was born in Teignmouth in 1791. He pioneered the era of
modern computing when in 1835 he designed the world's very first programmable
computer. Babbage was unable to take his idea further than the drawing
board but it was a simplified version of his 1835 design which George
Scheutz used to build his programmable computer in Sweden in 1855.
It was for Babbage's 1835 design that Lord Byron's daughter
Ada Lovelace wrote a computer program and in doing so became
the world's first computer programmer. In recognition a computer language
was named after her, ADA.
Charles
Babbage
Ada
Lovelace |
|
National Parks |
|
Dartmoor
was designated a National Park in 1951.
Exmoor
is
England's smallest National Park and was created in 1954. |
|
Places of Interest |
||||||
|
|
World Heritage Sites |
|
The
Dorset
and East Devon coastline was designated a World
Heritage Site by the UNESCO in 2001. The rocks exposed in the
coastline's cliffs illustrate 185 million years of earth's history.
The
Cornwall
and West Devon Mining Landscape was
designated a World
Heritage Site by the UNESCO in 2006.
The landscape contains the industrial remnants of an extensive network
of mines in the west of the county and neighbouring Cornwall which
once provided 50% of the world's supply of copper and tin.
The industry transformed the area's landscape in the 18th and 19th
centuries, made a significant contribution to the industrial revolution
and exported its mining methods and expertise across the world. |
| Writers and Poets |
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
was born in Ottery St Mary in 1772.
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
Friends of Coleridge Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
In
1890 Agatha
Christie, creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, was born
as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay. Greenway,
a house lying on the banks of the nearby River Dart, was acquired
by the author in 1938 and stayed in her family until 2000 when it
was donated to the National Trust. It was here she wrote many of her
later books.
Agatha
ChristieI learned... that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back - that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street. At Bertram's Hotel (1965)
John
Fowles, author of The Magus and The French Lieutenant's
Woman, died in 2005 at Axminster in the county, not far from his
home in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast.
John
Fowles...to realize that life, ... , is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea. The French Lieutenant's Woman - Closing lines of novel (1969) |
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| Devon Online Parish Clerk |