Crownhill, Plymouth

Routes to my Roots Series

Exploring the landscapes of my ancestors

Crownhill, Plymouth – Childhood home of my dad

Crownhill isn’t really a place you visit. It is a place you pass through. A suburb of Plymouth, you will pass through it to visit the city. If you are a Plymothian you will pass through it for a day out on Dartmoor. If you want groceries you will pass through it to get to the supermarket. If you are ill you will pass through it to go to Derriford Hospital. Unless you live there, Crownhill will be seen from a dual carriageway at 40 mph.

I remember visiting my dad’s childhood house at Crownhill in the late 1970s, before it was sold so that my ageing Grandmother Kathleen could come to live in a ‘granny annex’ attached to our home. The house was a 1930s bungalow on Linketty Lane with garage to the left. I recall the dense sweet fragrance of the abundant roses in the garden, a flower that back then I associated with ‘old people’. And I remember the shock and pain of putting my foot into a welly boot and standing on a bumble bee that had made its way inside the black rubber cavern. And that is my memory exhausted. Born just before the outbreak of the second world war, the bungalow was mostly surrounded by fields in the days of my dad’s childhood. It was a rural landscape with pockets of development, but post-war urban expansion must have obtruded; must have threatened. And it is threat, both perceived and actual, that defines a dominant thread of Crownhill’s identity, some of which endures today, but much of which has now gone.

In walking around Crownhill, amongst all the traffic and development, I got to see the remnants of its military history, picked traces through its rural and courtly past, chanced upon zones of greenery, and began to understand this place’s own distinctive patchwork of landscape and history.

Fortifications and Garrisons

In 1859 a Royal Commission report recommended the strengthening of UK defences in response to the threat of the expanding navy of Napoleon III (Historic England, 2002). The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, authorised the building of 70 forts and batteries nationally including a ring of fortifications to protect the strategically important Devonport and Plymouth. Napoleon III greatly modernised France and invigorated the economy but he also allied with Britain against the Prussian empire. It is therefore hard, through the distance of history, to understand the threat he was perceived as posing to our nation. Whatever the twists of fate, the threat of Napoleon III never materialised, and this massive military infrastructure scheme, the biggest since the time of Henry VIII, was a white elephant. The various defensive buildings became know as Palmerston’s Follies.

Crownhill Fort (1863-72) was one of the more substantial Palmerston embattlements built in and around Plymouth. Because it lay in front of the main line of the city defences it is fortified around 360 degrees in an irregular septagonal design. Now owned by the Landmark Trust much of the fort is accessible with lots of details for the military enthusiast to explore. I walked the public footpath around its perimeter. I ascended from the stink, din and whizz of the dual carriageway, via an ugly flight of concrete steps that ran up the side of the earthwork on which the fort sits. Like walking through an unseen door, the noise immediately fell away as I started on a circuit of the ramparts. Helped by a sunny day, spring flowers and trilling birds, this puddle of tranquility and wildlife felt restorative, particularly when juxtaposed to its characterless carriageway neighbour. Not that many people seemed to be taking the benefit. I only saw one other person in a circumnavigating amble. The precipitous path is unfenced and the ramparts 9m high, so it is not a relaxing place to get outside with toddlers and, with my fairly acute vertigo, I can’t say I was overly comfortable myself.

To the SE of Crownhill Fort is Bowden Battery, now a garden centre and to its west is Woodland Fort, both part of the same era of battlement building. I didn’t visit Woodland Fort but the OS map shows it is connected to Crownhill through a footpath called the Plymouth Cross City Link that follows a wooded valley corridor through the city between Marsh Mills and Tamerton Foliot. It had never occurred to me that such a footpath would exist across Plymouth. With the expected Covid-related pressure on the UK countryside this summer due to ‘staycation’ holidays, I reckon 2021 may very well be a very good year to check out this less beaten track.

It is not just these Victorian ‘folly’ forts that make up Crownhill’s military history. The tithe map of the 1840s annotates a place called Castle Farm very close to Crownhill Fort, hinting at a previous military building near this location. On the First and Second Edition OS 25 inch maps of c1880 and c1904 the forts and batteries appear as big white voids. In days before aerial reconnaissance, presumably their purposeful omission was done to obfuscate potential enemies. However, on the second edition OS map there is plenty of evidence of Crownhill’s expanding military role as a garrison site. From the 1890s troops in transit were housed at Crownhill Barracks. A garrison church, ‘hutments’ and a drill ground are all marked (see map above).

The barracks were renamed Plumer Barracks in the 1930s, sited on the spot on which now sits the Land Registry building. Where the ‘hutments’ are shown, this location developed into Seaton Barracks, a marine base. This was sold off in the 1990s, but many will remember it because of the swimming pool that we were taken to in our childhoods.

Linketty Lane

My dad lived on the quaintly named Linketty Lane; one of the original ‘ways’ of a by-gone rural Crownhill. Linketty Lane still persists and walking through Crownhill today – the busy through roads and the sleepy residential cul-de-sacs – the contrast is obvious. Linketty retains the feel of a country lane; narrow, enclosed and with mature hedgebanks.

Linketty Lane East ran from near Eggbuckland, up to Widey Lane and then continued in angular turns in Linketty Lane West down to where the Parkway runs today. All of its route can still be followed and to do so is to experience a cut in time; one of the few elements of Crownhill that both ‘is’ and ‘feels’ pre-Victorian.

Widey Court

A prime part of Crownhill that my dad would have been familiar with was the Tudor house of Widey Court. Widey appears in Domesday as land belonging to Robert of Aumale in the Hundred of Roborough (Powell-Smith, undated) and the name is thought to originate as OE wiðig which means ‘withy’, and relates to the coppicing of willow (Glover et al, 1931). But Widey Court is no more – it was pulled down in 1954. It is hard to imagine a grand house in this location, on land that is now a primary school, surrounded by thundering carriageways, a decaying high-street, office buildings and acre after acre of residential land. I also find it hard to imagine its demolition coming as late as 1954 when there was already a growing appetite for saving historic buildings such as the National Trust, founded in 1884. However, listing of buildings, although first introduced in the post war Town and Country Planning Acts of 1944 and 1947, only included bomb-damaged buildings that were due for demolition (Historic England, undated). A proper survey of buildings to be listed did not occur until the 1960s by which time it was too late for Widey Court. It was gone.

Widey House’s time in the historical limelight came in 1643 and 1644 during the English Civil War. Plymouth was a Parliamentary town but in late 1642 it was cut off from allies by Royalist forces in what became known as the Siege of Plymouth. Prince Maurice, a nephew of Charles I heralding from the Rhineland, commanded forces in the area and based himself at Widey. King Charles I is thought to have visited on a couple of occasions and ‘held court’ here, entitling the house to become Widey Court (Quigley, 2013; Sanchez-Cabello quoting Copeland, 1955). Plymouth held out and ultimately Charles, as we know, had his head chopped off. The house was removed from Royalist hands and given to the Morshead family who had supported the Parliamentary cause (Moseley, 2020).

They held the house for about 300 years and conducted various alterations and improvements over this time. The estate went up for sale in 1921 but there were no bids and so it was sold off in various lots as farms, lodges and grounds as well as the main house. During the Second World War it was used by Plymouth City Police and subsequently a city council store; and ignominious end. Twentieth century social and economic change seems to have proved too much, and like many other ‘big houses’ that got pulled down, it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The land on which it sat is now a primary school and some of the Court’s former grounds provide a shady, damp and wooded oasis to walk through in this otherwise built up suburb.

Morshead Road

The Morshead family of Widey left a trace of their long residence in Crownhill in the name of the main shopping street. Developed in the Victorian era, Morshead Road used to be on the main road, now by-passed, and would have been an active and thriving business area, supporting all the usual services of the pre-supermarket days. Victorian and Edwardian OS maps show a coach factory, smithies, the New Inn and later the Tamar Hotel public house, a Methodist Chapel and Sunday School. In my Dad’s childhood Morshead Road would have still been a lively place. I had assumed my gran would have made almost daily trips there for groceries, but my Dad tells me that Gran shopped with Dingles (a large local department store) who had a shop in Morshead Road. They offered a delivery service. Gran would make out her weekly shopping list and give it to the man when he brought her delivery.

Today Morshead Road is still typical; a typical example of a 21st C struggling high-street, supporting the businesses that the supermarkets and Amazon do not compete with – hairdressers, take-away foods, estate agents, betting shops and a funeral parlour. Whilst a few lucky high-streets are blessed with a geography and history make them desirable, Crownhill has no such advantages. It is bounded by by-passess and the necessary but threatening subways that force pedestrian passage underground.

Knacker’s Knowle

Before the Victorian development of Moshead Road, the embryo of Crownhill was a small place with an unfortunate name. In the earliest maps the upwardly mobile ‘Crown Hill’ doesn’t appear, but instead the decidedly down-market ‘Knacker’s Hole’ does. Perhaps Crownhill was never destined to be a classy suburb? The various spellings of Knacker’s Hole/Knowle are shown on this sequence of maps between 1765 and c1840 and the location subtly shifts from the vicinity which became the fort to that which became Morshead Road.

It is likely that this name ‘Nacker’ or Knacker’ relates to an activity that took place here, the job of ‘knackering’. A knacker man did not have a pleasant occupation. His purpose was to pick up the carcasses of dead, injured and dying animals and to process these in order to make use of what was valuable – the fats, tallow, glue, gelatin, soap, animal feed and leather (Wikipedia).

The job of the Knacker was considered a disreputable one, and the Knacker sometimes doubled up an executioner (Medieval Britain, undated). In the early 19th C developments in industrial processing enabled bone meal and bone char to be manufactured but before this time I cannot find any reference to a use for the bones. I therefore wonder if the ‘hole’ part of the name here at Crownhill was a pit – an animal graveyard? In the 19th C the Knacker’s Hole name morphed into Knacker’s Knowle, before being dropped completely in favour of Crown Hill. in 1880.

St Edward’s, Eggbuckland

The Crownhill of today is a suburb of Plymouth with its own parish church, but before 1958, in my Dad’s childhood, it was in the parish of Eggbuckland. For this reason I wanted to include it in my perambulation. So, after paying homage to my Dad’s old home, I carried along Linketty Lane East, downhill towards Eggbuckland. I am so glad I did. The 15th C St Edward’s is a medieval island in a largely post-war landscape. Surrounded by residential estates it requires a little imagination to picture it, as it recently was, a rural church at the heart of a small agricultural community in this hilly landscape.

Eggbuckland is an odd name isn’t it? Egg! Listed in Domesday as belonging to a man called Heche, the ‘Egg’ is likely a corruption of this Saxon name (Gover et al, 1931). There is thought to have been a church here since Saxon times but the present church of St Edward’s dates from c1470. I didn’t go inside the church but wandered through the graveyard in which the tightly packed graves seemed so closely spaced they heaved the ground. I passed under the shade of an old yew and found a bench in a newer plot, surrounded by trees and a stream where I sat and drank tea from my thermal mug. Subsequently I have discovered that St Edward’s doesn’t employ a groundsman to cut the grass in the graveyard but instead a Ground Steward. The church here truly is a garden of remembrance – a resting ground for the dead and living; a place of roses and wildflowers and of bees and butterflies (St Edwards, undated).

Very few of us consider urban locations as suitable for a leisurely walk and of course, there are many downsides: traffic, noise, pollution and intimidating social and built environments. I started my narrative about Crownhill by suggesting it was a landscape that in many ways was characterised by threat, primarily in the strong military thread, but also in the volume and velocity of vehicles passing through it, in the stark, scary subways, and in the pockets of decay and deprivation. Despite all this seeming negativity I am championing urban walking in general and specifically this exploration of Crownhill. The built environment hosts much interest in addition to the familiarly mundane and suburban and who wants chocolate box all the time anyway?

The Route

• I parked in the vicinity of Church Hill and Fort Austin Avenue and started by visiting Bowden Battery which is now a garden centre (1) where from the outside the battery walls and gate mechanisms can be seen.
• I headed for Crownhill Fort along Fort Austin Avenue, a busy road that leads down into the Forder Valley. Glimpses north showed residential building continuing to nibble into the few remaining patches of open land on the steeps slopes of ‘Bircham Farm’.
• At the Land Registry building where Plumer barracks was sited I turned north onto Plumer Road, passing the Farm Foods shop, went under the subway and popped out the other side of the dual carriageway. I carried on walking until I reached the steps that led up to Crownhill Fort (2).
• After completing my circuit I retraced my steps, back under the subway and then through another subway that led from Plumer Road to Morshead Road (3).

• Hungry and thirsty I purchased refreshments in the Coop, crossed the road and headed past the library into residential territory – first 1930s homes and then 1980s and 90s estates.
• Cutting though I popped out onto Widey Lane and headed south, passing Widey Court Primary School where Widey Court once stood (4).
• I diverted briefly into the wooded vale that was the grounds of Widey Court and was tempted to descend as far as I could go but instead turned by a very old oak tree and regained the ground of Widey Lane.
• At Courtlands School I spied the pedsetrian access into the narrow Linketty Lane and was soon able to spot my Dad’s old home (5) which was, 60 years ago, almost entirely surrounded by fields.
• I followed the old ribbon of Linketty Lane (6) over and down the hillside from which I was able to joing Church Hill. The road borders more woodland valley and once again I was treated to birdsong, trees and flowers.
• Finally, I turned down to Eggbuckland Church (7), an idiosynchratic medieval element in this undulating recent realm.

References

Copeland, G.W. (1955). Widey Court. Transactions of the Devonshire Association. 87, pp230-238.

Gover, J.E.B., Mawer, A. and Stenton, F.M. (1931). The Place-names of Devon Part 1. English Place-name Society. Volume VIII. Cambridge University Press” Cambridge.

Historic England (2002). Crownhill Fort. historicengland.org.uk

Historic England (undated). About the List. historicengland.org.uk

Medieval Britain (undated). Medieval Executioner. medievalbritain.com

Moseley, B. (2020). Widey Court. Old Plymouth, https://oldplymouth.uk

Powell-Smith, A. (undated). Open Domesday. Widey. opendomesday.org

Quigley, L. (2013). Early Modern Britain. Plymouth: AD 1625 Under Siege. historyfiles.co.uk

Sanchez-Cabello, D. (undated). The Demolition of Widey Court, 1954. https://dominiccabello.com

St Edward’s (undated). Eco Church and Churchyard. www.stedwards.church

Warman, J. (2018). The History of the Knackerman. The Licensed Animal Slaughterers
& Salvage Association (LASSA). lassa.org.uk

Wikipedia – Knacker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knacker