15/05/2026
New records reveal the village of Hallsands, just before it was washed away
Hallsands lies in a cleft of a cliff at Start Point, Devon. Although a chapel stood here by 1506, the modern village grew in the 18th–19th centuries into a small fishing community of 37 houses and about 159 people by 1891. The nearby sandbanks were rich in crab and pilchards, and most men made a living from the sea. A public house, the London Inn, and a village store served the community. After 1897, massive dredging of shingle offshore for the Plymouth dockyard began, removing up to 1,600 tons a day. Villagers complained that the beach was sinking beneath their feet, damaging their shore wall and boats. In 1902, a Board of Trade inquiry was forced by protests, and the dredging licence was revoked in January 1902. A raised concrete sea wall was built in 1906, but by the 1910s, the shingle bank had been critically weakened.
