Down at the end of a quiet creek on the River Dart, between Dartmouth and Totnes, you’ll find our boatyard — tucked away where the tide curls into the trees and the world feels just a little slower. This is where we’ve been building Gwennel, surrounded by the sounds of the river and the hum of work that never truly ends.
We’re deep in South Devon, cradled between the coast and the lush, rolling hills of the South Hams. The village nearby is as pretty as a postcard — pink cottages dressed in climbing roses, narrow lanes that smell of warm earth and woodsmoke, and hedgerows so full of life you can almost hear them breathing.
The boatyard itself has its own small community. There’s a wood-fired pizza restaurant where the smell of dough and smoke drifts down to the water, a coastal clothing and homewares boutique that feels like sunshine bottled, a local cider maker whose sweet aroma of apples carries across the yard, a chandlery that has everything you never knew you needed, and a little art gallery that always seems to have something quietly magical inside. It’s a good place to be.
When the tides are kind, we row our wooden dinghy, Fatty Lumpkin, across the creek to Dittisham to the Ferry Boat Inn for a pint with a view of Agatha Christie’s home, Greenway. By the time we drift home again, the sun has usually melted into the hills and the river is silver and still.
Every day brings wildlife — seals surfacing in the shallows, cormorants drying their wings, egrets stepping delicately through the shallows. Buzzards circle high over the wall trees around our quarry, while jackdaws chatter in the rigging, and in the quiet corners the wrens and blue tits flit between the trees. Even the squirrels seem to have made peace with our sawdust and paint tins.
It’s a beautiful, serene place to build our future floating home — a life shaped by the tide, by the weather, and by the quiet persistence of craft. We’re truly grateful to be here, in this wild, gentle corner of Devon, carving out the beginning of our next great adventure.
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