Coffinswell is a small village in South

Devon Devon ( ; historically also known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by the Bristol Channel to the north, Somerset and Dorset to the east, the English Channel to the south, and Cornwall to the west ...

, England, just off the A380, the busy

Newton Abbot Newton Abbot is a market town and civil parishes in England, civil parish on the River Teign in the Teignbridge, Teignbridge District of Devon, England. Its population was 24,029 in 2011, and was estimated at 26,655 in 2019. It grew rapidly in ...

Torquay Torquay ( ) is a seaside town in Devon, England, part of the unitary authority area of Torbay. It lies south of the county town of Exeter and east-north-east of Plymouth, on the north of Tor Bay, adjoining the neighbouring town of Paignt ...

road. It lies within

Teignbridge Teignbridge is a local government district in Devon, England. Its council is based in the town of Newton Abbot. The district also includes the towns of Ashburton, Buckfastleigh, Dawlish, Kingsteignton and Teignmouth, along with numerous vi ...

District Council. Coffinswell has a church dedicated to

Saint Bartholomew Bartholomew was one of the twelve apostles of Jesus according to the New Testament. Most scholars today identify Bartholomew as Nathanael, who appears in the Gospel of John (1:45–51; cf. 21:2). New Testament references The name ''Bartholomew ...

with a Norman

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) includes fonts " Roman" (or "regul ...

. Near the church is Court Barton, a

manor house A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were usually held the lord's manorial courts, communal mea ...

of partly 16th century date; the southern part of which was used as a court house by

Torre Abbey Torre Abbey is a historic building and art gallery in Torquay, Devon, which lies in the South West of England. It was founded in 1196 as a monastery for Premonstratensian canons, and is now the best-preserved medieval monastery in Devon and C ...

. The village lies in a rural valley surrounded by farmland, and has many traditional Devon cob and

thatch Thatching is the craft of building a roof with dry vegetation such as straw, Phragmites, water reed, Cyperaceae, sedge (''Cladium mariscus''), Juncus, rushes, Calluna, heather, or palm branches, layering the vegetation so as to shed water away fr ...

cottages. Lanes and tracks lead to the neighbouring hamlet of Daccombe and over the ridge towards Haccombe and the

River Teign The River Teign is a river in the county of Devon, England. It is long and rises on Dartmoor, becomes an estuary just below Newton Abbot and reaches the English Channel at Teignmouth. Toponymy The river-name ''Teign'' is first attested in a ...

approximately 3 miles north over undulating land.

Surrounding places

Coffinswell is surrounded by several small villages and hamlets. Clockwise from the north-west these are: * Milber. This suburb of

is mainly residential. On the hill above it is the

Iron Age The Iron Age () is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. It has also been considered as the final age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progre ...

hill fort of Milber Down. * Netherton. A small hamlet between Milber and Haccombe. A footpath leads to Coombe Cellars on the River Teign. * Haccombe is a small hamlet below the St Marychurch road. Its small chapel is dedicated to

Saint Blaise Blaise of Sebaste (, ''Hágios Blásios''; martyred 316 AD) was a physician and bishop of Sivas, Sebastea in historical Lesser Armenia (modern Sivas, Turkey) who is venerated as a Christian saint and martyr. He is counted as one of the Fourteen ...

. Haccombe House is a "nondescript Georgian structure" (Pevsner): built ca. 1800: the chapel is in the grounds; the estate being the historic home of Sir Thomas Carew, 1st Baronet (1595–1640). The benefice is occupied by an incumbent with the rare title of

Archpriest The ecclesiastical title of archpriest or archpresbyter belongs to certain priests with supervisory duties over a number of parishes. The term is most often used in Eastern Orthodoxy and the Eastern Catholic Churches and may be somewhat analogo ...

. The archpresbytery was established in 1341 with six clergy: only the archpriest survived at the Reformation. The parish is combined with that of Stoke-in-Teignhead with Combe-in-Teignhead. * Plant World. A garden centre and a large garden which is designed as a map of the world, with rare plants grown relevant to their location on the map. It is significant for the cultivation of giant Echiums. * Rocombe. A small hamlet at the bottom of the valley on the lane towards Stokeinteignhead. * Maidencombe, about distant, is the closest beach to Coffinswell. It is also a small village (recognised by Torbay Council) on the coast of

Lyme Bay Lyme Bay is an area of the English Channel off the south coast of England. The south western counties of Devon and Dorset front onto the bay. The exact definitions of the bay vary. The eastern boundary is usually taken to be Portland Bill on ...

. * Daccombe. A small hamlet of thatched cottages and a campsite. It is at the head of the valley of the Aller Brook. The name is first attested in 1178 as ''Daccumba''. The name was once thought to come from an

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

personal name A personal name, full name or prosoponym (from Ancient Greek ''prósōpon'' – person, and ''onoma'' –name) is the set of names by which an individual person or animal is known. When taken together as a word-group, they all relate to that on ...

''Dæcca'' + ("valley"), in which case it once meant "Dæcca's valley". But

Eilert Ekwall Bror Oscar Eilert Ekwall (8 January 1877 in Vallsjö – 23 November 1964 in Lund) was a Swedish academic, Professor of English at Sweden's Lund University from 1909 to 1942 and one of the outstanding scholars of the English language in the firs ...

noted that this provided a poor explanation for the attested spellings, and argued that the first element came from an

common noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.Example n ...

*''dāc'' ("jackdaw") and that the name thus meant "jackdaw valley" (though he thought that the better attested Old English word ''dā'' "doe" could provide an alternative explanation). * Barton. A suburb of

. Barton Hall, a former manor house, is here. In recent years it has been a holiday camp and adventure centre with a dry ski slope. * Kingskerswell is a large village separated from Coffinswell by a hill. Mainly residential, it is on the old Torquay to Newton Abbot road.

Landscape

Most of the landscape around Coffinswell is hilly farmland. Traditional Devon

hedgerows A hedge or hedgerow is a line of closely spaced (3 feet or closer) shrubs and sometimes trees, planted and trained to form a barrier or to mark the boundary of an area, such as between neighbouring properties. Hedges that are used to separate ...

form field boundaries, and have existed at least since Norman times. Most of the flora is native, with the exception of cultivated or non-native flora in private gardens and horticultural sites, e.g. rhododendrons around Haccombe and

gorse ''Ulex'' (commonly known as gorse, furze, or whin) is a genus of flowering plants in the family Fabaceae. The genus comprises about 20 species of thorny evergreen shrubs in the subfamily Faboideae of the pea family Fabaceae. The species are na ...

and

pine A pine is any conifer tree or shrub in the genus ''Pinus'' () of the family Pinaceae. ''Pinus'' is the sole genus in the subfamily Pinoideae. ''World Flora Online'' accepts 134 species-rank taxa (119 species and 15 nothospecies) of pines as cu ...

s near Milber.

Water courses, rivers and hydrology

Coffinswell sits in the Daccombe or Aller Brook

drainage basin A drainage basin is an area of land in which all flowing surface water converges to a single point, such as a river mouth, or flows into another body of water, such as a lake or ocean. A basin is separated from adjacent basins by a perimeter, ...

. The Aller Brook flows west toward Aller, Newton Abbot, before entering the River Teign which empties into Lyme Bay at

Teignmouth Teignmouth ( ) is a seaside town, fishing port and civil parishes in England, civil parish in the English county of Devon. It is on the north bank of the estuary mouth of the River Teign, about south of Exeter. The town had a population of 14 ...

. Water collection on the east side of the Daccombe drainage basin or the Watcombe drainage basin flows through Barton and Watcombe into Babbacombe bay at Watcombe beach. Likewise water collection on the north side of the drainage basin collects in Haccombe and flows toward the River Teign.

Notable residents

The botanist and illustrator Rev. W. Keble Martin was Rector here in the 1920s, and studied the local flora. During his time Michael Constantine de Courcy, 33rd Baron Kingsale (1855–1931) lived in Coffinswell.Lord Kingsale was a director of the Moran Tea Company in Assam: Martin (1968); pp. 94-95 Sarah Buck, the first woman President of the

Institution of Structural Engineers The Institution of Structural Engineers is a British professional body for structural engineers. In 2021, it had 29,900 members operating in 112 countries. It provides professional accreditation and publishes a magazine, '' The Structural Eng ...

, (2008) lives in the village.

References

{{authority control Villages in Devon