Eight centuries on the river
A borough, a ferry, a bridge
Saltash was old when Plymouth was small. Its story is really the story of one river, and of the increasingly ambitious ways people found to get across it.
Further reading
Saltash Heritage
This page only skims eight centuries. Saltash Heritage — the town's museum and local history society, on Lower Fore Street — holds the real depth: archives, photographs, family records and exhibitions covering the borough, the ferry, the bridges and the people who lived among them.
The site is served over plain HTTP, so your browser may flag it as not secure.
- c.1068
The Normans fortify the crossing
Robert, Count of Mortain, raises Trematon Castle above the Lynher on the orders of William I. Below it, fishermen ferry travellers over the Tamar — the 'passage' that gives Saltash its name and its reason to exist.
- c.1190
The borough is chartered
The de Valletort lords of Trematon grant Saltash its liberties. The corporation would go on to claim rights over the whole of the Tamar — a jurisdiction it defended, litigiously, for centuries.
- 1569
A mariner's daughter marries a sea captain
Mary Newman weds Francis Drake at St Budeaux, a decade before he sails around the world. The Culver Road cottage said to be her home is genuinely late-medieval; the Drake connection is a local tradition historians have never been able to prove.
- 1859
Brunel throws iron across the Tamar
The Royal Albert Bridge opens on 2 May and Cornwall joins the national railway network. Brunel, gravely ill, crosses his finished bridge lying on a flat truck. He dies that September. The station opens two days after the bridge.
- 1961
The ferry stops
The Tamar Bridge opens — the first major suspension bridge built in post-war Britain — and the ancient Saltash Passage falls silent after some eight hundred years of carrying people, carts and cars across the river.
- 2001
A bridge widened while in use
The Tamar Bridge is widened with traffic still running over it: a world first for a suspension bridge of its type, and a piece of engineering as quietly audacious as anything alongside it.
The engineer
Brunel's last bridge
Isambard Kingdom Brunel had to carry a railway over a tidal river a thousand feet wide and eighty feet deep, without obstructing the Navy's passage upstream. The Admiralty allowed him two spans and one pier. So he sank a wrought-iron cylinder into the riverbed, built the pier up through it, floated each 1,000-ton truss out on pontoons, and jacked them into the sky an inch at a time while the town watched from the hill.
He was too ill to attend the opening. Weeks later he was drawn across his finished bridge on a flat truck, lying down, looking up at his own ironwork. He died that September, aged fifty-three.