Foss Street
What's In a Name - Foss Street
When you come to Dartmouth if you DON’T walk down Foss Street you have missed something – there can be few more beautiful places to shop and browse.
But the street marks a place so integral to the development and growth – quite literally – of the town, that it’s no exaggeration to say that without it there would BE no Dartmouth.
Imagine for a second that none of the development of Dartmouth had taken place: that the river and harbour had been left to their own devices over the last 1,000 years, rather than have man meddle with them. If that were the case, then right up to the play-park in Victoria Road would be a tidal inlet, rather like Old Mill Creek to the north of Sandquay.
The Foss of Hardness – Hardness being the hill overlooking the Old Market on one side and College Way on the other today – is first mentioned in 1243. William Fitzstephen granted Adam Cade a ‘messuage’ or the right to build a home, on the west side of his ‘Foss of Hardness’.
It was, basically a dam across the Creek allowing those who controlled it to hold in the water and use it to power water mills for the grinding of corn into flour.
Interestingly, the technology to build such a dam came from Normandy. When the tribe led by William the Conqueror - known to his enemies, (which was most people), as William the Bastard – conquered Britain, they brought the knowledge of how to build dams like this.
The Foss worked by allowing water in to what was now known as the ‘Mill Pool’ - because it was the pool that fed the mill at high tide, then a sluice gate was dropped to hold it in and await the low tide, when by opening another gate on the Hardness side, water flowed over a water wheel which drove the machinery of the mill.
The millers had to be prepared to work all hours of the day or night because they were dictated by tide not weather. Bread was the staple of all diets, so they must have been kept very busy.
In 1296 Philip Rurde paid the then massive sum of £200 for the mill. To give that a value – if you use average earnings to calculate how much it could buy today – Mr Rurde paid the equivalent of £1.9million for the mill.
That must have been one busy mill.
So busy, in fact, that a second wheel was built opposite the first in 1344. These were driven and used for the next four hundred and seventy one years, until 1815.
The Foss provided another important commodity in the town – somewhere to build. Being a strong base to build from was worth so much to a town which was growing fast thanks to its proximity to the sea and trade routes from the continent.
The Hawley family - who produced the three members called John over 100 years from the mid fourteenth century who would shape the town more than most – built themselves a warehouse next to the Foss which was the basis of their wealth. This hall was known, rather unimaginatively as Hawley’s Hall, but it gave them a base in the middle of the town which faced out onto the river, where ships could moor to unload.
Buildings began to spring up around the hall – and it began to be the beating heart of the town, partly because it was the quickest way to get from Clifton to Hardness, rather than go around, the only route being via Ford.
The owner of the Foss in 1619, John Roope, was so exasperated with people using it he took legal action to stop them - the 17th Century equivalent of a farmer trying to stop ramblers walking across their land.
He drew a map to qualify his claim – including some incredibly bad spelling. It shows the Mill Pool, apparently with what appear to be orchards along its banks, ‘Haleys hall’, ‘The Ford Grinne’ whatever that was, and a road which went ‘Towards Crowtor Hill’. It shows the extent of the town at the time and how important the Foss was.
Mr Roope lost and the Foss became an official thoroughfare which linked the areas of the town together, paving the way for more development, such as the Butterwalk in 1635 and Duke Street, linking with the waterfront which now stretched from there to Bayards Cove.
The next logical step for those who could see the town needed land to build on was to fill in the Mill Pool. This happened in fits and starts, as opposed to one grand scheme in the years after the mills closed at the beginning of the 19th Century.
Slowly, it seems, more and more of the Mill Pool was filled in and built on, until it was firm enough to take the Market which was built in 1834. Rather than massive, dramatic change that a project - like the Embankment in the 1880s – it was a slow and gradual change from one state to another, more and more of it became usable, first as gardens, then as places for buildings, until it was just part of the town.
Without the filling in of the Mill Pond there would be no Old Market, Lloyds Chemists, Doctors Surgery, Guildhall, bowling green and play park – plus countless houses.