The interwar period

The interwar period is evoked through a small, enduring settlement on the cliffs at Rame Head. The book connects this period to the beginnings of the scattered plots there, whose history shows how modest arrangements for shelter could outlast the circumstances that first created them.

The Plots at Rame Head

A local farmer rented plots on the steep hillside at peppercorn rents. People cut platforms into the cliff and put up tents and shacks, making places to stay within the rugged slope rather than building a conventional settlement. The account gives no precise years for this arrangement, but locates its beginning between the world wars.

Postwar Arrivals and Continuity

After the Second World War, people who had lost their homes in the bombing of Plymouth came to the plots. One man walking the coast explained that his family had arrived then and stayed. Over time, the makeshift dwellings were passed down through generations, added to, and made more stable. The interwar beginnings therefore led into a postwar history of continued occupation, not a temporary episode that disappeared with the period.

Ownership and Change

By the time the narrator encounters the settlement, the Council owns the land. The man recalls that officials tried to remove the residents, but they won the right to stay; rents had since risen substantially. He also observes that nearly all the plots had become holiday homes. The account sets this later use against the settlement’s origins in low-cost plots and shelter, while making clear that the transition did not erase every family’s claim to remain.

Place in the Narrative

The interwar period surfaces not as a broad historical survey but as an inherited layer in the coastal landscape. On the walk, the scattered shacks prompt a brief account of how the plots began, how war brought new residents, and how families established lasting ties to the cliffs. Their history makes the landscape a record of changing access to shelter: from peppercorn rents and improvised dwellings to higher rents, contested residence, and holiday use.