There are two bridges across the Tamar in this shot for anyone who has not seen them before. The one with the tall towers is a suspension road bridge, built in 1961. Before this date, if you wanted to cross between Plymouth and Cornwall, you had to do it by ferry or do a long road trip to Gunnislake and Tavistock. The one that looks a bit like two sausages in front of the road bridge is the rail bridge that the train from which this photo was taken was about to cross a few moments later. It’s called the Royal Albert bridge and was completed in 1859, within a year of its engineer’s death. The engineer in question was the colossus that is Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A man to be admired for his “can do” attitude to building the railway that connect Cornwall to the rest of the UK.

One of the glorious and perhaps unexpected benefits of the railway was that every spring tourists would come down from London to admire the great beauty of the Tamar Valley’s orchards. Sadly there are almost no orchards left here because the Government required farmers to grub them up to grow potatoes for the war effort. As you may remember, humans can live on a diet of potatoes, milk and butter so the more potatoes we had, the less likely the population was to starve in the face of international trade restrictions.

By the time the orchards were grubbed up, the tourist trade had dwindled because travel had, apart from the war years, become so much easier so there was more to see and more places to visit. By the time of the war, you’d have had to be a bit “wrong in the head” to want to travel to Plymouth because the Navy base there attracted much attention from the Nazis in the form of bombs and incendiary devices.

After you travel through the glorious, lush green Cornish countryside, past, the creeks and river estuaries and cross the Tamar, you travel into Plymouth above the height of the rooftops of the houses. From the train you can see where the bombs fell because there will be a row of Victorian houses with a gap part-way along and a modern building in-between. These are the direct hits which destroyed the houses. The people of Plymouth, like those in many big cities on both sides of the channel must have lived through hell. It’s hard to imagine how frightening it must have been. My journey goes from glory to tragedy in such a short distance. There are two stories of the land either side of the two bridges.