Life In Full Circle

A Memory of Saltash.

The little house next to Mary Newman`s Cottage is where I live now...but I first walked past it with my mother at about the time this photo was taken. We got off the steam train at the station just up the hill, to walk to the waterside.
I also remember the house about 8 years later as a young teenager with our gang from Plymouth...over to scrump the apples and pears which were once grown on Old Ferry Road. It was just by chance that I discovered that the little house was for sale in 1992 and I have been living here since.
Up until the 70s there was a gas works at the back of the house and a 3 storey warehouse at the fron,t now both demolished...so now I have wonderful views of the River Tamar and Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge. A couple of years ago a nice old fella from London stopped to talk to me outside my house...it turned out that he once lived here in the 1920/30s, his father was in the Navy and he had then 7 brothers and sisters...all in this tiny house. Mary Newman`s Cottage was lived in until the 70s.. now it has been restored to its Elizabethan origins. Mary Newman was the first wife of Sir Francis Drake and became Mayoress of Plymouth. It is now looked after by The Tamar Protection Society.