Ashford Hill

Plymouth used to be a very difficult town to get into on horseback, or on foot, without crossing water, which is what made it comparatively easy to defend during the Civil War.

Before the construction of the Embankment, the old road out of Plymouth for those eastward-boundused to curve around Lipson Hill and down to its present junction with Alexandra Road.

The reason it didn't run across the hill any further to the east was that the largely tidal inlet known as Lipson Creek used to reach up this far and this was the most easterly and fordable point of that Creek.

And if we are to assume any sort of logic beyond that, it would appear that this was the Ford were the Ash tree(s) grow - as opposed to the Ford were the water Ebbed, hence Ebbford (later Efford), a little further to the east and across the Plym.

EH 7 June 2003