Cliff Road

Time was, long before the building of the Mayflower (now Forte Post House) Hotel a narrow road curved down around the edge of West Hoe into Prospect Place. The original topography of West Hoe, prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century, would have seen all the land to the south and west of Cliff Road, then little more than a wide grassy field, gently falling away towards the line of Great Western Road and Grand Parade which, if you can imagine it, would have marked the line of the “cliff” edge prior to the quarrying of the area. Quarrying that was, by 1850, to have transformed West Hoe forever and a day.

Thomas Gill was the man responsible for the wholesale carving out of the limestone there and the great flat expanse that now characterises the area is simply the floor of the quarry, while Cliff Road virtually marks the boundary line between Gill’s land and the land belonging to the Corporation - that great public space we know as the Hoe. The cliff therefore is a man-made one and West Hoe Park is one of the few bits of the old quarry floor to have so far escaped development.

EH 23 November 1996