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Concept
Totnes
Summary
Totnes (ˈtɒtnᵻs or tɒtˈnɛs ) is a market town and civil parish at the head of the estuary of the River Dart in Devon, England, within the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is about west of Paignton, about west-southwest of Torquay and about east-northeast of Plymouth. It is the administrative centre of the South Hams District Council.
Totnes has a long recorded history, dating back to 907, when its first castle was built. By the twelfth century it was already an important market town, and its former wealth and importance may be seen from the number of merchants' houses built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today, the town has a sizeable alternative and "New Age" community, known as a place where one can live a bohemian lifestyle, though has in recent times also gained a reputation as being a hotspot for conspiracy theorists within the UK.
The 2021 census recorded a population of 9,214, an increase from the 2011 census which gave a population of 8,076.
According to the Historia Regum Britanniae written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in around 1136, "the coast of Totnes" was where Brutus of Troy, the mythical founder of Britain, first came ashore on the island. Set into the pavement of Fore Street is the Brutus Stone, a small granite boulder onto which, according to local legend, Brutus first stepped from his ship. As he did so, he was supposed to have declaimed:Here I stand and here I rest. And this town shall be called Totnes.
The stone is far above the highest tides and the tradition is not likely to be of great antiquity, being first mentioned in John Prince's Worthies of Devon in 1697. It is possible that the stone was originally the one from which the town crier, or bruiter called out his news; or it may be le Brodestone, a boundary stone mentioned in several 15th century disputes: its last-known position in 1471 was below the East Gate.
The Middle English prose Brut (1419) places the fight between Brutus' general Corineus, and the British giant Gogmagog "at Totttenes", while Cornish antiquary Richard Carew suggested that the fight may have begun near the town, but ended at Plymouth Hoe.
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