The county of Devon is home to some particularly ravishing towns and, while it would be a bit presumptuous to single out one of these towns as the best example of Devon's scenic beauty, the town of Kingsbridge would certainly be in the running where such an evaluation to take place. Paramount to the beauty of this town in particular is the stunning Kingsbridge Estuary, one of the most picturesque examples of a ria ever to exist. It is little wonder that Kingsbridge enjoys such popularity among seaside resort purveyors: The view of the surrounding countryside from the Estuary is one of the most phenomenal visceral experiences ever captured.
The towns of Alvington and Chillington are not far from either side of Kingsbridge and, to be sure, Kingsbridge originated as a bridge of sorts between the two locations. Its name is actually a combination of what the town itself originally was built as: A king's bridge. The manifestation of pairs exists throughout the towns history, actually, and you can see events occurring in twos at nearly every stage of the towns growth. As mentioned earlier, Kingsbridge grew as a result of two towns needing a link and the name is derived from two different words. Extending the comparison is the fact that Kingsbridge is actually a formation of two earlier towns known as Kingsbridge and Dodbrooke. Both towns came into being around the same time, with markets being granted to each within forty years of each other in the 1200s, and by the 1400s the towns would merge into one overarching blanket name.
Even churches obey the rule of pairs in the annals of Kingsbridge's history. To this day there are two ecclesiastical parishes in the town: St. Edmund's and St. Thomas Becket. The former was built in the 1300s and the latter wasn't constructed for another few hundred years but both are towering beacons that command attention from people on both sides of the town. Religion was at the forefront of the development of most of the cities in Devon but it was in Kingsbridge that religion and day-to-day life truly lived in harmony. This is evident in the fact that Kingsbridge is one of the few towns in the surrounding area that still has all of its churches in its history standing proudly to this day.
These days, however, Kingsbridge has fully come into its own as a decidedly modern town. The downtown area of Kingsbridge is filled to the brim with up to the minute diversions like theatres, pubs, and museums. In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, Kingsbridge still holds on to the remnants of its past rather admirably: To this day the town is still the main market center for the entire area and this has been the legacy of Kingsbridge for nearly a thousand years now. It is truly refreshing to see a town as current yet as steeped in the past as Kingsbridge and it is largely thanks to the adherence to custom seen in the people who run Kingsbridge that the place is so relevant and nostalgic at the same time.
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