Long before records began, travellers arriving on our shores found safe havens, natural harbours, the estuaries of rivers, and settled there, in sight of the ocean that had brought them to this land.

Gradually they moved inland to more fertile soil, usually along the course of a river that provided both guidance and essential water supplies. In later centuries, great lords built their castles and monks their abbeys upriver, at the tidal limit. Some of the routes are still used today while others lie ignored and overgrown. Villages, and, later on, towns grew up around these castles and abbeys to serve their needs; towns that still prosper today.