Touring - Cornwall And South Devon

Touring: Cornwall and South Devon (c.1970) – RAC
Royal Automobile Club | SBN: 706000625
Condition: Good | Sold by Crappy Old Books

Cornwall and South Devon. That glorious corner of Britain where the roads become narrower, the scenery becomes more spectacular, and the average motorist discovers that a journey of twelve miles can take approximately three hours if conducted behind a tractor, a caravan and a confused tourist attempting to reverse a Morris Minor through a granite gateway.

Welcome to Touring: Cornwall and South Devon, a splendid vintage RAC motoring guide dating from approximately 1970, when exploring the West Country involved a paper map, a thermos flask, a packet of sandwiches and the reassuring belief that your British-built motor car would probably reach its destination without requiring extensive mechanical intervention.

Priced at just 45p, this charming publication promised an impressive combination of touring routes, town information and a gazetteer, accompanied by mapping at three miles to one inch. An excellent arrangement for navigating the highways and byways of south-west England, although possibly less helpful when confronting a Cornish lane barely wide enough to accommodate a determined sheep.

The guide takes readers into a world of picturesque fishing villages, bustling seaside resorts, historic market towns and dramatic coastal landscapes. From the magnificent Cornish coastline to the attractive countryside of South Devon, this is a region where every bend seems to offer another postcard view, another ancient church or another opportunity to discover that the road ahead is considerably steeper than anticipated.

The inclusion of touring routes and a town guide reflects an era when motoring holidays were adventures in themselves. Visitors might spend the morning admiring Plymouth, the afternoon exploring the coast and the evening searching for a respectable guesthouse whose proprietor didn’t object to children, muddy shoes or guests arriving seventeen minutes after the advertised dinner time.

Naturally, the West Country had already developed a thriving tourist industry, but this was long before satellite navigation, online accommodation booking and review websites where disappointed visitors could publicly complain that the sea was too cold.

There is something wonderfully nostalgic about the guide’s cover, with its bold blue typography, attractive coastal illustration and simple regional map. It belongs to a period when publications were designed to be genuinely useful rather than merely providing seventeen pages of advertisements for attractions nobody intended to visit.

For today’s reader, the appeal extends well beyond practical navigation. This is a fascinating snapshot of tourism in the early 1970s, preserving the geography, presentation and holiday expectations of a region that has changed considerably over the intervening decades.

Roads have been improved, bypasses constructed, resorts transformed and countless traditional holiday establishments replaced or modernised. Yet much of the landscape remains gloriously familiar, particularly the narrow lanes, stone cottages and coastal views that have attracted visitors for generations.

This circa 1970 RAC publication, offered in Good condition by Crappy Old Books, is an appealing acquisition for collectors of vintage travel guides, motoring enthusiasts, local historians and anyone nostalgic for the days when a successful holiday required little more than sunshine, a decent map and a car that started reliably.

A delightful piece of British motoring and tourism history, complete with the charm of an age when forty-five pence could purchase an entire guide to two of England’s most beautiful regions.

And if you got hopelessly lost somewhere outside Bodmin, there was always the traditional solution.

Stop at a petrol station and ask a man who would inevitably begin by saying, "Well, I wouldn’t start from here."

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