Port Isaac Drangs
When Is A Street Not A Street?
When It's A Drang!
A large proportion of the buildings in the lower end of Port Isaac were built in periods when the shipping and fishing trades were at their most prosperous. They mostly date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when vehicular access was not a consideration.
This has resulted in the general character of the streets, in the historic core of the town, being narrow and winding. Here there are numerous interconnected narrow alleyways which are known locally as drangs.
Be sure to click on the image to view it full screen!
The drangs are pedestrian access only, and the streets wide enough for vehicles can barely accommodate foot traffic at the same time, so there are very few pavements.
Exploring the tiny streets is a really fun way of passing a couple of hours but their narrowness makes it very difficult to take good photographs.
Often, the view is either obscured by the next bend or you can't get far enough away from the buildings to get them in shot.
Most of Port Isaac's residents now live on the higher ground where there is twentieth century housing, the school, doctor's surgery, garage, supermarket and playing field.
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My Other Port Isaac Posts:
Sea Gull Ponders
Port Isaac View
Weird Architecture
Port Isaac Main Road
Thank you to @juliank and @photocontests for this daily photography contest.
I love those narrow "streets." There were a lot of tight alleys in southern Spain, where I lived, too. Nice photos!
Thank you @fotosdenada. The trip was well worth the effort! 😊
What a beautiful village! its always sad to see areas become mostly tourist but it is also wonderful to see areas as beautiful and unique as this survive. I lived in New Orleans for awhile and it was always struggling to retain its unique character which was really driven by the locals. But the tourism drove the economy.
Were you in New Orleans before all the damage? Has it been rebuilt?
Port Isaac is a very unique place that's for sure and you can see why it would be difficult to maintain a modern population there now.
Maybe the people who've moved up the hill are the younger generation of those that came before them. 😊
New Orleans has been cleaned up and rebuilt. Unfortunately, many people who left after the storm did not come back.
Has the population dropped then @steven-patrick or have new people moved in?
when I lived there population was about 500k, I think it is just now back to 400k and dropped much lower right after the storm . many of the homes that were lost were in lower income neighborhoods. families that could not afford to rebuild. and much of that lower income housing is just gone. Plus many found better opportunities in Houston and other more vibrant economies. Sad story
Oohhh, I love this collection, Gillian! Amazing how steep and narrow these streets get... And I think you did a great job with them, despite the difficulty! The walls of the buildings are great too with their textures and white paint... :)
Thank you @ackhoo. It's a very pretty place. I'm missing it all now I'm home from my trip. 😢
Wow that is an interesting place. I love those old winding streets...drangs they seem more human size if you know what I mean.
When they were being built cameras were not even invented so I suppose that didn't think that someday someone will have issues with line of sight lol
It looks lovely @gillianpearce and another place to put on the visit list. I'll be another tourist crowding the place out. :)
It's really worth a visit @molometer, especially if you can go outside of the school holidays.
Cornwall is full of beautiful places, as is Devon.
So, basically the folks that are down in the village are tourists, then, wandering through, rather than actually living there and working or something. Interesting. I guess that's what progress will do. It does kind of make it quaint, though, because the town becomes nearly all inhabited by vacationers. Does that mean, though, that there aren't any shops open down there?
Those are very narrow throughways indeed. I've been down a couple of alleys in Mexico that remind of that. It definitely takes you back a few centuries. :)
There are a few shops @glenalbrethsen and some of the people are locals - fishermen, lifeboat crew and such like. I imagine the people who work in the shops, pubs and restaurants come from further afield though, unless they're the owners.
But, yes, most of the people wandering around would be tourists. 😊
That kind of reminds me of Disneyland, in that virtually no on really lives there, but it's inhabited by tourists and people who work there for most of the day. I just hadn't thought of it in terms of an actual village where people used to live.
Maybe some day the reverse will happen to Disneyland, though I guess there's not really any homes (at least none that I can remember) in Disneyland proper. There's the hotels somewhere onsite. I've never stayed in one of them so I don't know exactly where they're located in relation to the park.
Still, it sounds like a cool place to visit and a rare opportunity (at least for me and where I live) to go through a town much as it was hundreds of years ago.
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