Visitors · The peninsula

A short history of Bere Ferrers

River first, then silver, then orchards, then the railway. The parish is the whole spit of land between the Tamar and the Tavy.

Tamara Way Trains & buses

The place

Beer Town on a spit of land

Domesday calls the manor Birlanda. Later spellings run Ber, Byr Ferrers, Beer Ferris and Beer Town. Bere may be an Old English woodland pasture, or a Celtic word for a point of land. Ferrers is the Norman family who held the manor from the thirteenth century. The civil parish still covers the whole peninsula: this village, Bere Alston, Weir Quay, Gnatham and the farms between.

St Andrew’s

Saxon site · rebuilt c.1330–33

There has been a church on the Tavy bank since the Saxon period. Sir William de Ferrers rebuilt it and founded an archpresbytery: an archpriest, four priests and a deacon living as a college across the road, saying mass for the family. The rector is still styled Archpriest. The east window holds fourteenth-century glass — the oldest in any Devon parish church — with William holding a model of the church and the line Wills Fereys me fecit. In 1821 the antiquary Charles Stothard fell from a ladder copying that glass and is buried beneath the window.

Royal silver

Crown mines from 1292

Edward I opened crown mines here and at Combe Martin. At Bere they employed hundreds of men, many brought from Derbyshire and north-east Wales. That industry is why Bere Alston exists as a borough. Workings went deeper than English mines had gone before; a fifteen-mile leat was cut from near Tavistock. Silver, then lead and arsenic, ran into the nineteenth century. Weir Quay had smelting works. The field is still treated as nationally important by archaeologists at Exeter.

Fruit, cider and two villages

When the pits quietened, the same south-facing slopes grew apples, cherries, strawberries and “the finest cider.” Bere Ferrers stayed the church-and-barton hamlet by the Tavy. Bere Alston, two miles north, was the market and, until 1832, a rotten borough returning two Members of Parliament.

The railway

Opened 2 June 1890

The Plymouth, Devonport and South Western Junction Railway opened the station as Beer Ferris. In 1897 the company changed the spelling so the name would not sound like a brewery. The old lettering can still be seen on the signal box. On 24 September 1917 ten New Zealand soldiers stepped from a troop train on the wrong side of the track and were killed by an express. A plaque in the village and a memorial in the church remember them. The branch survived Beeching as today’s Tamar Valley Line.

The club

1947 · this building 1985

The BFS Club began as the Bere Ferrers Social Club in 1947 and moved into its present home in 1985. It sits in that long story: river, mine, orchard, halt. Walkers on the Tamara Coast to Coast Way finish Stage 2 here and start Stage 3a from the same lanes.

A few dates

1086 — Manor listed in Domesday as Birlanda.
1258 — Reginald de Ferrers admitted as first rector.
1292 — Crown silver mines opened.
1333 — Church consecrated; archpresbytery confirmed.
1533 — Presbytery dissolved; the Archpriest title remains.
1832 — Bere Alston loses its two MPs.
1890 — Station opens.
1897 — Spelling changed from Beer Ferris to Bere Ferrers.
1917 — New Zealand troop-train accident.
1947 — Social club founded.

Parish registers survive from 1538–39.

St Andrew’s guide Exeter silver-mine project GENUKI parish page

Drawn from parish and county sources, Historic England’s listing for St Andrew’s, the University of Exeter’s Bere Ferrers silver-mine research, and the station history of the Tamar Valley Line. This is a visitor’s sketch, not a full parish history. Arthur J. Beddow’s History of Bere Ferrers parish remains the local printed account.