History of Vipers Quay

Vipers Quay was built by Col. Claude Scott, in the early 1960’s and completed in 1964.  At the time he and his family lived in Dittisham Court, in the centre of the village, (now mostly holiday cottages) and he wanted to keep a place to visit in Devon when the family moved to Yorkshire. The picture above shows the view down the river from Dittisham before the house was built.  The house featured in an article in Ideal Home Magazine in 1966 (see below), which described it as “imaginative yet practical” and “as attractive and exciting as its setting”.  The house was designed and built by Claude with local labour and he was his own planner, constructor, plumber, electrician and heating engineer, incorporating such modern conveniences as the huge sliding aluminium framed windows in the living room.

The original “Vipers’ Quay” was a small quay at the Southern tip of the property, downstream of the Anchor Stone, as shown on old OS and Admiralty maps, but no trace of it remains today. Legend has it that the sunny position and dense woods were particularly attractive to snakes, hence the name, although despite much looking we have never seen one!

The earliest reference to the Boathouse appears in the tithe map of 1839 where a building is shown in the location of the present boathouse, though without any jetty or quay. The jetty first appears on the 1886 OS map. The quay and the boathouse originally served the Rectory; at the time transport was much easier by water than by the steep and often very muddy Devon lanes, so many houses would have had their own little quay or landing stage to bring in coal etc, and the Rectory, as the most important house in the village after the Court, was no exception. 

The original boathouse was a single storey building with a pitched roof and had no residential accommodation. By the 1900s it had become a roofless ruin, almost lost in the oak trees which then covered the river bank. It can be seen in the photos below.