EPW023741 ENGLAND (1928). The town centre, Modbury, 1928

There were two nineteenth-century tanneries in Modbury - one at Brownston Street and the second between New Road and Poundwell Street. Tanneries flourished in Devon as the county had all the main constituents for making leather - water, oak bark [to make tannic acid] and the hides of Devon Red cattle, far superior to the modern herds of Friesians. A stream rising at Silver Well probably supplied Brownston Street's tannery; another stream running in from the north east served the New Road tannery