River Otter

Lower reaches of the Otter, halfway between Otterton and mouth.

The otter (English: River Otter ) is a small, 32 km long river in the counties of Somerset and Devon in the South West of England.

It rises in the Blackdown Hills north of Otter Ford, about 10 kilometers south of Taunton Taunton Deane district in the south of the county of Somerset. From there it flows almost all the way to the mouth relatively straight south southwest. Only in the relatively short section between Honiton and Ottery St Mary, he takes a south-west to west- south-west course. It flows just east of the seaside resort of Budleigh Salterton to Otterton Ledge headland into the English Channel.

The special thing about the Otter is his mouth. The mouth area was a broad, navigable estuary several centuries ago. The approximately five kilometers north of the present mouth -lying village of Otterton was a seaport at the time. However, were storms, among others a very severe storm in 1824, again pebble pebbles, the west of Budleigh Salterton are from the cliff, rinsed before the output of the estuary and blocked this increasingly. There were efforts to keep the driveway after Otterton free and until 1810 the mouth for 60 - tonne vessels was passable, but at some point, probably not least because of the diminishing importance of smaller vessels for cargo and passenger transport, these efforts were set and allowed nature take its course. Thus the estuary silted up rapidly and turned into a freshwater mudflats. Through the rubble barrier of the river describes a sharp bend to the east, before it finally reaches the English Channel. The former estuary is a nature reserve and is not accessible to the public.