A small village with Anglo-Saxon origins, Cockington is located about a half mile from Torquay in Devon, England. The village was originally part of a family-owned estate until it was sold to the Torquay Corporation in 1932. The mansion house, Cockington Court, was restored and greatly enlarged during the nineteenth century by its then owners, the Mallock family, who were wealthy silversmiths originally from Exeter. In the twentieth century, crime novelist Agatha Christie often visited the Court as a family friend of the Mallocks.