'You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it you are earnest to persuade others to enjoy it too.'
Centuries of Meditations ~ Thomas Traherne (1636-1674)
And quoted by John Lewis-Stempel in Meadowland The Private Life of an English Field (p236) and adopted by me as the loveliest little thing I have read in ages, so it's walking boots and woolly hats on everyone, we are off for a persuasive trek. Bookhound has packed the flasks of hot chocolate, the biscuits and the space blankets, I've got the map and compass and the kitchen sink, and we are going to get some of the River Tavy in our veins...
I have been doing a lot of reading about the history of the Shire and along the way I came across a suggested derivation of the word Devon...from the Celtic Dyfnaint, The Land of the Deep Valleys, and it conjured up the most perfect vision in my imagination.
There was then nothing for it but to take you all on a walk up Tavy Cleave on Dartmoor..
Tavy Cleave is the dramatic 'V' shaped valley through which the River Tavy makes it way down from its headwaters at 1840 ft in the heart of Britain's largest blanket bog, thence across Dartmoor to Tavistock and onto its confluence with the Tamar and out to sea at Plymouth. Falling a thousand feet in seven miles along the way makes the Tavy second only to the Spey in the Cairngorms for speed. I had always known it was the second-fastest flowing river in the country but not exactly why or how.
As a regular member of the Dartmoor Rescue Group back in the day, Bookhound has been to Tavy Cleave many times. The Rescue Group would train on the moor one night a week all year round whatever the weather, and often some poor soul would walk out, stick a broken bone from the butcher's out of their trouser leg, add a bit of fake blood and then sit and wait to be 'found.' The 'being found' was always mysteriously within reach of a decent pub, but the professionalism, the camaraderie and the social life was second to none and we made many friends who are still friends.
We have one of the modern-day definitive tomes on Dartmoor, High Dartmoor by Eric Hemery, and when I took it down from the shelf to check out the associated topography and history for Tavy Cleave, there tucked inside was a long-forgotten but legendary photograph of Bookhound out on a rescue back in the days when it snowed a lot...
If you know Holming Beam track you will know that great swathes of those trees have just been cut down (we wondered about Larch disease) changing the character of that whole part of the moor ; an absence and now a new and previously unseen skyline.
And here's another legendary photograph of the Rescue Group in their summer uniform...
A Tavistock Carnival entry, and perhaps you could all plead for my life in comments because I am going to be in so much trouble about this... but I decided it was marginally better than the year they all went dressed in nappies and pushed prams around the town. But listen, if you were trapped at the top of Tavy Cleave with a twisted ankle (or worse) and the mist was descending, trust me, you'd be pleased to see them whatever they were wearing.
We parked at Lanehead (click on the map and it should enlarge) and walked along to Nattor Farm before heading north up river, past Nat Tor and Ger Tor towards the Cleave. Visiting this wild and windy place on a relatively 'quiet' and mild day but I still needed hat and gloves, and you have to be sure the army aren't in the middle of firing practice too because this is slap-bang in the middle of the firing range.
No red flags. we were safe... but still rather a lot of cars and people... and horseboxes around, strange. And those clouds looked ready to soak us...
We roped up the dogs on leads until we had passed sheep and ponies. Nell and Rusty are really only accustomed to pheasants and rabbits, and signs warn that dogs can be shot on sight on Dartmoor if they are seen to be uncontrolled and chasing sheep...it would be just our luck. The next minute we sighted about a zillion dogs coming over the brow of Nattor Down, sheep and ponies running everywhere followed by hunting horns, red jackets, horses and the whole panoply of the hunt streaking across the skyline in the distance, and then gone. It made quite a sight.
Feeling slightly less nervous we let the dogs off the leads and made our way along the mining leat footpath.
Once required to sustain the moorland mining industry, the Wheal Friendship Leat, with water diverted from the Tavy, powered seventeen water wheels in 1878 at three separate mines. Now considerably shorter the Mine Leat flows to a reservoir and power station supplying a nearby village, and it cracks along at quite a lick, so it was only a matter of time before first one dog then the next leapt in and had to be fished out before they were swept on. The sides are sheer and Rusty did look a bit panicked...
He then had to be thrown right back on the horse ... whoever heard of a spaniel that wouldn't go in a river...
We have an older book Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts written by Lady Rosalind Northcote and published in MCMXX...1920, I had to double check. The entire book with original Frederick Widgery illustrations is available in a digital edition here, but to save you trawling through here is what Lady Rosalind has to say about Tavy Cleave...
There are some places—the Castle of Elsinore, for instance—that seem to have an amazing and incomprehensible gift of resisting civilization. They may be brought up to date, and trimmed, and filled with inappropriate people, and everything else done that should spoil them, but in spite of it all they do not for a moment look as if any modern extraneous objects had a meaning for them. They belong to their own day and its manner, and to no other.
The same sort of feeling hovers about Tavy Cleave, and a great sense of the mystery that here more, there less, broods over the moor....only the feeling that the valley is, in a finer than the usual sense, haunted.
As a valley Tavy Cleave is very beautiful, with its steep sides and clear rushing stream and red granite rocks, half in and half out of the river, that have a charm they entirely lose when once away from the water.... Sometimes a kind of black moss grows upon them, and tiny bits of white lichen, giving together a curious tortoiseshell look. Above, the hill-sides are covered with heather and broom and whortleberries among masses of loose rocks, and now and again there is the vivid green of a patch of bog. The great masses of rocks crowning the separate points on the hill-side, like ruined rock-castles, add to the air of mystery...'
Tavy Cleave can't have changed one iota, it still resists civilisation and even that distinctive tortoise-shell black moss and lichen still very much in evidence almost a century later...
Nor did it feel haunted and there are places on the moor that do make me feel slightly uneasy...usually forests.
As we approached Nattor, the last farm on our way back to the car, I recalled visiting new babies there thirty-six years ago and coveting the house and its location back then, and was surprised to be ambushed by those same feelings once more; living in the middle of nowhere seemed like the ideal...who knew we'd manage it eventually. The low beams in the farmhouse kitchen had crosswise slats between each one, and there on top, up by the ceiling, were housed all the old pots and pans. I was so transfixed by the simple brilliance of this idea that when Bookhound was building our little kitchen (from old floorboards) in our first little cottage, he designed and built in exactly the same beam, slat and ceiling arrangement as Nattor Farm, and up there we proudly placed...our twentieth century wok and our Habitat accoutrements.
The first settlement at Nattor Farm was recorded in 1340, but it is also known that in 1814, during the Napoleonic Wars, the farmer William Reep would make daily packhorse deliveries of dairy produce, milk, butter and cream to the prison war hospital at Princetown. In later years prison escapees would turn up at the farm and be given food and shelter whilst waiting for the police to arrive (must have taken an age) but Eric Hemery also notes other details ...
My abiding memory of Johnny Reep [the family farmed here for centuries until Johnny's death in 1969]: old raincoat with binder-twine girdle, white hair streaming in wind, riding small, powerful pony bare-back. State of domesticity unhygienic in extreme; small heaps of disused food cans in corners of kitchen [yes, the same one in which I saw those beams]...notice sensitivity in face of this tough, individualistic, widely respected old moorman.'
Yes Tavy Cleave is wild and isolated but like much of Dartmoor it is all breath-takingly beautiful, just imagine the walking and the complete peace, and the scenery enlarging on Ted Hughes' moorland observation...
Moors
Are a stage
For the performance of heaven
Any audience is incidental
Surrounded by old workings, and hut and stone circles, that performance of the past is only a breath away.
Eric Hemery suggests that the river is almost wine colour under an autumn sky and also remarks that the river is greatly impoverished at this point by the water diverted into the leat, but still the sound of the river 'rises always to the ear of walker on leat-side path.' We decided the time to go back this winter (without dogs and safely high up of course) might be when the Tavy further downstream is looking like this...
Any good walking over your way of late?
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