dovegreyreader scribbles

Still in Pursuit of Edward Thomas

My penchant for writing down the names of the inns and pubs of In Pursuit of Spring (more than seventy by the end of the book) is only matched by Edward Thomas's obsession with noting the names and epitaphs in churchyards, and it is something that has really made me pay attention. 

I wandered across to the village church (in Sydenham Damerel, the neighbouring parish to ours but nearer to home) a few days ago with a notebook in hand. We can see the church from here and on a high summer's day it looks quintessentially Devon ...

I'm envious because this parish has an original copy of its tithe map framed and on display in the church and thankfully it can't have been in there when the church suffered the devastating fire in 1957. The tower and the bells survived but only one chancel was rebuilt.

I walk over to St Mary's several times a week, and I frequently amble between the graves, reading the headstones and wondering, but I have never taken notes before. Well, after a very engrossing hour with my notebook I realised that if ever I have a novel in me (very unlikely) there was surely a story to be written here, though it might be a bit miserable..

I could include James and Elizabeth Giddy Jasper whose son Robert died on April 2 1858 aged three months followed by another son Richard aged 2 3/4 in 1859. I usually feel sad when I see these gravestones, but I spent some time imagining their lives before the sadness...much better.

In fact perhaps there was an epidemic of something in 1859 because Richard and Eliza Freeman lost Mary Ann that year too, born in April, died in July. " Cease to grieve for children taken early from a life of pain. Ripest fruit is quickly shaken, Death to them must needs be gain."

And what on earth happened in the Serpell household...

Eliza wife of Samuel died on January 25 1879 aged thirty years along with their son Samuel aged six days

" Not dead but sleepeth."

But maybe there was some happiness in the preceding months, just a bit in the midst of the hardships.

And I'm thinking all these people probably knew each other, were friends and neighbours with the church at its centre, because unlike ours it is a tiny parish, a very knowable community and one that, unlike ours, didn't benefit from the benevolence of the Duke of Bedford. The Duke slowly bought up vast tracts of land in Milton Abbot and provided copious employment; I always envisage the Sydenham Damerel-ites having to fight for their livelihood in comparison. In fact I imagine a bit of rivalry, maybe a touch of envy because if you worked for the Duke you at least had a modicum of security.

I had been dipping into The South Country by Edward Thomas when I came across this...

'The names of the local families - gentle and simple - what histories are in them, in the curt parish registers, in tombstones, in the names of fields and houses and woods.'

And with it comes the encouragement to make notes and explore...

'Better a thousand errors as long as they are human than a thousand truths lying like broken snail-shells round the anvil of a thrush.'

I'm not a historian, I'd be dangerous if I was, so I suspect I'm going the long way around the hedges to discover what I am about the local field names along with the people who lived here in the mid-nineteenth century. Hours spent online in the library where I have free access to Ancestry and cheap printing, so the Textithe project has my full attention now I have a stitching method that feels right.

I've finished the piece about the fields surrounding us here and it is now hanging on the kitchen wall, but one of the things I noticed on the 1842 tithe map were a number of farms around us that have long since vanished, swallowed up by their neighbours, no longer in existence, their names unknown by all but a few in 2018. It seemed a natural progression to quilt some of them back into life so I am currently busy resurrecting Newton Farm on the banks of the Tamar (owned by the Duke of Bedford), with its four long-gone dwellings and home to twenty three people on the 1841 census yet no trace of the farm by 1871.

I've been to visit our neighbours who now farm the land and we spent a fascinating hour poring over old maps and making then-and-now comparisons. They have also very kindly given me permission to hop over the gate and walk the fields whenever I want to. My Tex-tithe version of Newton is now tacked and ready for quilting and I am really looking forward to settling down with it and a good audio book (suggestions welcome).

Which book would I like to quilt into this...

What I'd give to find an old photo album, but who could afford that back in the day, so who can know what happened to farm labourer John Geake, his wife Elizabeth and their children John, Jane and William who lived at Newton in 1841...

Well in fact we do know because by 1851 our house has been built (about two miles across the fields) and they are living here with William and two more children, Alice and Ann. 

Isn't that an amazing thought. 

I hope the children played in the garden, and with thanks to Edward Thomas, still providing the inspiration a hundred years on.

 

 

Four Fields & some big sky thinking with Tim Dee

Four Fields by Tim Dee, as I mentioned a while back, is a book that has had a bit of a history with me.

I had invested in a paperback copy as soon as it was published having started my Beating the Bounds project around the fields that surround us here in the Tamar Valley and with a view to uncovering all the original field names. That project grew into a close look at everything I could find within a mile radius of home...at the time I compared it to that thing we used to do at school, you know, making a square of a wire coat hanger, flinging it over your shoulder and then closely examining everything that lay within.

Tim Dee's premise is the story of four very different fields spread around the world...

'walkable, mappable, man-made, movable, knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested, and changing...'

I am sure there will be a series of posts to come on Four Fields because it is a book to savour and consider slowly along with the astonishing depth and breadth of Tim Dee's writing. The book becomes a meditation, lyrical and meaningful and with deep resonances that I find somehow echo through my days.

For example I read this early one morning... Tim Dee has moved on from the Fens of Cambridgeshire and is now in Africa as night descends...

'After the lone tyrant sun of the day, barging all over, came the democracy of night, ancient lights, a myriad silver pin-suns. Their waltzing spangle said you are there and we are here, here and there and everywhere; a concert of stars spun through space, distant, open-mouthed, silent yet shouting; now is yesterday, here was tomorrow.'

We do that concert of stars here in the Tamar Valley too and are so fortunate to live in an area of nil light pollution barring our own. If we switch off the houselights a velvet dark descends and the sky becomes our own private planetarium.

Suddenly, as I read, and in that way that a book has of being able to take you somewhere else in your mind, I was thinking about Offspringette in New Zealand. Our tomorrow is always yesterday for her, and of course we miss her hugely, but she is happy, has a wonderful new job, we talk a lot and one of the things we often do is hand over the sun. I will send a picture of the sun setting here...

...Offspringette will send me back a picture of the sun rising there.

Just imagine how long that would have taken back in the day. I'd have taken a shot on my Instamatic, waited until the film was finished, sent it off to be developed, forgotten I had taken the picture, eventually written a letter and included the picture, posted it off... heavens, we'd be through an equinox at least, summer would be into winter by the time I had handed over the sun and that moment.

'Coming your way,' I say, ' get ready to catch it...' and I ping off a picture of a Tamar Valley sunset as the sun sinks below the horizon.

'Got it,' will come the reply and a picture flashes up of dawn sun creeping over the South Island garden.

The world and the distance that felt so huge and so far suddenly feels a little bit smaller to both of us and we often say we're looking at the same moon too,  something that really resonated when I was in New Zealand visiting last year and Offspringette and I sat and watched that full moon rise over Kaikoura. I think we both agreed to etch that night in our memory banks and think of it when we watched the moon and the stars in future and were missing each other.

Meanwhile Tim Dee looks at the vastness of the stars in an African sky...

'The shock comes, once again, at the demonstration of so much other, a star for every lark, a star for every grain of sand. And once again the oldness of the view, the way looking up shreds your life, strips it back, joins you to all those who have looked up, millennia of watchers, a star for every gazer.'

A star for every gazer...isn't that just perfect.

Just about every thought has me dashing off to Alice Oswald these days; my go-to poet along with Gerard Manley Hopkins... something Miss Maud circa 1972 Nonsuch Girls A Level English would never have credited. Mention of stars had me reaching for Woods etc and a beautiful poem entitled A Star Here And a Star There..

'the first whisper of stars is a faint thing
a candle sound, too far way to read by

the first whisper of stars is a candle sound
those faraway stars that rise and give themselves airs
         A star here and a star there
the first whisper of stars is a faint thing
that candle sound too far away to read by'

More about Four Fields to come I'm sure because I haven't even mentioned the fact that when Tim talks about 'my friend Kathleen' and I ferret around in Sightlines until I find Kathleen Jamie talking about 'my friend Tim' that I start to make connections and understand here are two writers who share friendship, and common writing ground; who both see and relate the detail that it is so easy to miss, ploughing furrows (sorry) that I treasure and I know many of you do too.

If you have read Four Fields please do share your thoughts.

I have Tim Dee's other book The Running Sky here and unread too. It was one of my Dad's favourites so I will be reading that soon too.

And I wonder if you too can identify with that feeling of sky and the way it connects you with the out of sight but never out of mind...

And when you've done that please do scroll down for  the chance of a gift...

 

 

 

Bookish Gallimaufry

A little pile of my favourite sort of reading has accumulated so I thought I'd share the titles with you...

On the Marshes by Carol Donaldson and published by the inestimable Little Toller Books.

At a crossroads in her life, Carol Donaldson decided to take to the road and return to her old hunting grounds, travelling across the marshlands of North Kent from Gravesend to Whitstable. The inevitable journey of self-discovery evolves as Carol explores the world of people who have chosen to live 'on the edge of this lonely, beautiful waterland.' 

One of the questions I am sure I have put to the male of the species when I have interviewed them in a previous life (I think I might have asked Robert Macfarlane this at Port Eliot Festival) is how much easier it is for men to upsticks, take themselves off, sleep under the stars and walk themselves into self awareness and insight, versus the women who often stay home to care for the children, or perhaps feel slightly less able to get out there and do all this...though this might just be my age and perspective talking here, I'd be interested to know your thoughts.

Meanwhile, Carol has no such truck with gender expectations, dons her rucksack and she's off and I am thoroughly enjoying a woman's perspective on the people she meets with the stories of her life woven in among  'the different ways we live on this tribally divided island.'

Waiting for the Albino Dunnock by Rosamond Richardson continues the trend for women to go on the journey... bookish information that follows is from You Know Where...

"Written by a beginner-birdwatcher with the freshness and passion of a convert,Waiting for the Albino Dunnock  explores the world of birds through the seasons of a single year. It describes encounters with particular birds in the landscapes of East Anglia where the author is rooted. Occasional journeys farther afield take the reader to truly wild places in the Outer Hebrides and Eastern Europe. Yet the ordinary experience of birdwatching is also far more than just that. The beauty of birds has the power to change lives, as it did the author's, and as in the case of the all-but-legendary snow leopard, it is more about the search than the result.

Personal and elegiac in tone, the writing is an unusual combination of prose poems based on the actual experience of seeing a specific bird for the first time, woven with elements of science and wisdom traditions, ornithology (and its punning counterpart ornitheology), mythology and philosophy, taxonomy and history, literature and folklore, conveying the wider picture of what it means to be human in relationship to nature. Waiting for the Albino Dunnock explores the degree to which wildness is embedded in the human psyche and how beauty is central to our mental and emotional wellbeing, while highlighting the careless damage we are inflicting on the natural world."

I have become increasingly aware of my woefully inadequate knowledge of birds and bird song in recent weeks. Out on Dartmoor a bird flits past my Walking Friend and I and unless it's a recognisable bird, or a skylark, or a buzzard we call out, ' Oh there goes a Something Else.' Who knows what rarities we might have unwittingly seen.

Four Fields by Tim Dee has lain fallow (sorry) and unread on my reading pile for several years now, largely because I had the Small Print problem with the paperback edition. Since starting Beating the Bounds on here, and tithe maps and naming the fields around us I have been desperate to read this one. So desperate that I had a small moan in response to a glowing 140 characters written about the book by a reader on Twitter, and to which Tim Dee responded by very kindly offering to send me a hardback copy. People often don't follow up on promises like that but true to his word Tim did so I am really excited about finally being able to read this...

"In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and their natural and human histories. Four real fields – walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable and knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested and changing. Four fields – the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life – looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written.

Dee’s four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, and a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look at and think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields."

It's all chiming with my recent discovery of Wendell Berry  and the Textithe Map of course...


This was the prototype (note the join in the backing fabric which I cut too small... now a design feature) few tweaks to finish and then need to find some wall-space (an ongoing issue) but yes, fields and I are very good friends.

And the top-most book in the pile is Landings by Richard Skelton. I'll wager you might not have heard of this one. I caught news of it, again on Twitter, where Corbel Stone Press (run by Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson) were asking for pledges via crowd-funding to enable the printing of a new and updated edition, and so I bought a copy on the strength of this description because again it chimes with my Beating the Bounds project here...

"In 2009, Richard Skelton published his first book, Landings, a deeply personal and unique response to the moorland landscape of Anglezarke, near his birthplace in south-west Lancashire, UK. Written over the course of half a decade, the book is assembled from a diverse array of materials: texts excised from his own notebooks and diaries are combined with excerpts from census and parish records, maps and historical treatises. The result is what Skelton terms 'mosaic sequences [of] reclaimed fragments' - discrete but connected strands forming an oblique and poignant testimony to personal grief, a meditation on memory and forgetting, a conjuring of the ghosts and voices of a landscape, and an exposition of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on rural lives."

I too have a whole heap of disconnected fragments about discoveries within that one mile radius around our house here in the Tamar Valley; piles of notebooks, folders and files, tithe maps, field names, census returns, copies of deeds and documents found in the Devon Records Office dating back to the 1600s and thoughts and ponderings as I walk and wander, so I was intrigued to see what Richard Skelton had done with his. This might be the best £14 I have spent on a book in a while (since the last £14 anyway) because I am deeply immersed and feeling very in tune with Landings and with that sense of the seemingly disparate pieces making up the whole (nice patchwork analogy there). We expect a book to have a start, a middle and an end but this book of fragments reveals that there are threads to be found that can join them, and that whole-cloth will emerge (I'm stuck on the analogy now, sorry).

I wrote about Reliquiae 4, Corbel Stone Press's annual journal of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, translations and visual art a while ago here. It has proved to be one of those journals that bears revisiting and repeated reading as, I think, will Landings.

How lucky we are to have so much bookish inspiration to choose from and as always please do share any other recent finds on this theme in comments.

And if you have read any of these please do share your thoughts...

And what about the Kent Marshes...reading Carol Donaldson is tempting me to visit a place I don't know at all.

 

Elementum and Elemental my dear friends...

Well almost Sherlockian.

I feel as if I've worked you all a bit hard this past week (but thank you so much for joining in, hasn't it been interesting, and we are going to do more of it this year I think) so maybe a Day of Rest is required.

I wasn't going to do this to you...live each day again as if it was last year, when I was on my month's sojourn in New Zealand visiting Offspringette (the daughter) but in the end it got the better of both of us chatting this week and those memories have spilled over into the everyday to brighten the January grey...and what are happy memories for if not that, so please forgive the indulgence

I have been immersed in Edition Two of Elementum A Journal of Nature & Story which arrived from across the Tamar in Cornwall before Christmas. Alongside it, this last week, I have also been reading Elemental - Central Otago Poems by Brian Turner, bought for me by Offpsringette at a wonderful general store we found halfway around the Otago Bike Trail in New Zealand, which we were cycling this time last year. We'd reached the area known as The Maniototo, this from the area's tourist website...

'Natural light reflects off the velvet folds of magnificent mountain ranges onto pastoral valleys, rocky tors and the awesome sprawling Maniototo Plain. Throughout this vast landscape remnants of a prosperous gold mining past lie in the scarred hillsides, occasional mud-brick buildings, old stone fences and lonely cemeteries. It is a timeless land where the Taieri River meanders lazily, and empty roads stretch by irrigated farmlands to historic, sleepy townships.'

Me and Cycling...really the two words haven't sat that close to each other for years, but thanks to my padded shorts and an electric bike I managed the 100 miles and at the end of each day I wrote my journal and read from Brian Turner's Elemental commentary and poems, absorbing the place through his words, so it doesn't need much to take me back there...

Once in a while
you may come across a place
where everything is as close to perfection
as you will ever need.

Place - Brian Turner

And I think, second to home of course, perhaps the Maniototo was one of those places.

It's hard, for an amateur like me, to make a photograph convey the atmosphere and the emotion, but it was a big and mighty place and seen alongside Brian Turner's commentary (he quotes Robert Macfarlane...this is good) it made a huge impression which hasn't left me...

'On such occasions I sense there's something of the numinous, something sacred, in and about our surroundings. I mean this in a broad-brush spiritual sense. It's as if the hills watch us, and ask if we are watching ourselves in them.'

...and that reminds me of our good friend here, Robert Macfarlane, and his book Mountains of the Mind, and The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd.

Meanwhile, over in Elementum Journal Oliver Bennett is writing about the Ancient Grammar of Landscape. How those old words, almost deleted from the English language and certainly from daily usage, are still so vital to our understanding of that landscape and our place in it ...'our rickety transit through time.'

Furlongs... 220 yards, that distance the oxen could walk before drawing breath and returning

Rods... 1/40th of a furlong and, as Oliver Bennett adds, supposedly (apocryphally) derived from the 'total length of the left feet of the first 16 men to leave church on Sunday morning.

Cubits ... the distance from fingertip to elbow

Hand ... the 4" width of the hand.

In the US apparently the 66ft chain is a key measurement with roads and intersections often a multiple of this measurement (maybe one of you could go and do a test walk for us)

It would seem horses have somehow held onto some of the old ways here in the UK whilst the rest of the world has gone determinedly metric...except for me of course who has always had a major problem with it, and anyway don't most people want to know what a baby weights in lbs and ozs. 'Can I have that in English?' was the most FAQ in my baby clinics of yore.

Oliver Bennett links poetry and walking with the suggestion that a sonnet lasts about half a furlong, and then I recall Alice Oswald telling her audience how she had committed her epic piece Memorial to memory by walking it  and there we had been looking all around for the auto cue.

It seemed like a 'rickety transit through time' as we cycled across the Maniototo, with the gold rush history underfoot (or wheel) and evident all around, and if a sonnet takes a furlong or so well I probably did the whole of War and Peace on my bike this time last year...or so my legs said (you still have to pedal even with batteries) but it's been very lovely to look back and join it all up with my life since and now, so many thanks for allowing me to indulge.

And the hardest I will make you work today (though please don't ever let me stop you if you feel inclined to add more, I love reading your comments) is to ask if you too have found that..

Once in a while
you may come across a place
where everything is as close to perfection
as you will ever need.

And if so, where it might be....

 

 

 

 

The Devon Great Consols Walk

Call me fickle...there you all are sitting poised with your walking boots on, all overcome with excitement about a walk to the arsenic mines, and I buzz off to London for a jolly with Bookhound instead.

We suddenly decided that this Ruby Wedding anniversary thing, and associated treats, could actually last all year and so we booked a whistle-stop trip to the smoke, somehow avoided the chaos on the London Underground by a whisker and enjoyed two fabulous clear bright sunny days in the city this week.

There were three more Persephone books that I absolutely needed ( Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens, Greengates by R.C.Sherriff and Vain Shadow by Jane Hervey) so we nipped into the shop in Lamb's Conduit Street to say hello and purchase and then had a lovely wander around Bloomsbury. So much that reminds Bookhound and I of those days when we first met back in 1975 as we walk around the Squares...Queen's, Bedford, Russell, Brunswick, Bloomsbury so we had a lovely nostalge. We also spent several hours at the Paul Nash exhibition at Tate Britain. Goodness me, a huge number of paintings, so much to look at and take in that all made the entrance fee worth every penny and more about it soon I feel sure.

Meanwhile we really should go and take a look at the arsenic mines since I promised after that read of Bitten by Witch Fever by Lucinda Hawksley

The woodland pathways surrounding the Devon Great Consols mines have been opened to the public in recent years...

...there are even swings, though I wasn't over-confident about the creaking branch...

...along with mountain biking trails, so always best to go on a week day. The colours this year have been breathtaking (sugar stores in the leaves etc)

I always feel a bit sorry for the people in that house because everyone must do this to get a closer look...

The woodland walk alongside the banks of the Tamar is really picturesque which always makes me wonder about the people, especially the children, who must have lived, worked and died here back in the day. Now it is a place of leisure, beautiful enough to make the heart sing even on the dullest of days, but for several hundred years it must have made many hearts sink.

The calciners, bearing all the hallmarks of hard work, dramatically reinforce that sense of history.

Then there are the spoil heaps that wouldn't look out of place on Mars...

This very nice looking lake ...

...is actually not quite as tranquil as it seems...

But it is all of enormous historical interest because as we wandered around Bloomsbury this week, plenty of which had been (and still is) owned by the Bedford Estates, Bookhound and I recalled that it was money from this very Devon Great Consols mine, on our Devonshire doorstep, that had added vast sums to the Duke of Bedford's wealth in the nineteenth century.  Fair dues, he invested heavily and benevolently in our local area...the Bedford mining cottages still bought, sold and lived in, a very attractive feature in the town and even immortalised on this tile by a local potter.

The Russell family name and connections are well-recorded in the street names of both London and Tavistock with a fair smattering of Russell, Bedford, Endsleigh and Tavistock in both, along with ducal statues, whilst around us here, with a nod to the Royalty of the day, the George and Charlotte Mine too.

It has all made me turn to Mistress of the Arts, The Passionate Life of Georgina, Duchess of Bedford by Rachel Trethewey which I wrote about back in 2010 here when Rachel gave a brilliant talk about the book.

The book happens to have opened at the page where Francis, the fifth Duke of Bedford and almost (but not quite) betrothed to the flighty and ambitious Georgina Gordon, is having surgery for a gangrenous intestine without anaesthetic. It is 1802 so it was never going to end well was it, but all hail to Georgina who was eventually and miraculously able to transfer her affections to Francis's son and heir John, now the sixth duke. It would be Georgina who would discover the perfect place to build the couple's country retreat at nearby Endsleigh...

Which I think brings us geographically and neatly almost back to where we started.

Home, I'll put the kettle on, you must all be gasping, cakey tea anyone?

 

Bitten By Witch Fever - Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Victorian Home ~ Lucinda Hawksley

I'm really sorry about this but I bring news of a very covetable book that you might want to add to the Ch*****as list...

Bitten By Witch Fever - Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Victorian Home by Lucinda Hawksley (published by Thames & Hudson)

 'As to the arsenic scare a greater folly it is hardly possible to imagine: the doctors were bitten as people were bitten by the witch fever.’ ― William Morris on toxic wallpapers, 1885. Bitten by Witch Fever presents facsimile samples of 275 of the most sumptuous wallpaper designs ever created by designers and printers of the age, including Christopher Dresser and Morris & Co. For the first time in their history, every one of the samples shown has been laboratory tested and found to contain arsenic. Interleaved with the wallpaper sections, evocative commentary guides you through the incredible story of the manufacture, uses and effects of arsenic, and presents the heated public debate surrounding the use of deadly pigments in the sublime wallpapers of a newly industrialized world.'

How odd then that I have, in my lifetime, lived just yards from two of the sources and natural providers for the wealth of William Morris.

In 1965 we moved from Mitcham in Surrey to a house in nearby Wallington on the banks of the River Wandle. By the time we arrived any traces of William Morris were long gone,  and stretches of the river were more of a polluted mess than the purveyor of clean water of the perfect chemical composition for William Morris's dyeworks upstream at Merton Abbey pictured here...

A  lot of life happens in between but in 1980 Bookhound and I move to Tavistock, a town whose wealth was once and briefly predicated on the existence of tin and copper mines locally and from which William Morris prospered, as Lucinda Hawksley elaborates in this book...

'The personal wealth of the family was derived from one of the world's largest producers of arsenic : Devon Great Consols Mine. Morris's father, who died when William was a child, left him shares in the mine (near Tavistock in Devon.) It was his father's lucky speculation in the mines during the 1840s that funded Morris's education as well as his early business ventures.'

In 1994 we moved out of town to splendid isolation in the Tamar Valley, and are now within walking distance of the Devon Great Consols mine, the source of all those minerals, and ultimately, when the lode was exhausted, the source of arsenic.

I feel a little as if I am stalking William Morris...or he is stalking me from beyond, because not only that but William's sister Alice Mary Morris married into the well-known Hornbrooke Gill family in 1864. The local banking family owned some of the land and properties around us here and, as Lucinda Hawksley confirms, it is well-known that William Morris, in constant denial about the dangers of arsenic in wallpaper dyes, came to visit his sister in these parts...

'A letter sent by Willam Morris to his wife Jane in 1881 while visiting his married sister Alice in South Devon proves that he did travel close enough to the mines to have inspected them in person...he reported that he and Alice had strolled together beside the River Tavy - only a few miles from Devon Great Consols mine...'

Incidentally Alice's husband Reginald Gill, much respected and a very prominent local figure, was to die as a result of a hunting accident in 1897, but his legacy is clearly visible for all to see in Tavistock...the Gill Wing at the cottage hospital still very much in evidence.

But I digress...

If we are talking about book as object to be stroked and loved then look no further...

Bitten by Witch Fever is a treasure trove of pages and pages of reproductions of many of the wallpapers of the day that contained arsenic, and all cleverly interspersed with smaller pages of text which recount the whole sorry tale. Who can know how many deaths there were from wallpaper exuding poisonous fumes in damp Victorian houses, indeed many of the deaths were apparently misdiagnosed as diphtheria. The stark facts of Lucinda Hawksley's text juxtaposed with the luxury of the decoration bring it all into sharp focus...

And then there were the cosmetics...

And the medicines...

I think you can tell that this has been an inspiring book for me, a fascinating story of poisonous beauty that has led me on an exciting trail of discovery and revelation. Ultimately it would be public pressure rather than any legal process that ended the use of arsenic in wallpaper; despite the very well-known dangers the British government was slow to act and in fact never has done. To this day apparently there is no legislation in this country that prevents the use of arsenic to colour wallpaper, it was the 'power of the pocketbook' that made its use obsolete.

The best books are those with legs. Read Bitten by Witch Fever alongside the more detailed The Arsenic Century by James C Whorton which I mentioned on here back in 2010, and I now see in connection with William Morris, and then add in Helen Rappaport's excellent book Beautiful for Ever : Madame Rachel of Bond Street - Cosmetician, Con-Artist and Blackmailer and maybe finish off with Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert and you'll have done arsenic inside out and top to tail.

But just imagine the working conditions for those who produced the arsenic. Many of them would have lived around us here and doubtless died and are buried in the village graveyard. At its peak in the 1870s Devon Great Consols Mine was producing 3000 tons of arsenic a year by smelting the ore in calciners (you can read more about the tortuous and lethal process here) and those calciners (stone kilns) are still there to see as part of the Tamar Valley Mining Trail through that woodland over yonder...

Boots at the ready and I'll take you for a walk over there later this week.

 

 

 

The Running Hare - The Secret Life of Farmland ~ John Lewis-Stempel

The harvest has just been gathered in here. The Four Fields to the Woods were left as stubble through last winter before that memorable spring ploughing transformation; six months later and 'tis all done for another year.

We never know what has been sown so it's always a bit of a lottery as to what will emerge. Will it be oil-seed rape, or oats, or wheat. One year it was maize and we lived through a summer of walking through what we fondly termed Mother Abigail's after that very scary Stephen King film The Stand. Now of course we have maize everywhere as a cover crop for pheasants. Anyway this year up came the green shoots until eventually we diagnosed it as barley.

We've watched it ripen and once the combine harvester has been through we go in for the straw for Nell and Rusty's kennel for the winter (with permission and pay for it) and so the cycle will begin again. Maybe they will plough in the autumn and sow winter wheat, but whatever happens I have a minute understanding of it all, the process and how it used to be start to finish, thanks to The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel. If you enjoyed his previous book Meadowland then I think you will like this one too.

John Lewis- Stempel takes a modern, conventionally farmed arable field and turns it into a traditional wheat field for a year. Following the old conventions of timing, equipment and methods, and weaving in history and literature as he writes, the result is a wonderful eulogy to John Masefield's line that 'the countryside is the past speaking dear.'

'Time does not erode it builds sedimental layers of particulate memory,' suggests John Lewis-Stempel and I was nodding my head in agreement and thinking on it every time I walked out to watch the progress of the highly mechanized fields around us here. It is sometimes hard to peel back that top layer of leased farm land to reveal the past that lies beneath, but we can usually talk ourselves into it ; exhausted to its limits by outside contractors, analysed by agronomists, sprayed and cajoled into production when sometimes I think it would like  a year off,

We'd much rather lean out of the bedroom window, as we did last week, and watch Farmer Steve haymaking in Mowhay Meadow with his dad's 1960's baler. It's like watching a childrens' Britain's farm come to life...remember the choking hazard that was the little yellow hay bales...





Frequently the facts presented in The Running Hare are startling...

Withered margins and the erosion caused by the run-off of the top soil...something we see around us here as we watch the fields take off in a muddy stream down the lane in the winter storms.

Spraying crops has reduced the numbers of hares by more than a million...

Only half the hedgerows present in 1945 still existed in 1990...

A 50% reduction in farmland birds since 1970...

DEFRA lists twelve birds that should be present. We are lucky I think, I have italicised those we see regularly

Corn Bunting
Goldfinch
Starling
Stock Dove
Grey Partridge
LapwingLinnet
Skylark
Tree Sparrow
Turtle Dove
Yellowhammer
Whitethroat

JL-S (forgive the initials, I know...it sounds like a boy band) adds a few more...again italics for those we see around us here.

Rook
Quail
Barn Owl
Pheasant
Partridge
Corncrake
Cirl Bunting

And I learned new things too... about an acre being the amount of land one man could plough in a day with oxen and he would walk ten miles doing it. The arrival of horses in the eighteenth century sped things up by a mile an hour. Woven in are references to Shakespeare and Edward Thomas and John Clare as JL-S works to create a field that fills with the traditional wild flowers and butterflies and of course the hares return. The ultimate is to harvest and tie his crop into stooks, like these spotted by the Kayaker last year. It can still be done albeit by machine...

Whilst we might hanker for the past I am under no illusions about the impracticalities and neither is JL-S. The world has moved on as has farming and there are a lot of people out there to feed, but even in the smallest ways differences can be made that preserve what is good and which is so often at risk of being lost in the grand scheme. As JL-S points out, programmes like Springwatch, often based in reserves, give the mistaken impression that nature in Britain is busy and bountiful when in fact it is often not, much of it is under real threat and we must never assume all is well.

Despite that, as the blurb says this really is a rare and joyful book and definitely one for the shelf.

Meanwhile we have been doing our little bit for nature here having just taken part in the Devon Greater Horseshoe Bat survey. We had a recent occurrence...thinking we had a swallow in the sitting room when in fact it was a very large bat (flew out of a bookshelf). Bookhound was on his own there, you didn't see me for dust and with Magnus under my arm who was looking very interested, but when news of the survey came up here in the Tamar Valley we booked the recording equipment, set it up in the garden for three nights, watched the bats swoop and swerve around the microphone, sent off the SD card and will get the results back later in the year....if we pressed the right buttons that is.

 

 

The Wood for the Trees - The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood ~ Richard Fortey

I had bought a full day ticket for the literary festival at Dartington last week and am so pleased I had booked to hear Richard Fortey talking about his book The Wood for the Trees - The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood. I had planned to read it straight through but am now opting for the month by month approach in which the book is written.

I just knew I was going to love this one.

Richard Fortey, heading into retirement from his role as senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, used his earnings from a TV series to buy Grim's Dyke Wood, four acres of beech woodland near his home in the Chiltern Hills. He then started to observe the wood in great detail, often forensic in depth, calling on his own expertise and that of contacts in the natural history world. The result is a treasure of a book that I had started to read the day before the event and now want to read very slowly, interspersed with walks up to 'our' beech wood which is currently in full summer raiment. I have been taking you all up there for ten years now on here, so I think you all know Berry Wood very well too...

and of course Nell loves it...

I was very excited to hear and read about solitary white bluebells because 'our' wood has them too...


As rare 'as a sober Irishman on St Patrick's Day,' suggests Richard Fortey, the white bluebell the result of a natural mutation, 'one tiny change on the DNA code and blue becomes white.' I know the places to find them and look out every year.

Berry Wood doesn't have many if any grey squirrels, in fact we were a bit upset when Rusty pegged a solitary one last year, Richard Fortey on the other hand has far too many and would probably be very happy to let Rusty (or the Gamekeeper...youngest son)  take a walk through Grim's Dyke Wood. I think my own affinity with greys goes back to the age of about five when I won Greykin a Squirrel as my very first  school prize, but sadly, as well we know, the greys are a scourge carrying a virus that has decimated the red squirrels. Nor had I realised that the greys were introduced from North America to a few estates in the nineteenth century for 'aesthetic reasons.' In fact I'm not sure I have ever seen a red squirrel in the wild so I don't feel quite so bad about finding all those grey squirrel tails in the washing machine when the Gamekeeper lived at home...he used the fur for tying into fishing flies.

Inviting all his friends and colleagues to visit I realise Richard Fortey must have an enviable Christmas card list; drawing in entomologists, archaeologists, botanists, moth experts, bat supremos and doubtless many more as I proceed through the book, all offering enthusiastic and interesting analyses of their findings in the wood. His own expertise also allowing him to delve deeply and accurately where the rest of us might just walk and wonder.

To our knowledge Berry Wood hasn't been 'managed' in any way for the twenty-two years that we have lived here and walked there, benign decay seems to be the watchword and  I certainly walk 'our' woods (maybe about two acres) with an air of familiarity rather than knowledge, but I'm going to look more closely, month by month with Richard Fortey as my guide, and see if I can notice more. No matter how often we visit (probably daily, one or other or both of us with dogs) there is always a feeling of anticipation when we reach the entrance...



I'm going to cover the perimeters too, rather than stick to our well-worn pathways, and am already on the fungus trail over the other side where I rarely walk. Imagine my excitement when I spied this new and exciting growth...



Until I realised it was a bio-degradable plastic bag in an advanced state of decay.

Never mind, if I find Britain's rarest plant the Ghost Orchid (Epipogium) I shall be well pleased, likewise Dutchman's pipe (Monotropa) and I will be dancing, meanwhile I am settling for some pennywort (I think, someone will tell me)...


And so I have moved through April, May and June reaching the chapter on July and must now slow down.

If you are fortunate enough to have access to woodland The Wood For the Trees will engage and enhance your visits. If not the book will inform and entertain as if you were walking through a woodland of your own. Richard Fortey shares Grim's Dyke Wood with an easy style that combines thorough scientific investigation and exploration with understandable explanation for the layman and enjoyable reading. His premise that 'curiosity is the enemy of certainty' suggests that despite his wealth of knowledge he has approached this venture with an open mind, making his enthusiasm and love for his little corner of England highly contagious.

This is definitely one that deserves a permanent place on the Nature Shelf.

 

 

 

 

Under the Tump - Sketches of Real Life on the Welsh Borders ~ Oliver Balch

One of the things that beating the bounds around us here on a daily basis has made me increasingly aware of is the fact that our footprint now extends back over the last twenty-two years. We moved in on a sweltering August day in 1994 with three pre-teenaged children, a dog (dear old Border Collie Ben ) a cat (Corky who sadly succumbed to feline leukaemia) two guinea pigs (Clover and Parsley) and twelve chickens (too many to name). I suspect H.E.Bates would most definitely have recognised us as a version of the Larkins that summer as we settled in, put a table in the garden and ate outside, dispatched children off on bikes to 'explore' and got used to the whole idea of not running out of milk because the nearest supermarket was six miles away.

Meanwhile the spring water supply had sprung a leak somewhere en route across the fields to our house, so we had to pipe water from a nearby cattle trough and boil it while we had a bore hole drilled, the telephone line and burglar alarm were struck by lightning. If we had a power cut the darkness was darker than dark, velvet black and we still have torches by the bed, and we knew that at some stage we were going to have to renovate the house around us, but we smiled on through, went to work and school and just got on with it because we had always wanted to live in the country.

It had started the minute we discovered a book in a junk shop in about 1977. Published in 1944, A Little Place in the Country by Marjorie Hessell Tiltman spoke to us. The writing is of its day, but the illustrations by Gwenda Morgan were our dream personified as we sat in our little flat in Plymouth hunched over the three-bar electric fire and wondering what the future might hold for us.


Bookhound carefully cut out and placed the 'dream' into a frame we found at the tip...

...thereby desecrating the book, but the picture still hangs on our wall as a homage to our vision and a reminder of how we finally got here.

This is all by way of a meander into Under the Tump by Oliver Balch and this is an unusual book. Everything (especially the cover) suggesting another 'nature' tome, but far from it. Returning from a sojourn in Beunos Aires, Oliver Balch decides that it is time, with his wife and young family, to put down some roots and settle into a community. Argentina had been about cherry-picking the life he had wanted with no social, cultural or personal ties, but sensing that he wanted 'to be a thread or stitch in the social fabric,' Oliver Balch set about searching for a 'genuinely enmeshed community.'

It all sounds a bit idealistic on the surface but aligning his own journey with that of diarist Francis Kilvert, Oliver Balch decides on the village of Clyro on the Welsh-English border and soon starts to dissect the superficial layer of the rural idyll, along with the tribulations of trying to anchor yourself within a community. With the motivation engendered by new beginnings and horizons, along with the chance to reshape his life, Oliver braves, among other things, the pub as well as venturing along to Young Farmers to see what the local youths gets up to.

Of course just a few miles away is Hay-on-Wye and with that comes the annual (this very week) influx of 100,000 visitors. There are complexities to an influx. We feel it keenly down here in the Tamar Valley too. There is really no point in heading far into Cornwall during July and August, we can't park and just get annoyed with ourselves for even thinking about going anywhere. But it is that influx that helps sustain the West Country for the rest of the year and likewise Hay-on-Wye with its unassailable reputation as the country's most prolific bookshop town.

As Oliver Balch discovers, the back story to a community can't be invented or experienced by the incomer, in many ways perhaps you have to sit it out for long enough until you become part of that back-story, until you suddenly feel that sense of security that comes from being part of it. Keeping your own counsel is often a good plan too because, as we discovered, there are more ways to put your foot in it than you can ever know existed, and I suspect we have tested them all. Juxtaposed with Oliver Balch's endeavours are the entries in Kilvert's diary demonstrating that in many ways the community was ever thus, but it makes interesting reading to compare then and now. I'd give my eye teeth to read a diarist's entries for our little corner of the Shire, lucky Oliver Balch to have Kilvert.

And as if the lack of a Victorian diarist isn't deprivation enough, just look who has retired...



Jim the Postie and we are bereft of all the local gossip news. No longer can we say 'Jim will know, we'll ask him,' in response to every inquisitive query we have. It seemed fitting to present Jim with a cutting from the climbing rose that wanders over our veranda and which he has fought his way through for the last twenty-two years of delivering hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books to our front door. We truly do wish him a long, happy and healthy retirement.

So now that we've lived here for twenty-two years I read Oliver Balch's book with an understanding borne of our own experience of which I was unaware and which suddenly morphed into a true sense of real belonging. They say it takes a lifetime to become a local, and though I was born in Devon so have a fraction of a head-start, it still takes an age.  And whilst I don't like to suggest that longevity in one place offers a sense of superiority, maybe confidence is a better word, but when some recent tenants for the large holiday let along the lane (£2000 a week) stopped at our gate recently I did have a bit of a moment...

'We're looking for the farmhouse,' said a rather clipped and authoritative voice before a woman jumped out of her Chelsea Tractor (un-muddy, unscathed) and approached the gate brandishing her mobile phone.

'The map says this house is it,' she said, 'did you know that the Ordnance Survey map is wrong ?'

I was a bit taken aback. I mean I've been beating the bounds map in hand, I know it intimately and I couldn't quite stop myself. It was out of my mouth before I knew it...

'Don't tell me we've been living in the wrong house for twenty-two years...' before going on to explain that the sat nav brings you to our gate but that we share the postcode with two other properties and she wants the one about half a mile further along the lane.

'But the Ordnance Survey map is WRONG', insisted She Who Had Never Been Here Before.

We quickly ascertained that shrinking down the phone screen solved the problem, there was the farmhouse next to the name, clear as day.

'Oh...' she muttered and we all heaved a sigh or relief.

' Easy mistake to make ' I offered. 'Anyway, good news that I've been living in the right house, you have a lovely holiday,' and off they went, a bit red-faced I suspect.

Ultimately Oliver Balch's life project seems to have succeeded..

'We talk of 'putting down roots' as though the work is entirely of our own doing. Us cementing our place. Us anchoring ourselves in. Yet if the ground is stony or the earth is barren, such efforts will be in vain. If anyone is to stay and grow and weather the years, the place itself must welcome them, must nourish them, must allow them to flourish...'

Having weathered the years our roots have gone a long way down and I now see how intrinsic that is to our day to day life here in the Tamar Valley. It's elusive to pin down but reading Under the Tump has most certainly helped me to appreciate that sense of an anchor.

I wonder if you have that sense of belonging wherever you are too...

Or may have known it in the past and had to uproot and start over...

And please do scroll down for gifts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Landskipping - Painters, Ploughmen and Places ~ Anna Pavord

'Time is stitched into this landscape,' notes Anna Pavord in her latest book Landskipping - Painters, Ploughmen and Places, and I knew in an instant what she meant.

And this piece of advice, from artist Samuel Palmer in 1850, also seemed very pertinent indeed..

'We must take the trouble to map out and paint with different local colours arable land and garden which comes in every variety of rows and patterns.'

Here is a little corner of what has become fondly known as The TexTithe Project.

An approximation of the fields, meadows and orchards, the lane and the green lane around us here; a first attempt at translating the 1841 tithe map into fabric (more about it soon) and with Anna Pavord's suggestion that, where landscape is concerned, you need to be hooked rather than force fed came a real affinity with a book that slowly builds a landscape of its own and which I have relished. There could have been no better book for me to have been reading right now. Beating the Bounds is a project constantly in progress and I find myself looking in minute detail at a landscape whose basic shape has barely changed in hundreds of years ...except by me, who found and then lost a fabric orchard and routed the bias strip of green lane across a field by mistake.

I had already been thinking about the impact of the 1750-1850 Enclosure Acts, when common land available to all suddenly became the property of one person. As Anna Pavord elaborates, 4.5 million acres of open field was suddenly boundaried and interlaced with straight roads replacing centuries of old familiar tracks and trails. Freedoms were curtailed, livelihoods destroyed, old ways dismissed as irrelevant, traditions dismissed and dispersed and perhaps one of the legacies is this...

Tantalising isn't it, especially when you know it leads to one of the Duke of Bedford's old carriage drives created around the Endsleigh estate for his beloved Duchess Georgiana (she who lusted after the artist Landseer) in the early 1800s. This used to be the site of an old corn mill, if I climb up the bank I can just see the remains of the old mill ponds.. 

Now only used by 4x4s carrying 'guns' who have paid a lot of money to shoot pheasant, it half kills me not to leap over that gate I can tell you.

But imagine the impact of enclosure. Your familiar world disappears...not unlike the sense I had of a shifting landscape post-earthquake as we drove through Lyttleton and Sumner in New Zealand back in January. Little wonder everyone headed for the towns and cities in the England of the 1850s.

Rather than a big old resume of the book, I suspect I will be incorporating my thoughts on Landskipping into quite a few posts here, much as I did with Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, because its themes have inspired me in all sorts of directions. My thinking has been gently marshalled and affirmed on what I like in 'landscape' and why, and how different we all are and that difference is fine, there is plenty to go round after all. I am definitely a rolling hills and valleys girl, maybe some mountains too.Send me to live by the sea and I might not like it... to begin with at least.

Anna Pavord outlines some fascinating history on our perceptions of landscape as mediated through painting and writing and I have emerged with a very long list of names to follow up in more depth. Some of the artists well-known to many of us... John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough but some less known (to me) John R Cozens, Thomas Girton and Richard Wilson, and likewise with the writers. I have a long list of reading to seek out.

But Anna Pavord talks about the stop-and-stare views too and it made me think about mine; the known landscapes that stir something deep and almost inexplicable.

Apart from the views from the bedroom window looking across the Tamar Valley on a chilly December morning...

Or the view from the windows of the summer house...



...there is one view that never fails to catch my breath. It is the glimpse of the valley as I reach the brow of the hill (usually in the car) before descending the other side and turning into our lane. It creeps up on me, no sign of it until suddenly there it is and I stopped purposely last week to take it all in.



As the land is worked so the fields take on a different emphasis throughout the year, currently it looks as if we have man-made lakes everywhere but no, 'tis the new-fangled bio-degradable plastic to encourage earlier germination. Disconcerting for a month or so..

With its emphasis on watching, and gleaning understanding from what is there, there is no pre-requirement to live in the countryside, or somewhere Very Landscapy and Picturesque to appreciate Landskipping. Living near a park or Common, or any open space, will be enough to trigger the thinking about what may have gone before and, if you live anywhere in the UK then I can highly recommend looking at the tithe map for your patch. I discover that original field names are often preserved in the street names and there I was thinking they pulled these odd names out of a hat.

So much more about Landskipping to come I am sure, but in the meantime as always, if you have read it I would love to know your thoughts...

And what about the landscape around you...

Does it reveal its past in unusual ways...

Do you have that Stop-and-Stare view ...

Does a Private-Keep-Out-No-Entry sign make you want to leap over a gate too..

 

 

 

Tithe Mapping

It all began with Beating the Bounds, my project on here to look closely at everything within a one-mile radius of home. We have lived here for twenty-two years now so we're getting to know the land well and then along came my obsession with the 1841 tithe map and an interest in what are known as the apportionments which have continued unabated. 

Fortunately for my purposes, our Parish has what is deemed a First Class Tithe Map. I have discovered that those considered 'sufficiently accurate to serve as legal evidence of boundaries' were marked with a seal of approval before being signed off by two of the three commissioners appointed by the government, in this case William Blamire, a Cumberland farmer and Capt T. Wentworth Buller.

All the documents in Devon at least are now digitised and availably online since my first foray into the tangled bowels of the microfiche and the machine for reading them at the local library, which all makes it a lot easier. I can sit at home with a magnifying glass on the screen trying to decipher the field numbers, which in turn can be referenced against the hand-written lists from the 1840s to give me the names of the fields. 

I have this desperate urge to ensure that somehow the names of the fields aren't buried under the weight of modern-day farming around us here.

More and more of the land in our immediate vicinity, once tenant-farmed on long leases, is now sub-let to contractors who move in, plough, sow and reap on an industrial scale and then disappear off until the next cycle begins. We used to know all the farmers by name, now we don't.

It all looks fine, and a good thing that the land is being used, but the machinery is huge, far bigger than was ever intended for our narrow lanes and gateways, so we watch and weep as they whip stems off our hedge and demolish those ancient gateways, fracture the granite posts that must have been in place since time immemorial and leave the broken debris for the brambles and hedgerows to swallow. We might see the occasional agronomist eyeing up progress but apart from that no one seems to know and tend the land in the way that past generations must have done, or care about it and maintain the fabric of its existence.

It's change and modernisation and progress of sorts, that I know, but it seems sad all the same.

The field names are so special. Our house, once two farm cottages, is built on Outer Down, to the west is Middle Down and beyond that Homer Down. We walk up to the woods across Coombe Park and Great Field, into Lane Field and then across Tuell Field to check our spring water supply. Tuell a derivative of Two Wells and we benefit from one of them.

We look for the traces of Lower and Higher Parson Darts; smaller fields long since absorbed into Tuell Field and we wonder about the name. 

Did it provide a little short cut for the local vicar...or maybe the Parsons family?

It brings us to the edge of what we know as Berry Wood...

..but in 1841 it was Barn Park Plantation and consisted of fir trees. The field behind it is Barn Park and alongside is Barn Park Meadow, further to the west is a field called Berry, everything makes sense eventually. Now it is mixed deciduous woodland carpeted with bluebells, and we have been told, by a farmer in the village who would know, that it was an old anthrax wood, a place to bury the dead animals. When did it all change we wonder.

Walking back down the green lane that runs alongside the fields we look for old gateways because part of the lane's ancient purpose has been explained by the tithe map.

Different fields belonged to different farms and the only access, without crossing someone else's land, would have been via this narrow track. It has sadly been discovered by the off-roaders who come armed with chain saws and winches to deal with any trees that may block their way. The council inform us that it is still classified as a metalled road and thus vehicular access is permitted, though criminal damage is not. Horse and carts back in the day maybe, but surely not a 4x4 with bull bars.

And so my quilted tithe map project has finally emerged from all this walking and discovering and watching along with a sense that it should all be recorded before it is too late.

Thus far I am working on the first of what I think may be one of many; what I consider to be an apprentice piece,a bit of an experiment in method and process and this my template, a first copy from the library microfiche.

I am experimenting with fusible interfacing and a variety of patterned fabrics at the moment. Suddenly I am looking through my stash for fabrics that look like grass, or ploughed fields, or stones.

We know there were a lot of orchards around us here, and meadows which would almost certainly have grown their share of wildflowers so I am having fun with some flowery fabrics too, and the plan is to edge around each field with a very narrow bias strip to represent the hedges, using something a bit wider for the lane.

I've been getting my eye in on that score with this gift for a friend's birthday...



God bless the person who invented fusible bias-maker, I love you. No more unravelling bias and pins everywhere.

I wonder whether you are seeing the landscape changing around your way too...

The old ways disappearing ('twas ever thus)...

And does anyone have any more hints and tips about finding out about things like long-deserted and now derelict properties and who may have lived there...

I get so far with Parish Records and Census Returns and then come across paywalls when I'm sure a lot of this used to be free.

 

 

 

 

River walking...

I hope you have recovered from that walk to the woods because we have seven miles along the river to do today.

It was a perfect day for the annual Tamar river bank walk last Sunday.

Mild temperatures and sun shining...



and as we have had very little rain for a few weeks we decided to take Rusty and Nell.

There are plenty of reasons not to take them...

If the river is in spate the chances are one of them will be in and swept out to sea before we know it...

There is usually livestock along the way and though neither of the dogs give chase the bullocks can see it very differently...

There is always the chance of a bit of pheasant sport, and would Rusty be off on a frolic of his own.

But Nell is three now, puppy madness less-evident, and Rusty at six is generally steady. In the end they were little angels the pair of them, back on the lead every time we suggested it to them, and walking to heel with a tweet of the whistle and never straying far from us...



The Tamar was looking idyllic and it's always a treat to have access to this seven mile stretch, usually the domain of people paying a mortgage for a day's salmon fishing, but opened up on this one day to raise funds for the village church.

Once upon a time someone realised that there was sport to be had here, and money to be made, the man-made weirs creating a deep pool on one side and a fast run of water on the other to make the river more interesting to fish (so I am told). In spate the whole lot disappears under a torrent of water, the river can rise at least six inches within a hour of a downpour of rain.

This was a gentle day...

Remembering the floods of a few years ago, this is what the Tamar is capable of on a fierce day, and we can hear it from home. This the next river crossing down at Horsebridge and to think this bridge has survived this seasonal onslaught since it was built in 1437..

.

Greystone Bridge, built in 1439, and the next crossing point up-river from Devon into Cornwall, is always a welcome sight at the end of the walk, and this year we happened to catch it just as a fleet of vintage tractors were travelling over...

If there was a very slight hiccup it was the shuttle bus ride that takes us back to the start.

Very nice new mini-bus, and to the driver's acute and very vocal dismay, one very river-wet Rusty was in and up on the seat to get a good view before we could blink. Nell meanwhile, completely petrified, spent the entire journey trying to sit on Bookhound's lap and shedding enough white fur to knit a jumper. 

You know that thing where you just look at each other and try not to laugh, agree silently to make a hasty getaway on arrival, and imagine the rest of the bus is silently passing judgement on your naughty charges, dogs worse than children honestly.

 

Beating the Bounds ~ The Making of the English Landscape - W.G.Hoskins

I have been reading (well, last October, wrote this in February but tempus fugit a mite fast since then) The Making of the English Landscape by W.G.Hoskins because I thought, with so many excellent nature books on my shelves, it might be a good idea to go back to the beginning and read one of the definitive ones first.

Published in 1955 my edition is an old hardback, but The Making of the English Landscape also makes a welcome and essential addition to the Little Toller Books list of nature classics, offering as it does such a definitive historical route through this land as we know it. I love the Fay Godwin picture on the cover too, her work graces several of Ted Hughes' books and I always feel it has that real sense of a brooding and secretive past just waiting to give up its treasures if I look hard enough.

Professor Hoskins sets off across Anglo-Saxon and Medieval England, traversing the devastation of the Black Death before heading into Tudor and Georgian enclosure, the Industrial Revolution, the roads, canals and railways and the establishment of towns.

It all sounds a bit dry and dusty doesn't it, but I was surprised to find a compelling and interesting book that really sorted out my homeland historical muddle. It's all so long ago... me learning it that is... and, well... it actually happening too. It was good to get everything back in the right order and feel some relief that I recognised the details of the Industrial Revolution, which for some reason was done to death at school; flying shuttles and spinning jennies imprinted and embedded when so much else was glossed over...or maybe I wasn't paying attention for a couple of years.

Professor Hoskins was eventually a dweller in the Shire so the South West receives many honourable and justified mentions, and with references to places very near to us here.

Incidentally the Shire is looking very well-dressed at the moment, finest raiment etc

Quintessential Hoskins...

One reference in particular that could (might...maybe) suggest that our green lane is the old boundary between one parcel of land and another, as each landowner dug out a ditch and threw the earth into a continuous bank on his own side. A double ditch emerges creating a track several feet wide and sunk several feet below  the level of the fields...that would describe our green lane perfectly.

..as well as perhaps explaining the origins of the Devon bank hedges that we know so well. 

For reasons that can only be speculated upon, apparently Devon was enclosed into smaller fields much sooner than elsewhere (1300s v 1700s) . The theory is that there was such an excess of pasture land no one really objected to a bit of hedging, but I was fascinated to read more about the creation of the hedgerows around us here...

'a trench is dug to mark the limits of the holders land, and the soil removed from it is thrown up into a mound on the inner side of the ditch...a lease in 1398 specifies that the ditch shall be four feet wide and four feet deep. The mound is planted with a quickset hedge, and grows in course of time by the addition of soil thrown up whenever the ditch is cleared. No feature of the Devon landscape is more characteristic than these vast banks crowned with oak, ash, hazel or other coppice wood growing to a height of twenty feet or more and forming an impenetrable screen.'

I can't tell you the difference when the 'impenetrable screen' to the front of the house has its spring and autumn cut, or how neat and tidy the lane looks (for a while) after it has been done...

and how quickly it reverts in summer...

Nor had it really occurred to me that there were two hundred years of tree-clearing slog before the emergence of the green and pleasant agricultural land that we take for granted. We have just watched them cut the grass in the field behind the house, hard to envisage it as forest...

'From rising ground England must have seemed one great forest before the fifteenth century, an almost unbroken sea of treetops with a thin blue spiral of smoke rising here and there at long intervals...'

The peasants set too and  imagine the extent of the destruction as Professor Hoskins defines it in human terms...

'Timber alone served the purposes of coal, steel and concrete today...we read that one Durham man alone was said in 1629 to have felled more than thirty thousand oaks in his lifetime...'

Imagine that destruction going on across the country, little wonder that by 1664 diarist John Eveyln was pleading with landowners to plant many millions more trees, which apparently all saved our bacon when ships were needed about a hundred years later in the great naval struggle with France.

The Making of the English Landscape is a book chock-full of Did You Knows...

Imagine this country with only twenty thousand people living in it...

Only twenty-five people to the square mile at the end of the eleventh century...

Imagine that population growing and then being reduced by half thanks to the plague when it arrived in 1348...

And so much more. Definitely one to read if, like me, you are enjoying the modern flurry of nature and landscape writing, Professor Hoskins certainly set the genre in very firm foundations.

Has anyone else read this one...

Are there any other 'early' books in this genre that I should add to the reading list...

 

Beating the Bounds ~ The Swallow's Nest

It was awful but we had to do it.

The swallows had built a nest on and above a bedroom window, right up under the eaves with the tiniest gap to fly in and out. The entire summer of 2014 was spent reminding ourselves not to open it as the brood fed and chirped their way to fledgedom (mostly at 4am) and even then kept returning at night right up to emigration time.

In the end, once they had all departed we took the plunge and removed it, but what a thing of beauty the core of the nest turned out to be now that we could see it in close-up, and with that one little blind egg...

I mean you could wear that to a wedding couldn't you??

Having much more time to stand and stare compared to those years when I went to that place called work, I started to wonder about swallows, eventually tracking down the existence of a definitive book, The Barn Swallow by Angela K Turner and available on Kindle at £7.72. Except this would be the sort of book I want on the shelf...and £7.72 is more than I will pay for an e book I can never actually own (does anyone else have an ebook price limit?)

Cue eBay where I found something akin by the same author and at a fraction of the price.

I quickly turned to the Nest Building chapter...

It takes a week to ten days to build a nest...

The birds may make 100 trips per day...

Travelling a total of 137 miles over a period of six hours..

Mud is collected from nearby...

The lining of grass and feathers is completed in a few days...

The preferred feathers are small, white and from poultry and about twenty to forty are needed...

A substitute such as sheep's wool may be used...

As the nestlings start to grow the female will start to throw the feathers out of the nest..

Old sites and old nests are often re-used year after year...

Our nest fits that description perfectly, all those interwoven feathers and sheep's wool, so by now I am feeling terrible.

Imagine the birds returning this year to...a space.

The book confirms what we have known here for years, that swallows may return to an old nest time and again, and certainly we have had a succession of lodgers in this one on our veranda, but it seemed abandoned for a couple of years and we sensed that the birds no longer trusted it so we took it down. Now I am thinking maybe we should have left it.

I shall be back on the case of the swallows and Angela Turner's book when the birds return en masse (and we have had our first sighting already) because who would have thought that the length of the male's tail feathers mattered, or that the mating behaviour can be so fraught. I am even thinking about offering compensation for the underhand demolition of the nest with a conciliatory pile of white poultry feathers on the bird table. Apparently the swallows will fight over these they are so sought after.

Of course Ted Hughes also had something to say about the return of the Swallows...

'A Swallow
Has slipped through a fracture in the snow-sheet
Which is still our sky.'

Meanwhile, for now, I hope they are all safely en route... we will have things to tell them when they arrive.

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ The Ammil

I am going to say something...and then you must forget I said it OK??

I am reading an early copy of Landmarks, the forthcoming book by Robert Macfarlane to be published on March 5th.

It is very strictly embargoed until the end of February, so I can only quote this much about the book to whet your appetite because the information is readily available online...

Landmarks is Robert Macfarlane's joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two.

Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.

There...right, now just forget I mentioned it for now, though we do have a Landmarks project planned, and there are a few others out there reading it in readiness, so expect a whole lot more about it eventually. And if the suspense is killing you then you could catch up on previous Robert Macfarlane mentions on here...or maybe here...or even here...and if you still haven't had enough...try here...and ...oh look, a bit more here and something else here. 

But meanwhile I have to thank Robert Macfarlane for reminding me about a word in Landmarks, ammil. along with a definition for the Devon word... 'the sparkle of morning sunlight through hoar frost.' I couldn't possibly take credit for remembering the word myself so wanted to honourably acknowledge my source.

Right that's that sorted, not in any way a review, I haven't really quoted anything, or breathed a word about what I think about the book have I (start saving etc)

Onwards...

Over this side of Devon, and within sight of Dartmoor, we know the 'ammil' as that and more, but then us can be patickley contrary yonder way and the book us'd turn to to avoid being confuddled and in a mizmaze would be the 1912 edition of Crossing's Guide to Dartmoor. 

The Ammil : A phenomenon...that consists of a thin coating of ice, which envelopes every projecting object down to the smallest, the effect produced being most remarkable, and when the sun shines upon the ice-cased blades of grass and sprigs of heather, one singularly beautiful.

William Crossing goes on to explain that the word is derived from the old English word ammel, equivalent to enamel. It is apparently produced by a renewed freeze after a partial thaw and may often go unnoticed because the Ammil is most likely to happen up on higher ground.

I want to say that the book (which I asked you to forget I was reading) is responsible for a renewed interest in local landscape words, and, on the look-out for more about the ammil, I went to an old book Devonshire by D.St Leger Gordon first published in 1950 (with apologies as always to the librarian in Exeter who had to go searching for it in the stacks) where I found a fulsome description of the spectre when describing Dartmoor under arctic conditions...

'If there is sunlight, the frozen waterways gleam like polished silver, and when the wonderful phenomenon known as the ammil sheaths all the upland vegetation in a glittering ice casing, the diamond-bright splendour of each wild hillside baffles description...'

Wait for it. there's more...

'Then the twigs of lone mountain ash or willow become transformed into a natural lustre, or wind-glass, through which the bitter nor'easter plays the cold rattling tune specially reserved for his own skeleton fingers, and beyond the capacity of other musicians and other instruments to produce.'

I would really like there to be an ammil this instant so that I can go and look and appreciate it with all this knowledge at my gloved fingertips, but a deep freeze is not in the forecast. The nearest we had was between Christmas and New Year when the Kayaker was out and about here with his camera and took this shot of the house through the thawing frost......

Meanwhile a trawl back through my photos and I found a few examples from that bitterly cold winter of a few years ago when we awoke to a what I now realise was a very rare ammil here in the Tamar Valley.

We stepped out of the front door to see Narnia...

and this...I really understand the skeleton fingers analogy now




Amazing isn't it...and I am sure those of you who live in the Northern Hemisphere might have seen your equivalent of the ammil too, though I wonder whether it has a different name.

Meanwhile I am thinking too of all those of you in the Southern Hemisphere who would probably like to snap off a bit of ammil and drop it in your glass of something cool whilst sitting on the beach...

Soon be us again, have you noticed the dimpsy (Devon twilight) is suddenly that tiny bit lighter for a tiny bit longer...

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Dartmoor - Nun's Cross Farm

Legendary in name because so many Dartmoor Rescue call-outs were co-ordinated from out this way, but to me Nun's Cross Farm was exactly that, just a name that Bookhound would shout out as he flew out of the door. Interestingly we have been wondering how the whole moorland search and rescue effort might have changed since those seemingly primitive pre-mobile phone and GPS days. Apart from plenty of places where there is no phone signal, navigation may certainly have changed for many.

Us, still on good old-fashioned map and compass.

So when December 1st dawned glorious (yes, still catching up on 2014) and it looked set to stay that way, Nun's Cross was top of my list for a High Dartmoor walk.

Not only that but I had carted yet another hefty tome back from the library, Wild Goose and Riddon - The Dartmoor Photographs of Chris Chapman.

We know Chris Chapman's pictures well because we spend far more time than can be good for us drinking coffee (or in my case pots of hot chocolate) or having lunch in the Bedford Hotel, and the walls are adorned with these atmospheric black and white shots of Dartmoor, both the landscape and the people. We have been known to sit 'neath that dead pig and tuck into sausages There are even people we know in the photographs, which must mean we have lived here a long time too, but one of the pictures in the book is of Syward's Cross and with a lovely story attached.

Out in the snow with James Ravilious and cameras, Chris Chapman and James managed to drive out on the Whiteworks road beyond Princetown and walk down to Syward's Cross...

Bookhound and I talked about how much we missed being able to get up onto the Moors in snow now that we don't have four-wheel drive. We decided that this winter we must just hi-jack the Gamekeeper's Land Rover and get out there. I can only begin to imagine how beautiful this bit must have looked because even on our non-snowy visit there is nothing disappointing at all about this bleak moorland with its views down to Plymouth Sound ..

As the two intrepid photographers were fiddling with cameras, and waiting for the best light to show the ice and snow clinging to the cross to its best effect, a figure appeared over the horizon. Making conversation, as you would, the elderly gentleman was most interested in what the two were doing, absent-mindedly tapped the cross with his stick and all the ice and snow slid off. Moment gone but not before Chris Chapman had managed a couple of shots, thank goodness...

Look carefully and you can see that figure walking over the brow of the hill, and yes, all attempts at sticking the snow back on the cross failed...what you see is what there was.

On our visit Syward's Cross was looking like this...

Earliest references to the existence of the cross, as Crucem Siwardi, date back to 1240, astonishing.

Nearby is Nun's Cross Farm...

How about this for a Des Res??

The site was spotted back in 1870 by one John Hooper who saw the potential for a moorland small-holding, leased the land from the Duchy and proceeded to build a house for his wife. Mrs Hooper moved in in 1871 and helped build all the walls for the newtakes (moorland that is 'newly taken' for fields). 

As Eric Hemery suggests in my bible, High Dartmoor, even by pioneering standards it can't have been comfortable, but children were born and raised there and the family seem to have survived somehow, several living well into their nineties, heaven knows how though. This really is miles from civilisation, and though I can look at it with a romantic eye, one night would probably be plenty...

Perilously close to deriliction when the late Eric Hemery wrote about Nun's Cross Farm in the 1980s, he would be pleased to see it now, renovated, sound of roof, sleeps thirty-six, a bunk-house well-used by outdoor adventure groups who probably relish the unchanged lack of electricity or running water bar that from the nearby leat.

I love this side of the moor, bleak and unforgiving in harsh weather, but magical and endless otherwise... and hardly crowded, not a soul to be seen, but probably plenty of souls we couldn't see...

Beating the Bounds ~ The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady redux

'Up on the moor the world seemed to be made of sky and gorse - such acres of fragrant blossom under a sky of cloudless blue...'

A walk across Yennadon Down, on the southern edge of Dartmoor, all started because of these...

A chance sighting in our local Oxfam bookshop a few months ago...some small upcycled envelopes, a set of six with plain cards inside for £2.99 and instantly recognisable as The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden from the book published in 1977, a diary of nature notes written for the year 1906. Damaged books which can't be sold in the shop are used creatively in this way and this little package brought back all the memories. In fact I am on my third pack and some of you may have received something from me with one of these enclosed because, much as I love them I do use them.

I say 'instantly recognisable' and immediately think ubiquitous, because didn't this whole design theme appear every which way you turned back in the 1970s. Duvet covers, curtains, peg bags, oven gloves, tablecloths, chopping boards probably crockery and almost, dare I say it, to the point of overkill. Richard Mabey's review of the book in The Times (June 16th 1977) was nothing less than scathing...

'There is scarcely a fresh and original insight in the whole year...did her curiosity really stop short at these bland entries. I doubt it. I suspect the construction of this exquisite scrapbook had much in common with the embroidering of a sampler, a formal exercise done for private consumption. To have made it public as it stands not only misrepresents what was an advanced and popular form before the days of typewriters and snapshot albums; but also I suspect Edith Holden herself, who I suspect was a more interesting lady than suggested by this rather bland record.'

Eeeek. Harsh or fair...what do you think??

Did I eventually get a little bit fed up with it, and with the whole nostalgia trend that the book represented....

Did I consign this book to the shelf as a bit twee and shun all accoutrements...

Did I buy a set of (now vintage thirty-eight years on) Country Diary curtains for £2 in a charity shop a few weeks ago and think they might actually do a turn somewhere now the craze has long passed...

Ultimately, yes, I'd rather have had the book than it not be published at all.

So I forgive my younger self and rush to the shelf to find my copy of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and there it is, a Christmas gift from the Tinker and my mum, and as I start to browse the month of April I notice something I may/may not have noticed before..


...a mention of Yennadon Down (though Edith here spells it as Yannadon) and as I flick back through the month I discover that on April 10th 1906 Edith travelled by train from her home in Warwickshire to Bristol, and thence to Dousland on the outskirts of Dartmoor, and it would seem she stayed there until May 1st (click to enlarge)

With my interest in the book rekindled it was out with my walking map...Dousland just twenty minutes from home and, along with Princetown, part of my last community 'patch' before I retired...

and to the library to reserve a copy of a biography of Edith Holden compiled by Ina Taylor because I certainly wanted to know more about her.

The biography reveals that Edith and I share a birthday, hers 26th September 1871, she a young woman from a loving and talented family of philanthropists, and one of three artistic sisters who all made a name for themselves. As Ina Taylor elaborates, there was nothing unusual about a woman keeping a journal back in 1906 and illustrating it with sketches, a sort of commonplace book in which to collect poems too, but Edith's diary may differ for its lack of personal information and the fact it was intended to offer examples to her students. This is nevertheless a book of close and keen observation revealing a deep love of the surrounding country side.

It is tempting to assume that Edith headed across Yennadon Down beyond the village of Dousland, saw the vast expanse of moorland around her and thought she might be in heaven compared with life back home on the outskirts of Birmingham.

I mean this view from Yennadon Down is enough to make your heart sing isn't it...

...and indeed Edith is effusive in private correspondence about her stay. But this would also be to deny the value and importance of her day to day life of nature drawing back home in Birmingham which constitutes the greater portion of the diary, her willingness to get close to her subjects (ploughing through nettles no problem) and her ability to share it in the classroom with the students she taught.

Edith started taking painting holidays on Dartmoor in 1902, travelling from Birmingham to Plymouth on the Great Western Railway and thence on the branch line which ran through Dousland towards Princetown.

The line was eventually closed in 1956 but I doubt Dousland Station would have changed much since the days when Edith had alighted...

before the train then made its steady progress onward up across Yennadon Down and thence the moor to Princetown, often with prisoners on board, chained together for their sojourn at HMP Dartmoor.

You can just imagine their hopes for escape dissipating the further into the moor they travelled can't you. It is still possible to walk long stretches of the old railway track and we often do, wondering all the time what it would be like to see a steam train crossing the moor and wishing the ghost of one might appear...

Here part of the dismantled railway track across Yennadon Down which Nell and I walked , parking at Lowery Cross and doing a complete clockwise circuit..

...there we were, both channellling our inner Edith and walking in her footsteps, though I doubt Edith Holden rolled on the ground when she smelt fox, and was thus gratefully put back in her kennel that night by her owners...


It was during these early visits to Dousland and Dartmoor that Edith became great friends with the Trathen family, and anyone living locally will almost certainly recognise the name. In Edith's day the family owned a local quarry and with it several horses which were often used with a half-governess cart to transport local visitors around the moor, maybe that was the beginnings of what was to become the Trathen's Coach Tour business, so prosperous until the 1980s but sadly no more. Back in 1906 Mrs Trathen and her daughters ran the Dousland Post Office and Edith corresponded with the family for many years, much of it kept by the family and reproduced in Ina Taylor's biography.

And then I'm thinking 'What's a half-governess cart?' so I had to look that up too...

Honestly, the things I find I don't know writing this.

Established as a book illustrator and, so her family thought, confirmed as a spinster, it came as some surprise when Edith met and married a sculptor Ernest Smith in 1911, then moving to a flat behind Cheyne Walk in Chelsea where both continued with their respective careers. Little is known of their married life until Edith's death at the age of forty-nine on March 16th 1920 (her life coincidentally bookended by another family birthday, this time the Kayaker's) when she was found drowned in a backwater of the Thames near Kew Gardens. It was thought she must have slipped whilst reaching up into a branch with her umbrella, in her hand a bunch of twigs.

So, how good it has been to revisit The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and walk the paths all of which shines a new and revealing spotlight on a book that seemed commercialised beyond redemption. I shall dip into it now and again in future but wonder, in the meantime, if we might expect a repeat of December 1906 soon...

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Widgery Cross

Having sat on Captain Hunter's seat overlooking his pool, and gazed across to his treasured view of Brat Tor with Widgery Cross at its summit, we agreed that on the next fine day we would walk up to the top and complete our homage in his name.

The late Eric Hemery (he of the High Dartmoor oracle) has much to say about the use of the name Brat Tor, preferring to call it Brai (pronounced Bray Tor) so we had better get this right..

'The pronunciation is 'Bray' and the colloquial Braytor has led OS (Ordnance Survey) into using the absurd misnomer 'Brat Tor.'

In which case I am never going to call it Brat Tor again.

Eric Hemery, by now in quite a strop, describes High Down Ford as a Dartmoor 'honey-spot'. One of those popular places, not too difficult to access and quaint for its stepping stones across the River Lyd, with spectacular views up to Brai Tor and Widgery Cross, to say nothing of the promise of even better if you can climb to the top (1511 ft), but the river has to be crossed and this seems a sensible place to do it.

The secret about the honey-spots is to drop everything on a Monday morning, because the sun is shining and the cleaning can wait (I actually abandoned the hoover in the hall) and go when no one else does, so that is exactly what we did. We had our first frost the night before, leaving the air crisp and clear and perfect for walking, so quickly gathering flasks of soup, snacks, boots on and we were off out of the door, leaving our route with the Tinker just in case, and suggesting he call the Rescue Group if we weren't back before dark.

The walk up is steady and yes, steep, and we had to keep on stopping to 'admire the view' when actually some oxygen would have been handy, and none of that is helped by someone overtaking us at a run and disappearing over the crest of the tor whilst we are 'admiring the view' for the tenth time. 

'We could have done that in the old days,' said Bookhound, though I wondered which old days he meant. I feel as if I have had shares in Votarol gel for my knees since it was invented, but the plan is to keep them moving, so on we trekked, finally reaching the cross at the summit, shedding a layer and indulging in a modest cheer, before soaking up some Vitamin D and trying to eat lunch with two spaniels eager to join in.

The cross was erected by Exeter artist William Widgery in 1887, in honour of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. Widgery was a prolific and apparently self-taught landscape artist, whose Dartmoor work is quite distinctive...it is never hard to recognise a 'Widgery' nor those by his son Frederick...

I can never quite decide if they are to my liking or not, though I guess if someone gave me one I'd find some wallspace somewhere....what do you think?

Thirteen feet high and built of granite blocks, the cross is clearly visible for miles around, we must have driven past it hundreds of times and yet this is the first time I have been to the top.

Another Dartmoor writer, Mr Pilkington-Rogers, writing in 1930 in Days on Dartmoor, probably voices what Eric Hemery was thinking about Mr Widgery's homage to the Queen...

'It is unfortunately impossible to avoid seeing what always strikes me, in such a setting, as an amazingly misplaced token of patriotism and an incomprehensible disfigurement of the moor for an artist to perpetrate. Yet this may be but a personal impression, for another writer says " Seen from any point this cross seems perfectly in place". To my mind it is as much in place as a saxophone in the Hallelujah Chorus.'

I have to say, it does rather spoil the look of the thing, but no matter, in the interim it has become a well-recognised landmark and the views from the top are spectacular, plenty to distract the mind from trying to decide if Mr Widgery's cross was a saxophone or not...



I can't think of a nicer place to 'book a table' for lunch and we sat in the sunshine, taking it all in and pondering the couple of walkers with dogs we had passed along the way...it was obviously Pedigree Outing Day, first a fleet of Dandy Dinmonts, followed by a little flock of Bedlington Terriers which look for all the world like miniature sheep..Nell and Rusty were very confused.

Talking of Nell, she gamboled and skipped along loving the wind in her fur and the different smells...pheasant is very overrated after a while. At the top of the tor she settled herself into a little nest of reedy grass for a sit down and really couldn't understand what we found so amusing..

In the end we were only just back before dusk because there is nothing like three hours out on Dartmoor to make you realise you have no chocolate in the house and really you've earned some. It was at this point we realised just how many village shops had closed in recent years, because in those olden days we would have passed at least three on the way home.

And so here endeth the homage to Captain Nigel Duncan Ratcliffe Hunter MC (Bar) 1894 - 1918, two wonderful walks in the footsteps of the man and his dog Gyp.

 

 

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Beating the Bounds ~ Tavy Cleave

My H is for Hawk experience...

Our local falconer Mr Buncle, can often be seen, with his hawks, outside Tavistock Market, selling Falconry Experience sessions. He actually also took part in that TV programme Wife Swap, and I have vivid memories of the swapped wife, a glamour model from London, chopping up rabbit for the hawks with her rubber gloves on, but I digress.

I wander past the hawks on their perches, or the one on his arm, and can't say I really pay much attention. It's not something I have ever really fancied trying (probably much to Bookhound's relief) and, if I am honest, one bird of prey looks much like another to a falconery klutz like me. But having had a bookish Falconery Experience I might pay more attention the next time I see them... that said I still don't want a Falconery Experience Day for Christmas, just a cart for lugging stuff around the garden (please Bookhound) 

My fall off the perch was legendary but the book had been hovering over me ever since...right that's dispensed with all the sad puns about my return to H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, and all after going into a sulky moult over it (oh, not quite done) back in August.

It just wasn't a deckchair in the sunshine book for me. I felt shut in and claustrophobic as I read of the days and days of sitting in a darkened room and feeding day old chicks to a wild bird in order to 'man' it...as in tame it.

And though I have never really been one for falconry, I doubt many others who had read this book may have been either, and it's true, I often don't know I am interested in something until I read up on it. H is for Hawk had been universally praised, loved by several friends whose reading tastes often chime with mine, scored highly with the Happy Campers book group, and then it won the £20,000 Samuel Johnson Prize. I had actually been so disenchanted I had lent my copy to Happy Camper Linda W (I very very rarely lend a book) thinking I could always revert to my Kindle edition if the hawking urge overcame me.

It didn't.

But when it won the Samuel Johnson prize I emailed Linda...

'It's won a prize, I supposed I'd better read it now, can I call in a collect R is for Raptor? '

First time around I had reached a hundred or so pages, but I decided to start again, though wasn't sure if I could bear it. I take notes as I read, and looking back to August I see they are rather stilted, if not clinical observations, not my usual fare these days; detached and... well I think I sound a bit repetitive, if not a little underwhelmed in the imagination department...

It will involve isolation.

Long periods of meditative stillness.

Patience - endless.

Gentle calm.

Peace and quiet.

Form of solitary confinement.

Compelling and intense.

It's hardly sounding compelling is it. I think I might have been pretending it was because everyone else was saying as much. And I remember I just couldn't focus on anything but the parallel, and rather disturbing story of T.H.White. A teacher at Stowe school, a closet homosexual with sadistic tendencies and a special interest in flagellation. Sylvia Townsend Warner, chosen as White's biographer after his death in 1964, visited his house in Alderney...

'Everything was there, defenceless as a corpse.'

writes Sylvia to William Maxwell.

Somehow I wasn't engaging with Helen Macdonald, or her grief at the loss of her father, or the hawk. The book felt dark and brooding and I was seeing the hawking element, especially T.H.White's Gos, as slightly malevolent, whilst feeling a bit wretched about Mabel (Helen's hawk) too. In fact it was all a bit disturbing, this can't have been the point at all.

Right book. Wrong Moment
Stop reading and save for winter.

I wrote in my notebook.

What an exercise this has been in not dismissing a book as 'no good' or 'bad' just because I can't get on with it first time around. It is why I rarely if ever write about books I haven't enjoyed on here...unless it is that one of course.

So I open H is for Hawk again and I read this on page five...

'Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes but not often, and you don't get to say when or how.'

How on earth did that sentence not slap me right between the eyes first time around?

The same search for grace could truly be said about Helen Macdonald's book.

And how did I miss the details about T.H.White's cruelly dysfunctional childhood?

I am always one to seek those childhood explanations for adult vulnerabilities, yet somehow I had glossed over all this on page thirty-five.

And so it went on as I read a completely different book and understood how T.H.White was trying desperately to re-write his own childhood; a new and improved script, a better narrative of love and nurture and food, as he recounted his terrible experiences whilst trying to raise his own goshawk.

And how Helen Macdonald, so subsumed by grief at the sudden death of her father, immerses herself in the world of falconry that she has embraced with a passion since childhood, coaxing young goshawk Mabel into a bond and an attachment with her in order to be able to fly her whilst knowing that Mabel will return to her gloved fist.

'History collapses when you hold a hawk,'

..says Helen Macdonald, and finally now I could see it; the man assumed the power and strength of the hawk whilst the hawk assumed the manners of the man. For Helen and Mabel there will be a cross-over point, because as Mabel is tamed so Helen seems to detach from reality, and I was mightily relieved when she finally recognised her depression and took herself off to her GP, and then heaved another sigh when she sat down with a doctor who would listen to and help her.

Life can all go so horribly wrong at this juncture.

Bonding with a hawk seems, in many ways, similar to bonding with a newborn baby  (and not in a lot of other ways...don't feed a baby day old chicks and rabbit legs etc and maybe don't expect it to sit on a perch) There are anxieties to be assuaged on both sides; food to be offered; a cycle of sleep to be established; paths of recognition and acceptance to be mapped; responses to cues and moods to be learned, even facial expressions and body language to be interpreted and recognised. To say nothing of the regular weighing, and the caring and the nurturing and the concern.

I was still very relieved when T.H.White's Goshawk escaped, and equally relieved when Mabel flew back to Helen Macdonald's gloved hand for the first time. This is Helen, though not Mabel, but still a very lovely picture...

And the day Mabel flew into the game crop (cover for pheasants on a shooting estate) and set off the pheasants like an 'artillery bombardment' before pinning down her selected prey... well we are surrounded by game crop here, along with 28,000 pheasants, and we have an alpha-male spaniel. I will say no more, but trust me it is heart failure time, and a pheasant caught 'by accident' sheds enough incriminating evidence in the way of feathers to fill what seems like twenty bin liners (don't ask me how we know that) I was completely in tune with Helen Macdonald's stress at this point, and with a Gamekeeper son in the family we know it only too well from both sides. 

When Mabel then launches herself into the Gamekeeper's inner sanctum, the sacred territory of the pheasant release pens...well I had to go and have a lie down and breath deeply.

Bookhound and the Kayaker (if he is around)  go out and help the Gamekeeper build his new release pens each summer. Off they go in the wagon, his estate is in the neighbouring Parish, about fifteen minutes away, not the one around us here...

...while I just make the cakes to fuel the endeavour...

We walked the bounds at dusk on a few idyllic summer evenings when the poults had arrived to make sure they had all roosted properly. Pheasant pens, sited in woodland, are surprisingly peaceful places when all is well, just the rustle of the birds as they fly up onto the branches, a flurry of sleepy craiks hither and yon. As we gently whispered our way around the edges (often several hundred yards of boundary to walk) ushering those on the wrong side in through the little entrances, it all felt very English; ancient, time-honoured and deeply rooted in tradition and history...not dissimilar to some elements of falconry.

Bring on a disturbance... say a hawk like Mabel swooping through, swiftly followed by a woman in hot pursuit, and all hell really would let loose. Little wonder Helen Macdonald is running free with the expletives and fears the 'Oi' of an 'incredibly angry keeper' at any minute as she watches the 'leafy explosion of buff and cappuccino feathers.'

Ye Gods.

First time around I was reading some of H is for Hawk on my Kindle too, and I still wonder if a Kindle sometimes encourages emotional detachment, in a way that the printed page can often surmount and turn around. If I'm a bit ambivalent about a book reading it on a Kindle might occasionally not be the best way to test it further. Is it about the feel of the book, the cover (in this case superb) even the paper and the binding (it lies flat without coercion, oh joy) and the layout of the words on the page. Maybe it's the very obvious pauses...or in this case the perch rests, the time to rouse (this is what happy hawks do with their feathers...bit of a fluffing up etc) and to preen, sorry couldn't stop myself.

In the end I was rationing the pages, not wanting the book to end. H is for Hawk has burrowed deep and it will stay there

'How the world is full of signs and wonders that come and go, and if you are lucky enough you might see them,'

says Helen Macdonald as she starts to see the world in a different and more rariefied light through the fog of mourning, 'that the world is for ever, though you are only a blink in its course.'

And how grateful I am to those who conveyed their love for H is for Hawk, encouraging and convincing me to go back to it and try again. In the end I realise it really has been a privilege to read this book, and Helen Macdonald's success so well-deserved, and now of course I am noticing and hearing hawks everywhere, expect more on the subject soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Captain Nigel Duncan Ratcliffe Hunter MC (Bar) 1894 -1918

There was one walk on Dartmoor that we particularly wanted to do in November.

I had borrowed a book from the library, With Magic in My Eyes - West Country Literary Landscapes by Anthony Gibson (yes, of course I have now had to buy a copy). The author known locally for many years as the voice of the National Farmer's Union here in the Shire, but also, as I was to discover with this book, a keen historian and an extremely engaging writer. I was browsing  through the pages on the usual suspects, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Daphne du Maurier when I came across a mention of Captain Hunter.

Captain Nigel Duncan Ratcliffe Hunter, born in 1894, lived in neighbouring Okehampton, at Glenholme in Station Road (I must find it next time we are at the dentist's, also in Station Road) and, according to his diary, had walked up on Dartmoor, around Widgery Cross with his dog Gyp on 30 June 1915. He was on leave from the Front having been wounded once already, and had recently been moved to Ypres, but he was home for a week or so and clearly made use of those long summer evenings out on the moor. Captain Hunter returned to France and would return home on leave several times before he was eventually killed in action at Biefvillers on Easter Monday 1918.

What a sad coincidence that poet Edward Thomas had been killed on Easter Monday 1917.

Of even greater interest was mention of the presence of a commemorative plaque to Captain Hunter, with one of his poems, and sited at Black Rock on Dartmoor, overlooking a waterfall and pool on the River Lyd, beneath Brat Tor with the very distant Widgery Cross at its summit...

Dartmoor is only a swift twenty minute drive from our door so off we trotted though minus the dogs because it had been raining heavily and who could know what the River Lyd might be doing. In fact they would have coped, but sometimes a dog-free walk is quite relaxing...nothing to worry about, and we can just look and walk, and talk and listen. 

How good to find that countless others had been there before us with poppies and that even at a place as isolated as this we will never forget...

and the plaque with the poem that Captain Hunter wrote after that midsummer walk...

Here is the poem in full, taken from this excellent local website which also holds a transcript of Captain Hunter's diaries...

Widgery Cross

I stood at the gate awhile in thought
And gazed out into the night
The tors stood black, but their peaks just caught
A flickering gleam of light.
For the night was clear; the stars shone bright,
And silence reigned o'er the moor.
And long I looked through the haze of night
At the cross on Widgery Tor.

Then cried I in my heart "Farewell,
Oh brooding moor, thou land of dreams
The wind-swept tor, the sheltered dell,
The gurgling brook, the rushing stream.
I loved to roam over all and breathe
The magic air, over laden with
The scent of heathers, gorse and bracken.
Of sunny rock grown grey with lichen,
Of bog that hides beneath a sheet
Of bright green moss or dark black peat.

Farewell, oh land that I must leave –
Mysterious land whose brooding face
In rocky tor and wooded cleave
Yet bears of forms men the trace;
Whose secret I would fain explore.
Yet must I hence. Perchance no more
Shall I return to linger by the rushing fall,
the dark still pool,
The stream which falls from rock so high
To depths so dark, so clear and cool.
Farewell, oh land I love – Goodbye"


Are we not like this moorland stream
Springing none knows where from
Tinkling, bubbling, flashing a gleam
Back at the sun – ere long
Gloomy and dull, under a cloud,
Then rushing onwards again:
Dashing at rocks with anger loud,
Roaring and foaming in vain,
Wandering thus for many a mile,
Twisting and turning away for a while.
Then of a sudden 'tis over the fall –
And the dark still pool is the end of all.
- - - - - -
Is it? I thought, as I turned away,
And I turned again to the silent moor.
Is it? I said, and my heart said "Nay!"
As I gazed at the cross on Widgery Tor.

N D R Hunter, 2 July 1915

Anthony Gibson suggests that Captain Hunter's poem , whilst not the 'greatest poem to have been produced by the First World War,' is, in its way, 'as moving as anything that Brookes, Graves or Sassoon ever wrote.' He argues that what makes it so poignant is the contrast between this beautiful and timeless place, and the horrors of the trenches to which he was returning, also suggesting the aptness of that metaphor about the rushing river and the life of the soldier at war...

We sat and looked across at the view for ages, listening to the water, and having walked up the River Lyd to Black Rock we walked back across the moor with the words of the poem resonating, it wasn't hard to imagine the wrench that leaving home must have been for Captain Hunter, and for so many others.

German Chief of Staff Erich Ludendorff's report of the March 1918 spring offensive at the Front reveals this action...

'In continuation of the great battle in France our troops on March 25th achieved fresh successes.  English divisions brought up from Flanders and Italy with the French threw themselves against our troops in desperate attacks.  They were defeated.

The armies of General Otto von Below and General von der Marwitz have finally maintained themselves in Ervillers after a hot and fluctuating battle, and in their advance against Achiet-le-Grand, captured the villages of Bihucourt, Biefvillers and Grevillers.'

Imagine Captain Hunter, just twenty-three, many miles from this beloved place, and in the midst of that 'fluctuating battle' at Biefvillers on that very day. A letter to his father from a fellow soldier after the Captain's death confirms the chaos caused by the German advance...

Dear Mr. Hunter, 

I was very pleased to have your letter of 23rd and shall be only too glad to help you by giving you all the particulars I can regarding the death of your son, Capt. Hunter. As Maj. Moore has told you, I was an eyewitness to the sad accident which occurred on the morning of March 25th just behind the village of Biefvilliers, 1 mile NW of Bapaume. We were, as perhaps you know, then holding the line with the infantry, but owing to the retirement we left our trenches and for a time lined a railway embankment facing the village. The enemy advancing slowly entered the village and a few of them with a machine gun managed to get into some tin huts about 200 yards away. Capt Hunter all the time had been going backwards and forwards among his men giving them help and encouragement regardless of all danger...

Captain Hunter was seriously wounded at Biefvillers just as his company was ordered to retreat from their trench, forcing his comrades to leave him behind alive, but maybe only just. I tell myself he might have thought about this place, perhaps imagined himself sitting there. His body eventually seems to have been identified from the buttons on his uniform, and his grave can be found at the Beaulencourt war cemetery near Calais.

The local Devon website has some incredibly moving letters written to Captain Hunter's family by those comrades and I never cease to be amazed, on reading these, how much effort went into ensuring that lives were remembered and honoured for the comfort of those families back home. Fellow soldiers would be sure to write and share recollections about the men, often giving those all important details about final moments, eye-witness accounts, and sharing the respect for friendships that meant so much.

As we walked back up the hill behind Black Rock something red caught my eye on the ground...

Just the one but it has been a tremendous autumn for fungi, and as I was taking a picture (and we think it was a Crimson Waxcap; likes old, mossy grassland says the book and is 'at home on blasted moors'...any fungi experts out there?)  it was Bookhound who said it...

'That could be a poppy couldn't it.'

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Tavy Cleave

'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?

 

 

 

The Ash Tree ~ Oliver Rackham

There is nothing like a book about something very specific, let's say an ash tree, to suddenly make me notice ash trees all over the place, and where previously I may just have walked past...


This one, spotted on the Tamar Walk a few weeks ago, diverted me off course for about ten minutes, especially as we were crossing private land open for one day a year only, so this a tree not usually up for the public's gaze. I wanted to take my fill...

Of course my one dread is that someone will say  'That's not an ash tree you muppet,' or similar, but I was fairly sure it was, not only because I passed my Brownie Nature Badge which involved pressing six leaves (and ash was one) but also because since reading Oliver Rackham's book The Ash Tree, third in the Little Toller Monograph series, I have been on the alert. Looking especially for ash keys...and maybe it is me but they seem to have been in short supply this year, so I was please to find some here...

Having read the first two in the Monograph series and realised that I will be collecting and keeping, and reading these little hardback books many times over, The Ash Tree was quickly in my 'basket.' I am on the edge of my seat for those promised next from Little Toller who are commissioning 'new writing attuned to the natural world and which celebrates the rich variety of the places we live in.'

Dating trees by looking at them is not really my speciality but I feel sure this Tamar Walk specimen must rank amongst the Getting-On-A-Bit and had I been of a mind to chop it down I would surely have been able to spot the narrowing rings marking the drought of 1976...how astonishing that a tree can tell us so much.

And here's something I didn't know. 

Ash leaves fall off the tree in autumn whilst still green. Why had I never realised that before?

Of course now I see it everywhere I walk...

Lacking the mystique of oak and yew the poor old ash may have been seriously under-appreciated until the sudden threat of Ash Disease (Chalara) loomed large, then it seems we all fell in love with it, worried that it might go the way of the elm...and the larch... and the horse chestnut...and the oak, because if this book does nothing else it alerted me to the very real threat that diseases pose to our trees. And it would appear that, unlike so many other countires, we are rubbish here in the UK at thinking ahead and organising some primary prevention. Even secondary prevention would be good, but our island complacency suggests that we only seem to wake up when the damage is underway, and then we panic. Larch have been felled in vast quantities around us here thanks to Phytophthora ramorum. Sorry, that's just showing off, of course I had to look it up, but everywhere you look there are suddenly vast tracts of bareness where previously we saw trees.

Though one of our chief woodland trees, I was intrigued to discover a sort of woodish class system surrounding the ash; a hierarchy of status which places ash below oak and elm in the pecking order meaning that it is never used in church carpentry, but you would be very pleased to see it used in spade handles, wooden wheel rims, or the oar if you were rowing a boat.

Remember wooden tennis rackets?

Most likely ash, and likewise hockey sticks.

When it comes to a pecking order in our woodshed, second to oak, we prefer to burn ash above all other, though Oliver Rackham would disagree with us and with Celia Congreve's Firewood Poem..

Elm wood burns like churchyard mould,
E'en the very flames are cold
But ash green or ash brown
Is fit for a queen with golden crown

But ash wet or ash dry 
a king shall warm his slippers by.

Oliver Rackham suggests that...

'but maybe in a damp and draughty palace it is the best a sovereign can get.'

No matter, the sight of a log basket full of ash next to our woodburner tells me we are in for a toasty warm evening.

Having set out the history, the prevalence, uses and mythology surrounding the ash tree I was reminded of John Caple's atmospheric paintings of Somerset and in particular the custom of Ash Tree Blessing...

' For an ash tree blessing you must find a young ash tree in a secret place, split its trunk open and pull back the two sides: the young baby is then passed through this gap of exposed heartwood. Then perhaps the most important part : the split trunk is reunited and bound up. As the wood heals and joins, so the baby will grow strong and healthy.'

Oliver Rackham offers as clear-a warning as it is possible to give about the consequences if we continue on the path of tree-disease denial, and also outlines where he feels the trouble rests...

'...the greatest threat to the world’s trees and forests is globalisation of plant diseases, the casual way in which plants and soil are shipped and flown around the globe in commercial quantities, inevitably bringing with them diseases to which the plants at their destination have no resistance. This has been subtracting tree after tree from the world’s ecosystems; if it goes on for another hundred years how much will be left?

Preface from The Ash Tree by Oliver Rackham

I emerged from the book informed and as worried as it is possible to be about the Emerald Ash Borer beetle which has apparently caused havoc in the US and will inevitably do so here. It arrived Stateside in a shipment of Japanese car parts and apparently has already killed more ash trees across America than exist in the whole of Britain and Ireland.

I was stunned. Honestly, the things we don't know to be worried about until someone spells it out...

To cheer us all up Little Toller have started a seasonal newspaper, The Toller Review, which you can either access online or, as I did, ask to receive a good old fashioned paper copy by post. But be warned, the paper copy comes with a beautiful sheet with colour pictures of all the book covers and a tantalising tear-off order form at the bottom offering free postage. Within a nano-second I had started ticking off the books I already had, selected two I didn't but of course absolutely needed to have, and the cheque was in the post before I knew it.

 

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~The Annual Tamar Walk.

I'm back on it, Beating the Bounds and walking the Tamar Valley, and the annual Tamar River walk often marks my first foray of the winter season. Some years we miss it, other years it is cancelled and some years it pours with rain, something called Hurricane Gonzalo threatens and it seems easier to stay indoors. Bookhound was busy around the homestead but I had spent the week in London and was ready for some fresh air, it was a bit murky and overcast, but dry and mild, so I loaded up, camera, water, apples, plasters, the kitchen sink etc and off I went.

Offspringette sent me a new rucksack for my birthday in our shared favourite colour, and I have to say, whilst I am sure there are good equivalents in this country, my Macpac 'Kahuna' has to be the most comfortable I have ever used. I am the Queen of the Rucksack, always use them when I am travelling or walking, and clearly New Zealand know about these things. This one has wide, well-padded straps, perfectly positioned and which nestle like gloves on my shoulders (and don't give me neck-ache which so many rucksacks do) But what I love the most is the little NZ map on the side, with a dot that is Christchurch; it makes me feel just that little bit closer to the distant one.

The walk from Beera to Greystone Bridge is almost eight miles in distance, from one fifteenth century bridge to the next, starting with a trek down through the fields on a local farm at Horsebridge, before walking up-river along the private river bank open for this one day in the year now that the fishing season is over.

Now as is always the case, half the patch I walk is on one map and half on the next one, and though we have recently ordered a special map with us in the middle to avoid this shenanigans, it is still neatly rolled up in the tube awaiting some wall space. I hope you will appreciate the hours I spent fighting with the flippin' things to try and get a seamless one to show you...

and even then I'm not sure it is very clear, but click on this one and that might help...

All you really need to know is that I started bottom right and hugging the right-hand river bank (the Devon side) finished top left.

Sometimes it can be unclear that the Tamar Valley is actually a valley. From where we live, high up on the Devon side, that descent not immediately obvious, and sometimes the presence and course of the river only really evident from the early morning mist seen from home...

but this view walking down to the starting point for the walk at Beera (that picture above looks across to this point) leaves little doubt.

U shaped...glaciated...V shaped...flat floored... I am trying to recall something of A Level Geography.

Does it matter...not really, but something always triggers the thought in my mind when I see a view like this. Miss Cassell would be both pleased but disappointed.

The river itself rises as a trickle from a bog in the parish of Morwenstow in North Cornwall, and such a short distance from the coast that it would have made Cornwall an island with its fifty mile traverse of the county, eventually becoming tidal as it flows into the estuary in Plymouth. Apparently no other river in the UK creates a boundary for its entire length, and to cross the Tamar from Devon into Cornwall most definitely invokes that sense of crossing a border into another county. One of us invariably says 'Us be in Cornwall now,' as we head to Launceston over Greystone Bridge, and this 1783 map of Cornwall actually shows the river and the divide quite clearly...

The Tamar is a spate river, fed by countless smaller ones...here's the River Inny flowing in at Junction Pool... on the left as you look at the downward-facing loop in the OS map above...

Adding to the fisherman's misery, the water has been very low this summer, but it will rise quickly after a spell of rain as you can see. Then, if no more rain it can't be fished until it drops a little and the water clears which I am told can take three days...I can't tell you how stressful it all is. If it is 'drumming' in Ted Hughes poetic fashion we can hear the roar of the water from home, as the crow flies about a mile distant. On Saturday it wasn't drumming but it was still fair galloping along, and fast enough for me to have been pleased with my decision to leave Nell at home...

One sighting of flotsam, or heaven forbid a tennis ball (it happens...Bookhound collects them by the dozen when he fishes the Tavy downstream from the tennis courts) and Nell would have been in and dragging me behind her...

The walk follows the banks of the river and tempting though it was I didn't even bail out at Hotel Endsleigh along the way...

Truth be told it is a very steep climb up to the hotel from the river and I doubt Georgiana Duchess of Bedford walked it very often back in 1820. If 'Royalty' fly in by helicopter a car is waiting to transport them, but then that was the whole point of the location; high above the Tamar to make the most of the view and the sweeping views and terraces which gave Sir Humphrey Repton masses of scope with the landscaping. 

The river looped and swept its way around huge bends and past woods various, Gunoak, Leigh, Wareham, Dunterue, and not a lot of autumn leaf colour to show thanks to mild weather and no frosts. Then around Inny Foot (that big loop) until Carthamartha when suddenly great cliffs appear on the Cornish side. They tower over the river and the whole aspect changes from one of open river bank to something much darker, and dare I say everso slightly menacing...

I always speed up through this bit.

Carthamartha House existed somewhere on the opposite (Cornwall) side and was at one time the summer retreat for the Bishops of Exeter...

...but new owners, sensing the house was haunted, had it demolished and replaced with a bungalow.

I needed a stride rather than a plod and so completed in just over two hours and was very grateful to jump on the shuttle bus back to the starting point, and even more grateful that the driver dropped me of at the top of the lane thus saving me another couple of miles of walking.

Home in the distance was a welcome sight I can tell you...

I rang ahead...

'Get the kettle on.'

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Book-Covetousness...

I couldn't think of anything else to call this post because for those of you who, like me, enjoy some good nature writing and traipsing on a bit of a wander via the page with someone else, well the good books are stacking up in time for any lists of suitable gifts you might be compiling in the weeks ahead.

As you know this is all to ensure that no one gives you The Life and Times of Kim Kardashian unless you really want it that is.

I am still clueless about exactly who KK is and why so important..

But moving swiftly on, While Wandering - A Walking Companion edited by Duncan Minshull, and with a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, caught my eye on a recent foray to the Falmouth Bookshop and a copy made its way home with me...I paid for it first obviously.

This is a re-issue of a book first published in 2000 as The Vintage Book of Walking, so maybe check it isn't already on your shelves, because Robert Macfarlane's copy is apparently very well-travelled after many miles in a rucksack. I can see that it is exactly the sort of book you might want to settle down with after a day's hiking; an anthology of 'walking-writing,' which I am reading at the end of each day (whether I have walked anywhere or not) while the bath fills, and finding delights such as this...

'There is charm in footing across a silent plain..
There is a joy in every spot, made known by times of old.
New to the feet, although the tale a hundred times be told...'

John Keats 'Lines Written in the Highlands' goes on to describe 'when weary feet forget themselves upon a pleasant turf,' and I immediately remembered my recent Tamar River walk (more about that next week) and the relief of grass after a few miles of path.

This book will probably last me for a full year of daily reading, what better value can there be than that.

While I am on the subject of daily reading, I spotted Claxton- Field Notes From a Small Planet by Mark Cocker  in the Caught by the River newsletter and immediately had to order a copy. If you don't know of Caught by the River sign up for the weekly e mail and you will soon be hooked (sorry)

"Caught by the River was born on a bankside seven years ago. Although initially an idle conversation between friends, it soon grew into an online forum for all things outdoors – angling, birding, walking, drinking, listening & living."

Mark Claxton, in a single year-long cycle,'explores his relationship to the East Anglian landscape, to nature and to all the living things around him.' It is an exercise in observation and awareness resulting in a concise but inspiring entry for almost every day of the year. So I put down While Wandering and pick up Claxton, and the bath still hasn't filled (because I now put it on very slowly.)

It is very local to East Anglia, and thus not of direct relevance to the view from my Tamar Valley window, and I wondered if that would matter...it doesn't. The observations are universal and can be of relevance wherever you live..

'The naturalist Max Nicholson once wrote something I always try to remember on seeing swallows, that trult they are not birds of the land; rather their primary habitat is a thin layer of sky that lies just above the earth's surface. Swallows are before everything citizens of the air.'

We certainly understand that living here...

Rising Ground - A Search for the Spirit of Place by Philip Marsden was another of those books I kept hearing about everywhere and for some reason seeing nowhere, when I would have thought it would be a book to trip over down here in the West Country.

Moving from a seaside village to a remote creekside farmhouse in Cornwall, Philip Marsden, surprised by his response to his surroundings, planned a journey around the county, creating in this book a 'fusion of travelogue, cultural history, nature writing and memoir' as he travels from place to place. He explores the myth and the magic, and the work of those who have gone before him...'the medieval chroniclers, the Tudor topographers, the eighteenth-century antiquarians, post-industrial poets, abstract painters' and in doing so tries to pin down that sense of place and belonging which had first struck him.

The quest is in progress, and 150 or so pages in I am completely spellbound by the mix of personal anecdote (the house is falling down, the water supply is dodgy...I have some sympathy) the local history and the wider travels. For one thing I will have to look at Bodmin Moor with new eyes, and not just as a bleak and desolate traverse in order to go shopping in Truro, or those hills in the distance from our garden. I blame Daphne du Maurier, she never made Bodmin seem particularly warm and friendly did she, it's not a place that beckons with the same power that Dartmoor does.

Finally, and keeping pace with the grayscale cover trend, Underlands - A Journey Through Britain's Lost Landscape by Ted Nield. I am so wrapped up with what's happening above gorund that a look at what lies beneath will be in order very soon. Ted Nield 'unearths the veins of coal, stone, oil, rock and clay that make up the country beneath our feet,' as he delves into the history and geology of 'this forgotten Britain.' A quick dip tells me I am going to be learning new things, probably a whole lot of 'Did You Know' for car journeys too...perfect.

It reminds me what a work of art is the geological map of Britain too, a patchwork quilt of Jurassic, Devonian, Cambrian and a whole lot more in between... like a beautifully marbled endpaper.


But I have a final thought. Four really excellent books...but all by men.

Are there really no women out there being observant and walking too...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ October in the Shire

After rather a lot of words from me last week I think you all deserve a rest and some looking. My fourth Persephone lunch book choice will be on here in a few day's time, but meanwhile, after all that sitting, time for some walking and a few pictures from the Shire in October. The clocks have gone back so for a few days I always feel strangely ahead of myself, as if I have all the time in the world and am early for everything. That will have dissolved by about Thursday, we will have had a few darker evenings and know that we really are heading into winter, but the lane and the green lane to the woods are still looking magical, scuffly leaf walks and plenty to see if I look carefully...

 The poisonous black bryony appears out of nowhere and looks for all the world as if it should boil up into some delicious jam....someone must have done it by mistake, and perhaps it is fortunate that most other hedgerow foraging is over for the year so it can be left well alone.

 and I quite thought the holly was looking promising until I realised more of the same...

The symmetry of the ivy flowers...amazing..

Sweet Chestnut profusion...any suggestions?

I've had an audience up at the potting shed, looking over from Rocky's Field and helping me to watch over my very tiny auricula seedlings

and they now seem to have been replaced by these..


I'm not in the least bit horsey but even I can see this is rather a handsome specimen...

and talking of handsome specimens, here's a pretty one; an unusually Persil-white Nell... post-600 tennis ball retrievals and pre- a swim and a drink in her most favourite green and slimey cattle trough...

Finally, does anyone have any idea what this might be thinking about growing into...


Sorry, not a very clear picture. Spotted in the woods yesterday and I doubt I will ever be able to find it again. The most likely culprit perhaps the Amethyst Deceiver mushroom, but someone out there will know...

Peter Beacham ~ Down the Deep Lanes @PortEliotFest

If I have a favourite book, amongst those I would never part with, it has to be my copy of Down the Deep Lanes, a collaboration between Peter Beacham and photographer James Ravilious (son of Eric).

I had borrowed the book from the library in the midst of last year's Beating the Bounds (which I plan to resume on here this autumn) and in an effort to cut back on my book-buying. All to no avail because to see is to covet; I quickly ordered a copy of my own, and the book became my guide for spotting the beauty of the everyday around here which it is so easy to walk past and miss.

At first glance the book could be shelved under 'Nostalgia' but look more carefully, as I did, and it becomes clear that much still exists...the cob, the belfry, the barns, the corrugated iron, the quarries. This is rural Devon with all its mud and manure, the minor, the obvious and the eccentric captured in the photographs, and beautifully described in Peter Beacham's words. We had seen the exhibition of James Ravilious's photographs in, of all places Truro Museum. Fortunately. according to the Pevsner, 'the interior is remarkably intact,' and this 1845 building seems to have escaped with its integrity preserved.

How sad to hear of the death this week of Candida Lycett-Green, a good friend of the Festival and prevented by her final illness from attending Port Eliot where she was to judge the flower show...but I quoted her introduction to Down the Deep Lanes, which she had called a revelation...

'It is not the stuff of ordinary guide books eulogising the familiar front of Devon...it is a beautifully painted portrait of the back...the terrain of Devon dictates the way men fashion it. Its ten thousand miles of lanes cannot easily be tidied up with kerbstones and widened to suit Euro lorries, for their paths are too sinuous and the hills over which they snake too steep.'

And what a joy it was to see Peter Beacham not only holding and signing my copy of the book (he uses a fountain pen for everything) but also telling us of its genesis in the last days of James Ravilious's life.

Desperately ill with cancer, James told Peter he felt his life and all his work had been wasted... all these photographs...what was the point...who would ever see or be interested in them. Rallying to the cause Peter reassured James that good things would happen, that there was a book in all this, that he, Peter, would write a series of essays to accompany the pictures, and thus Down the Deep Lanes was begun. Sadly no publisher would take it, and James Ravilious died without seeing this collaboration find its audience.

Fast forward to the Millenium when Devon County Council approached Peter Beacham about the possibility of a book celebrating the Shire...

'Well here's one I made earlier,' said Peter brandishing the ready-made and most perfect answer, and thus was Down the Deep Lanes published to much popular acclaim...and I at least had a tear in my eye at this point, at the thought that hopefully James Ravilious was up there somewhere, looking down on us all admiring his handiwork, and us all declaring it to be something very special indeed. 

Time was really definitely up now, we had overrun, the book shop next door were ready for Peter's signing and so it was Knitsuke time... what better than a Cornish pasty, some scones and a notebook...

...plus a little yarn-bombed house for Peter's lapel, made by the Knit Angel while he had been talking..


Ron in the bookshop next door had, at my behest, gone to the ends of the earth to be sure to have copies in stock and I felt a tinge of pride that people were buying it and getting it signed and taking a wonderful slice of the Shire home with them. The signing queue was moved to the sofa and Peter took his time, talking to everyone as he signed each book.


A really special final event... we couldn't have wished or planned for better.

Thank you Peter.

 

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Down the Deep Lanes ~ Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious.

Peter Beacham ~ Pevsner's Cornwall @PortEliotFest

Wanderings...

Dodging out inbetween the deluges has become an art form here.

The merest hint of sunshine and it is out with the dogs...if there is no hint of sunshine I miraculously HAVE to empty the dishwasher / sort the washing / tidy up because really what's the point of us both getting drenched.

Anyway one glorious morning we downed tools and both wandered up to Bury Wood with the sun beating down as if it was full summer...

From top left (click to enlarge)

The woods seem to have survived the worst of the storms intact, just a few stray branches down but no major damage...

With so much rain It has been a good winter for moss, masses of it everywhere...

And patterns on tree trunks that could, for all the world, be a Google Earth-type view of the landscape...

I always love the upwards view...

And it doesn't seem five minutes since we bade farewell to the bluebells, and now we greet them once more...

Nell on her usual ball-throw-fetch-drop-throw-fetch-drop routine...here she is pleading for just one more throw, the anticipation characterised by that raised paw which would look so endearing were it not for the fact that this is about the three hundredth time, and we are usually done in by all the ball-flinging.

The sun was creating ladders through the trees. Some days we catch the light just right and this was a perfect day.

And lastly, there's Rusty looking particularly handsome, this was just before he took himself off into the stagnant cattle trough for his regular dip.

Anyone else been for a nice wander this week...

Beating the Bounds... The Wonnacott Boys

Something I had known, but am not sure how I knew, was that the two of the sons from Hardicott, the farm that surrounds us here, had been killed in the First World War.

I have often wandered the fields nursing a bit of a tragi-romantic notion of young lives cut short, wondering how many times perhaps they too had walked those paths and looked out over those views. Maybe even this picture in their mind's eye as they sat in the trenches, and then just imagine the grief of their parents...
 
Think on it though, they must have seen this view daily, the corner of the field forever England in which we sit was once part of their farm; our house two farm worker's cottages knocked into one, so they would have known it well. We discover from the 1911 census returns that the horse men lived here, the carters and the ploughers.

In one cottage, perhaps the one that is now Tinker's Cott, lived George and Selina Peck and their four children, Alice, Frederick, George and Alfred, in the other James and Eliza Holman. As when Mo and Arthur stopped by this summer,  I love the fact that I now know more names. Maybe George and James even kept their horses in the field behind the house and from which this picture was taken.

The soldier sons of the farm were Eri and Thomas Wonnacott, confirmed on the war memorial in the village.

Eri an unusual name, not Eric with the 'c' missed off by mistake, but Biblical and meaning 'watchful' and also unusual enough to be traceable with some certainty. A bit of work exploring the census and Parish records as well as some information online ( the family is vast and has its own website) and I discovered that Family Wonnacott of Hardicott Farm was quite a tribe.

The 1881 census reveals that Eri Senior was born in 1851 and is now 29.

He farms 190 acres at Hardicott. He has a housekeeper and two servants. Eri's first wife Selina Palmer dies in 1880 at the age of 24 (I wonder whether in childbirth) and is buried within sight of this memorial. Eri then marries Elizabeth Palmer aged 22 (Selina's sister?)  in 1882.

The 1891 census reveals a rapid succession of children for the couple, two (not twins) in one year even ...

Frank (1883) Harold (1883) John (1885) Ethel (1886) James (1887) Mary (1889) and Annie (1890) all born before Elizabeth is thirty, seven babies in as many years. Much of the criticism levelled at the BBC TV series The Village was that it was relentlessly dismal, but somehow, apart from the odd glimmer, I can't imagine that raising so many children here and running a farm can have been easy. We are miles from anywhere even now and with a car, and the farm itself is still isolated and a fair old trek from the village. It is cold and damp and exposed to the extremes of the weather, heaven knows how Elizabeth got the nappies and the clothes washed and dry with no mains water or electricity.

Moving onto the 1901 census and I discover that father Eri has died (1899) at the age of forty-eight but not before some more begetting, Ira (1894) and finally our two boys, Eri (1896) and Thomas (1897) 

So in 1899 Elizabeth is left with ten children, the oldest just seventeen and a big farm to run, and in very a unofficial-history-like way that would doubtless make academics and proper historians shudder, I start to think of all the perhaps and the possiblys and the maybes in my imagination.

I felt sure Eri Senior's death at forty-eight would have been unusual and unexpected. My money was on a farm accident perhaps, so it was back to the library and the microfiche of the local newspaper. What I discovered came as quite a surprise, but that's another story.

In March 1912 Eri Wonnacott's second son Harold, now a grocer's apprentice, and his wife Annie, and their daughter Mary aged three, along with Harold's younger sister, also Mary, travel from Liverpool to New York on board the Lusitania, thus missing the Titanic disaster by weeks. They pass through Ellis Island before finally settling in Edmonton, Alberta where I discover, not surprisingly that more Wonnacotts still live. I doubt there can be many places in the world where the sun doesn't rise and set on a Wonnacott family.

And the two youngest sons, Eri and Thomas will go off to war.

Eri, a Lance Corporal in the Gloucestershire Regiment dies in June 1918 at the age of 22 of wounds received. Some weeks earlier his battalion, the twelfth has been involved in the Battle of Hazebrouck and I wonder whether this might be where those wounds were sustained. Eri is buried in the Tannay British Cemetery at Thiennes in northern France, just seven miles from Hazebrouck where the casualty clearing stations were located, so it seems likely.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission makes searching for this information very easy.

Thomas, a Second Lieutenant in the Devonshire Regiment has been killed in action in May 1917 at the age of twenty and his name is recorded on the memorial at Arras.

Given that the dates of the Arras offensive are April to May 1917, it seemed likely that Thomas was killed during that, and with no known grave. A microfiche search of the local paper eventually yielded an announcement in the weekly War Notes column on May 25th 1917...

'Mrs Wonnacott, Hardicott, Tavistock has received information that her youngest son, Second Lieutenant T.H. Wonnacott, Devon Regt, was, on May 9th reported wounded and missing. He was in command of a company and was seen some time after he was wounded. Stretcher bearers were fetched but before they could arrive the Germans were in possession of the ground.'

On today of all days, November 11th, it seems right to remember Eri and Thomas Wonnacott and I wonder if you too have people you are remembering today??

 

Footnote ::

Studying the family tree, I discover that a great-nephew of Eri and Thomas, son of a son of their brother James, is Tim Wonnacott of TV's Bargain Hunt fame, small world indeed.

 

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ The Twelfth Duke

Now where were we...

Mo's dad had died and the family had to leave their home (many years later now our home) but the previous decade had been one of complete turmoil here in Milton Abbot too, because in October 1953 the twelfth Duke of Bedford, landowner, main local employer, benefactor, provider of housing and supplier of a great deal of charity support, had gone missing on the estate at Endsleigh just two miles away from us here. Mo would have been almost two years old, (I would have been about two weeks) and blissfully unaware, but I feel sure the ripples would have been felt far and wide. 

The Duke had gone missing on the Friday morning and there was controlled panic as the days passed with still no sign. Just the night before he had been in consultation with Horace Adams his water bailiff and fishing ghillie about the contents of a cormorant's stomach.

As you do...

The cormorants were the scourge of the Tamar, nabbing the young salmon, and one of Horace's many tasks was to shoot them and then take the booty to the Duke's study for perusal.

As concerns mounted that the Duke, who had gone off alone for an early morning walk, may have fallen in the river and drowned, a contingent of Royal Marines and a plane joined the search. The body, with fatal shotgun wounds, was eventually discovered on Sunday October 11th 1953, lying in bushes at the foot of the steps to Swiss Cottage, Georgiana, Duchess of Bedford's 1815 homage to all things Alpine, and now a Landmark Trust property.

This tragedy occurred just weeks before the Duke was due to distribute various properties within the family to avoid the eventual payment of death duties. Of course it had all gone horribly wrong and there was much speculation, but eventually a verdict of accidental death was reached with the conclusion that the Duke had tripped over his gun and accidentally shot himself through the head, but imagine the whispered talk in the village shop and the pubs, and the rumour and the gossip.

It's exciting enough now when 'royalty' stay locally. Jim the Postie is our main source of information...

'The S.A.S. are in the woods...' he says under his breath....

.. if they think they are invisible they haven't reckoned on Jim's eagle eyes.

The death duties, in excess of £4 million, were indeed crippling and, bar one property overlooking the Tamar and still in their ownership today, that was the end of the Bedford family tenure and their benevolence in the locality. Lands bestowed in the 16th century on John Russell, the first Duke and a close advisor of Henry VIII, were to be dispersed.

Horace Adams in his wonderful memoir Memories of a River Keeper, an account of his years of service at Endsleigh, reveals intense allegiance and loyalty to the twelfth Duke, recounting the fear that rippled through his own mind and which must have been repeated in just about very home in the vicinity, ..

'That was the end of my Duke. I was down in the dumps I don't mind telling you. A lot of people were distressed, but I was distressed terrible.... His Grace was very good to me, very human...he was our bread and butter. He'd talked about installing electricity at Fishery Cottage, but never mind about electricity, electricity's no good to you if you haven't got a job.'

Incidentally Horace's old home, Fishery Cottage, now renovated and currently up for sale...you can actually take a virtual tour here.

The thirteenth Duke, somewhat estranged and living in South Africa was summoned back, and in his autobiography, A Silver Plated Spoon, describes Endsleigh as 'a hideous Victorian house standing in the middle of our Tavistock estates,' so he was hardly going to fall in love with the house enough to fight for it (even if it is more Georgian 'cottage orne' than Victorian) or the surrounding valley. Attention, and any remaining fortune, was focused on the family seat at Woburn Abbey and everything here, including our house, and even the Duke's beloved budgerigar collection (yes, he was a budgie man) was eventually split up and sold piecemeal. much to the horror of poor Horace.

Looking at the archived 1956 sale catalogue of the properties and surrounding land reads like a list of just about every place we know here, homes of friends, workplaces of others and stretching almost as far as the eye can see from the field behind us ...

Bedford Estate, Tavistock, sale catalogue...
Includes Endsleigh House and gardens
The following farms - Hardstone, Woodtown, Dunterton Barton, Sherrill, Eastacott, Edgcumbe, Leigh, Southcombe, Buddlemead, Beara, Ford Beckadon and Youngcott, Ford Mill, Hardicott, Timbrelham, Carthamartha, Rezare West, Rezare, Rezare East, Barons, Burrows, Trecombe, Tutwell and Underhill, Bridge, Lower Hampt, Newhouse and Latchley Fields, Lowertown, Solomons, Clitters smallholding, Lamerhooe, Capeltor, Scrubtor, Grenoven, Hele, Woodovis, Rubytown, Little Tor, Gulworthy West, Blanchdown, Gulworthy, Morwell Barton, Morwellham, Lower Sheepridge, Buctor
Land and houses in Milton Abbot, fields at Bealsmill in Stoke Climsland, Milton Abbot County Primary School, Scrubtor and Grenoven and Lower Hampt and Greenscombe Woods, Blanchdown and Hanging Cliff Woods and the Sawmill, Gulworthy Cottages, Latchley Weir Cottage, Wheal Josiah Cottages, Wheal Anna Maria Houses, Hatch and Morwell Woods, Luscombedown and Morwelldown Plantations, Morwellham Cottages, Woodovis House, Hawkmoor House, Tamar View, Newbridge House and buildings, Hunsham Cottage and fields, Newbridge Cottage, Hatchwood House, Lower Bealswood House, gardens at Gunnislake, Broadwell fields
Also the Tavistock to Morwellham Canal

Those in bold surround us here and a spare £300,000 back in the late 1950s would have bought you fourteen thousand acres of woodland and agricultural land (including the village) plus Endsleigh House and fourteen miles of prime Tamar fishing. 

I like that last bit, let's throw in the canal for good measure.

 

 

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Beating the Bounds ~ Mo's Return - Gerald and Beatrice

Beating the Bounds ~ Mo's Return

Gertrude Jekyll

Beating the Bounds ~ Mo's Return - Gerald and Beatrice

In the wake of Mo and Arthur's visit (and they are coming back soon for photos) I have been thinking about the era in which they lived here, the 1950s when Mo was born, through to 1964 when they lost their home on the death of their father Gerald. Several occupancies later it is now our home, nineteen years ago last week since we moved in, but we know it also became quite dilapidated in the interim, losing much of its roof at some time too. Mo and I speculated about whether the house was actually ever lived in again after they were given notice to quit, and before it was eventually sold off by the estate, especially knowing that it needed big renovations in the late 1970s, and houses take time to degenerate. Lived in or vacant, wanted by someone else in 1964 or not, there was no question of them staying on out of charity, they were out.

Gerald (pictured here with Beatrice on their wedding day in May 1942) had worked at Leigh Barton, the Big House next to Endsleigh, but suffered from acromegaly and ankylosing spondylitis, becoming increasingly infirm and disabled after a fall whilst out hedging. He was eventually rendered almost immobile and housebound, and suffered badly from bronchitis dying in January 1964.

I think about the damp air, and how hard we work to keep it at bay in the winter months (and the summer sometimes) so how much harder it must have been for Gerald to battle with so many health issues. Mo says she wonders now how on earth her mum managed to care for all of them, and I wonder too. It is quiet and isolated here, off the beaten track even nowadays, facilities were limited, supplies intermittent unless delivered or fetched on foot from the shop two miles way. 

As Mo recalled, and I remember this too, children were seen and not heard back in the day, knew better than to ask questions and would have been told little if they had. Parents' troubles were rarely shared with the children. They would have needed much fortitude, and talking to Mo it is clear the family had plenty of it, this was the way life was and they just got on and lived it...

'I think Mum did take everything in her stride. She had her work in the farm house at Leigh. I seem to think chicken was a treat when we were growing up. At Christmas Mum would bring home chickens from Leigh and pluck and draw them for the Blanchards. I used to help pluck them but wouldn’t draw them!!! I think we were always given a chicken then for Christmas dinner...'

But both Beatrice and Gerald had lived through a war..

Gerald was in the Home Guard, the local unit pictured here outside the village school..

and Beatrice had been a land girl..

So both part of that generation that knew a thing or two about resilience, and whilst Gerald's death was a blow for the family, it must have been a merciful release for him, and though the family had to leave they were certainly not broken.

Rather flippantly in contrast I find that if I am trying to place a ten-year old me, sitting in my little bedroom in Surrey, in the context of those years, say 1964, the year that Gerald died, one of the ways I can do it is to look at what was Number 1 in the charts. The Searchers with Needles and Pins, The Beatles A Hard Day's Night,  Roy Orbison Pretty Woman. I'm right back there now, and even though times were hard for us too (how did anyone keep a house warm back then?) I was living in the comparable comfort of suburbia, with public transport and a phone and my comic-swapping friend Ann living around the corner, within roller-skating distance.

All this may have been the last thought on the mind of anyone who lived here in 1964 because the community at large around the village had been in turmoil for some years... more about that in the next instalment.

 

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ A Royal Visit

Honestly, you wait all year for a Royal Visit and then two happen in as many weeks, in fact three if you count Fran H-B's visit to us here tomorrow....the red carpet has been doing overtime.

Prince Charles was in Launceston last week, we didn't turn out, but we were up bright and early for Queen Victoria today and took you all along to swell the numbers which I hope was OK. Two trips out in a week, you'll all be exhausted.

'We are still here profiting by the bad sea to visit many beautiful points de vie in this mostly beautiful county. We saw yesterday one of the loveliest places possible - Endsleigh - the Duke of Bedford's about twenty miles from here...'

Letter to King of Belgium 14 August 1856

The Royal Yacht had arrived in Plymouth on Tuesday 12 August 1856 and, accompanied by Prince Albert and the Royal children, Queen Victoria disembarked up the Tamar at Morwellham Quay on 13 August before setting off for Endsleigh and I love the fact that she took time to write to the King of Belgium to tell him.

And bless her, Queen Victoria made a return visit to Morwellham today, on the anniversary...

Morwellham Quay, in the Tamar Valley just a few miles from us here, is one of those living history tourist attractions on your doorstep that you never bother to go to, all the children went to this one with schools at various times but we never did. 

I'll bet you all have something similar too??

I'd love to know where...

In its mid-nineteenth century heyday, the port of Morwell-ham (as it is pronounced) was the main means of transport for all the copper ore extracted from the mines in the area, and for that reason I had bought a year-long ticket earlier in the year and have been doing some walks down there, and travelling on the underground mine train as I research for Beating the Bounds.

Setting Queen Victoria's original visit in its historical context, the Crimean war had ended, the Victoria Cross had been instituted and Florence Nightingale had returned home the week before. The Queen had sent Florence a letter and a brooch earlier in the year, which seems like measured thanks for all that hard work, but there was nothing to award a woman then, no great national honour that could be bestowed. 

There was apparently a 21st century crinoline crisis when it became apparent that the Queen would not be able to extricate herself from any sort of landing craft, ancient or modern, and step ashore with the dignity required by us her loyal subjects. We were well prepared and had all been given a quick lesson in 'Her Majesty' followed by 'Mam' to rhyme with 'ham' and a curtsey or a bow, though I left this reprobate in the stocks for fear of trouble...

To the dulcet tones of a piper the Queen made her entrance  from the Garlandstone, the ship moored down on the Quay and we all hip hip hoorayed and waved our flags when required.

In 1856 the visit was reported in the Exeter newspaper with details of the Queen's attire...

'Wearing drab coloured dress with flowers and blue trimmings, blue silk visits and white lace bonnet..'

So sporting an approximation Queen Victoria set foot on land again today, and there really is no point in ordering your own frock, they had sold out across the country within hours this afternoon.


The Queen greeted her subjects...

and had a quick game of Tossing the (previously cleaned) Horseshoe...

before heading around the Quay for a full diary of engagements...with the blacksmith...

and the school..

By this time someone had let the reprobate out of the stocks which was clearly a mistake as he was busy trying on all the clothes...you can dress in Victorian costume for that really authentic visit..

We had a good wander around.

The river Tamar is beautiful everywhere in our eyes, and very different on this tidal stretch..

Wide and deep enough to cope with larger shipping, and in quantity. Imagine the bustle and the noise when the port was working to capacity. 

There was a fine looking shire horse, with apologies, far too big to get into one picture so I settled for a bit of his head ...

and his hooves. just to give you the general idea...

And while we are on the 'H's, a heron down by the river gave us the watchful eye but unusually didn't shift...

There is plenty to see, including Ruth's Cottage where the BBC series Edwardian Farm was filmed, and you can even see what Ruth kept under her bed...

We extracted the truth from a costumed living history cottage person...

'Go on then tell us...did Ruth really 'live' here... did she 'sleep' here??'

Basically no, they all lived comfortably in other cottages in the area whilst filming took place... too much to ask for really. I wouldn't have wanted to stay there.

The trip to Endsleigh bit wasn't re-enacted. We've been trying to work out how long it would take a carriage and horses to make the journey... quite a while was the best we could come up with. The road up out of Morwellham is steep and twisting, the Fiat Panda struggles enough and the journey takes us about twenty minutes. Queen Victoria would probably have made it for a late lunch with the Duke of Bedford.

Meanwhile I will complete the day on Queen Victoria's behalf, with a trip to Endsleigh for the Salon this evening...

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Mo's Return

A truly lovely thing happened the other day, so unexpected for all concerned that there were tears and I am so pleased I can make it fit Beating the Bounds.

It was about 11am and we were all out in the garden. I was pottering, Bookhound was mowing, and the Tinker was tickling his tomatoes with a brush which seems to have gained him at least a truss ( as I gather they are called, tomato ones, not surgical) if not two, in the contest that he and Bookhound are having to see whose plant yields the most. It's all very secretive, mystery feeding solutions being added along with covert observation of the opposition, with any threat of storm or gales seeing the pair of them rushing out to make sure all is well staked and sheltered.

Anyway, there we were a picture or rural contentment when a car pulled up at the gate.

Now on an average day maybe three or four cars go past. If anyone stops for any other reason than visiting us, or delivering a parcel, it is usually via the postcode on a SatNav which brings them to our gate, but we share the postcode with two other properties and invariably redirect. But no, it was obviously our house they were interested in as the car slowed to a crawl.

'Can I help,' I inquired, leaning over the gate whilst wielding my secateurs.

'I was born here in 1950 ' said a very excited voice from the back seat.

Now I can't tell you the hours I have spent wondering who may have lived in our home in the past., I think we talked about it on here recently so I know I am not alone. We only have the deeds dating back to the sale in the 1960s, so I have ploughed through census returns and Parish registers and discovered residents various for our house in 1911, farm workers all but little else, and no photos of how the house may have looked back in the day. We only know what local people tell us, mostly that the place was dilapidated and the roof was 'off' for several years before it was renovated in the 1970s.

Well, we had that car parked in the drive, the occupants out, Mo and her brother Arthur and Mo's husband Peter, and the guided tour in progress before you could blink.

And yes Mo had been born in Tinker's Cott in 1950, back then not even called Youngcott, but Nos 1 & 2 Hardicott Cottages (which sheds new light on all those 'wrong' searches I may have been doing) and lived here until she was 14, with Arthur and their parents Beatrice and Gerald Rooke. Gerald worked in the grounds over at Leigh, the Big House next door to Endsleigh, about two miles away, and he would cycle to work each day up the steepest of hills. 

This picture of Mo with her mum was taken outside Tinker's Cott...

and at a place were there was once a porch and a door but where the Tinker now has a window..

But I keep looking at that pillar, with maybe a rose growing up it, and thinking how strange that we too have unwittingly placed a post in almost the exact same spot to support the veranda roof which Bookhound built. Mo was born in December 1950 and I reckon this picture is probably taken in spring 1951, and that rose is just beginning to sprout.... wonder what it is??

Mo's bedroom was the one the Tinker sleeps in now, whilst Arthur's is now a bathroom. We did a grand tour and Mo was moved to tears when she looked out of 'her' bedroom window and saw the familiar view, and there was so much that she and Arthur were able to tell us in response to my daft questions...

Did they have a cat... yes, a white one called Snowy.

What colour were the walls .... they were painted with green distemper, and we have found traces of that.

This hook in the beam... that was for the oil lamp.

Mo noticed it instantly....the same door latch on the bedroom door...

What did they grow in the garden... apparently Mo's dad would turn in his grave if he knew what we pay for rhubarb in a shop now. There was more rhubarb than they knew what to do with, along with raspberries and lots of flowers, antirrhinums a speciality.

We are about to plant rhubarb again and have some Timperley Early ready to go in.

And how on earth did they keep warm, because we have to work hard at it...

Mo didn't remember it being a particularly cold house though agrees it must have been, especially given that they had no electricity until 1960, just a range for cooking in the kitchen which was also used to heat the flat irons. I wonder if it resembled this range we came across in Truro Museum. I took pictures at the time just in case they came in handy one day...

Where the Tinker now has a woodburner, was once an open grate and fender. When the fire wouldn't draw Mo's mum always blamed the wind, as do we. If it's from the north we struggle, and that is usually when you need the fire the most, we always joke about it.

As we had guessed, the wood shed at that end of the house was the privy, and I'm mighty glad we have that better sorted now.

Milk was delivered and there was a mobile butcher, and a fish man, otherwise it was a two mile walk across to a shop in the neighbouring village, and also to school, with a bus service into Tavistock once a week for the Friday market.

The bus service hasn't improved a jot, in fact almost non-existent now. We joke that if you get the Thursday bus to Launceston you can't come back until the following Tuesday when there seems to be another one.

Interestingly Mo talked about being a child here, and how self-contained they had to be. To get to a friend's house was a long walk, almost time to come home by the time she arrived, but of course she knew of the woods, and the holloway and walked them often, and for all the seeming deprivations she never remembers being bored, there was always something to do.

When Mo's father Gerald died in 1964 they lost their right to live in the house (more of this in another post to come) Beatrice took a job as a housekeeper and moved with Mo and Arthur to the outskirts of Whitchurch near Tavistock. But in a nice moment of serendipity Mo told us that her mother had left school at fourteen and gone into service at the Manor House in Tavistock. Well our first house, the one we left to come here, was one of the terraced worker's cottages right opposite, so what a lovely sense of continuity that gave everything.

Mo has often passed by this way since 1964 for old time's sake, but this was the first time she had been able to see inside the house...her email afterwards said it all really...

"We can’t thank you enough for allowing us into your homes yesterday. It meant so much to me and it was quite emotional to step back into my childhood home. I know Arthur was as appreciative as me. It is just wonderful that such lovely people live in our childhood home and care so much about it and and love it...."

And me so overcome with excitement I completely forgot to take a picture of them, never mind, next time.

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Berry Wood

The bluebells in Berry Wood had their last fling weeks ago, just a few seed heads left now, but the light and the hush are mesmerising...

The canopy is at its summeriest, lush and glorious..

and my most favourite view, framed by the branches...well I could sit there all the day long...

But we have made an interesting discovery about this beloved place. 

I am speaking to as many local people as I can in my search for information about the past around us here, and we had tea with John and Ann at their home in the village a while back. We have known them for years, now retired they have lived and farmed around here for a very long time, their house in the village looks across the fields and is surrounded by the most immaculate and beautiful garden. John regularly wins prizes for his vegetables at the Village Show while Ann scoops the art and cookery honours; people like this are the beating heart and soul of traditional village life, welcoming and friendly and a gold mine of information, so we spent a memorable afternoon with them. They showed us some original eighteenth century maps of part of their ground which they still own but now rent out, and we were engrossed...

 
...once I got my bearings I realised this was part of one of my Long Walks, setting off from home, along the lane to the footpaths and through the woodlands. I am hoping you can get your bearings too with the help of this image from Google Maps, the secret is to start at the top of the picture (yellow star). I hop over a stile at the top of that very narrow strip of field (yellow star) and walk on down to the woods.

Some of the old hedgerows have gone but that narrow strip was once the driveway leading down to the farm, which has now lost its house but still has some old barns. It was fascinating to hear John talk about how, as a young farmer, he had cleared some of that woodland to create more grazing land. Having walked down through, and seen how steep it is, that is no mean achievement. The minute John's back was turned it reverted to woodland, to what it wanted to be, we say likewise about our garden reverting back to field while we sleep.

The conversation moved onto our own Berry Wood....well not exactly ours, but we walk up there almost daily so almost ours by default perhaps.

When might it have been planted, and why there...

This is one of our heavenly places on God's earth, so how disconcerting to learn from John and Ann that they had always understood it to be an 'anthrax wood', and they mentioned a couple of others too... clumps of trees surrounded by a carefully built high wall, and the place where the farmer would bury the sheep and plant the trees as sign that the land must remain undisturbed and would not be for ploughing.

There is no question, the wall is high, deceptively so (too high to jump down from...for me anyway, and even the dogs think twice about it) and very solidly and purposefully built, as this picture taken in April shows...

My thoughts immediately turned to Gruinard Island, a slight over-reaction admittedly, and it hasn't stopped us walking up there. No skull and crossbones signs that we can see, but maybe we'll hold off any digging. I am also pleased to report that it is well below the source of our spring water which laboratory analysis shows to be pure enough to bottle... and to think we just water the garden with it.

I didn't know much about anthrax either, and I still don't beyond being bacterial and not contagious between humans, because on looking it up I either encounter the rock band by that name, or scary stuff on chemical warfare which I can't bear to read. Yet thinking about it, just what would the farmers have done with infected sheep all those years ago when the disease was so common?? 

It would make perfect and practical sense to bury them all deeply in the same clearly identifiable place given the potential for the spores to live on in the soil, and thus to limit the spread of infection to other grazing animals and humans of course. 

All fascinating, and now I am thinking that I had only spelt it as Berry Wood on an assumption, but that a spelling of Bury Wood, and Bury Lane leading up to it, might make far more sense. And I am sure someone has mentioned here before the possibility of "Bury" also being the site of an old fortification.

I am on the trail and hoping to discover more soon, but meanwhile I can ask my worldwide encyclopaedia out there... has anyone else heard of anthrax woods or anything similar ??

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ The 1840 Tithe Map

Lesley Chapman, in her book The Living History of Hedgerows, recommends seeking out the local 1840 Tithe Map as an aid to research. I had already done this (thank you library microfiche) and from that we have not only been able to see the changes in the hedges and boundaries, but also to identify the original names of many of the fields around us here.

I have to be honest and confess that I didn't really know exactly what the 1840 Tithe Maps were but, as expected, it involved a tax of money paid by land owners to the local church, thus replacing the previous one tenth of everything made, earned, grown or produced. Charges were set as a proportion of the value of the land owned and this involved the massive national survey that produced these historic maps.

There, now we all know.

I can highly recommend the microfiche adventure in your local library if this sort of thing is of any interest. I commandeered the thing for hours, running off photocopies and taking notes for the best part of a day, and with no queue waiting I carried on. I have since discovered that Devon are in the process of digitisng this archive so eventually access will be online.

This may not seem very exciting, but to know more about how this Parish land that I am walking looked in 1840, and to know the names that those who lived and worked would have used for the fields, does feel like a real and vibrant connection with the past, and an important one given that so much has been eroded and lost down the years. 

As you can see we are right on the limits of the Parish Boundary, and our house (red arrow just below the centre, and not yet built in 1840) we now know sits in the corner of Lower Parson Dart's Field, whilst nearby we have Scramble Land Orchard and Long Field, and that field to the front of the house is called Moor. Closer perusal suggests that, unlike many, our little portion of the Tithe Map is highly accurate, especially when compared with the 21st century Google maps satellite image... even down to that dog-leg bend in the hedge in the field behind us. How on earth the Land Surveyors achieved such accuracy without an aerial view defies belief.


The shape of the fields around us largely unchanged since 1840, though some hedges have disappeared, but I can now look out for their traces as I walk and reimagine the fields as they would have been.

But the 1840 Tithe Map Records also revealed something else.

When we moved here in 1994 our house was called Youngcott Cottage. That seemed entirely too many Cotts in one name so we dropped the 'Cottage' and had thousands of address labels printed that said 'Youngcott.'

When some derelict barns, situated on the original Youngcott land lower down from us, were sold for conversion, our new neighbours asked if they could reclaim the proper name. We threw the labels away, had a think and came up with umpteen suggestions before eventually plumping for Higher Youngcott, and for no other reason than that we were 'above' them on the lie of the land. It seemed obvious even to our twentieth century rural sensibilities.

So imagine my surprise when I came across this, on the 1840 Tithe Map details...

 Has anyone else out there researched their home and its history, or their environs in a similar way??

I would be really interested to hear about it, and also other possible sources of information...

 

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Beating the Bounds ~ Rogation Perambulation 2013

Beating the Bounds ~ The Belfry

Beating the Bounds ~ Rogation Perambulation 2013

Well how wise I was to get out for my Beating the Bounds walk a few weeks ago (six or seven I now realise) before the weather changed for the considerably worse (and we have had better-worse-hot-worse since) and I had forgotten to post this so please bear with me. I need it on here for posterity or I am going to be all out of synch and meeting myself coming back.

Glorious sunshine was replaced by plummeting temperatures, howling gales and torrential rain, a reminder that we were not quite there yet, though I was so fed up with my winter clothes I did the change-over a little early for me...before the May is out, but did keep a few clouts (thermals) to hand just in case.

This, you can be forgiven for having forgotten, was my planned route... left out of the gate, along the lane, hop over the stile, walk up that Parish boundary, nip across to the woods, down the Holloway, nice and tidy should be back for an early lunch.

This is what I eventually walked...

All went well as I skipped down the lane with a bit of a spring in my step, though sadly minus Little Nell who was seasonal for the first time and thus attracted by and irresistible to anything on four legs. What a palava all that is. Rusty had to go back to the Gamekeeper's kennel for the duration and there will be surgical intervention in two months time for Little Nell. There will be no Little Little Nells, one is plenty.

 
I headed towards my ingress point down in what we, with some originality, call The Dip, at this stile...

 before making my way along the boundary line marked by those trees.

Unfortunately progess was then thwarted by barbed wire and bullocks so I had to do a few detours...
I also came across a bridle path within my square mile (ish) that I had always wondered about so I followed that for a while before getting my bearings and looping back through the farm, along to the woods and down the green lane towards home.

It was steep uphill walking for a while but along the way the views were even more stunning than I am used to, and easy to see that the earth is definitely round as I turned through 180 degrees on this spot.

Isn't it amazing how appealing everything can look on a sunny day, even the thistles, the curse of our own garden, had a shape and symmetry that it would be churlish not to admire.

I did a short detour along the edge of the woods on my way down to say thank you to our spring water supply, bubbling merrily out of the overflow pipe. This can be routed into the house in an emergency should the bore hole and the pump be in trouble, but we have it piped to various taps around the garden for copious lovely cool, fresh, un-chemical watering, and we never take its presence for granted.

and how welcoming the re-greening Holloway looked...

I didn't see another soul all the way round, but then that's usually the case, and so by this time I'm singing Joni Mitchell's Little Green, because why ever not...

Just a little green
Like the color when the spring is born
There'll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow
Just a little green
Like the nights when the Northern lights perform
There'll be icicles and birthday clothes
And sometimes there'll be sorrow...

Except no sorrow today as I made my way down, just aching feet..

A last look back at the woods also greening nicely back on that May day...

and then home to a cool drink and a Rammalation biscuit...or two... or three because lunch had been and gone.

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Beating the Bounds ~ The Belfry

Not quite either of the belfries within my Beating the Bounds square mile, (though I did sing in the choir there for a couple of years,) but St Andrew's Buckland Monachorum near enough, because all these local churches were being built at about the same time. It is said that if you travelled around these parts in the mid-15th century you would have tripped over a half-built church every few miles. A number of them have a similar tower design topped out with very distinctive pinnacles, the same team working round and adding the icing on the church cake.

Tower building was all about attracting the eye and announcing grandeur and importance, a way of providing the people with an experience of heaven on earth. It was about rivalry between villages too, and each tower an example of the care and expense lavished on their church by the community. Rarely did those communities number more than 200 people, and towers were expensive additions which according to John Scott must have eaten up a huge proportion of the local wealth.

I'm not sure I had ever given much thought to who would have paid for these, but as John Scott affirms the main motive was the glory of God and we do the builders and the benefactors a great injustice if we allow 21st century cynicism to doubt it. Look what a glorious legacy they have left us, and sadly what an endless struggle it can be to raise the funds to maintain them now.

I had found John Scott's book in the reference library a while back, entitled Towers and Bells of Devon. Two hefty volumes in fact, and my interest in all things bells piqued by the discovery of a book which should, if the title is anything to go by, have been enough to send me to sleep. Far from it, all utterly fascinating. A meticulous history of each church tower in the Shire with date, size, weight, note and name of each bell ... bit like a very great big baby, but with a note of dedications and inscriptions as well. I hadn't known about the inscriptions but I discovered that the bells in our village church bear little gems like...

'Prosperity to this Parish'

and

' Tenor I to the Church the Living Call and to the Grave I summon All' .

This latter I assume a reference to the tolling of the sonourous Passing Bell, the death knell that seems to be getting a good work out as I read The Nine Tailors. 

So at our allotted time there we were, first in the queue, Bookhound leading the way up the stone steps to the top of the seventy foot tower, built using local rubble and granite, and already we discover a design fault because though I could just about squeeze up the stairs, Bookhound found his top half was around the spiral with his legs still to waiting to catch up. If you look carefully you might just be able to see me 'going round the bend' this on the descent..

Tiny windows on the ascent giving a clue that we were rising higher, just in case the knees weren't telling us as much too..

and higher..

until eventually we emerged onto the roof, and what sights to behold..

...and a close up of one of those pinnacles.

On the way down (much quicker) we were able to stop and peek through the grill at the belfry itself,

From the church website I discover a little nugget of history.

The Buckland Monachorum tower design, with its high pinnacles at the limits of  practicability, sacrificed strength for elegance, though mercifully the first four bells hung all stayed put. However when two more were added in 1723, within ten years and with repeated ringing, the tower was seriously weakened necessitating major repairs. It would seem luck that the whole lot didn't come crashing down.

Now that all makes me want to read The Spire by William Golding and The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I have started both books and failed to finish them, but (sorry *SPOILER* alert) don't the towers collapse in both??

In 1858, it was discovered that the wooden bell cage had rotted and that someone had misguidedly driven wedges between the timbers and the walls of the tower.

Tsk, tsk.

This had caused fractures in the tower as a result of the constant vibration. More worryingly it was not until 1905 that the bells were re-hung in a new wood frame, before being re-cast in 1947 and situated in the metal frame visible, with two tenor bells added to make a glorious peal of eight bells.

Eight bells can ring 40,320 changes which would take eighteen hours. just saying in case you were wondering. I think the sum might 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 etc, someone will work it through.

It's hard to imagine how on earth any work is done in a belfry. The space is seriously limited and claustrophobic, to say nothing of dangerous, and I have yet to figure how you get a hefty bell in and out unless it is somehow lowered down through here, the chamber below housing the clock mechanism.

Unusually the ringers gallery below the clock chamber overlooks the nave of the church which I am not sure I had ever realised in those years that I occupied the choir stalls...

and like many such galleries has some wonderful signs and notices in place. This little warning from 1755... (if you click on these pictures they should enlarge)

and this more recent one...

Imagine the clock chiming in and messing up the changes. 

And so to the ringing, of which I know nothing beyond that which I have learned from the authorial campanology of Dorothy L.Sayers, so I am grateful to that Coronation edition of Picture Post for the low down.. or should that be the high down...or maybe the up down.

The ringers of St Paul's reveal the secrets for the man on the street down below in 1953. Basically you must learn how to pull on a rope to achieve certain results and without 'music' as it were, all has to be done from memory. You musn't move your feet while the rope's end is on the floor or you'll be swept off them and dumped back down with two broken ankles, and not surprisingly in this case the whole process requires absolute concentration. 

World records were few back then. I am not sure about now but the 1922 feat of 21,363 changes in twelve hours with not a single ringer taking a break (no, not even for 'that') seems remarkable and knocks Lord Peter Wimsey's meagre nine hours into touch. Apparently records were rare because no one wanted to listen to bells ringing for thirteen hours.

For anyone who hasn't read The Nine Tailors, the Picture Post piece ends with another spoiler so look away now...

'Disillusioning fact is that even the combined noise of St Paul's twelve bells at their loudest wouldn't really kill the victim of a detective story, locked up in the belfry. It might make his ears tingle - not more.'

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink....

Edward Thomas knew much of holloways and Robert Macfarlane quotes this poem in his latest book Holloway, produced with fellow writer Dan Richards and artist Stanley Donwood. The book is a slim but rich and intense fusion of words, observations and drawings compiled after the three returned to the holloway that Robert Macfarlane had explored with Roger Deakin in 2005. That excursion is recounted in The Wild Places...

'There is wildness everywhere,' Roger had written once, 'if we only stop in our tracks and look around us.' To him, the present-day and the close-at-hand were as astonishing as the long-gone and the far-afield. He was an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.'

The holloway (known in Devon as a green lane) just a few yards from our front gate, has become a special place to us in the nineteen years that we have lived in this house, and as I Beat the Bounds with renewed enthusiasm I am getting to know every inch. I spot every new heap of badger or rabbit digging, each newly broken branch, each recently shifted stone.

It now occurs to me that this of course is the rabbit's own 'holloway'. 

Our green lane is little known or used by anyone else; perhaps a few horse-riders, the man from the RSPB who comes to do an annual bird count, and may be just very occasionally some Sunday bikers who, having found it on the map, have to ride it perhaps on the Climbing Everest principle, because it is there. It occurred to me as I walked up with Nell the other day that it is largely us and our footfall that are now wearing and keeping the path patent and passable.

 
'They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than of suddeness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair. they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to other old paths & tracks in the landscape - ways that still connect place to place and person to person.'

According to Robert Macfarlane none of these paths are younger than 300 years old, in which case maybe it's our turn in history to know and connect with this one, and we never fail to wonder about that history as we walk.

Who may have built the stone sides and what labour it must have involved...

...and who may have used it, and how.

And we think about odd things too... what if a horse and cart were coming down as one was going up, well then what... that debate kept us going the full length of the holloway one day.

Can you drive a horse and cart backwards in a confined space...

Would this little place, about half-way up, with some extra width have made a passing place...

I'd buy a seat and make it a Sitting Place  

And a special treat, some words especially for you all from Robert Macfarlane, and a request....

 

"I have come to realise, in the eight years since I first wrote about holloways, that many people share my fascination with these sunken lanes, which have been harrowed down into the landscape by the passage of feet and rainwater (and sometimes 4x4s...). People have sent me photographs of the holloways they know, the paintings and sketches they have made of them, maps with their locations indicated, or the stories, memories and folklore they associate with them. Something about the idea of a path trodden by unknown predecessors, something about the everyday pleasure of walking and following these lanes, and something more mysterious about the symbolic power of the holloway as an image (tunnel, rabbit-hole, vortex, portal to the underworld), seems to draw the imagination of many. 

Last year, the artist Stanley Donwood, the writer Dan Richards, the letter-press printer Richard Lawrence and I self-published a small book about holloways from first principles. The first principle being a lump of lead. That lump of lead was melted to cast fresh type, which was used to set the text, which was then hand-printed onto soft thick Somerset wove paper pages, which were then ordered, stitched and bound, to make an ISBN-less book in an edition of 277. A year on, Faber and Faber have published a hardback version of that book, *Holloway*. They have also set up a site where people can post their own images of holloways and sunken paths. So - if there is a holloway you know or have known, it would be wonderful if you considered adding it to the gallery. The first few have begun to appear. I have this notion that, if the gallery gathers enough images, we might tag each of them to their location on a map, and in this way create a holloway cartography. The holloways don't need to be English or British, though, or especially old or deep. There's one from Normandy already up there. And perhaps the youngest holloways are barely a few inches in depth; perhaps holloways run through cities rather than only through the countryside. 

The site is here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/holloway/ I'm told you have to be a member of flickr to be able to post; I'm also told that if you're not, it's easy to join. But I know little about the internet and its ways. If flickr defeats you, as it has defeated me, you can always send your photos to johng@faber.co.uk, with a quick note saying they're for the holloway gallery, and with any info about location, photographer and such like for a caption. Thank you!"

My photos are in already so please do send yours too, and now scroll down where Magnus awaits with gifts.

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