Poetting in Totnes, plus a detour to Dartmoor

Having missed out on driving Son the Elder to Crewkerne last week - and enjoying a day fossicking around Dorset while he roboteered - because of waking up in the morning to the flattest of flat tyres that Could Not Be Pumped Back Up (and needed replacing), I was relieved to get safely down to Devon for my reading in Totnes a few days later. First, though, a stop on Dartmoor, my heart's home.

Hound Tor

Looking over to Hayne Down

I chose to visit Hound Tor, hoping that through the miracle of magical thinking, the late-flowering bluebells that cover the Down and Holwell Lawn might somehow be out, but as I suspected, I was just a bit too early to witness that glorious lavender haze that seems to float over the moor when they're in full bloom.

A few were just beginning to show their faces, though, along with heath milkwort, spring cinquefoil and marsh lousewort, which were lovely to see.

View across the Beckabrook to Black Hill, Grea Tor, Smallacombe Rocks, Haytor, Holwell Tor, etc

It was very warm for April, despite the breeze, so I had a bit of a sit-down on a rock. Up ahead a deer was grazing, and down in the valley, the cuckoos were shouting to each other.

The deer is in the middle distance, against a patch of green

Grea Tor 

Looking from Haytor and Holwell Tor to Saddle and Rippon Tors

It was then nearly time to leave, so I wandered back through the rocky outcrops of Hound Tor.

Looking back towards Haytor, you can see a face in profile in the rock

Looking up to Easdon Tor, with Hayne Down in the middle distance

Then down down down to Totnes, where a poster of me and my fellow-Bristol-poet-and-reader, Tom Sastry, greeted me on the door of the venue, which was the Barrel House and very fabulous indeed. I spent some time staring in every direction, open-mouthed.

Julie Mullen was our MC, and she'd put together a great bill, but first she read some of her own arresting poetry.

Then the first of two sets by the fantastic Bulgarian vocal group, Gora Ensemble, who were mesmerising ... 

... and an excellent set of funny-but-deadly-serious poems from Tom Sastry, reading from his new collection, 'Life Expectancy Begins to Fall'. 

And me, I read too, from 'Love the Albatross'. Here's an accidental selfie that couldn't have been better composed if I tried. 

It was so good to meet poets I'd only previously been friends with online, as well as catching up with real life mates, including my old friend Bob Mann, whom I've known for years and accidentally lost touch with when his computer died. Firmly back in contact again now, thanks to the poster on the venue door.

Then it was back home up the M5 and into bed at 1am, my five hours' sleep before the alarm went off leaving me to a zombie for most of the next day, but a small price to pay for a precious few hours on Dartmoor and a gig I'll never forget. 

The Watching Place

This is Beetor Cross on Dartmoor. It's on the B3212 that crosses the moor from Moretonhampstead to Yelverton. 

It's also known as The Watching Place, and there are several stories in circulation as to why this might be the case. 

The first is that it was the haunt of a highwayman called John Fall, whose speciality was leaping out at his victims and taking them by surprise.


Then there's the theory that it marked the point beyond which French and American officers on parole from Dartmoor prison during the Napoleonic wars and living in Moretonhampstead were not permitted to proceed. 

Or that in mediaeval times it was the site of the gallows, where relatives or friends of the condemned person would watch and wait for permission from the Lord of the Manor to cut down the corpse.

My favourite story is that the name dates back to an outbreak of plague in 1626, which was spread by soldiers and sailors travelling between Barnstaple and Plymouth via the Mariner's Way. Some of the inhabitants of a settlement called Puddaven, near Beetor Cross, were afflicted, and as they were no longer able to care for themselves, every evening neighbours placed provisions for them on a flattish stone at some distance from the house. They would then retreat to wait and watch. If the food was removed, fresh supplies would be left the following day. On the fifth day no one came and the food stayed where it was, so the neighbours understood that the last survivor had died. So, having approached the house, with no response to their shouts, the neighbours set fire to the thatch and burnt it down in the hope that this would stop the plague spreading further. From this time, it is said, the area became known as the Watching Place.

Something about this old story, the solidarity shown by neighbours during a time of great fear and uncertainty, lifted it above its rivals and prompted me to start writing a story of my own. As part of my research, I read all the folklore I could connected with the moor, and found several other stories associated with outbreaks of plague.

Notably, there was the story told about Merrivale by the celebrated chronicler of Dartmoor, William Crossing, who recalls that the area of Bronze Age relics on Longash Common was once known as Plague Market, the tradition being that during outbreaks of plague at Tavistock,

food would be left there by moor folk for townspeople to collect. 

And another that attaches itself to sites all over the country, but on Dartmoor to the ruins below Hound Tor: that the mediaeval village was abandoned during the Black Death.   

I visited and was moved not just by the deaths of the villagers but by the detail of their lives also, such as the fact they built their houses into the side of a hill, with livestock housed in the shippon at the lower end, and a gully cut to drain the slurry  ... 

... and the step leading up into the cramped communal sleeping chamber.  

And I read and wrote, and wrote and read, and after seven years there was a coming-of-age novel ... 

... and after a few more years, during which it sat on my laptop while I wrote poetry, and won a prize to have a collection published, it finally emerged into a largely oblivious world under my publishers' Tamar Books imprint.

I picked up a copy the other day and read the back. Swine flu ... avian flu ... SARS ... We are frequently warned of imminent, drug-resistant pandemics. But what is it really like to wait for the end of the world?

I flicked through. Social distancing. Self-isolation. It's all in there, centuries before these practices were formally identified and their names coined.  

There's even a scene involving frenetic hand washing, though no emphasis on that as a way of avoiding infection, because my characters, stuck in 1349, wouldn't have known that. And besides it's fleas they should mostly have been avoiding. 

Every day on Twitter there are countless stories of selflessness, bravery and idiocy surrounding Covid-19, and I'm reminded again and again that while pandemics come and go, and technology and medical treatments improve, people are essentially the same as they've always been. We're all in the Watching Place now, and I feel a renewed closeness to characters that were such a big part of my life for so long.




Illustrations by Dru Marland

On not getting to Watern Tor

Watern Tor was our destination. Tricky to get to on account of the bogginess of Gidleigh Common, it had eluded me for years. I'd seen it several times on the skyline at Scorhill stone circle, and really quite close at hand from Wild Tor (one of my favourites), although I had a long walk back the way I came at that point, and didn't press on to reach it. Yesterday, though, we were going to access it from Fernworthy Forest via the old fields at deserted Teignhead Farm. 

Except no one had told the Dartmoor weather gods when Son the Younger had his day off, and they were having a ciggie round the back of the bike shed. The smoke, or rather mist, blocked even the fabled view of Haytor rocks from the road as we ascended from Bovey Tracey.

We detoured to Hound Tor. I'd been hoping to see the beautiful sight of Dartmoor bluebells spreading over Holwell Lawns to Haytor in the distance, but this was as good as it got.

Hound Tor itself was murky too. (Somewhere up there is Son the Younger, waving his arms.) 

It wasn't without beauty, of course ... 

... but the views in all directions were non-existent. There was just the usual racket from the larks, and the crow's nest tucked into one of the outlying rock piles ...

... and this very vociferous stonechat. (There, perched on the highest sprig of gorse.) 

We made for Princetown, to have some lunch in the Plume of Feathers while we waited for the fog, which had been forecasted to clear by 9am, to clear.

It didn't.

We set off for Fernworthy Forest, and with that, everyone else got in on the act of Trying To Stop Us From Getting To Watern Tor. 

We parked, walked part way around the reservoir and then took a path through the forest, only to find that parts of it were shut off because of logging.   

In the end, that plus the relentless mist and rain led us to conclude that our open moor adventure was best left for another day. 

Instead, we opted to squelch around the rest of the reservoir. 

The South Teign

Bronze age hut circle

There were bluebells, after all. And lichen. And still only just blooming hawthorn blossom, which feels like a time-slip and would we all care to experience the month of May all over again? Maybe do things better this time.

Rowans starting to blossom

And it was OK. It's always Dartmoor calling the shots, after all, and sometimes it likes to remind mere humans of their place in the pecking order. 

And maybe we'll have better luck next time.