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

Pebbles On The Shore

On Thursday we were off to Teignmouth for the launch of Pebbles on the Shore, an anthology of poems about the town. We went via the scenic route. 

Gibbet Hill and Brent Tor

Cox Tor car park

My glee at being on Dartmoor under my favourite circumstances - bright slanty sun and pewter cloud - dissipated as rain rolled in over Tavistock and hit the moor. Hard. 

The same rook which had been preaching in the shade of the ice cream van almost exactly three years earlier was there again, but wetter.   

There was nothing for it but to retreat to the car and eat a Magnum.  My dog, Ted, kindly offered to do some of the driving through driving rain.  

By the time we reached Shaldon, the weather was brilliant and beautiful ... 

 ... though fitful.

  

I'd felt a bit apprehensive about returning here while I was driving down the M5.  The sudden death last spring of the owner of the caravan park, where my family had two caravans, had resulted in a massive hoick in ground rent, followed in September by two months' notice to everyone to get their vans off the site so that his sons could install a fieldful of lodges at £180,000 apiece.  

It was painful to lose what had been our home from home for the last 45 years, but the nagging fear inside that the landscape I loved had somehow abandoned me turned out to be unfounded. (Of course it did!) I'd simply forgotten Herman Hesse's wise words: 'Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.'

So now I was looking at everywhere with new eyes, stripped of complacency.  A new relationship, a fresh and fruitful way of interacting with a place that is part of my heart.  And still less than 100 miles from where I live.  

(Of course, we wouldn't be in this situation if my parents had bought this house, Thalassa, when it was offered to them decades ago, but £3,000 was a huge sum then and they couldn't raise it.)

I must have eaten dozens of meals in the Clipper over the years, but this was the first since they dismantled the glass-walled booth selling souvenirs of Devonshire pixies and unpinned the tea towels from the walls, and it was by far the best, being decidedly palatable.  The cider was pretty good too. And it's dog friendly. 

A quick wander up to the bridge ...

... a glimpse of a still rainy moor ... 

... a peep down School Lane, through which my sister and I would walk to fetch our dad's newspaper ...

... a peek at the river between cottages ... 

... and it was time to head to the Alice Cross Centre in Teignmouth for the launch of Pebbles on the Shore.  

As well as reading some of the poems, anthology editor Neil Howell explained about the work of the Centre and gave the audience background information about them, while the artist Maureen Fayle spoke about her ink illustrations, many of which were executed in part with twigs.  I love this one of the back beach she drew to accompany my poem, The Poet and the Boatman, which you can read here. 

The whole evening went well, and it was a pleasure to meet some of the local poets. Even Ted behaved himself, although in the penultimate poem I heard a couple of loud, theatrical sighs emanating from the back of the hall to signal that even dogs who are dark poets can sometimes get poetried out.  










Information about Pebbles on the Shore and where to buy it is here on Neil's blog.  

'The Poet and the Boatman' is from my collection, Map Reading For Beginners.

A Three Hares Pilgrimage

Though I've done it already - visited all the Three Hares churches in Devon, that is.  Plus the stained glass in the Castle Inn, Lydford and the roof bosses in the chapel of Cotehele, over the border in Cornwall, and in Selby Abbey, Yorkshire.  Yup - been there, done that, written the poem.  

However, now that Dru has relocated onto NB Eve on the Kennet & Avon, space is at a premium and she's decided that some of her work must tie up its goods in a red and white spotted handkerchief and go out into the world to earn its keep.  So I offered to drop some of her beautiful Three Hares postcards into each host church in and around Dartmoor, while I was on holiday in Devon, as a free-gift-cum-advertsing-campaign rolled into one - or card-bombing, if you prefer.  

 There are 17 churches with mediaeval carved roof bosses depicting three hares running in a circle, each sharing a single ear with their neighbour so that it looks as if they have two apiece, and they are fairly widespread, from Ashreigney in the north to Paignton in the south and from Kelly in the west to Broadclyst in the east.   So visiting all of them does constitute a pilgrimage, and allowing for pub time, the most you can really expect to do in a day is half a dozen.  

Conversely, you can stop off at any you might happen to pass, and this is what I did at St Michael's, Ilsington, a minor diversion en route for the bluebells of Holwell Lawn.  

Ilsington is a lovely village on the edge of Dartmoor, but turning its gaze towards the smaller and less celebrated Haldon Moor.  It has a decent pub and the church, with its dark and mysterious interior and weathered churchyard, is typical of the area.   

Having found a suitable spot in which to deposit Dru's cards, I set about locating the three hares roof boss, remembering belatedly that the last time I'd undertaken this mission, I was younger and sharper-eyed and had four positively eagle-eyed offspring with me.  Alack, now I was reduced to squinting and craning and trying to recall whether this was one of the churches with the boss in the centre aisle or to the north or south? In the nave or the chancel?  Painted (and easy to spot) or merely carved?  

Ah, there they are!


Two days later I crossed several churches off my list in one go. First, Widecombe's St Pancras, which must have one of the best churchyards in the country (though I suspect the me in the parallel universe where I live on   

Dartmoor and enjoy wild literary success will end up mouldering with all those Harveys in Manaton).

The Widecombe hares are also favourites, partly because I love their naturalistic colouring, but mainly for being The First Hares Of My Childhood, when they were believed to be tinners' rabbits and their mystical significance had been mislaid.   

Also, it's next to one of three amazing Green Men. Look at this one!  He's just scored a penalty against Germany!

And in the porch, a couple of swallow nests.  

On to Tavistock, graced by the River Tavy in unwontedly sober mode.

The Church of St Eustachius - they made him up! - with its hugger-mugger graves ... 

... and the last remaining arch of the Abbey cloister in its grounds.

More baby bunnies than hares here, I think ... 

... but a fantastic monument to Judge John Glanville, who fell from his horse and broke his neck in 1600, and his wife, Alice.  

Next, St Andrew's in South Tawton, with its lovely Church House, and just opposite the Seven Stars pub too.  

More swallows in the porch and Dru's cards looking very much at home ... 

... presided over by possibly the best carved of all the hares, with their lovely fluted ears.  

Finally to Chagford, where I had a bit of a shock because the Church of St Michael the Archangel has been improved mightily since I last ventured inside in - ooh - probably 2005, because England were playing Australia in the Ashes in one of those nail-biting games that went right to the wire. 

A Church has to serve the needs of its community and be useful as well as beautiful, and that often this means making changes to the fabric of a building, but it has lost some of its darksome mystery.  

Plus, with the doors of the screen chained shut, presumably for reasons of security, I had to perform gymnastics to espy the hares.  (Did it in the end, though.)






So. Five down and a dozen to go, I'm going to enjoy the rest of my mission, whenever the next instalment falls.