Dead Creatures

Concern has been expressed for the nearly dead rabbit I encountered last week, and indeed, at the time I had a little weep.

Whereas two days earlier, this dead rat had evinced a small shriek of horror. Funny how deep these ancient dreads run, to the point of being reflex actions.  

Three Go To Smugglers' Top

On a less than promising day, we adjourned to the Ferryboat Inn in Shaldon for lunch before heading up the River Teign to Ringmore.

Where is Shaldon, you ask? Why, just about here. (Measurements in miles, furlongs and poles.) (A pole - or a perch - or a rod - is a unit of length equal to 5½ yards.) (Or 16½ feet.)

As we began the long climb up Higher Ringmore Road to the lane that runs along the top of the ridge, our socialist spirits were cheered by this welcome sight. 

OK, so it's probably more to do with local geography than a celebration of the fact that there is at least one politician in the Labour Party with principles, but we continued with a spring in our steps.  

On top of the ridge, there were views - still pretty saturnine, it has to be said, but far-reaching and impressive. Here's Teignmouth, with a smudgy looking Exmouth in the distance ... 

... and the view back along the lane, with Dartmoor lowering on the horizon.    

And the hedges were full of thyme and honeysuckle and lots and lots of butterflies because this is Butterfly Lane.  There was no muddy water making it impassable either, presumably because the kids who used to ride their quad bikes along here have grown up and moved away to an area with marginally more affordable housing.  Or the council has sorted out the drainage.  

There was this young dead bunny too, which actually wasn't even dead yet, though not far off. At first we wondered if it had been shot, as we'd heard firing from the fields shortly before, but it seemed to have sustained injuries to its ears, so maybe we'd scared off a predator.  I remembered the last time I'd walked along the lane - before I'd been forced to turn back because of the flooding - I'd seen a stoat skedaddle across the track, and that seemed a plausible explanation.  

It was horrible to see it scrabbling on its side in the dust, and so very hard to walk on and let nature take it course. We hoped a kindly or at least hungry predator would return soon and finish the job.  

Looking back up river to the moor. 

The lane started to climb again as we approached its end, and there were views down the coast to St Marychurch, whence hailed my great-great-grandmother, and Torquay.  And the sun came out. 

After dicing with death for a couple of hundred yards on the Torquay Road, we turned onto the coast path at this very excitingly named house.  

Then there was a final bit of risky living - at least as far as my partner is concerned - as we skirted a herd of unconcerned cows and made our way down the extremely steep path towards the Ness at Shaldon.  My home from home.   

Cuckoo Rock,Combshead Tor, Hingston Hill and Down Tor

We arrived in Devon under the metaphorical cloud of a rubbish weather outlook and expecting to have to make our own entertainment.  But it turned out fine, so we found ourselves having to go out for walks instead.


Not that it was always that simple.  After lunch in the Cornwood Inn on the edge of Dartmoor on our second day away, we tried to find our starting point (admittedly from a very old guide book) down a lane so narrow it was more like wriggling your way through the Earldelving under Alderley Edge* than being out for a Sunday afternoon drive. Then, since it seemed to have disappeared, we made for Watercombe Water Treatment Works instead, which was the start of our planned back-up walk, but permission to park there had been withdrawn, leaving little choice but to back down another tunnel-like lane until there was room to do a fourteen-point turn and head for somewhere - anywhere - less trying.  

Which turned out to be Norsworthy Bridge at the eastern end of Burrator Reservoir, which has a proper car park and an ice cream van.  

Nearby is Middleworth Lane, one of many ancient tracks on Dartmoor. It leads past the ruined farmhouses of Middleworth and Deancombe, all long abandoned.  There are even some staddle stones remaining where the storehouses used to be.

Lichen draped over an oak tree 

Up ahead, on the northern side of the valley, we could see Cuckoo Rock, our next way-mark.  Too late for cuckoos now, of course, but actually we weren't far  from where we'd heard them back in the spring, at Legis Tor.  As for the Rock itself, well, apart from its strange shape, it's pretty nondescript until you get up close and appreciate just how massive it is.

Thence to Combshead Tor. On the way Ted spotted some sheep, and the wisdom of keeping him on a lead on the moor was again apparent. (He's of working stock and it's hard to fight all that breeding.)

The sheep spotted him too, and sensibly kept their distance.  

We had a bit of a rest on top of Combshead Tor and admired the views, including this of Down Tor in the middle distance, where we would shortly be headed, with Peek Hill, Leather Tor and Sharpitor on the horizon. 

But first we contoured around Hingston Hill to the celebrated stone row and cairn circle ...  

... only to find we'd been beaten to it by a couple of groups of squaddies, one accompanied by a border collie of its own.  We wondered whether it was a regimental mascot, or if it had just tagged along with them, as happened more than once out on walks before I had Ted. (But not since. Frankly, I think he'd take a dim view.)

While Ted pondered whether he could get away with pissing on a Bronze Age ritual feature, I got up close and personal.  

The circle at the western end of the row has 27 stones - they didn't dance so wildly that I couldn't count them - and there are two flat slabs in the central hollow which may be the remains of a kistvaen.  

The huge blocking stone next to the circle is reckoned to weigh about 3 tons, and the row runs for about 350 yards.  We didn't wander the entire length, but another day I plan to walk out to it from Nun's Cross and encounter it from the opposite end.  

After Hingston Hill we walked the quarter of a mile or so to Down Tor, with ravens cronking overhead.  

It was pretty windy. 

Here's the view across to Sheepstor and Burrator Reservoir ... 

...  over Newleycombe, scarred from extensive tin mining ...

... up to Roos Tor, Great Mis Tor and North Hessary Tor on the skyline ... 

... and back the way we'd come, to Combshead Tor and Cuckoo Rock.  

Coming down off Down Tor you're not supposed to look back until you reach Deancombe Rocks.  That way you get a whole new perspective on the tor you've just climbed, in all its conical magnificence. 

Then back to the car via two tors not even on the OS map but strange and unique and mysterious in their unsungness - Snappers Tor and Middleworth Tor, which online accounts suggest often get switched around. Anyway - whichever you are, we love you.

*I've been rereading 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen' and 'The Moon of Gomrath'. And then I read 'Boneland'. And then I cried. Quite a lot.

Othello, National Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon

A short review I wrote for our local rag ... 

It sometimes seems that each new production of a Shakespeare play demands some singularity, if only to distinguish it from all the others.  With the RSC’s current, modern-dress version of ‘Othello’, directed by Iqbal Khan, it is that our eponymous hero (played by Hugh Quarshie) and his nemesis, Iago (a superb Lucian Msamati), are the same race, yet this shift in perspective is no gimmick.  At a stroke, the racism inherent in the plot becomes more subtle, and complex reasons for Iago’s villainy suggest themselves. For instance, when Iago repeatedly refers to his commanding officer as ‘the Moor’, it is with a degree of sarcasm that leaves the audience in no doubt as to the level of bitterness he feels at having been overlooked for promotion in favour of the spuriously liberal Cassio. Othello is permitted to own his identity, whilst Iago must dance attendance.

Along with Iago as evil-for-the-sake-of-it psychopath, the stereotype of Othello as 'noble Moor' is also jettisoned when we see him sanction waterboarding by his troops and, as his madness deepens, come close to asphyxiating Iago in order to obtain details of Desdemona's presumed infidelity. 

It is the character of Emilia, Iago’s wife, who touches me most, being unwittingly complicit in the fate of her mistress, and in this production she is played with passion and intensity by Ayesha Dharker.  Also outstanding is Ciaran Bagnall’s set, comprising arches and arcades and a pool of water which sees service as a Venetian canal, an instrument of torture, and a bathing pool.  As the jealousy of both Othello and Iago grows, so the mist over the water billows and thickens and the shadows lengthen.  This is an electrifying production that more than makes up for the disappointing Merchant of Venice running concurrently.  

Apotropaios: Soul Outlines

Last week came the partial unravelling of a mystery that has foxed me ever since May 2011, when Dru and I visited St Michael's, Dundry, which, as its dedication suggests, perches high on Dundry Hill overlooking Bristol.

This is Dru's photo of an altar tomb dating from the 1730s in the churchyard. If you look to the right hand side you can see that there are outlines of shoes - or rather, soles - on the slab.  But why, dammit, why?

We pondered long and hard. Perhaps a lover had cut them while he was waiting for his sweetheart to emerge from evensong.  Except he'd have opted for a heart and initials, wouldn't he? 

Maybe it's a dancing lesson, Dru said. It's interrupted when father comes home from the quarry - there's his hobmail boot on the threshold, see?  

No, it's the footprints of a mother and her children dancing on Father's grave, I concluded.  And I wrote a rather poor poem and Dru drew a picture for a putative illustrated book of local poems that never got any further than that.  

I did make sporadic, rather lethargic attempts to find out a little more. 'Was it a cement top to the tomb?' asked David Williams, a then inhabitant of the village. 'Could they be prints rather than carvings?' But no, it was definitely the local yellow oolitic limestone that goes by the name of Dundry stone.  

And that was that until some desultory browsing on Facebook last week uncovered this photo taken in the porch of St Gile's Church, Bredon in Worcestershire in a group called Apotropaios.

Well, I knew about the practice of concealing (mainly well-worn) shoes in buildings since at least the early modern period, as magic charms to ward off evil and/or fertility charms, but I hadn't associated this with carved outlines or even realised that the examples at Dundry were anything more than an isolated phenomenon. 

There was more. A friend of Dru's, Philip Watson, posted these from the roof of St Peter and St Paul at Mucheleney, with the hasty postscript that he hadn't been up there for nefarious purposes.  

I tried a spot more googling.  June Swan, former keeper of the shoe and boot collection at Northampton Museum, writes 'Shoe and sole outlines may be found scratched on buildings and other structures, which confirms the significance of the shoe shape' but offers no further information or explanation.  

I found further examples in the form of an outline of  what looks like a matching pair of shoes carved into the lead on the roof of St Michael and All Angels in Edmondthorpe in Leicestershire.  Also in the graveyard at St Stephen's Chapel, which forms part of the ruins of Bordesley Abbey, Redditch, where the Curator believes them to be either acts of vandalism or an indication of profession, such as cobbler. Meanwhile the blogger who posted the photos suggests that they might be connected with the custom of giving clothes shoes to the poor by the monks - although this wouldn't account for other examples elsewhere, and in a non-monasterial setting.  

All of which poses more questions than it answers - for example, are they always associated with religious buildings? - and leaves me more intrigued than ever by these vestiges of lost souls.  

20th August 2015

Dru Marland has drawn another example to my attention, at St Melangell's Church in Welshpool. Again, locals seem to be blaming cobblers! 

5th March 2016

A shoe at St Mary's in Trostan, Suffolk, together with the head of a demon.

26th August 2016

Spotted these at the back of the redundant Church of St James of Compostela in Cameley. The guide to the Church merely describes these as 'three pieces of lead from the roof, where presumably those who laid or repaired it autographed it with their footprints and the dates 1733, 1757 and 1795.' 

Ted Goes To Berrow Beach and Brean

It being the first weekend of the summer holidays, Berrow Beach was rather busier than usual. 

There might even have been a couple of other people there apart from us.  

There was a man with a metal detector which Ted had a good look at, just to make sure he hadn't sneaked a vacuum cleaner onto the beach, but on the whole he was far more interested in his ball. 

I'm sure he thinks that if he stares at it hard enough, it will gravitate towards him. 

 

When we arrived the tide was still quite high. It was curious to see the wreck of the SS Nornen afloat - if only briefly and only after a fashion.  

The moon still being very new, the sea was receding rapidly and within fifty minutes it had abandoned the wreck and was disappearing over the horizon.

Our plan had been to head to Brean for tea and chips and then walk the length of Brean Down, but Ted's lead broke so we only managed to do the first bit. (There's sheep on that there ridge.)  Never mind, that means we'll have to go back again soon.