Tavistock Abbey to Buckfast Abbey Monastic Path: Part 4 – Horse Ford to Buckfast Abbey

Background

I have walked up and over Dartmoor on this east-west route, and now it is time for me to descend on the last stage of this walk. After a good eight miles of open moorland I leave behind the peat, grasses and heathers; the bogs, tors and openworks. The complexion of this walk changes from moor to tarmacked country lanes, where landscape becomes hemmed-out by hedges, and glimpsed mainly through gateways.

As I walk between these hedgerows, I contemplate the restraining banks; what bounded constraints in the landscape were experienced by earlier travellers, journeying along, what Fleming postulates, is the shortest and easiest route over Dartmoor (Fleming, 2011, p28). My vista, and the precise line of access I can take, is certainly more enclosed than that of earlier travellers. But this is not a simple story of a one-directional march to the present, of proliferating hedges and walls. The past was populated with its own boundaries, some of which are now long gone, others visible as subtle seams (such as the Venford Reave), and still more, incorporated into the fabric of now. Travelling this way centuries or millennia ago then, a wanderer would have still seen plenty of hedges, just not necessarily as many, and certainly not all in the same places as we see today. The best I can do is hold in my head that the landscape I see is different to that seen by a monk travelling this way before the monasteries fell; and different to that seen by a Saxon thegn, travelling to his hunting grounds; and different to that seen by a Bronze Age tinner, traversing the moor to trade his precious metal to distant markets.

In his paper ‘The Crossing of Dartmoor’, Fleming draws on a variety of evidence – Saxon charter boundaries, land holdings, field layouts, place-names, stories (e.g. Childe the Saxon Hunter), artefacts (e.g. Syward’s Cross), topographical reasoning and the historical geography of important places – to present a case for why this long-distance route may have served an important function, particularly one that relates to elite members of society. He suggests that this history stretches to a time before that of monastic religious elites, to a Saxon or even a Britonnic past . As Fleming says:

“long-distance routes in history have often been created to enable political elites or their emissaries to reach critical destinations swiftly, on horseback. If the strategic importance of the Ashburton–Tavistock road [and it’s spur to Buckfast] was at its height in the period when relationships between ‘English’ Devon and ‘British’ Cornwall were uneasy if not downright hostile, the road should go back to the eighth century at least.“

Fleming, 2011

Familiarising myself with Fleming’s work, as I have picked off this route in stages, has enriched my conception of this cross-moor track. I started out with a more one-dimensional view of a ‘monastic way’, lined with iconic, often desolate crosses. I finish with a deeper appreciation of it, not just for ‘abbey business’, but also as a route for pilgrimage, for trade, for elite hunting pastimes and networking, and as a vital passage of military communication in a newly forging Saxon kingdom. All of these threads, not just a story of medieval monks, enriches an understanding of this route and its changing role, not just over centuries, but over millennia, disappearing into its dissipated past.

Links to previous stages of this walk:

• Tavistock Abbey to Buckfast Abbey Monastic Path: Part 1 – Tavistock to Walkhampton
• Tavistock Abbey to Buckfast Abbey Monastic Path: Part 2 – Walkhampton Church to Siward’s Cross.
• Tavistock Abbey to Buckfast Abbey Monastic Path: Part 3 – Siward’s Cross to Horse Ford

7 Interesting Things

1. Venford Reave

Over Holne Moor this route runs roughly parallel with another ancient line – the denuded banks of the Venford Reave. The Venford Reave is the longest terminal reave on the moor; that is to say, it is the longest Bronze Age bank up to which parallel reave banks run up to, and terminate, thus marking the edge of a field system. Fleming contrasts the more irregular fields of later years, formed by the ‘ebb and flow of piecemeal enclosure at the moor edge’ with reave systems that were ‘prehistoric blocks of enclosed land’ that ‘were systems planned on a large scale’ and served a regional function (Fleming, 1988, p37).

Fleming notes the practicality of laying out these extensive planned reaves, and that, for shear practicality, must have been done in an already fairly open landscape, felled of trees. Radiocarbon dated pollen and spore evidence by Fyfe (2008, p2250) shows that a transition from woodland to heath on Dartmoor occurred at their reave-located sampling site in the middle Neolithic (c. 3630-3370 cal BC). At the time of the development of the Bronze Age reaves, records indicate a ‘substantial shift to species-rich grassland with grazing animals c. 1480 cal BC’, lasting for about 400 years.

Fleming found that, in excavating the reaves, they showed they were made with low bases of stones, cleared from the surrounding fields, and would have been topped with turf and hedging. Spending so much time scraping through mud, to excavate the hut circles found within the reaves, season after season, gave Fleming an intimate appreciation of the soils and how they changed with the landscape. The reave dwellings had been built on mineral soils, and the peaty, humic soils, so familiar to the Dartmoor walker, had developed only later. This alteration to wetter soils was caused, at least in part, by deforestation and iron pan formation, and must have had consequences for how later Bronze Age farmers were able to live within and use the uplands.

For me, the most remarkable things in reading Fleming’s account of his fieldwork, was how the reaves and dwellings yielded evidence, not just of the stone walls and hut circles we are so familiar with, pocking the Dartmoor surface, but also timber huts, and timber stakes below walls, that pre-dated their stone equivalents. This timber-built history was one that I had never properly appreciated about Dartmoor’s pre-historic environment. I had thought stone dwellings, enclosures and boundaries some of the most ancient on Dartmoor, but these traces of timber hint at a history older than the stone.

“Once again we had demonstrated that despite the predominance of reaves and hut-circles in the field, there is much that is not visible on the surface; once again, the importance of timber in Dartmoor’s prehistory had been underlined.”

Fleming, 1988, p93

2. Holne

Holne is first recorded in Domesday (1086) as Holla, meaning ‘at the hollies’, but its history goes much deeper (Fox, 2012, p19). It is not uncommon to hear about archaeological finds of Roman coins and Saxon hoards, but I have never, on Dartmoor, come across Greek coins turning up. However, here at Holne, at Court Farm, were found two silver ‘tetradrachm’ coins, one of Alexander of Macedon (Alexander the Great), minted at Alexandria c 326 BC, and the second of Aesillas Quaestor of Macedon, c 93-92 BC, minted at Thesalonika (HER^a).

This makes the Roman coin of Antonianus Probus c 276-282 AD found in a cob wall of a tithe barn on the western side of Holne, seem rather mundane in comparison (HER^b). It is suggested that the presence of these coins at this Dartmoor location must raise questions of the relationship of the area, and its tin history, to prehistoric international trade and wealth (HER^a).

The church at Holne is most definitely worth visiting for its particularly fine Tudor rood screen and pulpit. Both are carved and painted with gold and rhubarb-red panels, and the rood screen adorned with images of saints. The delicate wine-goblet shaped pulpit is supposedly carved out of a single piece of timber.

The neighbouring church house, a near contemporary of the church, is considered to date to 1329 (Quick, 1992,) and like many church houses, was secularly re-born as an inn. The Church House Inn, or the Tavistock Inn as it was once known, was associated with two individuals of distinction. Oliver Cromwell is reputed to have stayed here in the 17^th century, and it was the birth place of the writer Charles Kingsley, of Water Babies renown. Crossing (1912, p348) describes the inn as being old-fashioned with a porch and a ‘parvise’ room; not a term I had ever come across before. According to Oxford Reference, this is a corruption of the word ‘paradise’, often incorrectly used to describe a room over a church porch.

3. The Holy Brook

How could I amble from abbey to abbey without picking out the Holy Brook as one of my interesting things? This ethereal epithet was not always so. In the 13th century the Holy Brook is recorded as Nordbroc or Northbroke (Gover et al, 1931, p7), meaning, obviously, north brook. It was probably given this name as it marked the northern boundary of the parish of West Buckfastleigh (see image below). Clearly the 13th century naming of this water-course was dominated by Buckfastleigh parish, for it it were named by the people of Holne parish, then they would surely have called it the Sūþbroc or Southbroke!

At what point the name converted to Holy Brook is unclear. Tim Sandles (2016), in his legendary Dartmoor website ‘Legendary Dartmoor’, explains some of the theories behind this new name. Apart from perhaps a simple association that grew out of the proximity of the Holy Brook joining the Dart at Buckfast Abbey, more specifically the brook runs through two fields named Paternoster. According to Field (1972, p 161), ‘Paternoster’ fields were land on the boundary of a parish near a place where the Lord’s prayer was said during Rogationtide ceremonies or ‘land held by service of saying one paternoster daily for the soul of the donor‘ [see the ‘Information Box’ below for more on ‘What are Rogation Days?’].

Sandles also cites work by Brown (1976) on some Devon beliefs and customs that may link the Holy Brook’s water – that has been established as being slightly radioactive – to possible curative powers. According to local belief, the brook was reputed to ameliorate strained muscles, bruises, rheumatism etc. I don’t see why we need to accept just one of these explanations. Why can’t all have contributed to the story and naming of the Holy Brook?

4. Holy Trinity Church

Holy Trinity Church, stands ruined, on top of Church Hill, overlooking Buckfast to the north, and Buckfastleigh to the south. A fire torched the building in 1992. Whilst this was clearly a tragedy for worshippers and for the heritage of the church as a building, it presented the opportunity to investigate the archaeology below the site in a way that would never have been possible if it were not for the disaster. What it revealed was fascinating.

Discovered below the ruined church, some of which dated back to the 13th century was: ‘an apse-like structure’: a destruction layer, with traces of a high status monumental tomb and rare inscribed tiles; and five later Anglo-Saxon bodies in wooden coffins (Reynolds and Turner, 2012). Osteological examination revealed these individuals had a rich diet, indicative of the type of food that might be consumed by members of a monastic community. Below this was another even older stone building with a burial excavated below this earliest feature. These finds were interpreted as suggestive of an early Christian origin for the site. The excavations, coupled with a Ground Penetrating Radar survey showed the structure was based on the format of a Roman basilica, a form for which the closest analogue would be the types of early churches found in the Merovingian and Carolingian world.

“Several of the most elaborate burials were those of females, raising the interesting possibility that the church may have been a nunnery before the Benedictine reforms of the tenth and early eleventh centuries.”

Reynolds and Turner, 2012

It was always supposed that the earliest abbey at Buckfast dated to 1018 AD based on a 16th century tradition that an Ealdorman called Ethelweard established the abbey in the reign of Cnut (ibid, p22). Like so many religious sites, it had also been assumed that this was sited below the present monastic precinct, despite the fact that no archaeological evidence dating before the 12th century has ever been found. The opportunity of archaeological investigation at Holy Trinity has revealed that, not only did the first monastic site probably lie atop Church Hill, but also that academics such as Higham (2008, p88), who considered that the date of 1018 AD marked, not the founding of a new abbey but was a re-founding of an existing religious community, were probably right.

5. Caves, Cabell, and Conan Doyle

Perforating Church Hill, beneath the gravestones and hallowed turf of Holy Trinity, are a collection of limestone caves: Higher Kiln Quarry Cave, Joint Mitnor Cave (also called the Bone Cave) and Reeds Cave, shown in the video below. Reeds Cave consists of a number of captivatingly named chambers including Partition Cave, Rift Cave, Spider’s Hole, and best of all, Disappointment Cave (Pengelly Trust). Strewing Joint Mitnor cave is a considerable collection of animal bones – bison, hyaena, straight-tusked elephant, fox, hippopotamus – dating from the last interglacial, known as the Eemian, which lasted from around 130,000 – 115 ,000 years ago (HER^c).

No human activity is noted in the cave apart from the presence of a small carved figure of a man that supposedly stands directly beneath the tomb of Richard Cabell (d. 1677) (Devon Caving), a 17th century squire of Brook Hall, a manor west of Buckfast on the River Mardle, close to Hawson’s Cross.

His sepulchre is a chest tomb which he is thought to have had built to commemorate his grandparents Richard (d 1612) and Susanna (d 1597), and his father, also called Richard (d 1655); presumably though, he also had one eye on magnificently commemorating himself in death. The tomb was probably made around 1656 because there is thought to have been a weathervane with this date sitting on top of the building that surrounds and covers the tomb. The current mausoleum, one of the earliest in the country, is despoiled through clumsy restoration. Historic England consider the present structure to have been re-roofed in the Edwardian with walls that have been cement rendered, and with a Victorian or Edwardian cast-iron grille. Today the little building looks more like a public lavatory than an historic sepulchre. (Historic England)

According to Baring Gould, Richard Cabell was not a nice man. Apparently he:

“died with such an evil reputation that he was placed under a heavy stone, and a sort of penthouse was built over that with iron gratings to it, to prevent his coming up and haunting the neighbourhood. When he died, the story goes that fiends and black dogs breathing fire raced over Dartmoor and surrounded Brooke, howling.” 

Baring Gould (1907), quoted in Langston (2018)

What did Cabell do to deserve such a sinister reputation? Some writers speak of his jealous behaviour including that recounted by Robson in a book about Arthur Conan Doyle …

“Cabell was jealous of his wife, accusing her of adultery with an inhabitant of the nearby town of Buckfastleigh. Cabell beat her savagely, so that she fled across the moor. He followed her and stabbed her to death with a hunting knife. Her hound, devoted to its mistress, then flew at Cabell and tore out his throat …“

Robson 1(993), quoted in Langston (2018)

It is from these stories swirling around the myth of Cabell, that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s is thought to have gained inspiration for his most famous Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Whether utter myth, or myth born out of some historic facts, the prison-like mausoleum is certainly atypical. And what of the little cave man, who stands in the dark below? If he does indeed guard directly below the sepulchre, then, whether true or not, local sentiment certainly seems to have ben extremely fearful of a diabolic and monstrous man; terrified enough, not just to prevent his evil spirit escaping over-ground, but also to insure against his cunning descent into the cavern below, where perhaps he might fly, like a cave bat, into the night air.   

6. Buckfast Abbey

Buckfast Abbey church gleams and bounces with light, to the lustre of God, like no other I have been in. The clean bright Bath stone walls, polished light marble floors and gilded accoutrements, in monastic timescales, are fresh and new. Building of the church was started in 1907 by a community of monks who ‘re-colonised’ the site in 1882 after an absence of 343 years, since dissolution in 1539 (Buckfast Abbey). Very little of the wasted abbey remained, and so the monks, working from an old print, the discovery of the original foundations, and examples from other Cistercian houses, had plans drawn up for their vision of a new church.

These Victorian monks did the building work themselves, led by a master mason, cutting their teeth, initially, by learning masonry skills, restoring some of the few surviving medieval buildings (Wilson, 2017). It took only twenty-five years to complete this remarkable abbey, with the building being consecrated in 1932. It is this part of the recent Buckfast Abbey history that is the most special; that this glorified building (and I don’t use the word pejoratively), was erected by the monks’ own hands, with a breathtaking level of skill, which anyone who has put up a wonky shelf or had a rather shabby stab at grouting, will take their hat off to. As one of the attendants expressed to me and my walking companion as we interrogated the church’s stone-work, “in the past, these holy buildings were constructed by people, from the fear of God; but Buckfast was made by the monks’ own hands, out of their love for God“.

7. A Royal Hunting Park?

I love place names almost as much as I love my maps and so, whenever I do a walk, I get my place-name books out, and do some digging to see what they can tell me about the history of the places I have trodden. When I looked up Buckfast in my Place-Names of Devon book, I was a little under-whelmed by the entry. The earliest mention dates to 1046 AD as ‘Buckfæsten‘ and states ‘The name is apparently a compound of OE buc, ‘buck’ and fæsten, ‘stronghold’, possibly used as a thicket where a buck once took shelter (Gover et al, 1931). Not being satisfied with this explanation I started to investigate the landscape and the history of deer in the medieval. In doing so I think I have uncovered strong evidence for a Saxon hunting park, located between Buckfast and the moor, in an area roughly the same as West Buckfast parish .

The Saxon’s did not use the word ‘park’ for deer parks but used the word ‘haga‘, from which we get the name ‘hay’. Within West Buckfastleigh, at the moorland edge is a place called Hayford. Near here is Bowden which in 1314 was documented as ‘Steneneboghedon juxta Bocfasteneslegh (Gover, et al, 1931), which I interpret as translating to ‘stone bow hide next to Bucklastleigh’. On the open moor, directly above Hayford, is Huntingdon, a place where stags from the enclosed wooded deer park might be released and chased over open ground for sport. Finally, ancient oak trees have been shown to have a strong relationship with lands that were once deer parks. West Buckfastleigh has numerous place names that indicate it was a territory populated by oak, such as the wizened ‘Stumpy Oak’ at Hawson’s Cross, and many other examples. For anyone interested, I explore this story (and all the research that underpinned it) in more detail in a separate blog called The Bucks of Buckfast. What I found most valuable from interrogating the landscape in this way was how the Buckfast landscape potentially still holds clues, not just to a royal Saxon hunting ground, but also clues as to how deer hunting was managed within the park, and beyond, to the hunting grounds of the Forest of Dartmoor.

The Route

• Taking the journey up from Horn’s Cross, above horse ford, follow a rough path over Holne Moor, heading to the south of Venford Reservoir. Notice to the north of the path the low banks of the Venford terminal reave (1).
• The route coalesces with a track that runs roughly east, joining the Holne road at a place marked Fore Stoke on the map.

• Stay on the Holne Road that heads SE. Divert into Holne (2) to see the church and church house.
• Return to the Holne Road but just outside Holne, continue straight on the steep bridleway track to Langaford rather than the longer tarmacked road route via Littlecombe and Scorriton. This comes out at the Holy Brook (3).
• Keep heading in a SE direction on the road, passing Hawson’s Cross and the Stumpy Oak.

• Stay on the road and at the crossroads at Hockmor, go straight across (south) and then branch left to stay of the Holne road to Holy Trinity Church (4).
• Whilst you can’t see them, underneath this hill are the Buckfast caves (5).
• On the east side of the church a path descends to join the main road into Buckfast and to Buckfast Abbey (6).
• Not a ‘point’, but a wide area on the map, the deer park ‘buck fast’ of Buckfast is indicated (7) and discussed more fully in a separate blog – The Bucks of Buckfast.

References

Buckfast Abbey. Buckfast History. www.buckfast.org.uk

Crossing, W. 1912. Crossing’s Guide to Dartmoor. The 1912 Edition published in 1990. Peninsula Press.

Devon Caving. Devon Caving, Reeds Cave. Video posted by Catchpool1.

Encyclopaedia Britannica. Rogation Days. www.britannica.com

Field, J., 1972. English Field Names: A Dictionary. Alan Sutton Publishing Inc: Wolfeboro, New Hampshire.

Fox, H. 2012. Dartmoor’s Alluring Uplands: Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages. University of Exeter Press: Exeter.

Fleming, I., 1988. The Dartmoor Reaves: Investigating prehistoric land divisions. Batsford Ltd: Bath.

Fleming, A., 2011. The crossing of Dartmoor. Landscape History, 32(1), pp.27-45.

Fyfe, R.M., Brück, J., Johnston, R., Lewis, H., Roland, T.P. and Wickstead, H., 2008. Historical context and chronology of Bronze Age land enclosure on Dartmoor, UK. Journal of Archaeological Science, 35(8), pp.2250-2261.

Gover, J.E.B., Mawer, A. and Stentson, F.M., 1931. The Place-names of Devon (Part I). English Place-Name Society Volume VIII. Cambridge University Press.

HER^a. Undated. Greek coins found at Court Farm, Holne. MDV47969.

HER^b. Undated. Roman coin found at Tithe Barn, Holne. MDV60231.

HER^c. Undated. Joint Mitnor Cave. MDV15156.

Higham, R., 2008. Making Anglo-Saxon Devon: emergence of a shire. Mint Press.

Historic England. Cabell Chest Tomb and Structure Over Tomb to South of Church of Holy Trinity. historicengland.org.uk. Date of most recent amendment 30-Dec-1993.

Langston, B, 2018. Doyle’s Dartmoor. The Transactions of the Sabine Baring-Gould Appreciation Society. Volume 18, pp 44-49.

Oxford Reference. Parvis(e). oxfordreference.com

Orme, N., 2021. Going to Church in Medieval England. Yale University Press: New Haven and London.

Pengelly Trust. Caves . pengellytrust.org

Reynolds, A.J. and Turner, S., 2012. Discovery of a late Anglo-Saxon monastic site in Devon: Holy Trinity church, Buckfastleigh. Archaeology International.

Sandles, T., 1997. A Pilgrimage to Dartmoor’s Crosses. Forest Publishing. Exeter.

Sandles, T., 2016. Holy Brook. https://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk

Quick, T., 1992. Dartmoor Inns. Devon Books.

Wilson, H. 2017. Buckfast. Report from the Buildings Section. The Devonshire Association. Taken from the Section Conference Reports. www.devonassoc.org.uk.