Poo, Power and Potable Water: A wet and dirty walk around Tavistock – Water Walk 3

Walk 3 of 3 – West Street – Ford Street – Fitzford – The Meadows.

On this third of three water walks we will be venturing a bit further, out to the west of Tavistock. Broadly speaking the route takes us along Ford Street and back to the town via a riverside walk through the Meadows.

In Water Walk 1 there was a focus on the Tavy being used to power industry and in Water Walk 2 a key theme was the way the Fishlake stream was used to provide drinking water to the town. This walk gives us a chance to look at some other water landscape issues such as pollution and water meadow management. We will also see how other pockets of habitation developed outside the town around secondary water sources.

To reiterate from my previous blogs on this theme, my aim has been to convey the wide variety of the ways water has impacted on Tavistock’s heritage. In doing so I have tried to pick out some lesser-appreciated facets of the Tavistock water landscape, as well as those that are better known.

Using my format of ‘7 Interesting Things’ each walk starts and ends roughly in the vicinity of St Eustachius Church in the town centre. In total there are therefore 21 ‘interesting things’ to encounter, seven each in the three walks. The three walks can be strolled individually, but are also designed so that they flow from one to the next, and can be combined into one longer walk of about 6 km (about 4 miles). These are:

• Walk 1 (East) – St Eustachius, Brook Street, Parkwood Road (c 1.5 km).
• Walk 2 (North) – Market Street, Lakeside, Bannawell (c. 1.5 km).
• Walk 3 (West) – West Street, Ford Street, Fitzford, The Meadows (c. 3 km)

The specifics of the route are described throughout this blog in blue text  and also shown on the map below.

Starting from the town centre, head along West Street. At the mini roundabout, notice that the road that heads up hill called Spring Hill. Carry on along Ford Street and stop in the vicinity of the junction of Ford Street with Chapel Street.

1. Spring Hill and Ford Street

Your walk along West Street and Ford Street today is an urban one. If you were to go back a few hundred years, you would be more aware, as you strode out, of leaving the town centre behind. Houses would give way to fields, until you then came to a cluster of dwellings at western end of Ford Street, at the spot where you now stand. This is significant because, just as the town of Tavistock developed around the water source of the Fishlake (see Water Walk 2), this place also appears to have developed due to the way its springs could be harnessed.

At least as far back as the 13_^th C this place was referred to as ‘La Forde’ or just Ford (e.g. DRO W1258M/0/D/13), with the area only getting its Fitzford association at a later date. The earliest building known here was the medieval ‘Maudlin’ or St Mary Magdalene leper hospital, founded some time before 1244 AD (HER^a). Post-dissolution the Maudlin grounds provided alms houses and then, in 1818, the Mount Ford Workhouse (HER^b). Historic property-related documents reveal that there were also several other tenements here as well.

According to an old map, the workhouse appeared to receive water from a culvert issuing from a spring on the hill above (HER^c). Given the workhouse housed 100 people, it is likely the building required a better water supply than could be provided by a well. Tapping into water from a reliable gravity supplied spring would make a lot of sense. With the workhouse situated on the Maudlin ground, it is possible that this arrangement was also true for the medieval leper hospital.  

The spring from which the workhouse appears to have obtained its water is no longer visible. It has been built over by housing, but it is not difficult to work out where it was. Anyone familiar with walking the footpath along the disused railway line will know the spot. Year round, a cascade of water tumbles over the edge of the embankment, spilling water into a little pool, now adorned with grotto figurines. At this spot, before the railway existed, was situated one of Tavistock’s early but short-lived reservoirs, serving the new Victorian houses built on the high ground along Watt’s Road. The reservoir was gone again by the time the railway was built, presumably its life curtailed by the railway cutting, which would have disrupted the pipes. 

Before the railway and before the reservoir, this spring of water would have flowed downhill to Ford Street. And the name of the hill it flowed down? – Spring Hill! There are other watery place names here that give an inkling of the wetness of this landscape; water we do not see today because it is all culverted under the streets. On the Wynne Map of c.1752 there is a field north of Ford Street, lying topographically below the spring, called the ‘Causey Meadow’. On the lower side of the road are two fields called ‘Frog Meadow’. The ‘Causey Meadow’ is suggestive that Ford Street once had a causeway. Causeways were bridge-like structures that were built to traverse wet ground. The name Frog Meadow speaks for itself – damp ground, that was a prefect habitat for frogs.

To summarise then, this landscape around ‘Ford’ once had a spring that, for a short while fed a Victorian reservoir, and further back in history seems to have supplied the workhouse and possibly the medieval Maudlin hospital. The spring probably gave Spring Hill its name, and its water created such sodden ground that the main road out of Tavistock needed a causeway. The fields were also so wet that frogs abounded, sufficiently noteworthy for two fields to be named after the amphibians.

The spring of Spring Hill was not the only water source here of historic landscape significance. Funnelling down to ‘Ford’ was another stream of water, exploited by the Fitzford family. It is to their well that we are now headed.

Carry on, passing the Spar shop on your right and continue until you see a road callaed Boughthayes on your right. About 50m along, on the right, in a small patch of grass is the Fitz Well.

2. Post Monastic Private Water Supply – The Fitz Well

Of the origin of Fitzford Mansion, little is known. It stood roughly where the neat rows of Fitzford Cottages assemble today. It historically emerged as a home to the Fitz family in the 16^th Century before falling into ruin as a result of civil war damage and the death of Lady Howard; presumably its last notable resident, in 1671 (HER^d). Today all that can be seen of it are its reconstructed gatehouse and the Fitz Well.

The Fitz Well is a repaired square stone rubble structure about 8 ft high with flat concrete roof and a granite arched doorcase (HER^e). It bears the Fitz family arms and the words ‘John Fitz of Fitzford Built this 1568‘. The plaque is delaminating and in poor condition.

On Water Walk 2 we looked at the conduit house known as The Buddle House in Bannawell Park, serving the drinking water needs of the town. This Fitz Well is almost certainly a good approximation to what the Buddle House would have looked like, with the Wynne Map showing them of comparable size. However, unlike the Buddle House, which served middle class properties with individual piped water as well as the general populous via public taps, this Fitz Well was almost certainly for the private supply of water to the Fitzford mansion only.

In keeping with the design of other conduit houses it probably sat atop a lead cistern and had lead pipes to convey the water to the mansion (similar in operation to the image shown above). With the demise of the great house, the expensive lead would have been removed long ago. Because the leadwork and the clean water itself, were expensive and sought after resources, conduit houses were kept locked to avoid theft. Even those conduit houses where there were taps were for public use were kept locked at night (Lee, 2014). Given the Fitz Well was a private well, it would certainly have been kept locked and it is from this practice that we seem to get the name of Bolt House Close; a name still used today and appearing on the Wynne map.

The Reverend John Swete (Gray, 1997, p146), who travelled through Tavistock in 1792 described the Fitz Well and confirms it as the source of the name Bolt House:

“I saw an antient Edifice of a square form overgrown with ivy, which I was informed was called the Bolt House, within which burst forth in a large unremitting spring, a crystal stream, which ran in a fine current through the channel of the streets”

Swete, quoted in Gray, 1997, p146

As Swete describes, and as the Wynne Map illustrates, a hearty flow of water used to emanate from the Fitz Well (presumably that which was surplus to that which entered the pipes). It is described in the HER record as ‘dried up’ although I think more likely it has been stoppered up, and water from Boughthayes now culverted in pipes below our tarmac streets.

Retrace your steps. At the Spar Roundabout then head for the Drake statue roundabout. Continue in the same direction (with Tavistock County Primary School on your right). You will cross over the canal. Enter The Meadows at the first gate on your left and stop by the canal.

3. Tavistock Canal – Water Transport and Hydroelectricity

Overseen by engineer John Taylor between 1803 and 1817, Tavistock Canal was designed to transport minerals from mines near Tavistock to Morwellham Quay. What makes this canal special, and unlike most other canals, is that it was purposefully built with a gradient steeper than most, so that the water steadily flowed from Tavistock to Morwellham (Waterhouse, 2017).

This flow had a dual purpose. On the one hand this flow helped with the efficiency of transport of the heavily laden barges, with their mineral loads, down to the quayside at Morwellham. Entrepreneurially it was also designed to also attract and facilitate industry along its course, with its flow purposefully manufactured to power waterwheels for those mines popping up along its route willing to pay.

The canal water still provides power today, through a hydro-electric scheme, operated by South West Water. The Morwellham Power Station was originally built in 1934 by the West Devon Mining & Power Co, taking water from canal (HER^f).

Take the footpath that heads towards the river Tavy, passing the underpass on your right. Stop in the corner of the park where you should be able to see West Bridge.

4. Fitz Ford, West Bridge and the ‘Braddeford’.

The seat of the Fitz family – Fitzford – like many places, is landscape-named after water. It is supposed that the ford, after which it was named, was a crossing of the Tavy before the place got its bridge, West Bridge only being built in the 16^th Century.

It is hard to imagine a ford here today. The river speeds though in a deep, narrowly contained channel, housed within banks several metres high. This topography concentrates the flow meaning it is far from conducive for a ford. If we were to go back many centuries, the landscape would have been different. Long ago, before West Bridge, for it to have been fordable, the river would have had to have had lower banks and it would have babbled in a wider, shallower and less dangerous channel.

High levels of medieval sedimentation, caused by ploughing, tin mining and the deposition of waste from the town has incrementally raised the floodplain, giving the river its entrenched form (e.g. Lewin, 2014). To this we should also recognise the way that past generations revetted the river banks to stabilise them. All of these accidental and purposeful changes gradually led to the over-deepened river channel we see today.

That explains the landscape changes that once allowed for the ford, but then necessitated the bridge. And of what about the bridge do we know?

Woodcock, writing in 2001 (p84), states that the first document to mention the bridge comes from 1601. He makes a case for it being built between 1540 (after the dissolution of the abbey) and 1556, when the medieval ‘Great Bridge’ starts to get called ‘East Bridge’; the implication being that the Great Bridge only gets the East Bridge epithet once it had a more westerly rival. Woodcock suggests that its building was possibly in reaction to a statute of 1531, bolstered by an Act of 1540 encouraging rebuilding in Devon towns.

For those of you who are Finberg afficionados (and who hasn’t read his history of Tavistock Abbey from cover to cover?), he suggests that West Bridge was actually built as early as 1460, being referred to as ‘le newbrig’ in a charter of this date (1969, p202) . Woodcock disagrees, suggesting that the ‘newbrig’ is that across the Tamar at Gunnislake. Given that the Tamar bridge is still known to this day as New Bridge, and the fact that two granite spandrels with a trefoil design, part of an abbey archway, were found in the north pier of the original West Bridge, I am going to side with Woodcock on this debate.

Thanks to easy access to digital archive information, it is possible to easily find other documents that help us date the bridge. On 31^st August 1545 a bond between John Fitz and John Lord Russell was signed in which Fitz agreed to build a suitable way between ‘the West Bridge’ in Tavistock and Russell’s land called ‘Crondell’. However, on the 6^th October 1543 a quitcliam is drawn up which releases a chap called John Glubbe from his tenement at ‘Fordestrete’ which lies between certain named lands including those on the highway leading from Tavistocke towards a ‘Bradefford bridge’ on the West. 

Braddeford Bridge seems to be one-and-the-same as West Bridge. It looks like it was initially called, by some, after the ford it replaced. Braddeford means ‘broad ford’ and, as explained above, for the river to be fordable here, it would have had to have been wide and shallow. Bradefford was therefore a very apt name! With both its new bridge, and the establishment of the Fitz family in their mansion house, the name Braddeford, and that of Ford for the settlement here, was quickly supplanted by the names West Bridge and Fitzford; names that have stuck until today.

Our modern West Bridge is a 20th century structure, widened and strengthened in 1939 to deal with modern vehicles (HER^g).However, photographs of the old bridge show that it had three arches, with strong rounded piers. Beneath the bridge, and presumably to aid flow by reducing bed-roughness, the river bed was engineered with smooth flat slabs . These can still be seen today when river levels are very low and it is safe to be able to snoop about in the channel as I managed to do a couple of years ago (see image below).

Follow the footpath which runs alongside the River Tavy. Notice the flat ground, now used for recreation, on your left. Stop anywhere along the path to consider this area’s previous land-use as water meadow.

5. Water Meadows

According to Historic England, water meadows were damp grasslands irrigated to produce plentiful hay crops and rich pasture. They used engineered channels and sluices to ‘float’ a steady thin sheet of nutrient-laden water across the ground at set periods (2018). In winter, meadows would provide grazing for sheep and cattle, whilst in summer, these would be moved to graze on upland pasture. The elevated ‘managed’ moisture of meadows was manipulated to increase the summer hay crop yield.

Before the 17^th C this was normally done in a process called ‘floating upwards’, involving blocking channels with ‘stops’ of turf, peat or logs so that they overflowed and flooded the meadows. This method could cause water-logging problems and so a more sophisticated ‘floating downwards’ systems was developed. This involved regulating a constant gentle flow of water by means of either a system known as ‘catchworks’ (which caught water running off hillslopes before re-distributing it) or a later system called ‘bedworks’, suited to floodplain sites, taking water off the river. The water would be diverted to follow a contour ditch or ‘gutter’ which skirted the top of the meadow and redistributed it across the meadow by opening sluices from the gutter.

Investments in these forms of meadow management increased post-dissolution, particularly in the age of agricultural improvement in the 17^th and and 18^th centuries such as the example below from the Duke of Bedford’s collection for one of the Bedfordshire farms.

The catchmeadow method would have been employed on the monastic estates of Tavistock Abbey. There is a ‘catchmeadow’ still evident on late 19^th C Ordnance Survey maps of the land that was to become the grounds of Tavistock College (HER^h). The grounds of Mount Kelly School and ‘The Meadows’ park also contained meadow, as evident from the field names on the Wynne Map . More recent land usage (the spreading of the town’s waste dung, landscaping for schools and leisure) has probably masked earlier meadow management channels and sluices, but if we went back several centuries these areas were almost certainly incised and patterned with water channels.

Continue until you reach the footbridge close to the Meadowlands leisure centre. On the footbridge stop and look at the river water to consider the issue of water quality.

6. Poor Water Quality

Being a river that drains a heavily mined catchment, from tin on the moor, to copper and other minerals in the valleys, the Tavy has seen its fair share of mine pollution. For a start, the great openworks of the Tudor tinning age released huge quantities of sediment from the moorland ‘gerts’ which would have made waters turbid, and de-oxygenated. Not only harmful to aquatic life, all that mud also thickened floodplains and clogged up harbours.

Mine pollution had other poisonous impacts, including the specific toxic effects of individual metals like copper and arsenic. In 1872 evidence was submitted to a Board of Commissioners, looking into the pollution of rivers. Harms noted were to the fishery, to property on the banks of the river, to cattle, to meadows irrigated from its waters, and to residents who drank the water. They heard from Henry Clark, who was the Chairman of the Board of River Conservators. Henry said:

“I have known the Tavy and its surroundings for fifteen years. It has been polluted principally by the mines in the district… Some damage to property has been done, but the chief damage is to the fishery. At the present time a quantity of water – deleterious water and pollutions – comes down so thickly that fishing is almost impossible and the fishery materially injured. Dead fish have been found in the rver from time to time, but the principal effect is that it sickens the fish. Spawn is altogether killed. By the pollutions the river is very much discoloured. Two or three days ago it presented a leaden-muddy appearance”

Clark, 1872, quoted in Woodcock, 2012, p51.

The enquiry did little good because in 1896, speakers at a meeting of those who paid to fish the Tavy decried the continuation of discolouration and poisoning, as well as noting how the pollution was ‘offensive to the nature lover’ and was harmful in putting off visitors.

Not everyone thought the mineral-laden waters were harmful though, as recalled by a local, writing to the Tavistock Gazette…

I remember looking at the red coloured waters (iron) and seeing a poor afflicted woman bathing her eyes and face in them, and being told that “Crazy Su”, as she was called, “was not so silly as many supposed her to be”.

‘A Native’, Tavistock Gazette, 2 January 1909.

Sadly Crazy Su was not doing herself, her face nor eyes any good as copper oxide is a skin and eye irritant and arsenic was well known to be downright deadly.

When over the bridge, turn left and follow the footpath parallel to the river. You will be heading up-stream. On your right you will notice a well set into the bottom of a steep slope. The well is framed by masonry and the name St John’s Well.

7. Holy and Healing Water – St John’s Well

We are going to finish this water voyage with a look at Tavistock’s only surviving holy well. The medieval landscape was one in which holy wells played a significant role – many towns and village were populated with them. In pre-Christian times springs seem to have been associated with deities and and having healing powers; qualities we may now conceive as coming from magical thinking (Bradley, 2012). ‘Pagan’ springs then became appropriated into Christianity and given saint names.

Whether St John’s Well – on the far bank of the River Tavy opposite the old abbey – had such a pre-Christian origin or not, we will never know. By the 14^th Century its healing waters come into historical view, associated with St John’s Chapel, a hermitage, and a hospital. It’s waters supposedly were known for curing skin complaints; presumably a quality the hermits and Tavistock Abbey were able to leverage for their financial benefit, through donations from the desperate and disfigured.

Today a dribble of water from a cut cliff face at the bottom of the railway embankment, is framed by a carved arch and labelled as ‘St John’s Well’. This is almost certainly not the real St John’s Well, but an early 20^th century replica, installed to memorialise the historic well that seems to have been destroyed when the railway re-sculpted the hillside in c. 1859. A number of early 19^th C Tavistock writers describe St John’s Well as being a strong torrent of water that gushed forth at a location roughly opposite the abbey Still Tower, several hundred metres further up stream than the current structure, which merely dribbles water out of the rock-face.

For those that would like to know more about the wonderful medieval St John’s Well, the chapel, its post-monastic history, and its lost landscape, I have written about this topic in more depth in a blog St John’s Chapel, Tavistock: Springs, Summers and Hermits.

Continue along the footpath towards the Abbey Bridge. Notice where the footpath widens and diverges to form an upper and a lower path. This is where the St John’s Chapel and the original St John’s Well were located. Cross over Abbey Bridge, where you will find yourself back in the town centre.

Thanks to Chris Bellars for tipping me off to the reference to Crazy Sue in the Tavistock Gazette.

References

Bradley, I. 2012. Water. Bloomsbury.

Finberg, H.P.R. 1969. Tavistock Abbey: A Study in the Social and Economic History of Devon. Augustus M. Kelley, New York.

Gray, T (Ed.) 1997. Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete (1789-1800). Devon Books.

HER^a Undated. Hospital, Formerly Leper Hospital. MDV17678. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/

HER^b Undated.Workhouse at Mount Ford, Tavistock. MDV57357. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/

HER^c Undated. Culvert, Mount Ford to Spring Hill. MDV103942. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/

HER^d Undated. Fitzford Mansion. MDV3961. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/

HER^e Undated. Well House, off Callington Road. MDV3944. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/

HER^f Undated. Hydroelectric Power Station at Morwellham. MDV62956. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/

HER^g Undated. The Old West Bridge. MDV3949. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/

HER^h Undated. Catch Meadow System at Tavistock Primary School. MDV124265. https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/

Historic England, 2018. Water Meadows. Introduction to Heritage Assets. Historic England.

Lewin, J. 2014 The English Floodplain. The Geographical Journal, 180(4), pp317-325.

Waterhouse, R. 2017. The Tavistock Canal – its History and Archaeology. Camborne: The Trevithick Society, 536 pp

Woodcock, G. 2001. Tavistock’s Yesterdays: Episodes from Her History. Volume 11. Deer Park Productions.

Woodcock, G. 2012. Tavistock’s Yesterdays: Episodes from Her History. Volume 21. Deer Park Productions.