Cotehele and Bohetherick

Background

In this walk around Cotehele and Bohetherick I am going to put my emphasis on its Victorian and early 20th Century history, infused with the memories of my Dad, who was evacuated here in WW2. I am going to largely ignore Cotehele House and its ‘noble’ heritage, instead focusing on farming, milling, market gardening, orchards, river and rail transport – the working and productive landscape.

In response to the air raids that reduced much of Plymouth city centre to rubble at the start of 1941, my dad and his mother Kathleen evacuated to stay on West Bohetherick Farm. West Bohetherick was farmed by Uncle Nelson (second cousin of my paternal grandfather), and his wife, Aunty Lil. My dad was just three when he arrived. But they were not the only evacuees at West Bohetherick. Uncle Nelson and Aunty Lil also gave a safe home to my dad’s cousin Ann and her mum, plus a lady called Mrs Stewart who was there with her daughter Barbara. They were ‘placed’ evacuees from London. The countryside was swollen with evacuees. Even George, the 5th Earl of Edgcumbe evacuated from Mount Edgecumbe to the family’s ancestral home at Cotehele at this hazadous time (Neale, 2010).

The farmhouse certainly swelled with numbers in 1941, and although a big house it must have felt very full. My dad recalls his mum cooking on a primus stove in their room upstairs – Aunty Lil must have been far too busy with her farmhouse and farm duties to be spending the war playing hostess for so many families. I wonder what Uncle Nelson and Aunty Lil felt about having so many people sharing their home, including having all the little ones running around their wellied feet whilst they were trying to work?

7 Interesting Things

1. West Bohetherick Farm

West Bohetherick Farm is grey and substantial, stoically looking south over the steep slopes down to Hay Marsh and the Tamar below. The farmhouse is fully slate fronted with a pleasing symmetry of triangular gables, balanced chimneys on either side, all about its two storey entrance projection.

The farm was both a dairy farm and market garden and my dad recalls the market garden doing very well during the war. He remembers the ‘working’ rooms of the Victorian farmhouse much better than the ‘best’ rooms.

“In the kitchen there was a range cooker and a big farmhouse table. In an air raid we used to all get close together under that table. Out the back there was a dairy where Aunty Lil made butter and cream. Everybody used the back door, nobody used the front. Locals would bring jugs every day to get their milk”

John Gedye

Not all of the memories are idyllic and some clearly had a more traumatising impact on my Dad as a little boy.

“One pig a year could be killed for farm use. I remember one being strung up on a hook. It made a hell of a noise. I wasn’t allowed to watch. It was very primitive. The same happened with the chickens. They were strung up on a branch and had their throats cut too. They made less noise than the pig”

My dad experienced his own assault on his throat with a knife, which may, in his young mind, have cemented his identification with the suffering of the slaughtered pig and chickens:

“I had to have my tonsils out. I was put on the table and knocked out. It was very frightening.”

2. Market Gardens

The sheltered south facing slopes of the Tamar Valley made the climate here ideal for tender crops, but it was the arrival of railways that turned these fecund slopes into the flourishing fruit and flower market gardens that so stamped their identity on the region for 100 years. The story goes that a man called James Lawry spotted the business opportunity whilst visiting London’s Covent Garden. Chatting to the market traders he realised that:

“their earliest strawberries arrived in June, while back home in Tamar Valley their crop was much earlier. Upon learning the difference in price for Strawberries in London as opposed to Devon, there seemed little to lose.”

Gibbons, 2016, summarising Neale, 2004

The railways, which had reached Plymouth by 1849, enabled him to transport his crops down the Tamar by boat and then onto the train to reach the lucrative London market within 24 hours. The economic sense of the idea spread and soon market gardening was the business to be in. This was an economic saviour, coming on the back of the implosion of mining. Market gardening hit its height in the 1950s giving employment to over 8,000 people (Lewis, 2004). Whilst there are still railway links into the area, the Beeching cuts made transportation costs increase. Couple this with advances in greenhouse cultivation (enabling other areas to produce food), the emergence of supermarkets, and the international transportation of food and you no longer have a viable industry. Through the 1970s, the area haemorrhaged producers including Uncle Nelson who gave up the dairy farm and his market garden at this time.

Much of the gardened land has now reverted to grazing or woodland, but some market gardens still exist. Not all of the benefits of the area have been lost. The sheltered slopes are still sheltered slopes. In places, rows of bushes and trees regiment the hillsides, with foliage destined for florists and bouquets. Schemes such as Tamar Grow Local are supporting people to become market gardeners as we move into a new era for food production, helping produce local food and bring it to others in the community in more sustainable ways of growing and feeding.

3. Cotehele Quay

By the time my dad was running around Cotehele Quay in the 1940s, it had long ceased its purpose as a working transport hub. The lime kilns, stores, brewery, stables and timber yard were all redundant. The quay had once been used to ship produce from the valley’s lucrative market gardens down river to Plymouth and Saltash which had railways c.1950. However, once the railway running through Bere Alson opened in 1890, produce was instead taken by ferry across from the quay, only a matter of metres, to the other side of the river, then up the hill to Bere Alston railway station (Neale, 2010). This would have enabled the fruit and flowers to get to London in even more rapid time. Dad didn’t go down to the quay much. As a small boy it was just a bit too far off his patch from Bohetherick. But he does recall the fishermen. At the right times of month and river flow, they stretched their nets wide across the Tamar, from Quay to bank, from Cornwall to Devon, hoping for a haul of salmon.

4. The Tamar

At what point does a river become an estuary? It becomes an estuary when it is subject to tidal movements and the water becomes saltily brackish. But this is a soft, not a hard transition. River bleeds into estuary; estuary reaches into river. The Tamar here is definitely estuary, with its muddy flats and its ebb and flow of tide. But yet, it has a feel of transmutation. Lower down, the Tamar becomes wide and open and you can perceive the presence of the ocean beyond in the tang of the air and the aesthetic of the environment. Towards Gunnislake all sense of the sea is gone as the freshwater channel becomes enclosed in the steep wooded banks of the valley. But here at Cotehele the Tamar is a bit of both.

What Arthur Norway wouldn’t have seen as he was so poetically describing his trip up the Tamar, are the large earthen levees that trace the edges of the meander bends, veering this way and that, along this segment of the river. My dad remembers them being built during the war in order to claim from the Tamar its fertile valley floor, a necessity vital to increase food production for a populous that was going hungry. In 2005 the National Trust set forward a ‘Cotehele Wetland and Restoration’ scheme in order to return Hay Marsh back to marshland. According to Neale (2010) this divided the community and the Trust stepped back, with a more modest proposal to continue farming the former marsh with ‘nature in mind’. It is interesting how people react to changes in their environment, even when this relates to returning land to its natural form after a relatively short life-span being farmed. The issues are complex and emotional. However, with sea-level rise predictions constantly being revised upwards (1.35m rise above datum by 2100 at the time of writing), no land management will stop the former marshlands of the Tamar Valley from becoming re-wetted. In fact, a lot more than marshlands will inevitably be flooded.

5. Cotehele Orchard

When in the Mediterranean I have relished the aromatic parched terraced groves of olive, lemon and orange trees yet, back at home, I am guilty of almost ignoring the fruit trees in our own damp landscape. I have certainly been guilty of not giving them the same veneration that I afforded the ‘exotic’ fruits. But apple, pear and cherry orchards are as quintessential a component of our British landscape as olives and lemons are of the Med. But the familiar is, by definition, not exotic.

Originating in Asia and brought to the UK by the Romans, the British have adopted apples as our own, leading to around 3,000 varieties from our island (Crumbs on the Table; The Orchard Project). Pears and cherries have similar back-stories. That is an incredible breadth of biodiversity. Orchards were once ubiquitous in our countryside and people would also have commonly had their own domestic fruit trees in their gardens. Orchards were not monocultures and contained a variety of fruit and nut trees such as walnuts. They also made efficient use of ground with stock grazing the grassy understory and munching on fallen fruit; a sustainable form of agriculture with low maintenance manuring. Sadly, our orchards have been decimated through agricultural intensification. Nationally 60% of orchards have been felled and in Devon this figure is thought to be more like 90% (Johnson, 2019).

In the Tamar Valley, with its steep, sheltered south facing slopes, there were plenty of orchards, with apples and cherries being favoured. The National Trust at Cotehele, along with other local landowners are trying to preserve what remains of old orchards and provide new ground to nurture old varieties. This has been enabled by a growing interest in locally grown produce, biodiversity and sustainability. Alongside the ‘Old Orchard’, Cotehele, has its new ‘Mother Orchard’, with 125 different varieties of apple, whose names, like ‘Cornish Honeypinnick’, ‘Limberlimb’, ‘Pig’s’ Nose’ and ‘Lemon Pippin’ are a joy on the tongue to say, let alone to eat. West Bohetherick Farm had an orchard and in one of those war years Uncle Nelson remarked at how abundant the cherries were – a bumper crop. My dad’s remembers scoffing his face full of cherry fruit.

6. Cotehele Mill

Now a museum, part of the National Trust estate, my dad recalls Cotehele Mill when it was still working. Labelled as Morden Mill on the 1st edition OS 25 Inch map (1880-1899) the mill was taken over by the Langsford family in the 1870s who ran it for almost 100 years. It would have been the Langsfords working the mill in my dad’s memories.

As part of the war effort farmers were doing all they could to maximise their production of corn and so the mill would have been busier than ever at this time. Dad remembers driving downhill with Uncle Nelson with threshed corn and unloading it into the mill from the road above, through a door at the top of the mill house, which was set up against the steep hillside. He had the chance to go inside too. His overriding impression was of the dust in the air and the movement of the machinery – shaking, rotating, things going forwards, things going backwards . All helping grind the grain that, under gravity ended up in the sacks at the bottom of the mill, ready to be collected and turned into bread. The mill was more than just a mill. Next door was a Blackmith’s Shop which by Dad also recalls being still in use. The mill would regularly need worn out and broken parts to be mended not to mention all the trade from the farm traffic coming and going all day.

7. Cider House

I took a photo of this little building at a junction in the middle of the village as I was intrigued by its purpose. Too small to be a house or a barn; architecturally it didn’t look like a shop either. My dad was able to fill me in. Apparently it was used as a place to ferment cider. My dad can’t remember the details so I don’t know how it operated. He did say that the building was also used for different things so it can’t have been solely for cider production. I wonder, were the apples milled and pressed here too? Was it linked to a particular farm or was it communally used by whole village?

Cider was very important in agricultural communities even until relatively recently. As late as the 19th C, workers were often part-paid in food and alcohol until the Truck Act of 1887 stopped this practice. On a Cornish farm the alcohol would always have been cider. I suspect this tradition continued quite a bit later than 1887! Whilst not paid in cider, my dad has a visceral memory of drinking the cloudy juice. Aged only four or five he ended up in a competition with another young village boy to see who could drink a pint of the stuff. The boys were egged on by the men, knowingly enjoying the sport of getting the youngsters ‘propr langered’. My dad recalls feeling very ‘woozy’.

The Route

For the sake of the narrative of this blog post I have started the labelling of the ‘Interesting Things’ at West Bohetherick Farmhouse (1). However, in reality I parked at Cotehele Quay, which is the best place to start.

• Take the path from the NT car park at Cotehele Quay into the woods and follow the path as it gently climbs uphill.
• Pass the Chapel on the corner and go a little further before taking a public footpath on the left through the grounds of Cotehele House.
• Open to the public during the lockdown, I was able to access the Cotehele Orchard (5) without NT admission charges. The orchard lies west of the house after a little detour through the upper gardens.
• Return out of Cotehele House ground towards the car park then follow the road away from the property and downhill. Take the well marked path on the other side of the road and keep gradually descenging through the woods down into the valley.
• Cross the river at the footbridge and walk towards Cotehele Mill (6)

• From the Mill ascend to the road above. Opposite the mill is a steep rocky path that zig-zags its way up hill to Bohetherick.
• At Bohetherick, take a little detour west (to your right when walking) to see West Bohetherick Farm (1).
• Walk back to the small heart of the village, which used to have a shop and garage. Look for the little cider fermenting building on a junction (7).
• Take the road east, out of the village and down hill. You will pass market gardens on your right (2) and get very good views to the Tamar (4)
• The road goes down to the river where you cross over the 15th C bridge and veer right to Cotehere Quay (3).

References

ARCHI UK Old Maps. https://www.archiuk.com/

Crumbs on the Table. The British Apple and its Orchard Heritage. www.crumbsonthetable.co.uk

Gibbons, A. (2016). From Mines to Market Gardens – The Tamar Valley. www.writingcities.com

Johnson, H. (2019). The Traditional British Orchard: A precious fragile resource. Buildingconcervation.com

Lewis, J. (2004). Sovereigns, Madams & Double Whites – Fruit & Flower Pioneers of the Tamar Valley. Devon Books.

National Trust. Cotehele Mill. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/cotehele-mill

National Trust. Cotehele’s Orchards. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/cotehele/features/coteheles-orchards

Neale, J. (2010). Discovering the Tamar. Amberley Publishing Ltd: Chalford.

Norway, A. H. (1907). Highways and Byways of Devon and Cornwall, Macmillan and Co. Ltd: London.

The Orchard Project. The Amazing World of Apple Varieties. www.theorchardproject.org.uk