This blog is the second of two parts, using journals from two ‘outsider’ visits to Wheal Friendship to develop a portrait of this globally important mine, using their observations to glimpse the mine landscape and the people who worked it. In this second part we see what French mining journalist Louis Simonin makes of the mine, aided by drawings made by his companion artists.
Category: <span>Dartmoor</span>
This blog, in two parts, uses the journals of two ‘outsiders’ visits to Wheal Friendship to develop a portrait of this globally important mine, using their observations to glimpse the mine landscape and the people who worked it. In this first part we will examine what local woman Rachel Evans has to say about Wheal Friendship and in Part 2 we will see what French mining journalist Louis Simonin makes of the mine.
In this blog I take a walk in the most southerly part of Dartmoor National Park, exploring the delightful Longtimber woods, the River Erme and the open expanses of Hanger Down.
At last! In this blog I finally reach Chagford, on the final stage of the old highway across the moor from Plymouth to this lovely eastern Dartmoor market town and staging post to Exeter. In this route I descend from open moor, back into the security and constriction of the Devon lanes and head for the town, which for hundreds of years has been a place of hospitality for a weary traveller.
In Tavistock there is a shady riverside walk on the far bank of the Tavy known as St John’s. It has an amazing history of having once housed a chapel, hermitage, ‘pest house’ and holy well. Apart from a well, nothing remains of this past, and it is fair to say very few people have any idea of its yesteryears.
In this blog I take its known history and, using new map evidence, take a more in-depth landscape look at St John’s to reveal: where the medieval road used to go; a previously un-recorded farm; a mysterious summer-house; a picturesque tor by the river that has been obliterated; and the ‘real’ St John’s Well.
I also find not just one, but three potential reasons, why St John’s is so perfectly named.
Postbridge is a new village but an old place. Its clapper has meant that, for God knows how many centuries, traffic has had to pass through here. But it is also part of the island of ancient tenements; making a living in a highland sea of swelling and rolling tors, in a place of safety and harbour. And in being separate, in being cut off, there is a feeling of this place as being otherworldly.
Is it stag semen? Is it Piskie Puke? Is it the gelatinous remains of a fallen star? In this blog about rare Star Jelly, I look at past and present understandings of this odd glob.
I have once again taken up the old trans-moor track, that connects Chagford in the east to Plymouth and Tavistock in the west. This middle moorland section, between Two Bridges and Postbridge, is particularly impacted by turnpiking, bringing trade and inns to the central moor; a hospitality trade still much in evidence today.
I love landscape and I love Dartmoor. With a background in physical geography I have some understanding of geology, but a geologist I am not. I find mineral compositions, geological terminology, and geology’s buried strata, sometimes challenging to get my head around. That is why Josephine Collingwood’s new book – ‘Geology of Dartmoor: An Introduction to Dartmoor through Deep Time; its Geology, Tor Formation and Mineralogy’ – is so fantastic. Yes, Josephine knows her subject, but what makes this book so engaging and useful is her ability to communicate. The book adeptly handles the detail of Dartmoor’s geological history in a simple, yet not dumbed-down way. She provides explanations with clarity and uses abundant diagrams and annotated photographs to beautifully illustrate the concepts. All of this requires skill and effort – it is much easier to make something sound complicated than to make it sound straightforward! It has been fifty years…
In this blog I finish the route over Dartmoor, between Tavistock Abbey and Buckfast Abbey, two monasteries founded in the late Saxon. This final section revealed: churches built for the glory of God separated by over a millennia of time; caves full of pre-historic fauna; an individual who, even in death seemed to provoke fear in the local population; and elite hunting Saxons, enjoying the sport of the Buckfast landscape.
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