In this blog I start pulling at the thread of the name Buckfast to reveal, through other place-name and landscape evidence, what I contend is an ancient Saxon deer park, previously uncommented upon. Discovering so many ‘clues’ was thrilling and just goes to show what amazing landscape histories are sitting in plain sight.
Category: <span>Dartmoor</span>
With my recent contemplations of the river Tavy in the context of the history of British rivers, I began wondering what all this meant for the stages of development of the town of Tavistock. In this blog I use a hydrological perspective to explore, what I hope is an informed speculation, that the original Saxon abbey may not lie under the remains of the abbey as we see them today, but on slightly higher ground north of the floodplain.
In walking this third leg of my journey, on the monastic way between Tavistock and Buckfast, I wonder if, in order to experience this route as it would have in the past, I should actually be on horseback, as previous ‘elite’ or jobbing workers would have done. In exploring this way, I am learning more of its deeper roots, to a Saxon and maybe even earlier prehistoric past, pre-dating its Christian use and the imprint that the crosses leave in the current landscape. Along the way this crossing of Dartmoor reveals that one of the great Dartmoor legends – that of Childe the Hunter – may not just be historic hyperbole.
Rivers feel like a very natural part of our landscape yet they are far more altered than many people think. A great deal of river change happened in the medieval, as valleys floors became blanketed in sediment, altering floodplains and river channel forms – all of which had consequences for medieval settlement, communications, farming and industry.
This is the final installment of my Lich Way trilogy. I finally get to Lydford and the focus of all the attention, the graveyard and the burial of bodies. On completing my walk, I end up wondering if the Lich Way is really ‘a route’ at all.
In this second instalment in a trilogy about the Lich Way we get closer to the ghosts that haunt this Corpse Path. Be it real or imagined, the spirit story of this path is integral to its identity.
On this walk I glide along the Lich Way, a route used in the middle ages to take bodies for burial at Lydford. ‘Corpse Roads’ or ‘Ways of the Dead’ have a macabre cachet, where hiking melds with hammer horror to give them a leisure era popularity. In this first of a series of blogs I explore the historical rationale for the route, as well as the practicalities and folklore attached to death and funerary journeys.
Exploring the landscape and history of this western approach into Okehampton has revealed to me a story that is seemingly underpinned by environmental determinism. It is a narrative in which roads are the stars of the show; roads controlled by the imposition of geography, forcing a path north of the moor in a need to connect to Cornwall, West Devon and the Tamar valley.
Rivers feel ‘natural’ but they are natural features with a very modified past. What can we know of the natural geomorphic history of the Tavy and does this help us when thinking about the history along it? This blog peels away the layers of sediment and infrastructure to discover a different type of river of the past.
The morning haze gave the sky a bright grey luminescence which bounced its scattered rays off the green fields and the golden Molinia. The air was still near Wind Tor as I trod out to walk along the ridge of Hamel Down. The brown ground was bone dry and unyielding under my feet after another especially dry April. So much for drip, drip drop little April showers.
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