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.
Category: <span>Paths, Routes and Trackways</span>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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