I flick the kettle on and make myself a flask of coffee, then jump in the car. With all the effort of a flex of my accelerator foot and a slight clockwise and anticlockwise twist of my arms, the car, through a succession of pulls and swoops over the ribbon of tarmac, transports me up 1000 feet to Princetown.
Category: <span>Paths, Routes and Trackways</span>
This so called monastic way is rich in crosses and the ghosts of crosses. It has a complexion cast and re-cast: from Saxon suffused hollow-ways; to medieval farm lanes; to the tantalising tinners tracks.
Post-boys rode in country entirely unlit after dark, and along roads which, when not pestered with sloughs or loose stones, often dwindled over heaths and open farmland into a vague uncharted right of way. A post boy benighted in such country might spend miserable hours dismounting to feel for cart ruts, turning his coat inside out to defeat Robin Goodfellow, listening for the murmmer of a remembered brook of the clinking chains of a never to be forgotten gibbet (Crofts, 1967)
When I sat down to write this blog, I anticipated a post emphasising packhorse travel. Instead I have been taken down a different road; a road about the potential embryonic development of this highway with a prehistory linked to transhumance.
Gibbet Hill dominates this stretch of the King Way with a history I sense is intertwined with this postal route; a place where the highwayman’s cadaver was left to ferment in the breeze, just like his notoriety.
The tincture of transformation in the built environment is duplicated in the natural, as the road ascends from the plateau of Roborough Down, up through the borderlands, to the open moor: a transition to abundant fog, and reduced visibility; to stronger winds, and lesser shelter.
The King Way was a riding track between Tavistock and Okehampton, used for pack horses and post-boys on horseback delivering the King’s Mail. As a walk, I feel it is a hard sell.
Through the collection of tithes and taxes, through the control of manors and markets, through the exercise of power and politics, monks of various rank would have had need to travel.
The whole geography of this route span on its axis two hundred or so years ago, reflecting the changing importance of places and the changing standard of the roads.
Long ago this track was once a main road between Tavistock and the harbours of Plymouth, connecting up Tavistock and Buckland abbeys. But for some reason its significance has fallen out of memory along with its use.
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