In this blog I expand on the history of the medieval Abbot’s Weir near Tavistock by exploring Rachel Evans’s detailed 1846 account in her book ‘Home Scenes’. Through her writing we get fanciful tales of a mineral-thieving abbot’s watery demise and a factually richer, less-known version of the AD 1280 dispute between monastic communities over weir-related rights. Through her nearly two hundred year old landscape account, Evans offers us a unique narrative on this once significant landmark.
Category: <span>Devon</span>
Betsy Grimbal’s Tower, or the West Gate, is an important architectural survival of the medieval abbey of Tavistock; but is this building really what it seems?
In this blog I share an unexpected landscape finding. By chance I stumbled on an association between rushes, St John and an area of ‘holy’ fields south of Lamerton at Rushford. Revealed, I was amazed to learn, is a surprising story of the ceremonial role of the rush in medieval society adding historical and landscape richness to our understandings of olden Tavistock.
In this blog I discover another fish weir! Who knew weirs could be so exciting? This is not just any weir, this is the medieval Abbot’s Fish weir on the Tavy, once controlled by Tavistock Abbey but transferred to Buckland Abbey in 1278 AD. In fact, this weir probably furnished the Tavy for the best part of a millennia. The weir was notoriously the cause of a fight in 1280 AD, where bows, arrows and blood were drawn. In this blog I share details of its remains, including a whopping slab of stone the size of an estate car, and reveal its forgotten whereabouts.
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.
As readers of this blog will know, one of my enthusiasms is the relationship between landscape, the past, and water. So, when a friend recently shared a copy of an old map of the Bere Peninsula, the first thing I did was to eye its lines, pictures and annotations to see what it revealed about the area’s hydrological history. Scanning, I noticed ‘The Were’, on the Tavy, just south of Denham Bridge. This blog tells the tale of what I discovered about this ancient weir and my hunt to see if any evidence of it still remained.
A necessity to visit the outskirts of the city sparked a walk, in territory I wouldn’t normally think to walk – rural spaces in the city. North Plymouth is particularly endowed with woodlands in its steep valleys, which provide important corridors and habitats for both nature and people.
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.
I ascended from the stink, din and whizz of the dual carriageway, via an ugly flight of concrete steps that ran up the side of the earthwork on which the fort sits. Like walking through an unseen door, the noise immediately fell away as I started on a circuit of the ramparts.
Not every walk provides a lesson. Why should it? But this walk did give me one. It reminded me of the need to get out of the ruts we form for ourselves when we walk our usual haunts, and the need to sometimes depart from our self-made beaten track.
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