Sir Francis Drake’s Weir – Discovering the Disappeared Fish Weir on the Tavy

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.

The Corbridge Map and Other Map Evidence

This story starts with a plan of the manor of Beer Ferris (Bere Ferrers), surveyed for the lord of the manor, Lord Hobart of Blickling, by James Corbridge and dating to 1737. The map is delicately drawn, bordered with flowers. Even the trees are drawn with shadows (thank you to my friend Yolie for noticing this delightful detail).

Shown on the map, below Denham Bridge, after a bend in the river, where the Tavy turns to flow to the west, is ‘The Were’. Historically, this spot is bordered on the west bank by the Bere Ferrers estate and on the east by the Buckland estate, held for most of its post-monastic history, by the Drakes. The weir is drawn at a distinctive and identifiable location, above a kink in the river where a huge shingle bar of sediment is deposited, a feature seemingly depicted by the illustrator.

Although less attentively illustrated, the weir also appears on the Tithe Map of circa 1840, along with the shingle bar deposits.

By the 1880s ‘The Were’ is gone. It is not recorded on the first edition OS six inch to the mile map, or any map onwards. This is unsurprising. Rivers, when in spate, are dangerously energetic and destructive. Any historic weir, not maintained, will sooner or later be washed away in flood waters. However, even when historic features are not shown on current maps, they can often be found on something called the Historic Environment Record (HER). This is a record of information on all known archaeology, recorded county by county, and often accessible as a map layer on specialist open access sites. I checked to see what the HER said about this weir, but found the spot unmarked. This really was a lost weir!

Rootling the Riverbank

Even though I didn’t really expect to find any sign of this old weir, I decided to take a walk along the river in Denham Woods, just to see the spot where it once dammed the waters.

Taking a forest track, mantled in fallen tawny leaves, I headed for the place where I thought the weir might have been. Veering, I dropped from the path, down a steep slope, grabbing at trunks to stop gravity accelerating me to the floodplain. In places it was so steep I sat, using my bum as a break, to safely descend. Later I found a safer route to the riverbank, but no matter, the scrambling was fun.

I found myself at the back edge of the shingle bar, a large lobe of sand and cobbles on the inside of a bend of this watercourse. As rivers flow around bends, the water is forced, centripetally, to the outside, and it is here the river energy is highest and more erosion takes place. On the inside of bends, the reverse is true; the energy is lower and deposition, not erosion, takes place. And so it was here. Only in flood flows would this shingle bar be over-washed by water.

My feet scrunched on the sand and gravel as I located the up-river edge of the shingle bar, where the weir would have spanned. Here the channel was narrower and deeper, constrained by rocky outcrops on the western bank where I now stood. I stared across to the opposite bank. Not expecting to see anything, I was convinced this was the spot that, logic dictating, you would build a weir. Here the river constricted and it might be secured to the foundation of rocky, not alluvial banks.

Finding the Fabric of the Fish Weir – Field Evidence

I would never have paid much attention to the inclined plane of stones, stacked at about a forty-degree angle on the opposite (Buckland) bank, if I hadn’t been hunting for a weir. They would probably not have registered as anything other than natural. But these stones were not naturally aligned. They did not mirror the geological fabric of the country rock in the surrounding riverbank.

I investigated some more. Also on the opposite bank, at what I guessed would be the down-stream face of the weir, I could see what looked like a stone post hole, incised from the rock, which I estimated to be about 15cm across and 50cm high.

On my side of the river (the Bere side) were two more chiselled-out chunks. They were directly opposite the post-hole on the other bank, also looking distinctly man-made. Finally, I looked down, and there, protruding from the rock where I stood, I spied an iron pin, hammered into the top of the stone.

I was thrilled. I hadn’t expected to see any landscape evidence of such an old weir, and yet, here I had three different features, none of which on its own were spectacular, but in their corroborating proximity were pretty definitive.

The Buckland Fish Weir – Recorded Evidence

With the field clues established, what could I find out about the recorded history of this ghost weir? Was anything known?

The Letters of Sir Francis Henry Drake (1723-1794)

Firstly, I shared my find with Clive Charlton of the Bere Local History Group. Clive, immensely knowledgeable about this region’s history, immediately highlighted some documentary evidence of its use. Clive pointed out that, in the 18^th Century, when the Corbridge map was drawn, the Buckland Abbey Estate was owned by Francis Henry Drake, a descendent of the well-known sea-farer. Charity Scott-Stokes and Alan Lumb (2019) recently published letters exchanged between Drake and his Steward, Nicholas Rowe from this time.

Clive picked out some references in  this book pertaining to a weir on the Buckland estate and to fisheries and salmon including “concerns about damage to the weir, severe flooding and also the landing of salmon from the river and estuary on the Bere Peninsula, perhaps to the detriment of the catch taken by the Drakes.” It is entertaining to learn that “in the 1740s, there were disputes between the Buckland estate and residents of the Bere Peninsula, not least the Rector, the Rev. Snow, who encouraged his parishioners to take salmon!”. Could this be the same weir?

The Writings and Illustrations of Rev. Swete

Even though the HER did not include an entry for this historic weir, there are other weirs still in existence, further up the Tavy above Denham Bridge. These do have HER records attached to them. I had realised that the record for the weir of Denham Bridge Mill mentioned that a man called Reverend Swete had illustrated the weir in the late 18^th Century. But something was wrong with this. Denham Bridge Weir and corn mill, do not appear on the Corbridge map, nor the Tithe map, only showing up on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six inch to the mile map around 1880. This weir-mill combo is therefore Victorian[1] and was built some time after c.1840. The description and illustration by Swete in 1797 could not therefore relate to Denham Bridge Weir but almost certainly the lost Buckland weir.

The Reverend Swete describes departing after a visit to the mansion house of Buckland Abbey and riding north, up an avenue to “a romantic scene on the Tavy – a Wear for the sole purpose of taking salmon” (Gray, 1997, p154). After taking a wrong turn in the woods and getting a bit lost, Swete descends into the valley and finds a track along the river which is “the most execrable I had ever met with – it was not only slippery and deep in mire, but the roots of the contiguous trees ran across it in every direction – inevitable stumbling blocks to the horse of an incautious traveller”.  Then Swete recounts:

Swete is wrong about this being a ‘natural ledge’, but given the weir would be obscured by the cascading water, it is a forgivable choice of words.

Observations by William Marshall

But Swete was not the only writer to have chronicled the Buckland weir. A few years earlier, in July 1791, William Marshall, the well-known agricultural writer, made observations of it whilst on the Buckland estate. He devotes several pages to describing the weir. It is worth recounting what he says in full for the important detail he provides about the weir’s construction and function.

Of the weir he says it:

“is a work of considerable magnitude and expence [sic]. It consists of a strong dam or breastwork, ten or twelve feet high, thrown across the river, in a part where two projecting rocks serve happily as buttresses to the masonry; which is built somewhat compassing or archwise (but not regularly nor sufficiently), to resist the pressure and force of the waters, in times of flood.”

Marshall, 1796, Reprinted in 1970, p256

He then describes a ‘weir house’ trap on one side …

“At one end of the dam, is a “weir house” or trap; on the principle of the Vermin trap, whose entrance is outwardly large, but contracted inwardly, so as to elude or prevent the escape of the animal which has taken it. It is remarkable, however, with respect to salmon, that although the entrance is by no means so narrow as to prevent even the largest from returning, it is believed that there is no instance of those which have once entered, quitting their confinement … a circumstance, perhaps, which can only be accounted for, in the natural propensity, or instinct, which directs them against the stream, and will not suffer them to give up any advantage which they may have gained ...”

Marshall, 1796, Reprinted in 1970, p256

On the higher side of the ‘trap’ he says:

“opposite the entrance, is an opening or sluice in stonework – or rather the rock – as a passage for water. This passage has two lifting floodgates: the one close, to shut out, occasionally, the whole of the water; the other a grate, to suffer the water to pass, and at the same time to prevent fish of any considerable size from escaping. When the trap is set, the close gate is drawn up, with an iron crow: thus suffering the water to pass through the house. On the contrary, to take the fish which have entered , the close gate is let down, and the trap is presently left in a manner dry.”

Marshall, 1796, Reprinted in 1970, p257

Marshall’s comments are very detailed but are enormously important in explaining the intricacies in design and operation of the weir as a fishery resource …

“the narrow entrance of the trap is judiciously placed , somewhat above the floor; so that before the salmon are seriously alarmed by the fall of the water, it has sunk below the mouth of the trap, and their retreat the more effectually cut off; for by following the water, near the floor, they are led away beneath the tunnel: which, like the open floodgate, &c is made of strong wooden bars, open enough to permit the passage of water, but not that of the fish. The top covering of the trap is a floor of planks, nearly level with the top of the weir”

Marshall, 1796, Reprinted in 1970, p258

Marshall does not precisely locate the weir, describing it only as ‘appendent‘ to the Buckland Abbey estate[2] and therefore might be assumed to lie below Denham Bridge, which marks the northern boundary of the post-monastic estate. He describes it as situated on one bank with ‘wild coppice wood‘ and the other ‘high grown, impending timber‘. This description does not fit with the other known weir extant in the 18th C at Anderton, which was flanked by orchard and fields. However, this woodland description does accord with the landscape of ‘The Were’ annotated on the Corbridge map.

The Reports of the Salmon Fishery Commission

Nearly one hundred years after Marshall and Swete visited, a weir at Buckland is mentioned in the minutes of evidence taken for the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into Salmon Fisheries in 1860 (cited in Solomon, 1999). In this inquiry the Duke of Bedford’s steward, Mr Benson, reports that he has knowledge of the historic fishery on the Tavy “at a weir“, a “little above the tideway at Buckland Abbey“. He also reports that it “has been washed down during floods of this present year” (p11). Is this the last gasp of the weir? [3]

‘Buckland Abbey’ by Crispin Gill

Finally, I remembered I have on my bookshelf a copy of ‘Buckland Abbey’ by Crispin Gill (1968). In it, Gill recounts disputes over fish and timber in monastic times with Tavistock Abbey. Tavistock Abbey held the rights to take fish from the Tamar, whilst Buckland Abbey held the fishing rights to most of the Tavy.

After the monasteries were dissolved the Buckland Abbey lands were divided and sold off. Of relevance to this story, a wealthy merchant called Crymes bought the northern part of the Abbey estate, the manor of Buckland Monachorum. He therefore possessed land on the eastern Tavy above Denham Bridge. The part of the estate containing the abbey buildings, was sold to Sir Richard Grenville in 1541 and then on to Sir Francis Drake in 1581. This land bordered the Tavy below Denham Bridge, through to Lopwell.

But what of the weir? Luckliy for me, Gill mentions it (p55) saying that:

How Does a Weir Work?

Before interpreting this evidence it is important to understand a bit about different weirs and how they work, because they are not all the same. A simple distinction is to think of two types of weir – fish weirs and head weirs. We are most familiar with head weirs.

Head weirs are used to dam the flow of water, causing it to back up and create a deeper pool of water, i.e. a ‘head’ of water. This head of water is then taken off, above the weir, along a leat, to create a flow of water to typically power a mill. For local readers of my blog, we will also be familiar with the weir across the Tavy at Abbey Bridge in Tavistock. This, instead, creates a head of water to feed the canal.

Fish weirs are a bit different. There are many types of fish weir – some made of stone, others of timber, withy or brushwood, or combinations of these. These may occur in intertidal zones where they funnel fish using the ebb of the tide to trap the fish, often in baskets (Kilpatrick, 2017). A different construction of fish weir can be built in a river, as is the case with this Buckland weir. In rivers, the purpose of a fish weir, as much as I can surmise, is not to create a head of water, nor to trap fish, but rather to create a barrier which prevents fish swimming upstream, thus controlling where they spawn.

Most weirs that we see in today’s rivers are of the mill/head weir type. These are frequently built with a fish pass or a salmon ladder so that fish are able to get above the weir. This tells us that weirs, unless specifically adapted, are good at stopping fish from moving up stream. On average salmon can leap in the order of three metres to overcome obstacles (Hendry and Cragg-Hine, 2003). If a weir is higher than this then it will prevent most Salmon from being able to migrate upstream to their favoured spawning grounds. Salmon prefer to lay their eggs in the gravel beds of river headwaters, where the water is rich in dissolved oxygen, well away from more turbid and salty lower reaches. Salmon, whilst they live much of their time in salt water, do not spawning in it (IFA, 2017).

In the case of salmon fish weirs, we can see that there are a few important design features. Unlike head-weirs, fish weirs need to be really high to stop the fish swimming further upstream. They also need to be situated above the limits of tidal saltwater. Whilst they prevent salmon reaching well-oxygenated headwaters, the huge tumbling and bubbling water cascading over the fish weir will help to oxygenate the water, thus artificially aiding an adequate salmon spawning environment.

But this is a simplistic explanation of fish weirs. As we have seen from Marshall’s observations, there is a lot more to their construction and function than just being a large barrier to impede fish. Marshall show’s us that, certainly by the late 18th C, they had a complexity of engineering in their design that was intimately related to how they were used. Luckily, Marshall has more to say about this …

Marshall’s Description of Fishing (and Poaching!) at Buckland

Marshall clearly spent a number of days by the weir in July 1791, understanding how it worked and talking to the estate fishery workers who fished for salmon and salmon peel (young salmon; referred to as ‘pail’ in local dialect). Occasionally trout might also be taken. The fishing season started on the Tavy towards the end of February, finishing in October to November. During the winter the weir was opened so that the fish may ‘go up to spawn’.

He saw the weir at low-flow, when all of the water of the Tavy passed though the ‘weir house’ and he also saw it several days later when the flow was ‘tenfold size‘, pouring over the weir in a ‘dense, broad sheet, smooth and glassy‘ producing white and foaming whirlpools below. So high was the water that it cascaded over the sluice on one side, and the native rock of the bank on the other. He thought the scene ‘picturable‘, especially with the heightened effect of salmon animating proceedings with ‘fetes of futile agility; — throwing themselves far out of the water, in endeavouring to surmount the cataract‘ (p259).

Fishing principally took place using nets whose use is inseparably linked to the environment of the river. Marshall describes the river, for a mile below the weir, as broken into rapids and pools, with ‘seven or eight’ of these being adapted to the ‘seine’ or ‘draw net’ – these being a net which hangs vertically in the water with floats at the top and weights at the bottom, the ends of which are drawn together to trap the fish. This, Marshall recounts, was done once or twice a day by four men, aided by horses to carry the net and ‘with dogs to convey the end of the rope across the water, where it is too deep or inconvenient to be forded’. Apparently it was typical, preferably after a flood, to net up to a dozen salmon, but it was said that in the past upwards of one hundred were known.

Marshall then goes on to discuss the ‘depredations‘ of poachers and the vulnerability of the fishery because of its proximity to a mining district, ‘notorious for its pilferers‘. Gangs of men – ten to a dozen – might come to the river at night and take fish using a net. In the day, when the water is ‘dead and clear‘, they have a different method ‘using a spear, which they throw with dexterity‘.

Marshall even had first hand experience of poaching here. He recalls passing through the meadows which margin the river with the Hine (a name for a farm labourer) and his son when ‘a party of three or four net poachers were discovered‘ (p261). The poachers fled into the undergrowth, abandoning their valuable net in their hurry.

Revisiting the Weir – Extra Fieldwork

After finding the weir and pulling together an evidence-base for its history, it was time to share my findings with knowledgeable friends.

Firstly I returned to the publicly accessible Bere bank of the Tavy with Dr Chris Smart, an archaeologist from the University of Exeter, who I had enthusiastically persuaded to come and take a look with me. I have a physical geography background but am no archaeologist. Chris was able to corroborate what I had initially observed, and his expert eagle-eyes spotted other ‘suspicious’ features on the far bank, including what looked like some metal-work. Chris was invaluable in talking through the evidence with me, helping me develop my interpretation of the weir.

The other person whose help I called on was Prof David Dance, an angler who fishes the Tavy. David could offer an angler’s perspective on the fish weir and he shared my blog with his fishing community. They were able to report back that there was a feature here, that looked to be a leat. They were also able to to demonstrate their angling community ‘memory’ of the weir; it appearing in the names they give to locations on their fishing beat.

The Buckland bank of the Tavy is private but David, with fishing rights, was able to reconnoitre it for me, sharing the images with myself and Chris. This was incredibly valuable because it is on the Buckland side that the weir-house and sluicing mechanism would have been situated – the place where the intricacies of its operation were to be found. David was able to confirm an array of features including the sluice channel, rock cuts used to house posts (there was a pair opposite what would have been the sluice outlet), a recumbent stone with metal-work protruding, and a wall in the location of where a weir house (shown on the tithe map) would have stood.

Interpretation – The Story of Drake’s Fish Weir

After compiling this evidence I think I now have a credible story to tell about Drake’s long-lost fish weir.

Before the monasteries were dissolved, these powerful institutions, who owned vast estates, had the fishing rights to their rivers. Fish was very important in the medieval and monastic diet and so their fisheries and weirs were vital.

On the Tavy, the monastic estate of Buckland possessed the fishing rights from Lopwell, along the Tavy as far as Double Waters and then along the Walkham. Along this stretch they had their choice of where to best place their fish weir but it would have to be below Double Waters where the Tavy and the Walkham meet. This would ensure that they did not lose their their valuable catch by the fish swimming out of their lands and up the Tavy to Tavistock for the monks of Tavistock Abbey to benefit.

Abbey records tell of disputes over fish and timber, taken to maintain the weir, between Tavistock and Buckland Abbey in Blackmoorham woods (Gill, p24). It is therefore along this stretch of the river that the monastic fish weir – probably a huge timber construction[4] – would have been built. The name of Hatch Mill and Great Hatch Wood are indicative of the location – the ‘hatch’ referring to the hatcheries of the salmon that spawned below the towering wooden weir so it would have been upstream of these places.

Fish weirs, long seen as a nuisance and source of conflict throughout history, were almost totally destroyed in the reign of Henry VIII, overseen by Cromwell, and inextricably linked to the dismantling of the monasteries (Moore-Scott, 2009).  It is almost certain that in the 1530s/40s, the Buckland Abbey fish weir would have been destroyed. However, by the time Sir Francis Drake owned Buckland Abbey, half a century and several monarchs later, the totalitarian attitude to fish weirs must have relaxed.

Drake would have been unable to build his new fish weir where the monks had previously sited theirs because this land, north of Denham Bridge, was no longer part of the abbey estate. Drake’s new weir would have to be located downstream of Denham Bridge. However, for the fish to spawn in freshwater it would also have to be positioned above the highest point of the estuarine tides at Little Whiterock Wood. The shingle bend by the Great North Wood was therefore just the ticket – the goldilocks point – between Denham Bridge to the north and the saline water to the south. It offered a narrowing of the channel, making it easier to span the river, just above the shingle bar, which would make a suitable hatchery bed.

Unlike the timber monastic weirs, this Early Modern one was made of stone – certainly that is what Marshall and Swete describe. It’s necessary fish-blocking height of ten to fifteen feet, making it a formidable structure. The inclined plane of stacked blocks that remain today on the Buckland Bank are possibly part of the interior of the weir-house ‘trap’ described by Marshall – for they are in the location where this design feature would have been.

In exploring this fish-weir history, I found Marshall’s detailed description of the weir, both enlightening and confusing. Trying to interpret the function of the weir to act as a barrier to fish moving up stream to spawn, did not equate with the description of the fish ‘trap’ and sluice gate mechanisms, and the fact that in the winter, the gates were opened to allow fish to pass. In trying to reconcile this conundrum of the weir being both barrier and point of passage, I was fortunate to find an essay by post-graduate researcher Ian Jackson, who had also been struggling with similar conflicting evidence.

In Jackson’s essay (2021), he describes how there was a concern in the 18th century about the impact weirs were having on fish migration, with requirements, by act of parliament, for owners to ‘keep open one scuttle, or small hatch, of a foot square in the waterway or channel, allowing free passage of salmon from the 11 November to the 31 May every year‘. Jackson explains that many weirs of this era have sluice gates, which had been believed to be used for flood management or weir repairs. However, he asks the question ‘could they have also been a ‘scuttle’ used to allow seasonal fish passage?’. Further, he cites the case of the Hopping Mill near Milford in Derbyshire and negotiations over the fish gates within the ‘Hopping Wear’, wondering ‘were these gates allowing fish migration or were they there to solely catch fish?’

It is therefore possible that the ‘weir house trap’ described by Marshall, was a feature added, as a requirement, to the earlier fish weir, specifically to allow a proportion of fish upstream whilst keeping others in the Buckland fishery, below the weir. Jackson’s questioning of whether fish gates were used as a design mechanism specifically to catch fish doesn’t match with Marshall’s description of nets being used in the river below the weir, rather than trapping in the sluice gate, so the former explanation seems more appropriate.

Finally, whilst I have been concentrating on Drake’s weir as a fish weir, I wanted to come back to the quote from Gill (p55) which also mentions that it worked a small mill to grind the corn of the estate. Is there evidence of this? Drake’s mill would have been on the Buckland side of the river . The Corbridge Map, is only concerned with the Bere lands, and leaves the Buckland side blank. The Tithe map doesn’t record any building here. However, if we take another look at the first of the OS 6 inch map that I showed at the start, there, opposite the shingle bar, on the Buckland side of the river, is the remnant of a structure. It is only about 20 metres down-stream of where the weir spanned the waters, and perhaps presents a further alignment of the evidence of this being Drake’s 16th century weir. David was able to confirm that there is little evidence of a building here now, other than a large scatter of building stone, forming a discrete zone in the track, re-purposed to make better the surface of the woodland track.

Conclusion

Flood waters, violent with energy, are highly destructive. Weirs are therefore ever-liable to being washed away. Fish weirs were specifically designed to rear high, their function to block salmon from migrating further upstream. This size must have made them particularly susceptible to the force of water in spate. Fish weirs are also redundant – we don’t use them anymore to catch fish – so they stopped being maintained, furthering their vulnerability. Perhaps the mention by Mr Benson in 1860 marks its demise – a flood washing it out, after which it was never repaired again? But, although Drake’s weir is virtually vanished, a vestige of the former structure does exist, which makes it rare and noteworthy.

It is remarkable how much is historically known about the Buckland weir – Swete’s illustration and Marshall’s detailed descriptions providing an invaluable record of this formidable structure. Certainly, from their descriptions, it was a feature that loomed large in this landscape – physically and audibly. No wonder it tumbled, according to Swete, with such roaring reverberation. The link between this weir and ‘the’ Sir Francis Drake also makes this a special story.

And what to do with this evidence? I don’t like to ‘bother’ busy people with trivial things but I decided that this weir was special enough and sufficiently evidenced to get in touch with the Devon County Council Historic Environment Team. I am so glad I did. They were generous in their response and glad to have this information shared with them. An historic record will now be made for this weir and it will deservedly, get its place back on a map.

Addendum 1

This week (early April 2023) I purchased a few more Tavistock’s Yesterdays by Gerry Woodcock. My collection of all 27 volumes is almost complete! What should I discover in Volume 21 (2012, p25) but a short chapter called ‘ William Payne and Drake’s Weir’ in which Gerry gives a bit of background to the water-colourist (1760 to 1830) before picking out his painting of Drake’s Weir dating to c. 1787/8. Could this have been the same weir that I had blogged about?

The painting Gerry discusses is included in an earlier book by Japes, ‘William Payne: A Plymouth Experience’ (1992, plate 19) in which the figure is captioned as ‘Sir Francis Drake’s Weir at Tavistock’. It is perhaps for this reason that Woodcock locates the weir in Tavistock, rationalising that, because it cannot be the weir at Abbey Bridge, it must therefore be further up river at Parkwood. Woodcock explains that, in the 15th century, a tan mill, amongst others, was powered from the Parkwood weir leat and was operated by Thomas Drake, who gave his name to the mill-brook channel which became known as Drake’s Pool. Woodcock thinks Payne conflated the two Drakes.

Initially I was puzzled. Had I got the location of Drake’s Weir wrong? What was Sir Francis Drake’s weir doing upstream of Tavistock? Then I wondered if Gerry was wrong about the weir.

There are a couple of reasons to disagree with his landscape attribution. Firstly, the topography of the way the river winds through the landscape as shown in the painting does not fit the Parkwood site. Secondly, if looking up river at Parkwood, the mill leat, and therefore the weir house, would be on the left of the picture, not the right. The weir house is on the wrong side.

Obtaining another book of Payne’s watercolours (Hunt, 1986) I found a further painting of the same weir but this one was titled ‘Sir Francis Drake’s Weir, Tavey’. I therefore think the other painting, at some point in its history, has been misleading labelled as relating to the town of Tavistock rather than the River Tavy. I am therefore confident that Payne has given us another two images of the weir below Denham Bridge – Drake’s fish weir.

What else do Payne’s two pictures show us? In both an angler is shown standing on the weir house with a rod, with another figure sitting next to him. In the 1787/8 version there is also a man walking, carrying a sack of something on his back. The two images are taken from slightly different viewpoints, the earlier one slightly lower than the later one. What is particularly useful in this image is the detail it shows of the weir house, making it easier to marry up with the description given by Marshall. It also confirms the height of the weir described by Swete as being about 12 feet, with the angler appearing small atop the wall of the weir house.

These paintings also tell us that, at least up until the end of the 18th century, the weir was linked to Sir Francis Drake. However, we need to remember, this does not necessarily mean the Sir Francis Drake but could relate to any one of them – there were five of them after all!

How wonderful to have two more images to add to this collection of evidence on this remarkable weir.

Addendum 2

This weir keeps on giving. Thanks to Ian, who reads my blog, he informed me of database of historic images that I had not searched before, called watercolourworld.org. Through this collection I have found another two images of the Drake Weir by an artist called Conrad Martens (1801-1878). Conrad Martens was a prolific landscape painter, significant for joining the HMS Beagle and then settling in Sydney, hence why these paintings of the Tavy are to be found in books in the collection of the State Library in New South Wales, Australia.

Published 19th Feb 2023; Addendum 1 updated 10 April 2023, Addendum 2 updated 11 May 2024

References

Finberg, H.P.R., 2014. Tavistock Abbey. Cambridge University Press.

Gill, C. 1968. Buckland Abbey, 3rd edition. Underhill: Plymouth.

Gray, T. (Ed.) 1997. Travels in Georgian Devon: The Illustrated Journals of the Reverend John Swete (1789 – 1800). Devon Books: Tiverton.

Hendry, K. and Cragg-Hine, D. 2003. Ecology of the Atlantic Salmon. Conserving Natura 2000 Rivers Ecology Series No. 7. English Nature.

Hunt, P. 1986. Payne’s Devon: A Portrait of the County from 1790 to 1830 through the Watercolours of William Payne. Devon Books.

IFA, 2017. The Farmed Salmonid Handbook: Chapter III – Environment. IFA Aquaculture; the Marine Institute; Vet Aqua International, Global Trust Certification; and the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine (Ireland).

Jackson, I. 2021. Hydropower & salmon: historical case-studies for modern-day problem solving. Feb 9, 2021

Japes, D. 1992. William Payne: A Plymouth Experience. Brightsea Press.

Kilpatrick, K. 2017. Medieval Welsh fish weirs. Flood and Flow: Place-Names and the Changing Hydrology of English and Welsh Rivers. waternames.wordpress.com/

Marshall, W. 1796. The Rural Economy of the West of England including Devonshire and parts of Somersetshire Dorsetshire and Cornwall Vol II. Reprinted as Marshall’s Rural Economy of the West of England. 1970. David & Charles: Newton Abbot.

Moore-Scott, T., 1993. Medieval fish weirs on the mid-tidal reaches of the Severn River (Ashleworth-Arlingham). Glevensis, 27, pp.4-6.

Scott-Stokes, C and Lumb, A 2019. ‘Sir Francis Henry Drake (1723-1794) Letters from the Country, Letters from the City’, Devon and Cornwall Record Society and Boydell Press.

Solomon, D.J. 1999. Salmon and Sea Trout Fishing in the Estuary of the River Tavy.
A Review. Environment Agency: South West Region. Nov 1999

Woodcock, G. 2012. Tavistock’s Yesterdays: Episodes From Her History. William Payne and Drake’s Weir, Deer Park Productions, p25-26.

[1] The Colbridge map does show mill houses here in 1737, on the bend opposite Ludbrook. On Colbridge they are annotated as ‘Mill House’ and ‘New Mill’. They take their water from a leat off the Tavy on the bend in the river opposite Hatch Mill, according to the map evidence, without the aid of a weir.

[2] Finberg (1969, p160) thinks that Marshall is describing a salmon weir just below Double Waters which, when writing in 1969 he thinks can still be seen. I think he has misinterpreted this. None of the maps , spanning from 1797 through to the present day, show a weir here. There was a footbridge here in the 19th C mining boom, the footings of which he might be confusing with weir remnants. Monastic weirs were almost certainly made of timber, besides which, they were all town down in the reign of Henry VIII.

[3] Thanks to Dr Chris Smart for finding this reference for me.

[4] Finberg (1969, p163) says that in 1527, Gulworthy weir on the Tamar is described as consisting of oaks with all their boughs and branches interlocked. To these, boards were fastened with iron clamps, making the whole as “close as a wall”. The structure was described as being nearly sixteen feet high.