Hemery’s ‘Walking Dartmoor’s Ancient Tracks: A guide to 28 routes’, Track 11. This section is from Meldon to Okehampton. 3.7 miles
This completes my walk along the King Way. See King Way: Part 3 – Nodden Gate to Meldon for the previous installment.
Background
This is the last stage of my walk along the King Way from Tavistock to Okehampton and one that sees me descending from the western flank of Dartmoor, through fertile agricultural land, joining up with the old highway into Okehampton. And it is this ancient highway that I feel is at the heart of this final blog post on this journey – not just in how it relates to my theme of the King Way as a postal route to Tavistock, but also how it influences the whole geography and history of the area going back several millennia. Through the ‘Interesting Things’ in this blog, this intersection of the ‘western highway’ to the landscape, townscape and people of this area will be explored, be this in the Roman road network, the location of a former Leper hospital, or the multitude of inns servicing the needs of travellers on the highway.
Before we get to this great road I firstly need to tie up a loose end. In my last blog of this route I indicated that I was going to talk about how the postal service evolved practically and economically. To do this I have been using a wonderful old book that I bought – Crofts, J (1967) ‘Packhorse, Wagon and Post: Land carriage and communications under the Tudors and the Stuarts’. I had wanted to focus on this aspect because Crofts explains that commercial pressures coming from the flourishing port of Plymouth in the early 17th century forced a re-birth of the postal system from its inconsistent, inefficient and uneconomic Tudor form to one that put it on a firm economic footing. Given the ‘local to me’ dimension of my blog I thought this Plymouth connection in the story of the postal service was worth giving some attention.
It is difficult to do justice to the narrative of these historical events with brevity because to explain how the Plymouth postal route helped re-invented the postal service requires quite a lot of detail about how and why the Tudor post operated the way it did, and how commercial trade and carriers subverted the system and challenged the legal framework of the royal mail. However, I will do so as succinctly as I can.
Tudor ‘Posts’ were required to secure transit for official letters and packets by provisioning horses and a post boy to carry them. In their role they were part inn keeper and part Post Master, and in servicing their role they had to keep horses and also had the power to requisition horses from others if necessary. Inconsistencies in demand and the waxing and waning of royal support made keeping sufficient animals for peaks in demand uneconomic. Commercial mail, as opposed to the royal mail, could only use this government postal system when official mail was being sent, otherwise commercial correspondence had to sit and wait until such time as official letter arrived. Commercial mail could therefore sit for days and days awaiting dispatch. The alternative to this was to pay a private carrier who would courier the goods along the entire journey (i.e. not a ‘post’ system).
Growing international trade made Plymouth a flourishing mercantile city but consequently it also meant that merchants trading from London, out of Plymouth were very unhappy with the slow speed of the post. They therefore set up their own relay of private posts. This invaded the royal Post’s monopoly. Representing the Post Masters, whose trade was being illegally poached, was a man called Thomas Hutchins, who Crofts describes as being akin to a Trade Union leader. Hutchins believed that the royal post, if operated differently, could become a source of government revenue rather than a drain on the coffers. Hutchens and the Post Masters along the Plymouth route wanted the King to allow Post Masters to be able to ‘undertake the speedy dispatch of all private letters‘ (p100). A concession for the Western Posts was granted in 1629 and very quickly this resulted in consistent and economically profitable trade. The sound economic footing meant they could now invest in sufficient horses which in turn made the system even more efficient for both royal and commercial mail. Eventually the Privy Council realised that it made sense to roll out this arrangement nationally, which it did in 1635. Crofts explains the consequences:
“It would hardly be possible to exaggerate the historical importance of this experiment by the Posts of the Plymouth road. It ranks as the greatest social invention of a century which produced also the coffee house, the printed journal and the turnpike road … It meant that a shop keeper of Barnstable, for instance, who hitherto had been obliged to wait three weeks or more for a reply from his supplier in London, could now get an answer … in seven days or even less. By what must have seemed like a sudden shrinking of the map he found himself as closely in touch with London as a shop keeper of St Albans had been in Elizabeth’s days.“
Crofts, 1967, p102
Crofts goes on to describe the impacts, not just on freeing up commercial enterprise but in the rapid transfer of news and the mitigation ‘of the sense of isolation in which most country folk lived‘. Whilst he acknowledges that not all transformations could be attributed to the newly invented Post, the regular and speedy traffic of goods, news and ideas was certainly integral to economic and social change in 17th century Britain.
Although not an initial beneficiary of this invigorated Postal system, Okehampton was to become a main post town in c. 1703, lying as it did on the ancient highway from Exeter to Launceston (Robbins, 1888). The post route through Okehampton would have operated with mail coaches. This was unlike the King Way branch, a less significant limb to the postal system officially added in 1720 and one that operated as a fast riding route through open country to Tavistock (Hemery, 1986). And so, in this final part of the King Way my footsteps along this path have merged me from this riding route onto the ‘big’ roads – roads for vehicles; roads of importance; roads of antiquity. Okehampton hosted mail coaches because it lay on this geographically determined key highway.
In a final, but rather downbeat reflection on this history, the evolution of transport and transport infrastructure has meant that Okehampton is no longer a place of importance and buzz servicing travellers with their victualing and accommodation needs on a highway that has existed for millenia. The bypass of the 1980s, discussed below, concretely exemplifies (no pun intended) the end of the town’s relationship to its prime position on the western highway to Cornwall.
7 Interesting Things
1. Meldon
Meldon taxes me. The settlement is a place, but in terms of size, not much of one. I don’t mean to disparage it, but there isn’t much at Meldon these days – a small number of cottages. But the name, locally speaking, is much bigger. We have Meldon Quarry, Meldon Station, Meldon Viaduct, Meldon Dam and Reservoir, all of which couple Meldon to a recent industrial heritage. In actuality, there are two Meldon quarries, the earliest of which is no longer annotated on the OS Explorer map. This first Meldon Quarry was a Limestone quarry, which feels highly irregular – Limestone not being a rock one usually associates with Dartmoor. Definitely a topic to explore in a future blog.
The name of Meldon is also written in Meldon Common, Meldon Woods, Meldon Lane and Meldon Farm, linking it to a deeper pastoral past. Tithe maps teasingly record an ‘olden town’ in the fields here, perhaps helping to explain why this diminuative settlement has left its mark over a wider area of the map.
Today then, if we think of Meldon, we may be conjuring an image of a jigsaw of environments. Whilst Meldon was perhaps once a defined place, today it is a diffuse collection of landscape elements; a patchwork of adjacent places and components that make modern Meldon.
2. A30
A is for A30 and A is for audible, and the A30 certainly dominates the soundscape around Meldon. A thread of red on the Explorer map – red for danger and red for its arterial flow into the peripheral limb of Cornwall. The road upgrade, which bypassed Okehampton in 1988 (DNPA, 1988) was much needed. It is hard to imagine now the high traffic volumes, peaking on holiday change over days, passing through the town’s streets.
A bypass to the town had been mooted as early as the 1960s but should the new dual carriageway cut through the high quality farm land to the north of Okehampton or encroach into the unique and protected National Park to the south? A Department of the Environment review seemed to suggest a northern route would be favoured to protect the National Park landscape.
‘It is now the policy of Government that investment in trunk roads should be directed to developing routes for long distance traffic which avoid National Parks; and that no new road for long-distance traffic should be constructed through a National Park, or existing road upgraded, unless it has been demonstrated that there is a compelling need which would not be met by any reasonable alternative means.’
DoE Circular 4/76 (para 58) Report of the National Park Policies Review Committee, dated, 12 January 1976, in DNPA (1988)
Opposing groups campaigned and lobbied but a public enquiry of 1983 sided for the southern route, clipping the top of the National Park (DNPA, 1988). This decision was challenged but confirmed for go-ahead in 1985.
I was fifteen in 1985 and I am quite amazed that I have no recollection of any of this happening. I do not remember the road before the bypass and I do not remember any of the controversy about it – I can only put this down to my selfish teenage brain, and not being able to drive at this time!
The dual carriageway had a big impact, not just in cutting a new and large carriageway through the landscape but also in altering older lane patterns – some severed, others forced beneath the new road. My own route along the King Way was diverted down one side of the A30, underneath and back up the other side to rejoin the former direction of travel. And so I headed on, thinking of all the travellers that traversed this way before, including those from the deep, deep past. ….
3. Ye Olde Road Junctions?
My walk along the King Way merges from Meldon, under the A30 to join with the Old Tavistock Road at Gradon Cross. Although the A30 dual carriageway dominates the road network of today, hiding in the hints of records and maps, and beneath the soil and tarmac of the present, is possibly an older road nexus.
The Historic Environment Record (HER) for this zone pinpoints a number of spots around Sourton Down, of metalled road surfaces thought to be Roman. These extant surfaces and boundary features have been combined by heritage experts to conjecture the route of this road through Okehampton and, via Bridestowe and Lewdon to Launceston (see the fat pink line on the map below).
I don’t think it should be too surprising to see evidence of Roman road here. This location is significant because it lies along an important axis of access. If you needed to travel from up country to Cornwall (and why wouldn’t you? Cornwall had a lot of rich tin deposits!) then how would you do it? Of course, there were sea routes but let’s stick to travelling overland. Dartmoor is a major obstacle. You couldn’t really circumnavigate it to the south because you would run into the problem of difficult to cross rivers such as the Tamar. The best route was north of Dartmoor, avoiding the wilderness and heights of the moor and instead only having to contend with smaller, more fordable or bridgeable rivers.
This area therefore lies on a major spinal route though Devon and into Cornwall (just as it still does now). Part of this King Way route, in the approach to Okehampton, very likely coincides with the route of a Roman road. The Historic Environment Record (undateda) states:
The line of the road is particularly clear across Sourton Down where earthworks survive and where stretches of metalled road have been found during excavations. Beyond Bridestowe the names Old Street Down and Portgate probably indicate the route. It is suggested that the road then ran along the ridge to Tinhay, descending steeply to Lifton. Beyond Lifton the line of the road survives in field boundaries
HER Record – Roman road westwards from Okehampton
Between Sourton Down and Okehampton the conjectured route heads NNE before turning eastward to the town. I am not entirely sure about this arching route. Why didn’t it follow a straight, more direct line? Ok, so the conjectured route is along a ridge but the straight route of the Tavistock Raoad also sits in an elevated position on the valley side.
I wonder if instead, this area was, as it is now, a place of road junctions, with another road heading south into the area west of Dartmoor, and extending north into north Devon (see the blue dashed line on the map below). The HER record shows another speculative Roman road as proposed by Pye (thin pink line) and I wonder if this route headed into Okehampton via Stoney Park Lane (green dashed line). So, what I am suggesting is, rather than thinking of this area in terms of ‘the‘ Roman to the west, I wonder if we should be imagining a network of roads; a more complex pattern diverging from the geographical pinch point at Okehampton, sited at the top of Dartmoor.
Drawing this section to a conclusion I am going to finish by throwing in one of the earliest historical mentions of the roads of Okehampton. This comes from records of manumissions (i.e. the freeing of slaves), in Leofric’s Missal (as listed in Hooke, 1994). Sometime around 1050 AD the missal states:
… freóde huna æt ocmund tune on mides sumeres messe euen for þon … ? for þa … on feoper þegas
… freed Huna at Okehampton on midsummer’s mass even. for the … and for the … at “Four Ways”
In Hooke, 1994, p 226.
It was common to free slaves at junctions and this reference to a place called Four Ways of Okehampton clearly relates to a place where roads intersect. I am sure there are several candidates for this location but I would like to imagine it relating to Sourton Down and what I fancy to be a prehistoric interchange.
4. Leper Hospital
The word leprosy derives from the ancient Greek word for scaly and flaking and so, if you had encountered a leper begging here by the roadside 750 years ago, this is what you would have been most aware of; a person with scaled skin which was particularly disfiguring and apparent on their face. In fact, the Old English word for leper was hreofla and it is probably this name that gives rise to the ruff in the dandruff we get on our head and shoulders (Forsyth, 2012).
Whilst no trace of a leper hospital exists now, there used to be one (HER, Undatedb). Like most leper hospitals, it was sited on this former main road on purpose. This was so the lepers could beg alms, trade their wares, and offer to pray for benefactors (Historic England, undated). In the Middle Ages it was a common belief that lepers experienced a living purgatory through their suffering with disease – purgatory being ‘a place or state of suffering inhabited by the souls of sinners who are expiating their sins before going to heaven’ (ibid). Their suffering was likened to that of Christ and for this reason lepers were thought to go straight to heaven. Within this belief framework people thought that lepers had a close connection to the Lord. Caring for and donating to lepers was therefore not purely altruistic but was done because people thought their charity would speed their journey to heaven, reducing their time in purgatory.
What I was drawn to in reading about lepers was how they were treated and how ideas and knowledge of contagion have changed. Given these Covid times, it seems so alien, situating a hospital of contagious people on a main road specifically so they could be in contact with people to beg. As a society we have, for complex reasons, very neggative attitudes to begging, Not only does the disease itself feel so distant but so also what it illustrates about how we view the world.
5. Okehampton High Street
Where is the historic centre of Okehampton? Once the Normans imposed themselves here it looks like the town shifted and developed along Fore Street, between the West and East Ockment rivers, where the shops of the modern town are today. But deeper in history the town probably started on the hillside to the west, around High Street (Parkes, 2016). The original name for this town was Ocmundtune – possibly Ocmund’s settlement? Later the town became known as Ockington and was still known by this name until the 19th Century.
As evidence, burgage plots are traceable along High Street (HER, undatedc). These are long thin strips of land with a property – a house or shop – fronting the street. This ancient east-west highway towards Launceston wasn’t always called High Street. Previously it seems it was known as Sharp (steep) or Shob (sheep) Hill (Endacott, A, 2002). Sited along this important road, and benefitting from drove roads also passing through, this location was ideal for an expanding Saxon market town. Indeed, as it became a Saxon borough, with the privileges and freedoms granted to burgesses, this meant that Okehampton thrived, as evidenced by complaints of unfair competition made by the nearby, and once greater Lydford (ibid).
Why did the town and market shift to its current heart? I have recently been reading and writing about how Medieval rivers changed. I wonder if here too is an example in which the old town expanded and shifted onto the flatter land between the two rivers, enabled by decreases in flood risk as a result of floodplain sedimentation and river channelisation?
6. West and East Ockment
Okehampton lies at the point where the West and East Ockment merge, the later medieval town occupying the peninsula of land between the two rivers. Two small rivers are easier to get across than one big one and so this geographical feature probably explains the routing of the Roman / prehistoric road network through here rather than further north where the rivers become one.
There are many examples of places which take their name from the rivers that run through them – Tavistock, Exeter, Plymouth to name just a few local examples. However, in the case of Okehampton, the reverse may be true. Parkes (2016) discusses historical references to these rivers which commonly refer to them as the Lyde or Lede – a name almost identical to the nearby river Lyd from which Lydford gets its name. Parkes cites a document of 1329 that:
“refers to ‘a burgage situated between the waters called Lyde’. It is possible that the waters were
Parkes 92016)
originally called Lyde, and were named Okement after the early settlement of Ocmundtune, rather than the other way round.”
As outlined above, medieval Okehampton at some point shifted eastwards from High Street on the hill to Fore Street. This relocation to a site between the two rivers now meant that the people of Okehampton were no longer so conveniently situated to attend their parish church of All Saints. In 1365 they petitioned Pope Urban V for permission to instead attend St James Chapel (Endacott, A, 2002). They gave an interesting reason – that because they were between ‘between two streams of water, on account of which floods often occur, so that the distance of a mile or so it is impossible to hear divine service‘. I found this wording of interest. Certainly All Saints was no longer convenient and I can see why they would want to seek leave to attend St James instead, but were they embellishing the truth they told to the Pope?
The mention of frequent floods implies that no bridge existed over the West Ockment for if there was one then, for all but the worst floods, the river should have been passable. Given that this road was a main east-west route to Cornwall, and was therefore one of the most important roads of the region, I find it hard to believe that there was not a bridge here in the 14th C. Also, I know that ‘back then’ there was no standard idea of what constituted a mile but I have measured the distance to All Saints and it is less than half a mile away from the nucleus of the new town – a much less impressive excuse for not wanting to walk to the church on the hill than the ‘mile or so’ mentioned in the petition. I wonder if there was a degree of dissembling going on for the Bishop of Rome, who would clearly have had no idea of the geography of this Devon town?
7. Coaching Inns
Given its position on this time-worn highway into Cornwall, Okehampton was always well accustomed to providing hospitality to travellers. The town would have had many inns as testified by historical records that name The White Hart, White Horse, King’s Arms, Three Pigeons, George, Royal Oak and The Angel, all mentioned in 17th C records (Parkes, 2016).
With increasing coach travel in the 17th C and the rise of ‘posting’ houses, coupled with the trade brought by market days and fairs, the inns and taverns of Okehampton flourished, with 16 premises recorded in 1775 including the Exeter Inn, Pack Horse, Post Boy and Three Horse Shoes (Parkes, 2016). Some of these were large and purpose built; the carriage openings and broad frontages still evident in the architecture of the town today.
“The drivers of wagon trains and the fast passenger and mail carrying stage coaches stopped over at the burgeoning coaching inns while their horses were stabled overnight”
Endacott, A. 2002, p 84
Sadly the relationship between these coaching inns, the Royal Mail and Post Masters remains opaque to me. I do not know which of the inns was a post house or indeed how many were post houses (for it may have been more than one). Increasing postal demand from the 17th C through to the point at which trains took over the bulk of postal distribution must surely have meant strong demand and through-put in the town.
I am going to finish with a rather down-beat reflection to bring this blog to a close. 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. Okehampton grew and flourished here in part to capitalise on the interchange of traffic and trade determined by its location. Whilst entirely appropriate for our age, I now see the A 30 dual carriageway bypass as marking the end of the town’s relationship with this ancient highway.
Route
- From Meldon, walk north along Meldon Lane.
- Over the stream this diverts down one side of the A30, underneath and then back up the other side to rejoin the original course of the lane.
- This joins the Tavistock Road at Graddon Cross.
- Follow the Tavistock Road until New Road Cross. This is a busy road but it is wide and straight with good verges so I didn’t feel unsafe.
- At New Road Cross join the Old Road and continue straight into High Street, over the West Ockment and into Okehampton Fore Street.
References
Archiuk. Old Maps. https://www.archiuk.com/archi/archi_maps.htm
Clay, R.M. (1909). The Mediaeval Hospitals of England. Methuen & Co: London.
Crofts, J. (1967) Packhorse, Wagon and Post: Land carriage and communications under the Tudors and the Stuarts. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London.
Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) (1988). The Okehampton Bypass – a case study in decision making. Dartmoor Factsheet. DNPA. https://www.dartmoor.gov.uk
Devon County Council Environment Viewer. https://maptest.devon.gov.uk/portaldvl/apps/webappviewer/
Endacott, A. (2002). Tales of Old Ockington: Reliving 2000 years in Okehampton, A Dartmoor community. Orchard Publications: Crediton.
Forsyth, M. (2012). Leper Juice. The Inky Fool. blog.inkyfool.com. 27/2/2012.
Hemery, E. (1986). Walking Dartmoor’s Ancient Tracks: A Guide to 28 Routes. Robert Hale: London.
Historical Environment Record (HER) (Undateda). Roman road westwards from Okehampton www.heritagegateway.org.uk/
Historical Environment Record (HER) (Undatedb). Medieval Leper Hospital, Okehampton. MDV4767, www.heritagegateway.org.uk/
Historical Environment Record (HER) (Undatedc). Burgage Plots to north of High Street, Okehampton. MDV109201, www.heritagegateway.org.uk/
Historic England (Undated). The Time of Leprosy: 11th Century to 14th Century. historicengland.org.uk/
Hooke, D. (1994). Pre-Conquest Charter-Bounds of Devon and Cornwall. The Boydell Press: Woodbridge.
Parkes, C. (2016). Devon Historic Coastal and Market Towns Survey: Okehampton. Report for Devon County Council.
Robbins, A.F. (1888). Launceston, Past and Present; A Historical and Descriptive Sketch. Walter Weighell, Cornish and Devon Printing Works, Launceston. https://launcestonthen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/launceston-past-and-present-by-A.-Robbins.pdf
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