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?
A Walk in English Weather Posts
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it stag semen? Is it Piskie Puke? Is it the gelatinous remains of a fallen star? In this blog about rare Star Jelly, I look at past and present understandings of this odd glob.
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.
An opportunistic walk near my holiday accommodation led me to the most enchanting river I have ever walked. The River Gelt sculpts insane fluvial shapes in its bedrock channel, whilst the valley, which once clanged with the chisels of Roman soldiers, quarrying blocks for Hadrian’s Wall, hides the ghosts of these men in the graffiti they left on the quarry faces.
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