In this second instalment in a trilogy about the Lich Way we get closer to the ghosts that haunt this Corpse Path. Be it real or imagined, the spirit story of this path is integral to its identity.
A Walk in English Weather Posts
On this walk I glide along the Lich Way, a route used in the middle ages to take bodies for burial at Lydford. ‘Corpse Roads’ or ‘Ways of the Dead’ have a macabre cachet, where hiking melds with hammer horror to give them a leisure era popularity. In this first of a series of blogs I explore the historical rationale for the route, as well as the practicalities and folklore attached to death and funerary journeys.
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.
Rivers feel ‘natural’ but they are natural features with a very modified past. What can we know of the natural geomorphic history of the Tavy and does this help us when thinking about the history along it? This blog peels away the layers of sediment and infrastructure to discover a different type of river of the past.
The morning haze gave the sky a bright grey luminescence which bounced its scattered rays off the green fields and the golden Molinia. The air was still near Wind Tor as I trod out to walk along the ridge of Hamel Down. The brown ground was bone dry and unyielding under my feet after another especially dry April. So much for drip, drip drop little April showers.
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.
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.
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.
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