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.
A Walk in English Weather Posts
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.
Gibbet Hill dominates this stretch of the King Way with a history I sense is intertwined with this postal route; a place where the highwayman’s cadaver was left to ferment in the breeze, just like his notoriety.
The tincture of transformation in the built environment is duplicated in the natural, as the road ascends from the plateau of Roborough Down, up through the borderlands, to the open moor: a transition to abundant fog, and reduced visibility; to stronger winds, and lesser shelter.
In response to the air raids that reduced much of Plymouth city centre to rubble at the start of 1941, my dad and his mother evacuated to stay on West Bohetherick Farm. This walk explores the landscape of Bohetherick and its agricultural and market gardening heritage.
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.
The King Way was a riding track between Tavistock and Okehampton, used for pack horses and post-boys on horseback delivering the King’s Mail. As a walk, I feel it is a hard sell.
Through the collection of tithes and taxes, through the control of manors and markets, through the exercise of power and politics, monks of various rank would have had need to travel.
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