A Hunt for Tarka the Otter – an eight mile walk from Hillsford Bridge

Henry Williamson is one of those writers who are a delight to read but, as with Ernest Hemingway, if he came into a pub, you might be knocked down in the general rush for the door. Eccentric, solitary, with a strong preference for animals and for the countryside to human beings, a fellow-traveller of a fascist persuasion, Williamson remains a one-hit-wonder of English literature, known exclusively for his classic animal story, “Tarka the Otter”. “Tarka the Otter” was published in 1927, and recounts the life story of an otter and his battle with the hound, Deadlock. It is set mainly in the land between the rivers of the Taw and the Torridge near Barnstaple, but at one point Tarka ventures on to Exmoor, country which Williamson knew well from childhood. Williamson, who in the years before writing the book, had kept an otter as a pet, was so determined to see life from an otter’s perspective that he would crawl on his hands and knees across country to ensure correctness of detail. The book was obsessively crafted and rewritten some seventeen times, but it possesses the stark and evocative power which distinguishes his best writing.
 

Our walk followed the path of Tarka as he journeyed from the Hoar Oak Water to Watersmeet, and then across country to the West Lyn River where he fights his first battle with the fearsome Deadlock. The direction which Tarka, and no doubt Williamson himself, took is easy to follow as Williamson obligingly heads each page with a place name. Tarka comes down the Hoar Oak Water, passing under Hillsford Bridge, until he reaches Watersmeet, where the Hoar Oak Water joins the East Lyn River coming down from Brendon and the “Doone Valley”.

We parked the car in the National Trust car park at Hillsford Bridge, where the honesty box requires a pound donation, and instead of following slavishly the otter’s path, walked a little way up the main road towards Barbrook, and then struck into the path signposted to Lynmouth.

Tarka at Watersmeet at first swims up the East Lyn River but he encounters an otter bitch, dead in a gin trap. “Tarka heard the clink of the chain as the swollen body rolled; and his bubbles blown of fear rose behind him.” He returns to Watersmeet and then sets off westward across country. Our path took us round the foot of the Myrtleberry Iron Age settlement, giving us magnificent views back over the wooded slopes which led down to Watersmeet.

Above Watersmeet

Soon afterwards the path divided, and we took the left hand fork signposted to East Lyn which led us along a grassy lane between banks of wild spring flowers and through the farms of Higher and Lower East Lyn. The way continued through fields, with Lynmouth and the sea far below us.

Looking towards Lynmouth

Eventually we came into a metalled lane at West Lyn, where we first turned right and then left, past a farm which specialises in alpacas, and thus to the main A39 road with the Beggars Roost pub away on our right. We walked straight up the road until we reached a sharp left-hand bend and here went straight on along the footpath signposted to Stockwater. Tarka crosses “stubble with lines of sheaves, stacked in sixes and tied in fours, fields of mangel and sweet turnip, where partridge crouched, and pasture given over to sheep,” but we saw only the ubiquitous sheep. We circled Stockwater Farm, and came out into the lane leading down to Barbrook and with the beginnings of Ikerton Water which flowed towards the West Lyn River. Here “Hazels grew on the bank above. Their leaves took on the golden-green of spring in the beams of the low autumn sun as Tarka crept under the rock”

Ikerton Water

 

“He was awakened by the tremendous baying of hounds”. What follows is a magnificent description of the hunt as the otter hounds pursue Tarka down the West Lyn River. Ikerton Water meets the West Lyn River just above the bridge at Barbrook where the main A39 road meets the minor road running down the Lyn Gorge.

 

Ikerton Water meets the West Lyn River

Here Tarka leaves the water and runs the road, hoping to destroy his scent, and even under a charabanc. Oddly enough trippers in the 1920’s seemed to be more untidy than the modern variety. “He ran in the shade of the ditch, among bits of newspaper, banana and orange skins, cigarette ends, and crushed chocolate boxes.” Barbrook seems a great deal tidier these days with its muddle of stone cottages.

 

 

At one point the hounds are at fault and follow a scent which leads to a duck “that beat its wings and quacked in terror before them.”  On our morning the ducks slept on undisturbed. Otter hunting ceased in England in the 1970’s, as otter numbers declined because of river pollution and well before the species became protected.

 



 

We followed the West Lyn River downstream as Tarka did. “The water was friendly to the otter” and, as he swims and turns from pool to pool, the pack of hounds flounder in his wake. Tarka’s hunt was in autumn but on this late spring morning the bluebells were still out in profusion.

 

West Lyn River

 

At Lyn Bridge Tarka continued towards the sea, but we crossed the road by a pub which promised a” belly-busting burrito”, a culinary treat which I found easy to resist, and walked along a lane which is signposted as a no-through road but which took us pedestrians above Victorian villas, built into the sheer rock of the gorge with wonderful views out over the sea, and into the town of Lynton.

 

Lynmouth

Here we found the famous Cliff Railway, which Phillip Maddison, the hero of Henry Williamson’s autobiographical novel sequence “A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight”, takes when he arrives for a holiday just before the outbreak of the First World War. “He saw steel lines with grease on them going down fearfully steep to a tiny roadway below. He saw the tiny white fringe of sea breaking on grey boulders. The sea was nearly black, like a stain, beyond a dwarf quay. He felt giddy and put down his bag…”

 

 

 

To date I have tackled only the wartime volumes, (there are fifteen in all,) but the “Chronicle” seems to me a great but sadly neglected documentary of English twentieth century life. Williamson brings his typically obsessive eye for detail to the life of his hero, and it allows the reader to appreciate just what it was like to serve in that terrible conflict. Robert Graves’s and Siegfried Sassoon’s accounts seem mere rough sketches by comparison.

At sea-level we wandered on to the shingle of the beach. The Lyn Rivers, now one, flowed along their channel to the sea. It is the story of much of my life that the tide in the Severn Sea is always out. Tarka, before breaking out into the open sea, has the last word this time in his struggle with Deadlock. “Deadlock tried to twist round and crush the otter’s skull in his jaws, but he struggled vainly. Bubbles blew out of his mouth. Soon he was choking.” Deadlock is hauled from the channel and has the water pumped out of his lungs while the triumphant Tarka makes for the open sea.

The way to the sea

 

Rhenish Tower

We passed the “Rhenish Tower”, in which a General Rawdon stored seawater for salt baths in his villa, and walked upstream to where the two Lyn Rivers meet.

East & West Lyn Rivers

 

 

At the next bridge we took the eastern bank of the East Lyn River, and started our walk back towards Watersmeet. Watersmeet is a deservedly popular beauty spot, easily accessible from the main road, and with a busy National Trust tearoom. Prejudice on our part against the National Trust, which prohibits stag hunting on Exmoor, even though their holding was given to it on the assurance that it should continue, prohibits us from using the tearoom. We continued, as Tarka did, up the magnificent stretch of Hoar Oak Water with its run of boiling falls, until we reached Hillsford Bridge and the car.

Hoar Oak Water

 

We had our eyes on a better treat than a National Trust slice of carrot cake. We were heading for the nearby Brendon House tea gardens for, according to the Country File programme, the best cream tea in England. Well, it might have been, but it evidently wasn’t the most profitable as we found the gardens closed and for sale. We withdrew to Simonsbath and to Boevey’s tearooms where we enjoyed an excellent tea. It was more expensive than Cloud Farm’s, £5.50 each rather than £4.50. I preferred the Boevey scones, which were heavier and “breadier “than the Cloud Farm ones, but my wife argued the opposite case for Cloud’s more ethereal offerings. A Boevey’s tea certainly filled one up after an energetic day’s otter hunting. The original Mr Boevey owned Exmoor in the sixteenth century when he discovered, as everyone does eventually, that Exmoor is a place to spend money, not to make it.