Richard Jefferies and Cloutsham Ball - six and a half mile walk in Horner Woods

Richard Jefferies lived for only thirty eight years but left behind him twenty two books. This remarkably prolific author, despite being dogged by poor health, was a journalist, essayist, and novelist, whose “Bevis”, a wonderful evocation of a boy’s country childhood, and “After London”, which virtually invented the post-apocalyptic disaster story, should find space on anyone’s bookshelf. In 1882 Jefferies came to Exmoor with his friend, the painter John William North, and used the bare fortnight that he was on the moor so intensively that it allowed him to write the magnificent “Red Deer”, possibly the last word on the species and on stag hunting, as well as the charming essay, “Summer in Somerset”.

The chapter “Deer in Summer” in “Red Deer” concentrates on Horner Woods, near Porlock, and particularly on the area around the hill, Cloutsham Ball, (“Ball” simply means a hill.) Our plan was to walk from Horner to Cloutsham Ball, and then back along Horner Water, as Jefferies had done himself. We parked the car in the National Trust car park at Horner, where we unwillingly paid a fee of £3 for the pleasure.

Our prejudice against the National Trust originates from its behaviour towards stag hunting, particularly as far as the old Acland estates are concerned. When the Acland family handed over its glorious holding on Exmoor to the Trust, it was understood that hunting would continue in perpetuity. The Trust’s ban on stag hunting, in advance even of the restrictive Hunting Act of 2005, meant that the hounds could no longer meet and hunt over Horner Woods and the slopes of Dunkery Beacon.

We took the little path past the tea garden and turned left into the road which led up to Horner Mill. When Jefferies was here, the mill still had its “immense iron wheel.” Just past the Mill, we turned right into a track and passed through a high deer gate. Here the way divides without a signpost but, following the old maxim that one’s way is almost always up rather down, we turned right and hiked uphill.

After some way we were rewarded with a signpost for Webber’s Post. We passed a shelter dedicated to the memory of the pioneer photographer, Alfred Vowles, where we found a “story tin” left by the organisers of the long-distance path, the “Coleridge Way”.  The object of the tin is to encourage walkers to contribute to a serial story, but this seemed lost on most passers-by. They had treated it, frequently and recently, as a visitors’ book. We contributed a few lines of dialogue in a lame attempt to initiate a narrative as intended, but suspected that the book would soon return to names, addresses, and “very nice views” in the accepted fashion.

Cloutsham Ball

Well, there are very nice views and particularly so at Webber’s Post, named after a famous stag hunter. There is no better place from which to see Cloutsham Ball, as Jefferies did himself, “a round green hill standing by itself in the midst of the dark heather-covered moors which overlook it. In shape it resembles a skull-cap of green velvet imitated in sward, or it might be a great tennis-ball cut in two.”

Jefferies was an acknowledged influence on Henry Williamson, author of “Tarka the Otter”, and both writers bring a microscopic attention to detail to their descriptions of nature. Jefferies used a method of quartering the perspective before him and searching each segment in detail in his attempts to spot deer in cover. Eventually he was rewarded with a sight of a stag. “He stood breast-deep in the brake, and there was a purple foxglove in flower just beside him. There seemed the least possible fleck of white among the golden russet of his side.”

Sadly, we saw no deer, and set off down the narrow lane which leads through East Water Valley towards Cloutsham Farm. Few vehicles pass this way, and the lovely combe which leads up to the farm is a pleasanter walk than along the bridle path which circles the northern edge of the Ball. When Jefferies passed by Cloutsham Farm, a hunting box built by Sir Thomas Acland, the house was still thatched but the balcony which “overlooks the steepest part of the vast natural fosse surrounding the mount” is still there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just past this end of the house we turned right and then left into the bridleway which took us away through sheep pastures towards Stoke Pero.

 

We walked round the edge of the yard at Church Farm, guarded by a very laid-back sheep, and into the lane below the church.

 

Jefferies does not mention the church, but at the time of his visit it was seriously dilapidated. It lays claim to being the highest church in England at 1013 feet above sea level.

 

The church was renovated in 1897 and only the tower and the porch survive from the original building. All the materials for the renovation were brought from Porlock on a wagon drawn by a donkey called Zulu. His heroic efforts are commemorated by a sketch on an interior wall, made by Hope Bourne, the late Withypool writer and artist.

 

In the churchyard we found a tombstone with a splendidly grim but ironic text.

 

 Farewell my husband and my children dear,

Now I am gone, don’t for me shed a tear.

As I am now, so you must shortly be.

Therefore, prepare for death, and follow me.

 

Mrs Mary Rawle was to be disappointed. Her husband, David, did not follow her for another twenty years. We rather hoped that he might have spent the intervening years doing everything that she might have disapproved of.

 

We retraced our steps into the bridleway, passing the sheep which was now industriously mowing the lawn by the roadside, and followed the path as it dived down through ancient oaks into the combe above Horner Water. “Here the sound of rushing water grew much louder, and in a minute or two the stream appeared, running at great speed over the rocky fragments of its bed,” wrote Jefferies as he approached Cloutsham Ford. In his day the foot bridge was a tree which “had been thrown and hewed flat at the upper side.” Today’s bridge is more prosaic but it is still a delightful spot.

 

 

 

 

We searched for the red stones which Jefferies noticed, and found them. Although mostly grey, some of the stone of the bank and the river bed is distinctly pink or red, particularly when wet. Wipe them with your hand and it will leave a distinct red stain.

 

 

From here we walked down the river until we reached the village. Horner is blessed with two tea gardens and we chose Horner Vale for no better reason than we had visited the other in the past.

 There were chairs and tables in a garden surrounded by flowers at the side of a pleasant cottage.

It was a delicious tea and at £4 the cheapest we have encountered so far. If it doesn’t top our list of tea gardens at the end of a long, artery-hardening, summer, it is only because we prefer a warm scone, (even if it thanks to the ping of the “magic box”,) and also jam to jelly. But these are mere details which did not come near spoiling a real treat in lovely surroundings.

 

Ten mile walk to the birthplace of “Tarka the Otter”

The New Roadbridge

Here’s some free advice to anyone who wants to visit the birthplace of Tarka the Otter, hero of the eponymous, and deservedly famous, animal story by Henry Williamson. Hire a bike. Even dedicated walkers such as we would surrender temporarily the belief that a first-class walk is better than a first-class ride along the “Tarka Trail” between Bideford and Great Torrington. We had expected an informal path on the old railway line which follows the River Torridge upstream, but discovered instead a tarmac roadway along which mountain bikes, racing bikes, bikes drawing baby-trailers, and even tandems sped, peddled often furiously by riders in plastic helmets which made them look like extras from “Star Wars”. They were all scrupulously polite but it was a far cry from the solitary wilderness of Exmoor to which we are accustomed. We had acquired a copy of the 1970’s film of “Tarka the Otter”, which was filmed on the Torridge in the very places which Williamson had described, and we were determined to see them for ourselves.

We parked in the “long stay” car park on the quay at Bideford, and bought four hours for £2. It proved a false economy as, even at our best Somerset Light Infantry pace, we only just managed to reach Tarka’s birthplace and to return before we might have attracted some gross civic penalty. We set off down the quay, where a continental food market was in full swing, and crossed over the river by the handsome stone bridge which dates back some six hundred years.

We joined the “Tarka Trail” at the site of the old Bideford Station. No trains have run here since the line was closed in the 1960’s but there were some carriages, one of which promised, but did not deliver, “teas”, which are probably restricted to fete days, and a shunting engine, in front of the old signal box.

 

As we walked eastwards, we passed a path which led down to a cycle hire, and it wasn’t long before a steady stream of its customers began to pass us. They were never obtrusive but, like a tiny piece of grit in your boot, they irritated; better by far to join them. For most of the way, the trail is overhung by the branches of the surrounding trees, which gave welcome relief from a broiling sun but also obscured the river and the surrounding countryside.

There are, however, fine views over the estuary and the town. As usual with the Bristol Channel, the tide was out.

Bideford once was a hive of activity, including some lime kilns on the bank which were serviced directly from the water with limestone brought from South Wales.

A local grandee, Lord Rolle, had a canal constructed to import the limestone further into the hinterland to provide fertiliser for the surrounding farmland. He started his project in the 1820’s, a little late in the day for canal expansion. We passed the remains of an ingenious lock system, soon to be made obsolescent by the very railway on which we were walking.

At last we came to the iconic bridge which overshadows “Owlery Holt” where Tarka was born. This splendid structure once carried the canal over the river.

The twisted roots of the trees still look as if they might obscure the refuge of an otter. The cyclists did not pause. As we took our photographs, a man walking the other way called out cheerily, “No otters today then?”

Further on, after we had passed a summer camp for children which boasted a magnificent “death slide”, we came to Beam Weir. “Below the fish-pass the water rushed in a foamy spate. Above, it slid black and polished,” wrote Williamson.

We returned the way that we had come. The skyline of Bideford features a wonderful dome on the top of “Quay House”. Nowhere could we discover the reason for this exotic appendage. One might expect that it had once housed the Bideford cinema, probably with a name such as the “Alhambra” or “Granada”, promising Arabian nights of entertainment here in North Devon, but there was no evidence of a suitable entrance into such a magical interior.

We did visit, however, the market, buying two delicious French sausages and a bottle of nectar fit for gods, cidre bouché from Normandy. It makes a change from scrumpy.

As we neared the car, we came face to face with a suitably forbidding statue of that muscular Christian, Charles Kingsley. Kingsley’s famous fable, “The Water Babies”, was part of my very early reading. Somehow I could never bring myself to appreciate the sooty little chimney sweep Tom’s luck in being drowned and becoming a plump, naked cherub with fishy fins, as depicted in my illustrated edition. Even as an infant, I would have preferred to be dirty, exploited, but unmistakably alive.

Kingsley also wrote “Westward Ho!” a buccaneering story of privateers based on Bideford. The book was a smash-hit when published in 1855, so much so that some Victorian entrepreneurs gave its name to a hotel which they built outside Bideford on the southern tip of the Torridge estuary. Gradually a seaside resort grew up around the hotel, and it too was named “Westward Ho!” the only English town named after a novel and with an exclamation mark. I have always thought, however, the wonderfully named Durham colliery village of “Pity Me” worth the same punctuation.

We set off to Westward Ho! in search of our literary cream tea. Just as Tarka the Otter now gives his name to holiday parks and even a tennis centre, so the famous historian, novelist, and clergyman is remembered in road names, hotels, and caffs. We were not heading for the Kingsley caff, however, but to “Tea on the Green”, a celebrated and crowded teashop. We managed to sit outside with views of the waves rolling in on to the miles of sands.

For reasons that remained obscure, the set teas were named after 1950’s film stars. Remaining loyal to my Bristolian roots, we plumped for the “Cary Grant”, the original of which was born Archie Leach in Bristol in 1904. Calling a tea consisting of two huge fruit scones, a huge bowl of strawberry jam, a huge bowl of cream, and a huge pot of tea, a “Cary Grant” at least was not as eccentric as calling a version of the same, “Audrey Hepburn”. I still cannot see in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” that sylphlike, gaminesque figure, in headscarf and raincoat, dumping her cat in an alley in a torrential rainstorm without bursting into tears.

We were warned that we would not finish all the scones, and we didn’t, but they were absolutely superb. They were not too heavy, not too light, but like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right. We took one away with us in a napkin. Amidst the “adult gaming” arcades, peeling bungalows, fishnchip shops, caffs, lounging youths, girls in shortest shorts, blue blue water and sundrenched sands, this was a tea to remember.

 
 

 

Henry Williamson Unchained – an eleven mile walk over the Chains and by the Hoar Oak Water

The Chains, the brooding ridge of hills which are the source of the Exe and the Barle, the greatest of Exmoor’s rivers, may seem the heart of this wild landscape. Henry Williamson, author of “Tarka the Otter”, thought “of The Chains as his ancestral homeland, giving race-memory of the source of divine creation that he called 'ancient sunlight',” notes the excellent “Henry Williamson Society” website. In his long novel sequence, “A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight”, his alter ego, Phillip Maddison, wanders this part of the moor in the last summer before the outbreak of the First World War.

The Chains can be a forbidding, not to mention dangerous, place in winter when the mists come down without warning over the rain-sodden marshy ground, but on a perfect day in late May it seemed anything but. We parked the car in the big lay-by opposite to Acland Farm  Drive on the Simonsbath-Challacombe road, and set off up the bridleway signposted to the Chains Barrow. The way across the sedgy pasture is easy to follow as posts are obligingly stuck in the ground to show the driest way. When we reached the boundary wall which runs right along the ridge, we turned right towards Exe Head.

Exe Head is a lonely place. “Southward lay mile upon mile of lower moorland, and beyond a shimmering prospect of woods and patchwork fields dissolved in sky,” wrote Williamson in the “Summer’s Lease” chapter of “How Dear Is Life”, the volume of “Ancient Sunlight” which chronicles that last, perfect, summer of 1914. Williamson liked tearing his clothes off to dry them when wet from the streams and bogs, but it would have taken a deliberate effort to be anything but bone dry on the perfect day which we enjoyed.

 

We hiked down the combe towards the Hoar Oak Tree. At first you hear the Hoar Oak Water without seeing it but eventually the passage of the stream becomes more marked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Hoar Oak is a stunning valley on a day like this. At its foot, massive beech trees bend over the water in a luminous green avenue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

On the western side is the Hoar Oak Cottage, a ruin which once provided shepherds with welcome winter shelter. The National Park had ambitions of turning it into a study centre but it has contented itself by caging the crumbling walls within steel fencing and hanging it with warning signs. Better that it should have left it alone, a reminder of harder and wintry times.

In the “Summer’s Lease” chapter, Williamson wrote an extraordinary description of his alter ego, Phillip Maddison, being caught in a thunder storm near Hoar Oak.

 

“Behind him played several kinds of lightning: long jagged electric blue threads forking into the ground; rose-coloured fan-like effusions which made everything a momentary glowing pink; green slashes that hissed a moment before the sky broke.

The ground was jumping with water. He gasped with icy shock. Shirt, shoes and trousers were heavy with water, dragging shapeless. He could see nothing beyond the smaller stones of the track dancing knee high. He knew not where he was walking, but walk he must, or perish in cold.

Thunder rolled continuously; reddish burnings arose upon the watery earth, or hovered as balls of fire, or shot sideways like expanding flares illuminating the massive sheets and torrents of the rain. White streams of water, suddenly suffused with pink, were everywhere gushing down through the heather; while through all was a roar that was frightening until he realised that it was the little Hoar Oak Water rolling its bed of boulders to the sea.” When nine inches of rain fell in a thunderstorm on The Chains in August 1952, thirty four people drowned and much of Lynmouth was washed away.

Maddison makes off down the Water towards Barbrook, but we took the track which passes the cottage and leads to Furzehill  Common.

 

 

 

 

 

 In a previous walk we had wandered too far eastwards on this wide expanse of moorland without distinct paths, but this time we steered north-west and miraculously kept to the intended line, which allowed us to take the necessary left turn into the little settlement at North Furzehill. We followed the farm track towards Shallowford, but at Hill Cottage found ourselves again on open moorland. We needed to go due west, and a compass here was a considerable help in sorting out which of the many paths was which. Frequently on Exmoor the most frequented track is not the most distinct on the map.

At Shallowford we turned left and headed up the track which would take us back to the ridge of The Chains. We passed through Saddle Gate, while behind us sky and sea merged in the haze, although the smudge of the Welsh coast was just discernible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 As we climbed, Longstone Barrow came into view. This is the country of “Redeye”, the vicious lurcher in the story of the same name from “The Old Stag”, a collection of Williamson stories first published in 1926. “Redeye” is one of my favourites, strongly reminiscent of the writing of Jack London. In a forerunner of the battle between Tarka the Otter and the hound, Deadlock, Redeye is hunted by the foxhounds from Brendon Two Gates, led by Lightfoot, across western Exmoor. “He passed the Longstone Barrow, loping onwards over Challacombe Common and past Blackmoor Gate.” “Blood is spilled in plenty,” L.P. Hartley noted in a contemporary review, and Redeye kills Lightfoot in an epic struggle before expiring himself just as he reaches sanctuary.

We reached Wood Barrow, past which Redeye would have struggled, and turned eastwards towards Pinkworthy, (pronounced Pinkery,) Pond. It was looking its cobalt best in the bright sunshine. A favourite with the more morose type of suicide, it can be a godforsaken spot in bad weather. Here Tarka played with the ravens and lived off frogs. “A tarn lies under two hills, draining water from a tussock-linked tract of bog called The Chains. The tarn is deep and brown and still, reflecting rushes and reeds at its sides, the sedges of the hills, and the sky over them.”

From Pinkworthy Pond it was just a short walk back to the point opposite the Chains Barrow from which we retraced our steps downhill to the car. A short drive took us into the hamlet of Challacombe where we were looking forward to having our tea in the garden of the Post Office. We were not disappointed. The scones were just the right balance, neither too heavy nor light, there were generous bowls of cream and home-made jam, and there was the final five-star touch which accompanies the best of cream teas. There was a jug of hot water with which to top up the teapot! If you drink tea in pints as we do, a pot with a maximum of two cups each in it just won’t do. Challacombe Post Office goes straight to the top of the leader board, not least because its cream tea was a very reasonable £4.50 each.

Although Henry Williamson was as red in tooth and claw as Jack London in his writing, thankfully he was more temperate in his diet. London’s passion for eating raw game ruined his digestion, ( not helped by the prodigious amount of hard liquor which accompanied it,) but Williamson’s hero Phillip Maddison was as keen on boiled eggs and bread, jam, and cream in a farmhouse, as we are.