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.

  

 

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.