Exmoor Literary Walks: R.D. Blackmore

There is more to the literary history of Withypool than a claim that R.D. Blackmore wrote much of “Lorna Doone” while staying at the “Royal Oak”. Our village also boasts the writers Walter Raymond and Hope Bourne as former inhabitants, and you can throw in the painter Sir Alfred Munnings if you like, whose three-volume autobiography has much to say about the little village nestling in the valley of the Barle.

In her latter years, Hope Bourne, the writer and painter, often could be seen tucked into a sunny hedge or bank, like some basking cat, close to her beloved moorland. She had been persuaded eventually to move to a small cottage on the end of a social housing terrace in Withypool after spending years living in a tiny caravan in the grounds of a remote and ruined cottage. Scorning the comparative luxury of her final home, she slept on the floor in front of an open fire, leaving the rest of the house to her chickens.

Hope Bourne's cottage is the lower gable

She survived on the proceeds from her column for a local newspaper and from books such as “Living on Exmoor”, as well as from her self-sufficient life-style which included shooting her own meat. She loved the moor and its flora and fauna. She also loved the hunt, and not just for the welcome grub at lawn meets which she enjoyed enthusiastically as a supplement to her normally frugal diet.

Walter Raymond, the dialect writer active at the turn of the twentieth century, also lived simply enough himself in the cottage which he rented in Withypool. He describes the experience in his charming “The Book of Simple Delights”, a kind of Somerset version of Thoreau’s “Walden Pond”. Even so the cottage would have been positively luxurious compared with Hope Bourne’s caravan. James Russell’s excellent article about Raymond in Withypool at http://jamesrussellontheweb.blogspot.co.uk includes a photograph of the cottage, which I tried to copy with my usual cavalier attitude to other people’s copyright but was foiled by some cunning device.

Walter Raymond gives few clues in his book, a collection of articles originally written for “The Spectator”, as to where his incidents took place, with the exception of his cottage and the pub. Hope Bourne could be more informative, but she too is less than generous with place-names. We decided to celebrate these two worthies by walking the route which Hope Bourne used to take between her caravan at Ferny Ball and Withypool Post Office Stores, returning by way of Brightworthy Barrows and Withypool Hill to a cream tea at the Withypool Tearoom, a treat which I am convinced both writers would have enjoyed enormously.

Hope Bourne at the Withypool Tearoom

We set off from the bridge, where all walks in Withypool should start, and took the riverside path towards Landacre.

At Brightworthy Farm we began to climb away from the river. Some of Hope Bourne’s most evocative writing describes farms such as Brightworthy in their promise of shelter from the extremes of the Exmoor climate. “Down from the moor, under the rim, lies the old farm, its fields sodden and dun-coloured, desolate in a winter world, its hedges stark and black above the long white seams of snow that lie as yet unmelted by the driving rain. The wet slate roofs and old stone walls of the farmstead huddle together in a knot of wind-battered beeches, house and barn and shippon close and tight in a hostile element. Its yards and gateways are all squelch and slush and splashing mud. Around the buildings the raw sou’wester seems to blow the rain in all directions at once, so that there is no shelter anywhere, dashing the wet into one’s face from the eaves and gutters and tree branches, flinging it round all the corners and into every doorway, until one is soaked at every point.” Like so many of the old homesteads, Brightworthy is now a holiday home, occupied only during the summer months.

After climbing through a succession of pastures, we passed out on to the moor again and soon saw Landacre Bridge beneath us. It is a river crossing of great antiquity, and was the site of the Wainsmote, an Anglo-Saxon parliament.

Keeping the river on our right, we crossed the road and walked over the brow. Soon below we could see Sherdon Hutch, the barrier which prevents detritus threatening the bridge in times of flood, and where Sherdon Water meets the Barle.

In winter, with the river in full flood, we once watched a herd of Exmoor ponies attempting to cross to the northern bank. Each one in turn was carried away helplessly by the torrent before scrambling on to dry land some hundred yards below where they had entered the water. Hope Bourne frequently describes this ancient breed which somehow recalls the primitive horses of the deep past. “The ponies move in a long file over the brow of the hill and down the shallow combe seeking the shelter of the lower ground. Save for their movement one’s eye would hardly see them go, so much are they part of the moor, and so well does their colouring harmonize and blend with the winter colours of the moor. Dark-bay and brown bodies, mealy underparts and blue-black points seem but a reflection of the mahogany red of the sodden bracken, the dark brown of the winter heather, the bleached dun colour of rush and bent and inky blackness of the newly swaled patches.” Today one stands alone, looking out over the bridge and the river.

At a gate, hung with a wrecked “No Entry” sign, we were obliged to stop. As we know from hunting days, the track continues over the river and up to Ferny Ball Cottage, which has been rebuilt since the days when Hope Bourne and her caravan sheltered within its wrecked walls. Two sketches from her notebooks depict the way she would have walked carrying her meagre shopping. To see more, visit the Exmoor Society exhibition on Hope at the Guildhall Centre in Dulverton until November.

Ferny Ball Cottage today

We climbed the punchbowl to our left and, after a strenuous climb, emerged at the cattle grid above Landacre. Here we crossed the road, and walked across the moor towards the Withypool-Sandyway road with Dillycombe to our left. In winter this land lies very wet, and the whole Brightworthy Barrows area is very trappy with numerous bogs. We reached the road and turned left back towards Withypool until we reached the point where an obvious path leads to the left towards the Barrow itself. Dog walkers, and seekers for a signal for their mobile ‘phones, like to stop in the informal lay-by on the opposite side of the road. The views from the Barrow are magnificent and, although conditions on this sunny autumn day were not ideal with the wind in the south, it was more than worth the effort.

Dunkery Beacon from Brightworthy Barrow

Hope Bourne was no respecter of permissible paths, and in sympathy we took an unmarked path eastwards off the hill which delivered us safely into the private farm road between Knighton Farm and the public road. From her we regained the road and then struck off across Withypool Common to find the stone circle. Here on the common, even in the new Dark Age of political correctness, it is not unusual to see the hounds which Hope Bourne often described with such enthusiasm. “Across the small fields the cry of the hounds comes louder and fiercer, deepening now to a bay as they run down under the criss-cross of hedges and little paddocks behind the buildings in the hollow. Like avenging angels they course him, the thief of hens and killer of lambs and across the plats, and into the last little field. I run and reach the gate just as they come pouring into the midst in a snarling wave. Whoop! They have him! Like a wave of the sea they pour over themselves and surge in a snarling mass of white and tan and black, a swirl of animal bodies in savage splendour on the grass.”

Walkers sometimes find the Withypool Stone Circle difficult to find. When asked for directions, I routinely warn, “Don’t expect Stonehenge.” The secret is to find the path on the Hill which lies between the summit and the feature below known locally as “Four Fields” and which is marked on the map as “Tudball Splatts”.

Four Fields

Thanks to reading Hope Bourne, I now know that a “splatt” is a water-course. When stock was grazed on the moor throughout the winter, the large enclosure must have been a welcome refuge for man and beast.

The Stone Circle

History does not record, nor even speculate on, the rites practised here. Next midsummer morning, if the weather is propitious, we intend to climb at dawn to the Stone Circle in the hope of seeing the sun fall directly on it, or at least experience some other suitably mystic revelation. The chances, considering the Exmoor weather, seem suitably remote.

We carried on up the path to the summit of Withypool Hill with its cairn of stones marking the remains of a barrow. The Iron Age worthies were determined to be buried as close to heaven as possible. Despite the increasing haze, there was a good view of Winsford Hill.

As we descended the hill, the cottage, appropriately closest to the moor, where Hope Bourne spent her final days came into view. Withypool could do with a stock of blue plaques to celebrate the scribblers who had lived there.

Our plan had been to reach the Withypool-Hawkridge road just above the cottage, and make our way along the bridleway to South Hill and cross the Barle at the stepping stones below the farm. Sadly, when we reached the river, despite the dry summer, some of the stones were well-covered by the water. This prevented us from entering the village at the far end and passing the Royal Oak and Raymond’s Cottage. We were forced to beat a humiliating retreat and walked down to the bridge past Hope’s cottage and thus to the tearoom.

The Withypool tearoom has its own eccentric charm, constructed from the remains of the village filling station, its pumps still standing. A cream tea here is £4.50 with one large scone, fruit or plain according to taste. I managed to construct a mountain of cream and jam on each half which should have effected immediate cardiac arrest.

It is but a step from the tearoom to the “Royal Oak” where R.D. Blackmore laboured away at his tale of the feud between the Doones and the Ridds. You will find “Raymond’s Cottage” in the lane at the side of the pub, much changed from the days when Walter lived there. Our own cottage was once called “Loo’s Cottage” but whoever Loo was, he or she didn’t scribble for a living.