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.