Hope Bourne, Walter Raymond, and Withypool - a nine and a half mile walk

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.

 

Raymonds Cottage

The Royal Oak

From Winsford to Nethercote - a nine mile walk in search of the Johnsons

Winsford, with its thatched pub and cottages, and streams and bridges, may be the prettiest of all Exmoor villages, but it is sadly short on literary talent, past or present. Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary in the post-war Labour government, has been the village’s most famous son for many years, but he popped his proletarian clogs even before he could pen any memoirs.

The title of Winsford’s foremost literary and political family now may be claimed by the Johnsons, the blond behemoths Stanley, Boris, and Rachel, who soon may include in their own dynastic soap opera the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

I have to confess that I have never read a word of paterfamilias Stanley’s many books on conservation, but I have attended a talk which he gave in Winsford Village Hall. It was a warm, autumn evening, and I had spent a long day in the saddle following the stag hounds. As Stanley floundered with the intricacies of the slide-projector, and as a surreal polar bear seemed to walk across the screen standing on its head, I sank into a profound coma from which I failed to awaken until the author of “Where the Wild Things Were” had sat down to enthusiastic applause.

I felt that I should do better with the literary aspirations of his children; Boris, the present mayor of London, and Rachel, editor of “The Lady”, the magazine “for elegant women with elegant minds.” For purposes of research, as men say when studying unorthodox internet sites, I borrowed Boris’s masterwork “Seventy Two Virgins”, and Rachel’s blockbuster “Notting Hell”, from the library.

 

In both cases I intended to adopt that traditional reviewing technique of reading only the first and last chapters of each but, to my eternal shame, in the case of the “Virgins”, I never progressed beyond the first page. My prep school English master had drummed into me, usually with the back of his hand and sometimes with the board rubber, that it was “the first sentence that counts.” If Boris too had attended that character-building academy on the muddy shores of the Severn Estuary, he might not have penned the following.

 

“On what he had every reason to believe would be the last day of his undistinguished political career Roger Barlow awoke in a state of sexual excitement and with a gun to his head, the one fading as he became aware of the other.”

It’s not quite on a par with Jane Austen’s use of irony, is it? “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Austen’s sentence balances effortlessly like a high-wire walker, but the Boris period flops like a great blond whale. If you replace “one” with “former” and “other” with “latter”, the conclusion at least becomes more precise, but it still deserves “awkward” in red ink in the margin. If the sentence ended at “head”, it would be much improved.

I think that it was Albert Camus who created a character who spent his life polishing the first and only sentence of his first novel. It never progressed any further. Boris has much to learn from him. You might find it an absorbing exercise to improve Boris’s opening yourself. Obviously, his publisher’s reader failed miserably.

Rachel Johnson is a more accomplished writer than her brother. The title of “Notting Hell” may well be the book’s best moment, but this saga of a community garden in a fashionable quarter of the metropolis may amuse some. The relentless punning and listing of chic brands, however, soon becomes a surfeit, as in the following passage.

“I put on some Levi’s and some cashmere socks, a grey cashmere sweater over a white Agnes B long-sleeved T-shirt, and pad down to the kitchen. I make a cup of green tea, slip on my fleece-lined lace-up nut-brown Ilse Jacobsen boots, and head out into the communal garden for some fresh air, pausing only to fondle the bud of mop-headed allium in our garden.”

What is it that makes reading this feel like a form of literary water torture? It’s the relentless stacking of compound adjectives, one on top of the other; “fleece-lined lace-up nut-brown Ilse Jacobsen boots.” It induces the throbbing neuralgia of a serious hangover until you are slugged from behind by the nausea from the inevitable brand name. Still, Rachel’s a tasty looking blond and I took a quick whiz through this saga of metrofolk to see how she dealt with what we called at school  “the good bits”, but they never seemed to progress beyond heavy breathing and references to obscure lingerie brands.
Perhaps the Johnson literary standard should be left in the hands of Rachel's aunt, Birdie, who produced "Reflections", a book based on her collection of Exmoor oral history. Birdie interviewed scores of Exmoor characters, and the books includes some fascinating photographs and personal accounts of life on the Moor.

Notting Hill seemed far away as we left Winsford by Ash Lane, after parking opposite the tea rooms and crossing the ford, in search of the Johnson fastness at Nethercote in the Exe Valley. We passed the lane which led up to the church and continued on the road until we could dive into the footpath which leads to Withycombe Farm and the Punchbowl. It’s a pleasant walk through the sheep pastures with dense woods lowering on the left. 

When we reached the Withycombe farm drive, we turned right and walked uphill back towards Ash Lane. The views of the Punchbowl behind us were stunning with a superb cloudscape.

To the right were the slopes of Winsford Hill.

When we reached the lane, we turned right and followed it, past a gateway leading to a Dutch barn, until we reached two gates together. The bridleway lies through the left-hand one, and this took us up a steep climb on to the top of Bye Common. After negotiating a gateway choked with a suckler herd of cattle, we passed through another and down the track which overlooked Nethercote.

We joined the rough roadway which follows the Exe and crossed the bridge which leads to the settlement of Nethercote. I have no idea of how many of the dwellings belong to the Johnson family. A skull-and-crossbones hung from the flagpole of the first cottage we passed, which seemed a suitable emblem for this swashbuckling family. I had a brief mental image of Boris as a child, in shorts and Clark’s sandals, living out some Arthur Ransome adventure on the banks of the Exe. Another property further down the lane appeared to have been renovated recently, and finally we came to the long, low farmhouse which I have always imagined was the family seat of the Johnsons.

All had a distinct feel of second, rather than first, homes. Everything was tidy enough, but plants grew across one of the front doors and the windows had that blank look which they show to the world when there is no life behind them. Notting Hill, not Nethercote, and Westminster, not Winsford, are the pastures where the Johnsons safely and mainly graze these days.

We walked on with the river on our left until we reached Lyncombe, another remote settlement which has a weekend retreat feel about it. We followed the track through the yard and upwards and on, past High Combe, until we reached the Staddonhill Road, a metalled no-through road where we turned right with a view of Dunkery Beacon to the north.

Above Staddon Farm, the roadway becomes the track known as Kemps Lane. This took us downhill back into the Exe Valley and eventually to Larcombe Foot. This is a lovely spot on the river and a good place to let a horse cool his legs after hunting, although we had never seen so little water in the river after the heat wave in July.

We took the footpath which runs to the south of the river back into Winsford, emerging on to the road just above where three hours earlier we had set off for Withycombe. At the side of Winsford Church we found this larky set of figures in a cottage garden playing out a cricket match.

Winsford Tea Room has fairly new owners, and they have certainly smartened the place up. As well as the charming garden next to one of Winsford’s many streams, there is a large indoor room for when the weather turns rough. A cream tea at £5.60 each was the most expensive we have seen on our travels so far but, in addition to the lovely setting, the Winsford Tea Room gave us the best scones we have tasted. There is proper clotted cream and a choice of raspberry and strawberry jams. We had both between us, and the vote goes to the raspberry.

 

Richard Jefferies and the River Barle – a seven mile walk from Tarr Steps

“The brown Barle River running over red rocks aslant its course is pushed aside, and races round curving slopes. The first shoot of the rapid is smooth and polished like a gem by the lapidary's art, rounded and smooth as a fragment of torso, and this convex undulation maintains a solid outline. Then the following scoop under is furrowed as if ploughed across, and the ridge of each furrow, where the particles move a little less swiftly than in the hollow of the groove, falls backwards as foam blown from a wave.”

 

Rarely has a river been so intensely realised in words as in “Summer in Somerset”, written by Richard Jefferies during his fortnight stay on Exmoor in 1882, but not published until after his death. It is no more than a fragment and much of it is devoted to a rhapsodic evocation of Exmoor’s most scenic river. It illustrates perfectly Jefferies’s method of pushing his nose flat against nature and itemising its detail, a technique which he unknowingly gifted to Henry Williamson, author of “Tarka the Otter”.

We started where Jefferies finished his walk; at Tarr Steps, up river from Dulverton. The ancient clapper bridge is one of Exmoor’s iconic landmarks, and arguments will always rage about its true antiquity. The past winter illustrated yet again how vulnerable the bridge is to the elements when in December 2012 a substantial length of the bridge was washed away by floods. West Somerset Council may be bankrupt but it found the money from somewhere to repair the damage promptly, to the relief of all who live off the tourist trade. Only Watersmeet near Lynmouth would challenge Tarr Steps as the most visited beauty spot on the Moor.

We parked the car in the National Trust car park above the steps for a reasonable fee of £2 for an all-day stay, and walked down to the river past the Tarr Farm hotel, of which more later.

 

 

We crossed the Steps to the western bank of the Barle and turned right into the bridleway which led steeply uphill towards Parsonage Farm. On our left we caught a glimpse of the roof of what used to be the Tarr Steps Hotel but is now a private house. Further up the track we could look back towards Ashway. It was the first day of the much-trailered heat wave and, as we walked through meadows thick with clover and flowers, ready to be mown, the flies clustered on our hats like grapes.

 

At the gate which led down into the yard of Parsonage Farm, we turned right and walked towards Westwater Farm across the top of the down, from which we had a panoramic view of the western moors. First came Withypool Hill.

Then the valley of the Barle topped by the sugarloaf of the stand of trees above Warren Farm which are visible from all points of the compass.

Finally, and much closer, stood Winsford Hill.

The heat thickened as we walked down the rough path towards Westwater. A suckler herd hid from the flies amongst the trees, and at the bottom a herd of sheep dozed in the shade.

 When we came into the lane below the farm, the collies that habitually lie in the entrance, and sometimes in the middle of the road itself, could hardly bother to rouse themselves to sniff us as we passed by and up the hill towards Greystone Gate.

 

The cattle grid is at the foot of the open common below Withypool Hill, but we kept on the road until it began to descend towards Withypool village itself.

Just above the village hall we turned right into the drive which leads to South Hill Farm. The bridleway used to pass through the yard, but there is now a right of way through the fields which brings one out between the house and the river. There is no bridge to take you to the path on the northern bank but a magnificent line of stepping stones.

 

For far too long the stones were blocked by a fallen tree, but eventually the Exmoor Park Authority cleared it away and the way is clear again as long as the river is not too high. Recently the weather had been comparatively dry. Sometimes one or two of the stones can be quite treacherous, and at others much of them are covered by the river.

We turned right towards Tarr Steps. It is said that Louis Armstrong never played the Ira Gershwin-Vernon Duke song “I can’t get started” after he heard Bunny Berigan’s awe-inspiring version. Similarly I leave our walk back to Tarr Steps to the words of Richard Jefferies and to my wife’s photographs.

 

“At the foot of the furrowed decline the current rises over a rock in a broad white sheet--white because as it is dashed to pieces the air mingles with it. After this furious haste the stream does but just overtake those bubbles which have been carried along on another division of the water flowing steadily but straight. Sometimes there are two streams like this between the same banks, sometimes three or even more, each running at a different rate, and each gliding above a floor differently inclined. The surface of each of these streams slopes in a separate direction, and though under the same light they reflect it at varying angles. The river is animated and alive, rushing here, gliding there, foaming yonder; its separate and yet component parallels striving together, and talking loudly in incomplete sentences.”

“Here is a pool by the bank under an ash--a deep green pool inclosed by massive rocks, which the stream has to brim over. The water is green--or is it the ferns, and the moss, and the oaks, and the pale ash reflected? This rock has a purple tint, dotted with moss spots almost black; the green water laps at the purple stone, and there is one place where a thin line of scarlet is visible, though I do not know what causes it. Another stone the spray does not touch has been dried to a bright white by the sun. Inclosed, the green water slowly swirls round till it finds crevices, and slips through. A few paces farther up there is a red rapid--reddened stones, and reddened growths beneath the water, a light that lets the red hues overcome the others--a wild rush of crowded waters rotating as they go, shrill voices calling. This next bend upwards dazzles the eyes, for every inclined surface and striving parallel, every swirl, and bubble, and eddy, and rush around a rock chances to reflect the sunlight. Not one long pathway of quiet sheen, such as stretches across a rippled lake, each wavelet throwing back its ray in just proportion, but a hundred separate mirrors vibrating, each inclined at a different angle, each casting a tremulous flash into the face.”

“The sky, which was not noticed before, now appears reaching in rich azure across the deep hollow, from the oaks on one side to the oaks on the other. These woods, which cover the steep and rocky walls of the gorge from river to summit, are filled with the June colour of oak. It is not green, nor russet, nor yellow; I think it may be called a glow of yellow under green. It is warmer than green; the glow is not on the outer leaves, but comes up beneath from the depth of the branches. The rush of the river soothes the mind, the broad descending surfaces of yellow-green oak carry the glance downwards from the blue over to the stream in the hollow. Rush! rush!--it is the river, like a mighty wind in the wood.”

 

“Every one has seen a row of stepping-stones across a shallow brook; now pile other stones on each of these, forming buttresses, and lay flat stones like unhewn planks from buttress to buttress, and you have the plan of this primitive bridge. It has a megalithic appearance, as if associated with the age of rude stone monuments. They say its origin is doubtful; there can be no doubt of the loveliness of the spot. The Barle comes with his natural rush and fierceness under the unhewn stone planking, then deepens, and there overhanging a black pool--for the shadow was so deep as to be black--grew a large bunch of marsh-marigolds in fullest flower, the broad golden cups almost resting on the black water. The bridge is not intended for wheels, and though it is as firm as the rock, foot passengers have to look at their steps, as the great planks, flecked with lichen at the edges, are not all level. The horned sheep and lambs go over it--where do they not go? Like goats they wander everywhere.”

Just above Tarr Steps there is a barrier strung across the river to prevent trees being carried down to the bridge by flood waters which would smash the ancient stones apart. Sadly, a few months ago, it proved completely inadequate.

“In a cottage some way up the hill we ate clotted cream and whortleberry jam. Through the open door came the ceaseless rush! rush! like a wind in the wood. The floor was of concrete, lime and sand; on the open hearth--pronounced 'airth'--sods of turf cut from the moor and oak branches were smouldering under the chimney crook. Turf smoke from the piled-up fires of winter had darkened the beams of the ceiling, but from that rude room there was a view of the river, and the hill, and the oaks in full June colour, which the rich would envy.”

 

When we first came here over thirty years ago, Tarr Farm had not changed much since Jefferies’s day. While our back was turned, however, the old farmhouse morphed into a luxury hotel, with a celebrated restaurant and a clientele in season of corporate tweedy shooters from the City. You can still enjoy an excellent cream tea in the garden above the river, from as early as eleven o’clock in the morning indeed. The price of £5.50 is at the top end of the range, as one would expect in so popular a spot, but look at the size of it. 

 

Three scones lay on each plate like golden hubcaps. Two of them went straight into the backpack for another day, and then we enjoyed the others in the company of a couple of chaffinches, a breed which seems particularly keen on scones. It wasn’t whortleberry jam but, judging by a pot which we bought once made from Exmoor’s signature berry, we weren’t missing much.