A hunt for the past
Rory Knight Bruce The A377 from Exeter to Barnstaple is perhaps 26 miles long, much of it bordering 'The Gentleman River' of the Taw and railway which will still stop at the many stations by request. Crags and steep coverts cast their shadows along the road, and in the water of the river below Henry Williamson found his inspiration for Tarka the Otter.
Few writers have been drawn to this Devon country of pasture and moorland, but one was the Exmoor essayist and biologist W.N.P. Barbellion who died in 1919, aged 30, of multiple sclerosis. The Journal of a Disappointed Man is his legacy — talking to gamekeepers, visiting heronries, observing insects and red deer and placing man in the context of Nature, in the tradition of Richard Jeffries and Knut Hamsun. Ted Hughes lived here undisturbed for many years and Sylvia Plath called the locals `stumpworts' before she left.
In the summer months, however, the road is full of holidaymakers heading for the North Devon coast, although they seldom stop. It is said to appear on a motorcyclists' website as a journey of exciting twists and turns that may be taken at speed, which perhaps helps to account for ten bikers fatalities in the last year.
In my childhood, my father would take us on this journey to the seaside for our annual day out at Woolacombe or Saunton Sands, the full distance from our farm near Exeter. My brother and I and my terrier would stop with him along the way at the Fox and Hounds at Eggesford or the Rising Sun at Umberleigh (where the salmon fishermen still congregate), a drive, in our opentopped Ford Consul, of mounting expectation. At Butcher's Row in Barnstaple we would be given a cream cake if we could remember the names of trees he had taught us. This was a freedom road to me.
Then, in 2000, I became the sole master and huntsman of the Torrington Farmers' foxhounds and, like Williamson and Barbellion, got to explore the farms and fields beyond the road's high hedges. Here was a community as settled and undisturbed as they had been more than 70 years before. There was a cattle market at Bideford and, each January, a dance in Umberleigh village hall full of farming descendants from another century. I would go bell-ringing, play in pub skittles matches and, just once, stood in the winners' enclosure of the donkey-and-cart races on the glebe field of St Giles-in-the-Wood.
In flaming June we would run the pointto-point, the last of the season, with the shimmering edifice of the Hall estate at Bishop's Tawton in the distance. At funerals, it was not uncommon for three or four hundred to attend, and I went to several Methodist low-church services.
Although I was born and brought up on a farm at the Exeter end of the A377, it could have been a million miles away from this life on the northern side. These people had been raised, as had their parents before them, with the familiar patterns of the local school, the rugby club and Young Farmers' outings.
Yet gradually, on my daily visits to farms to meet people to say when the hounds were coming, I began to acquire some kind of acceptance from this shy, proud, Godfearing and temperate community. Farmers would tell me their stories and I became, like Synge or O'Casey, who learnt about the west coast of Ireland by hiding above the pub rafters and listening to the drinkers' conversations, immersed in their narratives and dialect.
Did I know the 'Drummer Boy'? Bill Clements, retired from his lifelong job of selling toffee apples at fairs, asked me one day in the Duke of York at Iddesleigh. I did not then know Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, who had bought the Halsdon estate, but I did later. Each year I would go to see him and he would press a letter into my hand. 'This is to look after the horses not the hounds,' he would say, and afterwards I would open the envelope and out would fall a generous cheque.
Few incomers came to live in these parts, and even fewer were wanted. How could they hope to crack the intimacy of generations, where to own land was everything? One who did come — for reasons of seclusion, I imagine — was a forlorn poker player who had bought a farm at Honeychurch.
It had previously been owned by a family of two brothers and a sister and had its own tragic tale. When the sister announced that she was to marry, all three were found dead the next day. None could bear to part with their share of the farm which they had owned equally and which the marriage would rend asunder. I spent the day with the new owner and little, including the cow byres and watermill, had changed.
On Beaford Moor there was a woman with a smallholding who did all her shopping by bus. She and her handful of Devon red cattle were quite content with the buildings falling down around her.
But when foot-and-mouth came in 2001, it was as if the doors of Janus had flown open. Infected farms faced pyres of misery as their flocks and stock were burned. Yet something else died in the ashes. Those farmers not affected were left without compensation at a great personal and financial cost as they muddled on with their milking herds, sheep and bullocks with declining prices. I sat with farmers who had been compensated and those who had not, listening. It was not my place to ask why, almost mysteriously, some farms had been infected and some had not.
After three years, I left the hunt and the community, and my freedom road closed finally behind me. It was not a long journey by distance but it was a long journey by time. And it was the fulfilment of the journey of my childhood memories.
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