Huish ChampflowerMy Dad had become a country boy living here in these hills during WW2. A tiny Eastender who had been labelled like a parcel for express delivery and then packed off with his class to darkest Somerset for the duration of the war. As I walked I was impressed by how far he had covered as a small boy, how far he had learnt to roam.
Washbattle Bridge
I had visited most of the countryside around Wiveliscombe before. My Dad had brought us here when we were kids. I remember squashing my nose on our van’s window as I stared at the grey haired lady he once stayed with. I had come to this place with the wrong dimensions though. The car-based dimensions of my childhood. At the time I could not see the remoteness of the place he was talking about. The thirty years between our childhoods might as well have been a thousand.
Now, I can see in my mind’s eye the pack of boys of his stories. I can see them racing the steam train as it passed over the span of the bridge at Water End that now was no more than a line of brick stumps. I have a sense of the great range of those day-long fruit-picking expeditions.
My Dad laughs now at his own first impressions of Somerset. At the train ride that took all day. At the pig that slept across the front door. He laughs at himself asking forlornly where he could go and play. To him on that first day, the fields and woods that surrounded the house did not look like somewhere to have fun.
West Somerset was a new world and at first he was an alien. A place in which the older pattern of life still existed. An agricultural world which involved everyone working the fields at harvest time. His stories, with their horse and cart pace sounded to me like a Thomas Hardy novel.
It must have been a lonely world. The first people he was allocated to moved him on and he had ended up living with the local poacher. This certainly broadened his education to take in country craft, but left out the bit which had to do with school and other people. When she was eventually told, Nanny Stewart came storming down from London to take him back to be with her and the Doodle Bugs.
I was pleased to hear that the evacuees had left a permanent mark on this part of the country. As I followed a lane beside the River Tone I met an entire school coming the other way on a field trip. While the kids dipped and identified the life in the river I talked to the teachers and mentioned my father. One of the teachers told me that her mother had been an evacuee too and had married and stayed on in Somerset at the end of the war.
Somerset is a county full of surprises.
I’d walked the Levels, the Quantocks and the wide vale of Taunton and now I
walked in the Brendon Hills, a bakery full of risen bread. A land of flat topped hills
and deeply cut coombes into which I quickly descended.
I had decided to walk down the Incline. The name gives you the hint to its
profile. This old industrial ramp had once been the bed of an old mining trackway
which ran up the side of a coombe, but now it was a treacherous, overgrown and
slippery slide. I picked my way gingerly through a world of fronds, through a hint of
cloud forest clothed in an algal light. I swam down deeper and deeper into this damp,
subterranean place. Unfortuately my tired old boots were not up to the job of gripping
the mossy stones. I skidded, slipped over and then finally shot down the slope on my
bum. Fortunately for me, a layer of mud accumulated under me as I fell and made a
good cushion for the sharp twigs and other debris that tried to impale me.
It was while I was sitting down getting my breath back in the wooded bottom of this coombe that I noticed the name of the little hamlet down here in its folds. Comberow. I remembered reading in my book of English place names that references to Cumber ( as in Cumberland or Cambria as in Wales) are reference to the Romano-British. To the Celtic people who once lived all over England. Here was a place name telling me a story.
The English people who first came here to the Brendon Hills must have either remembered or even met a Celtic speaking family who had lived on, deep in this hidden world long after English became the dominant race in the rest of the country.
In tracing the lines of my own family’s story across these hills I could see the threads of this other tale that had passed from father to son for generations. I caught a whiff of England in the Dark Ages, fifteen hundred years before.
Here be ships making for port. Here be fishing craft working their trade near shore. Here be the isles of Flatholm and Steepholm, dropped like pebbles in a painted sea. I labelled each object as I recognised it, picked out on the expanse of the water. Here be Wales!
It was not so remote for the British families that had once lived in Somerset. Maybe they too came to Selworthy to look out at it and to remember the old stories of their power in King Arthur’s time. Perhaps one day they simply had enough of the English and crossed over the water. Or maybe they peacefully inter-married and faded into the wider Saxon world leaving their English speaking children a name and a badly remembered memory.
I could see the whole spread of South Wales out there in the light. A thin ribbon running from the Newport works to the right, past Cardiff to Swansea and then the Gower. A whole other country in a line that I could blot out with my thumb.
The top of Selworthy Beacon felt more like moorland the next morning. The view out to sea was obscured in a haze and I walked through the rugged gorse that had been whipped flat by the wet winds coming off the Atlantic. It was a desolate scene that reminded me of the Pennines.
I had argued with myself long and hard about this next bit of the route. Pauline and I had been staying with my Uncle and Aunt and Ian had sung the praises of Exmoor as we toured the night before. I dithered - should I walk the moor or should I continue on with the clear views from the cliffs on the South West Coast Path. Which to forgo, which one to keep? I opted for the cliffs and headed west.
From Bossington Hill the pathway swept down to the tide level passing over the pebbles piled-up in front of Porlock before rising again after the Weir into the lush woodland on the hillside beyond.
I did not feel like I was by the sea in Yearnor Wood. There was no sound of the water, only the whoosh of green leaves flying on the wind. There was a richness and a gentleness to this wood that reminded me of a lakeside copse. There was soft mud under foot and a thick leaf litter that covered old twigs and emerging fungi . The air was scented with woodland plants. I followed the path through the woods up past the pretty church of Culbone. In its clearing in the wood surrounded by wild flowers it reminded me of a tiny Russian church I’d once seen in a glade of light deep in dense forest.
I climbed and appeared out of the tree line high on the green hills above the cliffs. I was walking towards Broomstreet Farm which, tradition states, was the place that Samuel Taylor Coleridge stayed and conceived the ideas for his famous poems. Turning towards the vast expanse of the blue sea to my right I could see in an instant the inspiration for "Water, water every where".
There were a number of tracks marked on the map along these cliffs past Yenworthy Farm and I was a little unsure as to which of them to take. I had arranged to meet Pauline on ‘the path’ below the County Gate and this arrangement now looked very stupid. I carried on down the cliff, back into the rich covering of trees which were now made colourful by the exotic introduction of Rhododendrons. I came to path that ran up to the Gate and wondered what I should do.
It was nearly a thousand foot climb from the sea to the County gate and I walked up and down it three times. I had given up hope of ever seeing her and had left a small sad note on our car when I heard Pauline shouting somewhere in the trees. I felt like Tarzan roaring through the trees as I ran towards her.
The sun was now falling in the west and it filled the valley, as I looked, with a light like golden syrup. I came down on to the road through a sea of feathery ferns and turned and walked straight into the setting sun.
Later still, the world turned red. The fire of Devonian sandstone torched by the rich rays of the lowering sun.
I was up now, on an exposed cliff path that was not much more than a gull-ledge. My rucksack swung out over the cliff as I walked, adding an edge to my excitement. The soft stone let my boots slip. I was alone. I was flying. It was just me, the fiery cliffs and the long drop into the sea below.
I rounded a corner and even the cliffs were gone. Here at Highveer Point the River Heddon had cut a slot down to the cliff base, leaving me up in the air with nothing but the sunset around me.
Next Chapter
Return to Home Page
© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004