Category: Dartmoor

A cold churchyard but a warm welcome

The first Sunday in January saw us on the moor: not walking but taking my sister and her husband on a quick tour by Land Rover along icy roads. Not quite as bad as Christmas Day afternoon, when we drove to Hound Tor past Jay’s Grave and wondered if we would get back in time to pull the crackers, but still interesting.

Permanent four wheel drive is great, until you lose it. Then, as we found a few days later, more than a ton of metal takes some stopping.

Widecombe-in-the-Moor was all but empty of visitors. The National Trust shop, in what was once the Church House, offered a temporary respite from a bitter east wind, but we had come to see the “Cathedral of the Moor” and morning service in St Pancras was not quite finished. We loitered in the cold churchyard.

It was well worth the wait. We not only got to see one of the finest churches in our part of Devon (even though Pevsner wasn’t much enthused about it) but we were met as we went in with coffee and shortbread; and the suggestion that next month we arrive earlier to help with the singing!

A cold churchyard but a very warm welcome.

Happy Christmas

There is something about Christmas mornings. Caroline says the stillness is almost tangible, and so it seemed today. Complete quiet in the house. Outside very cold but no snow; the garden frosted and the bird feeders undisturbed. Lying warm in bed, we can just hear the longcase clock strike seven, two floors below us. Across the road our neighbours’ grandchildren are up, and the house is ablaze with light: what noise there we can only imagine. Our five sleep on, long past the excitement of Santa’s arrival, but stockings on each door nonetheless. Such are the rituals of Christmas in this house.

A most peculiar animal

We do not live in traditional hare country. There is a (relatively) local pack of beagles, and they meet, or have in the past, at Headless Cross on Mardon Down, but I have not seen a hare down here; well, not that is until the other morning.

Driving the windy road to Exeter (see Down narrow lanes) suddenly, at the top of the hill before the road drops down to Steps Bridge, a large brown hare; still, in the middle of the road. She must have come out of the fields on the right hand side. I stopped, and she lolloped off, across the road and into the woods that soften the the side of the Teign valley.

I have become used to seeing roe deer along this stretch of road, although the best view is from the passenger seat in the Land Rover; and occasionally badgers, although more usually their sad, muddy corpses. There are foxes in the woods, and early morning is a good time to see cubs. And through the trees buzzards and owls, and at night large brown bats. but a hare? It made my morning.

Apus apus

I always enjoy Harry Eyre’s Slow Lane column in the Weekend FT.  Last weekend’s The planet’s still working was no different: a delightful mixture of the practical and the philosophical, and at its heart the swift, or more correctly the European swift (Apus apus), as there are almost 70 different species of swift across the world.

We are like Eyre’s uncle, whom he notes,

Every May . .  notes down the first arrival of the swifts on his particular beat in north London. The birds are not quite as regular as the St George’s mushrooms which appear on precisely the same day – April 23 – every English spring, but the birds come some time between the 9th and 13th of the month. I haven’t asked him about this but I assume he finds it comforting, a sign in uncertain times that, as Ted Hughes put it, not entirely reassuringly, “the planet’s still working”.

We see them later in this part of the country, and often the ones we see first are on their way north. In the last 10 years, the earliest we have noted them was 30 April in 2004; and the latest, in 2002, 14 May. For the most part they are with us sometime in the second week in May. The swallow may be the usual harbinger of summer, but for us it is always the swift.

Eyre also quotes the recent RSPB report on the diminishing number of swifts: since the 1990s a 40% drop. Again, we have seen it here. This year there seem only to be four or five resident in Moretonhampstead, whereas in the past we have had far more. Changing building practice is partly (possibly largely) responsible, but this is nothing new. In his 1980 book, Devil Birds, Derek Bromhall wrote,

As old buildings in which swifts have nested for years are demolished, new sites become progressively harder to find. Modern buildings do not allow birds access into roof spaces, and in our present energy-conscious society we seal and insulate the roofs of those older buildings which are being preserved.

Eyre wrote almost the same last week, “Mostly unconsciously, we have been shutting the swifts out of our lives. Now the imperative to insulate our houses and make them airtight, to save on heating and therefore CO2 emissions, has made matters still worse.” He suggests swift bricks are one answer. Bromhall was there first, advocating nest boxes.

And an afterthought; Harry Eyre makes the mistake many people do, referring to swifts as hirundines, and thus lumping them into the same bird family as swallows and martins. They aren’t. Swifts belong to the Apodidae; swallows and martins are Hirundinidae.

And as for poetry, Ted Hughes’ poem, also ‘Swifts’ is every bit as good, “On their switchback wheel of death/They swat past, hard fletched,/Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,/and are gone again. . .”