Category: Dartmoor

Easter running

Spring has crept up on us this year. The last week has not been warm, and we seem to have had more than our share of rain, with only a little sun.

The house this Easter weekend has been full of running: not us but the girls (or at least three of them). The Great West Run, Exeter’s half-marathon, is a month away and all three are going to be home to run for Cancer Research: if you want to sponsor them you’ll find their page on Just Giving.

A savage downpour yesterday morning saw two of them pounding the track round Mardon Down. This morning was more ambitious: just shy of ten miles from the Hennock Reservoirs home. I dropped them at 9.00 and they were home as the Church clock struck 11.00. They are all pleased with how today has gone, but to beat two hours on 2 May will be tough.

We walked part of their route this morning on Friday, starting at the Trenchford car park and taking the road round to Tottiford then up to the county road, sharp right down to Kennick, across the dam and back along the road. Five miles of easy walking (although gumboots weren’t the best choice of footwear), and the chance to see Spring here: Swallows and House Martins over Trenchford, the first we have seen this year, and the earliest we have seen them in the 13 years we have lived here.

And just so we know Spring is indeed here, we heard the unmistakeable tapping of death watch beetle in the shutters in the study. This, I hope, is the last part of the house which is still home to them.

A Dartmoor day

Tuesday was a typical February day on the north Dartmoor edge: grey, rain threatened but instead a cold damp seeping into your bones.  2.00 in the afternoon, and the road into South Tawton lined with cars; in St Andrews, the parish church,  standing room only. A congregation of more men than women, in black suits rarely worn. A lot of people had been in the pub over lunch, but there was no buzz, little chatter. We were there, with, or so it seemed, most of Moretonhampstead, for the funeral of Roy Smaridge.

Roy was our builder. He had been born, he told us, just up the road from South Tawton, in Taw Green. We found this out as when we had thought of moving in 2006 (posted about in A lot can happen in seven days). The house we looked at had been in Taw Green. Roy, when he heard,  commented, “You wouldn’t have liked it much: that house was always damp”. A builder’s comment.

We had known him from the time we moved into Moretonhampstead in 1997. He had then been living here: a jobbing builder, a retained fireman, and one of those people that either you liked or you didn’t (or perhaps it was he that liked you or didn’t).  Whichever, we liked him from the start, and over the years he and his boys have lovingly rebuilt and repaired the house: bedrooms, bathrooms, dining room, hall, walls, roofs. There are very few bits of it that he has not worked on.

And the sadness is that those plans we still have for the house, and had discussed with him, will now be for someone else to complete for us. I always joked with Roy that our house was his pension: now not required. His yearly gift of a Christmas hamper to us might have raised the children’s eyebrows, but it was just part and parcel of the relationship. And he touched our lives in more ways than one. Roy had been on the shout when Holly had broken her femur up on Mardon Down, thrown off her pony: with the nearest emergency ambulance either Okehampton or Exeter, the Fire Service are our first responders.

We were in north Norfolk when we heard the news: somehow very apposite as it seemed that we were usually on a distant bird reserve when Roy called from work on the house. “Are you sitting down? Good. We have had to dig out the dining room floor” or some such piece of less than welcome news. And here we were, sitting in St Andrews with all those other people whose lives Roy had also touched.

And his boys brought him into the church to Madness’ One step beyond, and at the end of the service he left to Don’t let the sun go down on me.

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.