Various myths and legends concerning Dartmoor

To Dartmoor, the greatest expanse of wilderness in Southern England, and one of 15 National Parks in the UK (England has 10, Wales 3 and Scotland 2). 

A bleak but beautiful expanse of high ground in the middle of Devon, Dartmoor consists of some 368 square miles of bogs, granite outcrops (tors) and heather-grown moorland as well as lots of isolated farmsteads, a prison, various disused tin mines and granite quarries, a strong military presence (the north-eastern part of it has been an Army firing range for over 200 years), the sources of several Devon rivers (not just the Dart) and a few fine examples of clapper bridges which date back to Medieval times. 

Animals on the moor are mainly cows, sheep and ponies – those last being the descendants of the pit-ponies which were used when the moor was a centre for tin-mining.

And, of course, it is the source of many local legends.  Dartmoor is said to be haunted by (among others) pixies, a headless horseman, a few monks who got lost crossing the moor in the Middle Ages and several large black dogs – some of whom are said to go hunting with the ghost of an evil squire. The Devil crops up a few times, having visited a village in the middle of the moor during a storm in the seventeenth century and having also had at least one soul sold to him. In the twentieth century, several road accidents on the moor were attributed to the ‘hairy hands’, a pair of disembodied hands that apparently grabbed the steering-wheels of cars (or the handle-bars of motorbikes) and forced vehicles off the road; one suspects that quite a few of those accidents occurred at night, probably not long after the pubs had closed.

Quite a few of the tors are subject to various myths and legends. Hound Tor, not far from the road between Bovey Tracy and Widecombe-in-the-Moor, is said to have been created as a result of a pack of hunting-hounds being turned to stone by some witches who were upset that the dogs had knocked their cauldron over while they were chasing a hare; the huntsman accompanying them was also turned to stone – the granite stack that is Bowerman’s Nose, about a mile from Hound Tor, to be precise.

Tales of ghostly dogs are not unique to Dartmoor. Such stories abound across England (most counties have at least one), and as far as Dartmoor is concerned there’s the yeth or yell hound – a spectral dog which is supposed to be the spirit of an unbaptised child which roams the moor at night, making wailing noises. This is said to have been one of the inspirations for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles which is set mainly on Dartmoor.

Conan Doyle stayed at a hotel in Princetown (the Royal Duchy Hotel, now one of three National Park Visitor Centres on Dartmoor) while he was working on The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was published in 1902 (after being serialised in The Strand Magazine); this marked Sherlock Holmes’s first re-appearance since being apparently killed off at the Reichenbach Falls in ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’ back in 1893 (the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles prompted Conan Doyle to revive Holmes on a permanent basis, with the story usually hailed as Holmes’s ‘return’, ‘The Adventure  of the Empty House’, appearing in The Strand Magazine in 1903).

As well as the yeth hound, Conan Doyle also drew inspiration from the story of Richard Cabell, a seventeenth-century squire who lived in Buckfastleigh on the south-eastern edge of Dartmoor. He loved hunting and is said to have murdered his wife and sold his soul to the Devil. When he died in 1677 and was laid to rest in the churchyard at Buckfastleigh, a pack of phantom hounds is supposed to have raced across the moor to howl at the graveside, and Cabell’s ghost has (so it is said) been seen hunting on the moor with the ghostly hounds on the anniversary of his death. In an attempt to lay his soul to rest, a heavy stone was placed over his grave and a mausoleum (known locally as ‘The Sepulchre’) was built over it. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Cabell became the dastardly Hugo Baskerville – the ancestor of the Baskervilles and the source of the family curse (the story, as told to Holmes and Doctor Watson at the start of the novel, is that Hugo sold his soul to the devil in order to abduct a young lady, only to meet his end by way of an encounter with a giant hound).

But the purchase of the soul of a member of the local gentry was not the only piece of Devil’s work on seventeenth-century Dartmoor. Over at Widecombe-in-the-Moor there’s a fine fourteenth-century granite church dedicated to St Pancras; it is somewhat on the big side for the small village it serves, which has led to it being known as the ‘cathedral of the moor’. On 21^st October 1638 it was struck by lightning. During a service. The north-eastern pinnacle of the tower was dislodged and fell through the roof, killing four and injuring many others (some of whom later died of their wounds). An eyewitness report of sorts exists in the form of a poem written by the local schoolmaster, although the highly informative guide to the church (a booklet which can be purchased in the church for £1) adds to this by including an account, apparently from a pamphlet published in London a couple of weeks later, which states that the vicar tried to continue with the service, only to find that the surviving members of his flock “durst not proceed in their publick devotions, but went forth of the Church”.

According to local legend, the storm was the work of the Devil, who had come to take one of the parishoners; various reasons are given depending on where you hear or read of the story – the man in question has been described as an adulterer or a gambler (who had lost to the Devil at cards but failed to pay up), although the afore-mentioned church guide states that he was merely guilty of having “fallen asleep during the afternoon service”. The church is most definitely worth a look around, but then you tell me the English country church that is not!

Widecombe-in-the-Moor is best known for the song about a group of yokels, including Uncle Tom Cobley, all riding to that village’s fair on a grey mare (the fair still takes place, in a field just outside the village, in September). Their somewhat improbable ride is depicted on signs throughout the village. 

Needless to say, it doesn’t end well for the horse, and according to the song it too is said to haunt the moor…

A chapel with my name on it

If there’s one thing that’s more or less guaranteed to get me to notice a church, it’s the name. My name, specifically, for if a church is dedicated to St Nicholas then it’s done the hard part as far as grabbing my attention is concerned. Shallow? Me? Sometimes.

When I was a child and we used to go down to Sussex, I recall being quite fond of a little chapel by Pett Level beach, next to the lifeboat station, and looking back on that I think I may have liked it because of its name – St Nicholas. Last month I was down in Cornwall, visiting places like Falmouth, Boscastle and Tintagel. And St Ives. In addition to being named after a fifth-century saint to whom the main church in the town is dedicated (St Ia, a holy woman who according to legend floated across the sea from Ireland on a leaf), St Ives (which is usually included in any list of the top ten seaside towns in Britain) also has a stone chapel out on the headland that lies at the end of the town, with the sea on three sides.

This headland, which is known locally as the Island even though it is not an island, has had a chapel on it for a very long time – ‘from time immemorial’ according to the plaque on its walls, meaning that no-one knows how old it is, just that it is old. It pre-dates St Ia’s Church (itself a fifteenth-century building), and it is dedicated to St Nicholas. In a place which for centuries made its living from the sea, sailors would have worshipped there, which explains the dedication for St Nicholas was the patron saint of sailors (among others). As well as being a place of worship, the chapel has also been used as a lookout point, both by customs men looking for smugglers and for smugglers keeping an eye out for customs men! During the Napoleonic Wars it was the storage area for a nearby gun battery (the site of which is now occupied by the coastguard lookout). In the early twentieth century the War Office tried to demolish it, but following local outcry it was saved and restored in time to commemorate the Coronation of George V in 1911; further restoration work took place sixty years later.

I had to go and take a look, what with the chapel having the same name as me. This was despite the heat on the day I was in St Ives (despite being on the coast, there was no sea breeze). Down into the town from the Trenwith car park I walked, then through the town (stopping off for lunch in the form of a Cornish pastie on the way, for it just seems wrong to go to Cornwall and not have a Cornish pastie, whatever the weather) and out onto the Island. 

I’m glad I did. It’s a pleasant, modest little single-room place topped with a couple of Celtic crosses (it is in Cornwall, after all) with a whitewashed interior. 

A nice place to go for a spot of quiet contemplation away from the numbers in a town that can get very busy, and as a bonus it has some great views of said town.

Tintagel

To Tintagel, a village on the rugged, spectacular northern coast of Cornwall which is mostly famous for its castle. Having previously visited Tintagel in February on a day when said castle (owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, administered by English Heritage) wasn’t open, I was very keen to have a look round when I went back there on a trip to the West Country last month.

The first thing to note as you approach Tintagel is that the castle is not the castle-like building on the hilltop – that’s a hotel which was built in late nineteenth century in anticipation of a branch-line of the Great Western Railway which was never actually built. Why were they considering a branch-line? Well, there was (thanks to the likes of Lord Tennyson) a big interest in all things relating to the myths and legends of King Arthur in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and King Arthur is still the main reason for Tintagel’s appeal. In the village there’s a King Arthur’s Café and a (fairly decent) pub called the King Arthur’s Arms, while a few miles inland there is a hamlet called Slaughterbridge that claims to be the site of one of his battles (the last one, although quite how a wounded Arthur was able to get from Cornwall to Glastonbury is a puzzle). Perhaps inevitably, the souvenir-shops of Tintagel do a good line in Arthur-related tat.

According to the legends, Tintagel Castle is the place where his life began. The story goes that Uther Pendragon (Arthur’s father) was an enemy of Gorlois, a warrior who lived at Tintagel Castle. Uther quite fancied Gorlois’s wife, Igraine, but as Gorlois kept her at the castle, which was impregnable on account of it being on a rocky peninsular that could only be accessed via a narrow and tightly-guarded causeway, he couldn’t get anywhere near her. So he decided to cheat; he got his friend, Merlin the wizard, to cast a spell that made him look like his enemy. This served not only to trick the guards into letting Uther into the castle, but also to trick Igraine into letting Uther into her bed. Thus was King Arthur conceived; setting aside Uther’s rather questionable behaviour, this does pose the inconvenient notion that the Once and Future King of the Britons was illegitimate, a notion that many a writer has got around by adding a bit about Uther subsequently killing Gorlois and marrying Igraine.

Adultery also features in another of Tintagel’s legends, the story of Tristan and Iseult – a tragic tale of forbidden courtly love which is rather similar to the story of the relationship between Arthur’s loyal knight, Sir Lancelot, and his queen, Guinevere. Iseult was the wife of King Mark, presumably a client king of Arthur’s. She fell in love with Tristan, variously described as either one of Arthur’s knights or Mark’s nephew (sometimes both). He felt the same way about her, and the pair went to various lengths to keep their relationship a secret until, perhaps inevitably, her husband found out.

We know, thanks to archaeological discoveries at Tintagel, that the castle – located on the afore-mentioned rocky headland that can only be accessed from the mainland via a narrow causeway – was a high-status settlement of some sort in the fifth and sixth centuries which means that it was in use at the time when King Arthur is believed to have existed, and that it could well have been used by the kings of Cornwall (and in the Dark Ages Cornwall did indeed have its own kings, although if truth be told they were actually client kings of the post-Roman British kingdom of Dumnonia and later the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex; the last one died in or around 875). In 1998, archaeologists found pottery and glass fragments from the fifth and sixth centuries there, along with a 1,500 year-old stone bearing the Latin inscription Patern[--] Coli Avi Ficit Artognou, translated as ‘Artognou descendant of Patern[us] Colus made this’. This discovery led to much speculation that ‘Artognou’ could perhaps have been Arthur himself.

The present-day ruins of Tintagel Castle, though, date back to the thirteenth century. It was built by Richard, Earl of Cornwall – a younger son of King John who probably decided to build a castle there on account of the area’s Arthurian connections (which were by the thirteenth century very well known, thanks mainly to chroniclers like Geoffrey of Monmouth who popularised the Arthur legend in his largely fanciful History of the Kings of Britain). It was of little strategic value – Earl Richard, who appears to have been infatuated with the Arthur legend, built in such a way that it looked older than it actually was. By the early fourteenth century it was already a ruin, although in the 1580s the government considered fortifying it when England was threatened with invasion by Spain. It became a popular tourist-destination in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to a revival of interest in all things Arthurian, and it still draws in the crowds today.

From the village, it’s a steep walk down to the sea although in the summer months English Heritage does lay on a shuttle service. Once you’ve paid your entrance-money, it’s a steep walk up to the causeway across to the island itself. 

After perusing the ruins of the keep, I followed a narrow path down to the Iron Gate, a (not iron) wall with an opening that formed part of the castle’s small harbour, allowing it to be provisioned from the sea (the island itself has several natural springs, so in the event of a siege they wouldn’t have been short of fresh water).

Back up on the top of the headland (which has a windswept feel to it, although when I went there was very little by way of breeze), there’s a ruined chapel (dedicated, apparently, to St Hulanus, although some sources say St Julitta; little appears to be known about either) and a walled garden (believed to date back to the time when Earl Richard built the castle, and heavily associated with the Tristan and Iseult legend). 

There are the remains of various settlements from the Dark Ages, plenty of places to stand atop the cliffs looking out to sea or back to the mainland, and those who follow the paths to the extreme end of the island are rewarded with the slight of a knightly statue.

And the views! 

The visitor to Tintagel Castle cannot complain about these; out to sea and back to the mainland, with vistas of that rugged north Cornish coastline, atop which my attention was drawn to St Materiana’s, the parish church of Tintagel which stands somewhat isolated from the village it serves. I wonder why? Another mystery to consider…

There's something about Rachel

Last year, work took me first to Rotherhithe and then to a farm outside Rickmansworth. By ‘work’, I am in this context referring to being a film extra; Rotherhithe was where I went for the fitting and Rickmansworth for the filming. The fitting was done in under an hour, as is usually the case, and the filming – rather unusually – was over before lunchtime. Such was my very modest contribution to the movie My Cousin Rachel, and for what it’s worth a mere couple of seconds of the scene I was in made the final cut.

[Spoiler alert: if you have neither seen the film My Cousin Rachel nor read the novel of the same name, be prepared to have key plot details (including the ending) revealed to you if you continue reading this blog-post. You have been warned.]

Naturally one feels obliged to go to the cinema to see the films one is in (or in this case the films one might have been in, had the director decided that the flashback scenes required a couple more minutes than they ended up getting), and as My Cousin Rachel is based on a novel I also felt obliged to read said novel. So, for the first time in my life, I sat down and read a Daphne du Maurier novel. I’ve seen and enjoyed film versions of her work before – Rebecca, The Birds, Don’t Look Now – but I’d never read one of her books. Until last month. For the record, My Cousin Rachel was first published in 1951 and this is not the first time it was made into a film (that was in 1952, and I have not seen that version).

“They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Not any more, though.” 

The opening lines both grab the reader and give the first hint of murder, and hints of murder are what this story is all about. The opener is followed by a description of a decaying body (that of a convicted murderer) encased in a gibbet, and after the first few-dozen pages one of the main characters is dead in what are presented as suspicious circumstances. Ambrose Ashley is central to the plot despite being dead, for it is the manner in which he died that is at the heart of My Cousin Rachel. He is the one who raised Philip – his orphaned cousin, the novel’s narrator – on the family’s Cornish estate in a curiously female-free environment; a man content with avoiding the company of women and yet one who suddenly decided to marry his other cousin, the titular Rachel, when he met her when he went to Italy for his health. His death not long after marrying Rachel is the event that drives the rest of the novel.

It is young Philip who, via a rather alarming letter and an all-too-late trip to Florence, has to come to terms with Ambrose’s death at the same time as coming to terms with the existence of this mysterious female cousin on whom he has never laid eyes. Rachel, of course, comes to Cornwall and Philip’s feelings towards her are confused enough before he receives further communication from the late Ambrose in the form of letters or fragments of letters that surface throughout the novel. Philip’s only friend, Louise (the rather sensible daughter of his rather sensible godfather and the girl who everyone appears to have assumed he would one day marry), can only stand by and occasionally provide the voice of reason as he veers between feelings of hatred and infatuation towards his beguiling, enigmatic cousin Rachel.

It’s one of those books that has stayed with me since, mainly due to the ambiguity over the central question: Did Rachel kill Ambrose? Well, did she? Du Maurier does well to keep the reader guessing even after the end by providing no definitive answer. Even at the end, we do not know for sure. At first I was convinced that she had killed him, then I wasn’t so sure, then I was absolutely certain and then at the end doubts resurfaced once again.

Rachel, of course, is not the type to do something as rash as incriminate herself – assuming, of course, that she has anything to incriminate herself about, she being to all intents and purposes the grieving widow who has come to see her late husband’s estate that he was always talking about. Therefore, all Philip has to go on are the afore-mentioned letters which occasionally appear and his own gut instinct, and neither of these can be considered to be entirely reliable. The reliability of what cousin Ambrose says in his letters about Rachel trying to kill him is brought into question by Rachel herself, who tells Philip about his deteriorating mental state prior to his death; but then, if she did indeed kill Ambrose she would of course have a vested interest in making sure that the content of his letters is discredited as the ravings of a diseased mind. As for Philip’s gut instinct – well, he’s a bit of a fool is Philip, first building Rachel up to be an evil murderer before he meets her, and then making an idiot of himself as he falls for her despite what he thinks about her supposed role in his beloved cousin’s death.

A good farmer and a competent manager of a country estate he may be, but boy is Philip Ashley useless when it comes to interacting with a woman (the shortcomings of Ambrose’s unconventional way of raising him become clear as events take their course). Philip presents a string of pearls (a valuable family heirloom) to her as a Christmas present, only to be forced to take them back. Although Ambrose left the estate to him and not Rachel, he signs everything over to her despite being advised not to. He then becomes convinced that having sex with her equates to a successful proposal of marriage; this turns out to be particularly humiliating as he doesn’t bother to clarify the situation with Rachel before telling everyone that they’re engaged. The involvement of Rainaldi, the shady Italian lawyer who Philip mistrusted on sight in Italy and who over the course of the plot turns up in Cornwall, adds to Philip’s frustration and confusion; rather like Doctor Watson and Bertie Wooster, he is not so much an unreliable narrator as a narrator who doesn’t have all of the facts to hand (but unlike them, he has no Holmes or Jeeves to explain things and put things right).

It’s only when Philip himself falls ill, with symptoms not unlike those that affected Ambrose, that he (on recovering) veers back to his original hypothesis regarding Rachel’s involvement in Ambrose’s death, and for good measure it looks as though she might have been trying to do away with him too. All that tisana that she insists on making for Philip looks rather suspicious (a special brew just for him?), but he and by extension we cannot be sure even though there is strong circumstantial evidence (those laburnum seeds, “poisonous to cattle, and to men”) to suggest that this may have been the method by which she did for Ambrose.

But enough doubt remains. Rest assured, though, that we readers and viewers are not the only ones in the dark. A revealing line in Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall shows that the author herself wasn’t entirely sure about Rachel’s guilt: “I have often been asked whether Rachel was really guilty of murdering Ambrose or whether it was in Philip’s mind. I cannot answer the question. One moment I thought, ‘Well, I wonder if she is?’ and the next moment I was not at all sure. What is certain is that our past will not be buried, for it is alive, with us and within us.”

As My Cousin Rachel nears its climax, one of the characters is on the same wave-length as the author, and it’s not the narrator: “‘If there is no proof,’ said Louise, ‘you cannot condemn her. She may be innocent. She may be guilty. You can do nothing. If she be innocent, and you accused her, you could never forgive yourself. You would be guilty then, and she not at all ... I wish now we had not meddled with her things.’”

This makes Philip’s actions at the end all the more questionable. Although he cannot be sure of Rachel’s guilt, he is nevertheless prepared to send her to her death by encouraging her to go for a walk in the terraced garden without warning her that the newly-installed bridge is merely decorative and not in any way load-bearing (in the movie, he encourages her to take the horse for a ride on the top of a cliff that he knows to be dangerous; the effect is the same). With Rachel dead, the question of her guilt must go unanswered; suspicion is and was always tempered by doubt. But it does raise the issue of Philip being responsible for Rachel’s death; does him sending her out into the garden (or onto the cliff) without warning her of the dangers make him guilty of murder? It’s tantamount to manslaughter at least, and Louise clearly suspects worse (“‘What have you done?’ she said; and apprehension came upon her, conviction too.”).

What is not in doubt is the fact that My Cousin Rachel is a thoroughly engrossing read; the question of whether or not Rachel is a murderer is frustratingly left unanswered, but conversely that is in itself what makes the book so fascinating; had du Maurier provided a definite answer one way or the other, I suspect it would not have remained in my mind some two weeks after I had finished it.

And the film? Well, it was well-acted (especially by Rachel Weisz as Rachel) but it had a predictable feel to it that the novel did not. In addition, I wasn’t overly impressed with the way in which the film-makers contrived to provide Philip with a happy-ish ending (marrying Louise, no less) after the death of Rachel, rather than the ambiguity concerning his fate that du Maurier provided by repeating those haunting first lines at the end; as a reader I was left with a very real sense that, for all the question-marks about Rachel murdering Ambrose, there is much in those last few paragraphs to suggest that Philip’s fate is to be thought of as the murderer of Rachel; why on Earth would Louise or anyone else marry such a man?

So there we have it. Much to my surprise, I find myself at the age of 38 teetering on the brink of becoming a fan of Daphne du Maurier. Naturally I will have to read some more of her books before I can be sure of this new departure in my literary tastes, and following a recent trip to Cornwall which involved stopping at a certain old coaching inn on Bodmin Moor I have an idea about what the next one will be…