From Falmouth to Barnstaple

When I first travelled this way, all I saw was countryside punctuated by moors, but over the past year I’ve driven between Falmouth and north Devon often enough to get to know the changing shape of the land on the peninsula. Cornwall’s mines and windfarms, the post-apocalyptic waste of Bodmin, ruined pump houses, white pyramids and stepped ziggurats of slag colonised by gorse and heather, artificial lakes. The fields in the valleys that seem to blend into the common grazing on the moors, as if the hedges and walls are partially permeable. Bodmin is signposted from miles around by the telecommunications mast that rises from it, an absurdly exaggerated flagpole, a pin on a Google map. It’s a landscape that shows the marks of use. You could call them scars, but there’s a beauty to it that I wouldn’t want to wish away or regret.

Roll into Devon. The Tamar is disguised by the engineering of the A30 and can easily slip by unnoticed. But, unmissable, the tors of Exmoor rise up, ancient and still unconquered, on the right, while to the left hills and hedges stretch all the way to the horizon. This is Tarka country, and you wouldn’t know by looking that it’s changed at all since Henry Williamson crawled through it to get his otter’s eye view. Farms and villages, hunting and fishing, there’s a sense that if we believe it, it’ll still be true. In the far distance, past Hatherleigh, Torrington, Bideford and Barnstaple, a windfarm is rising here too. But not without fuss. The ‘distinctive character’ of the place has been frozen in time since the beginning of the twentieth century, through an act of collective determination unparalleled in the history of the English landscape.

This weekend I’m going to the museum in Barnstaple to see a James Ravilious photography exhibition. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Ravilious took over 80,000 photographs in the north Devon area, “intended as a photographic record of life in a largely unspoilt, but vulnerable, country area.” The images are an incredible record, and also beautifully composed photographs in their own right. But there were assumptions implicit in the intention of the project – that life in Devon belonged to a kind of stable, unchanging ‘yesteryear’ “when the country traditions that have been handed down for hundreds, if not thousands, of years were still part of everyday existence”, and that now this was being lost for something worse. Ravilious’s photography compounds this through his soft-focus and uncoated lenses, creating black and white images that are, more than anything else, picturesque. They fit into a tradition of countryside representation and preservationist thought that venerates the idea of an organic community, a natural life with a natural order. They say, this is threatened by your modernity, but it should be eternal. While other places are fallen, Devon will remain an Eden. There is obviously no place in Ravilious’ Devon for modern agricultural machinery (tractors are alright but only if they look rusty), incoming urban migrants, or, heaven forbid, wind farms. This is a working landscape, but more than that it is a picturesque landscape, where the interest of aesthetics trumps the interest of production every time. Cornwall has a historic landscape, but here, the landscape is a living museum.

Ravilious has picked a moment in Devon’s history that is now regarded as the Golden Age. But it is an inaccurate presentation, as self-consciously selective as the composition of a photograph. Agriculture in Devon in the 70s and 80s was largely dependent on European subsidies and employed fewer and fewer people year on year. The difference between the country and the city was increasingly one of setting – people watched the same television, had a very similar education, and often did the same jobs. There is a dream of self-sufficiency in this Golden Age that shuts its eyes to anything that doesn’t fit.

This setting, the landscape, the view, which is itself the product of changing trends in agriculture and land use, has now become sacrosanct. The hedgerows that once marked the enclosure of the commons are now protected by law in quite a different way. It’s not a modern obsession with progress for progress sake that threatens Devon, or a sudden, unnatural urge for technological innovation that drives farmers to welcome wind farm developers onto their land. We’ve been so diligent in remembering our fathers’ and grandfathers’ farming techniques and lifestyles that we’ve forgotten how much has changed. For better or worse, life in Devon isn’t like it is in Ravilious’s photographs. Now hardly anyone is employed in agriculture, a large proportion of the population are incomers, and the country lifestyle is more dependent on foreign oil fields and distant power stations than a decent harvest or good prices at the market. Devon’s landscape hides behind planning restrictions and preservationist ideals, and it’s hard to see what’s going on underneath it all.

 

*For more of James Ravilious’s photos, see http://www.jamesravilious.com*

Night in a hammock

At this time of year, the field below my garden is home to about twenty bullocks. They’re two years old now, and though they don’t know it, this is their last year in which to enjoy life on the pasture. They’ll be here for a few more weeks, then the farmer will move them to give the grass a chance to grow, so he’ll get a crop or two of hay off it. The field slopes downhill, into Great Wood. There’s no fence or wall between the field and the wood. It begins suddenly with a row of oak trees, all about twenty metres tall, and not yet past their prime. The cows go there to cool down on hot days, and they keep the undergrowth in check. When I walk down from the garden, through the field, and into the wood, the distinction between field and forest is as stark as day and night.

Last night I was home alone, and decided to spend it out in the woods. Why did I wait until there was no-one else around? I don’t know, really. Perhaps I was embarrassed. Perhaps I didn’t want to have to explain myself. I think I liked the idea of no-one knowing where I was. It was a clear, still evening, after a hot, early summer’s day. I read in the garden until the sun set and my eyes began to strain at the page. In the twilight, I walked round the edge of the field, out of sight of the lane, out of the way of the bullocks, and into the wood. The noise of my boots crunching the leaf litter startled a deer, as he cantered away his hoofs thudded into the ground with the sound of apples falling from a shaken tree. A minute later I heard his barking call, and an answering call from a nearby field. The stags will be fighting soon.

It was much darker under the trees. The forest is almost entirely oak, all of approximately the same age and size. I suppose it can’t be healthy in the long-term for a forest to be grazed this heavily, preventing any saplings from establishing themselves, but for now the open woodland, a high canopy ceiling supported by thousands of tall pillars, has an architectural quality that I can’t help but find beautiful. The air was cooler now, the smells of the forest condensing like dew, the sweet smell of sap, the earth, the dry leaves, mixed with an animal smell, cows, yes, but also fox and deer.

I found two trees a good distance apart and set up my hammock. I was out of practice at keeping the right tension whilst I tied the knots, and I had to redo both ends before I got the hammock tied tight enough to be comfortable. There was no threat of rain, so I didn’t bother setting up the basha sheet, which can be tied between the same trees above the hammock and stretched out to make a kind of roof. I laid out my sleeping bag, took off my boots, and jumped up. This part always makes me slightly nervous, no matter how many times I do it. I was sure the knots will hold, and I’d tied it in a way that the knots don’t even have to take much of the strain, but I was nervous all the same.

Soon, though, doubly cocooned in my sleeping bag and in the hammock, I was warm and comfortable. The evening chorus petered out, leaving a space for the strange noises of the night. Some noises I knew, owls hunting, lambs searching for their mothers, the last train from Exeter to Barnstaple chugging in the distance. Bats, on the extreme edge of sound perception, quieter every year. Other noises I could only guess at. I worried that the bullocks might come and try to eat me, before realising I was half-asleep already. Rustling and pattering in the leaves. Above me, stars glittered in the gaps in the canopy.

I woke up at about 2am, cold. I pulled the hood of my sleeping bag tight around my head, but slept lightly for the rest of the night. At around 4am the dawn chorus started, mostly birds, but also sheep calling for lambs that had wandered off in the night. At 5am it was almost fully light, and I decided to get up. Half way through getting out of my sleeping bag (a clumsy business in a hammock), I saw a male roe deer staring at me, not twenty metres away, bewildered. His short, three-pronged antlers looked like twigs. I froze, and he wandered off. Behind me, there were more deer, a hind and her kid. It was less than a month old, clumsy and shy. They wandered slowly deeper into the wood, and I got up, packed up my things, and left. I walked back up the field as the sun rose from behind the clouds above Exmoor. Early morning sunlight is like amber, turning everything golden. In the valley, mist curled along, blanketing the sleeping River Taw like a duvet. Foxgloves, red campion, and ox eye daisies, and the golden green of the grass. And I the only one awake to see them.