Part I
It was after lunch on a Saturday that I left Chideock for the second time. A wooden cross stood on the hill watching me as I passed. It commemorated the 7 martyrs who were executed there in the late 16th century and is a quiet reminder that our current times are relatively unique in their peaceful religious acceptance. I made my way to Exeter and was soon picked up by a VW van that pulled over rapidly with a whirr. The outside was dark green with flowers painted on it. I pulled open the door and chucked my rucksack next to the unmade bed in the back and then jumped in the front. Inside, from the floor to the roof everything was pink, except that is for Zoe who had jet black hair and emerald eyes.
Though only in her 30s, Zoe was a proud mother of 5. She was a determined woman, straight-talking and feisty and had a slight Dorset burr. She told me matter-of-factly about the values she hoped to instil in her children, “I always tell ‘em to pick up hitchhikers, and I pick ‘em up whenever I see ‘em. Don’t see ‘em very often though do you.” I explained how a lot of my girlfriends wouldn’t feel comfortable picking up a male hitcher so I was grateful. “Well, as long as you can defend yourself you’ll be all right. If someone tried to attack me I’d stab them in the fuckin’ neck!” I didn’t doubt it.
Above the windscreen, several dozen polaroid pictures were pinned to the roof. They were mostly of her husband, her second husband she explained. “I wouldn’t recommend it. Getting married,” she said blankly, “It’s just a piece of paper.”
Her first husband had been a bad egg. He stole her money and spent it on drugs. “So I smacked him with the garden spade and divorced him,” she let out a little laugh. Her second husband was a much better man and she loved him very much.
Zoe was an incessant traveller and her van was more than just a second home. She and her husband took the kids away 25 times a year. They’d go to Wales endlessly, Cornwall, Yorkshire and sometimes Scotland. She loved going to the coast most of all, having lived her whole life by the sea in Lyme Regis, but they’d go to the mountains and the moors too. Zoe wanted the kids to know their country intimately, its cities, geography and history. When they grow up she’s going to drive off in her van and I doubt she’ll ever come back.
She was on her way to a craft shop that afternoon, planning to get some paint. She was an artist too. Her first painting had been of her van done on a piece of old driftwood and though she didn’t say so it epitomised her semi-nomadic life perfectly. Now it hangs static on her friend’s wall.
I hopped out in the middle of Exeter. It’s an old city full of history. You can feel it in the overhanging timber-framed taverns and in the intricate tracery of its cathedral.
In 1549 this part of the world was in turmoil. Henry VIII, the architect of the English Reformation, was dead and Cornish rebels had mustered a force to march on London. Furious at the changes to their lives, they were marching to demand the boy-king Edward return the nation to Catholicism. As the swelling rebel force passed Exeter they discovered to their surprise that the city’s mayor refused to support them, branding the rebels not as heroes but traitors instead. Insulted, they besieged the city, starving its inhabitants for five long weeks.
They never took Exeter though and neither did they make it to London. The King’s army arrived and crushed the rebellion. At Clyst Heath 900 of the defeated rebels had their throats cut but most say over 5000 were killed in all.
Such episodes took place all across the country in what was the most seismic upheaval in English, and probably European history. The violence and fervour lasted centuries, making the divisions caused by Brexit look like minor disagreements. Every now and then, even 500 years later, ripples from the Reformation still drift by, though thankfully they are mostly peaceful now.
From Exeter, I caught a ride onto Dartmoor and was driven by a man called Samuel. He was on his way back from church.
Once we were underway, he told me at great length about that day’s lesson. It had been all about Martha I think, though I confess I didn’t pay much attention. I’d read earlier that the road we were on was haunted by a curious ghost called Hairy Hands who’d been the ruin of several motorists over the years. Apparently, a pair of ghostly hands pull the steering wheel hard to one side crashing the car off the road. Somewhat unconvincingly, witnesses described these dangerous hands simply as “invisible”. Luckily, Hairy Hands left us alone.
Samuel’s sermon rambled on and as I looked out at the gnarled oaks and ancient ashes that thicket the edge of Dartmoor, I thought to myself how it was a little unusual I was being given such a homily on a Saturday…
Despite various efforts to return England to catholicism in the centuries after the Reformation, it remained firmly protestant. However, by the 17th century, England’s protestants were fracturing. They began to disagree on theological minutiae and a new violent religious frontline was opened. In 1620 a small sect of persecuted protestants boarded a chartered ship in Plymouth, just a few miles from where we were. They cast off and sailed on past Cornwall which pointed like a withered finger to a new world far across the sea. They followed it and reaching the distant land they promised to establish their own heaven on earth. Over the coming centuries, the continent would fill up with millions more like them, risking the treacherous passage to find sanctuary and prosperity. They violently pushed the old inhabitants from their ancestral homes and built model settlements for themselves. Refugees, chancers, criminals and lords arrived from across the sea. They brought with them their ideas and religions which merged, mutated and grew into a forest of religious sects
.
Somewhere in Massachusetts during the 19th Century, a denomination called the Seventh-Day Adventists emerged. It was one of many, competing to have their message heard, so the loyal followers sent missionaries beyond American shores to spread the word to the unenlightened. Many went to Europe but most went to Africa and some of these settled in Kenya, in regions not yet reached by other missions. They began teaching the inhabitants about Jesus’ imminent return, the need for salvation and how Saturday was to be the sacred day of worship.
I now realised why I was being given this sermon on a Saturday. Samuel had grown up in one of the remote Kenyan villages visited by the missionaries all those years ago. He’d been a devout Seventh-Day Adventist all his life and since it was a Saturday he’d been at church.
Samuel was a lovely man and we chatted away amiably once his homily was complete. He told me about his kids, his job with South-West Water and the masters he’d just been awarded by Exeter University. He drove me well past his home taking me right into the middle of Dartmoor. He didn’t mind because he thought it was beautiful. “If you love the countryside and you love your job, that place will always feel like home,” he told me.
Before dropping me off, he pulled over and said a thoughtful prayer, thanking God for the beauty of nature and asking Him to protect me as I camped that night on the moor. Four centuries after the Pilgrim Fathers set sail from Plymouth, Samuel had returned to Devon, completing a long and winding loop.
I caught another short ride over Haytor with a friendly couple on their way back from looking at some beehives. They were growing an orchard and bees are essential to any thriving orchard so they were planning to keep a hive. They dropped me in the ancient village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor right outside the Rugglestone Inn, which looked like just the sort of place I fancied spending the evening. As cider pressers themselves, they recommended I try the Sandford Cider. I did, and it was delicious.
Tucked quietly in a valley in the middle of the desolate moor, Widecombe has a medieval feel to it. Made of heavy grey granite, the buildings huddle together as if keeping warm. It’s dominated by St Pancras Church and its spiralling 135ft tower watches over the village and the moors beyond like a lighthouse. It’s for good reason it’s nicknamed the “Cathedral of the Moors.”
Widecombe seemed like it existed in its own isolated world, insulated from the rest of humanity by the howling moors. But even in such a remote settlement, there were powerful signs that that was not the case. Inside the church, on the oak-hipped barrel roof, there were dozens of colourful wooden bosses, carved with beautiful, medieval motifs. One of these was a green man, leaves bursting from his mouth as a symbol of regeneration. No one knows exactly where this symbol first came from but examples have been found in Lebanon and Iraq and date back to the 2nd century. More examples from a similar time have been found as far east as Borneo, India and Nepal. There was also a boss of three hares running in a circle which could also be seen, if you knew where to look, in 6th-century Chinese caves. It was amazing to think of those ideas and motifs travelling through deserts, forests and mountain ranges before landing themselves here in Widecombe.
The church also offered a cautionary tale. In 1638, on the eve of the Civil War, the good parishioners of Widecombe-in-the-Moor saw the devil. During a church service, there was such a ferocious storm that part of the tower collapsed into the church killing several people. A great fireball burst into the nave and killed several more. In the words of the parishioners, written in a poem that still hangs on the transept wall: “A sulphurous smell came with it and the tower strangely rent / The stones abroad into the air, with violence were sent.”
The parishioners seemed to agree that the cause of the destruction was a drunken gambler who had fallen asleep during the service. So the story went, Satan had dragged the man in his ruinous slumber to the top of the tower and into the evil heart of the deluge. The devil untethered his snorting horse from the pinnacle and in so doing sent a mass of stone plunging into the crowd below. “A crack of thunder suddenly, with lightning hail and fire / Fell on the church and tower here, and ran into the choir.”
Not heeding the tales’ advice of temperance, I decided to settle in the Rugglestone Inn for a few more pints of Sandford and an excellent supper. Despite being mostly sunny, there were some aggressive clouds forming ominously on the horizon. Hoping to beat the coming rain I walked up out of the valley away from the village and onto the surrounding tors. As it got darker I hoped I wasn’t bound for the same fate as the drunken gambler or his fellow parishioners.
I pitched my tent out on the open moor high above Widecombe. Unusually for England, camping is perfectly legal on Dartmoor so I didn’t have to worry about angry farmers which was a relief. Then I sat atop the wrinkled granite rocks and looked back across Widecombe, the valleys beyond and the mountainous clouds pluming above them. A nearby herd of wild horses paid me no attention.
As I zipped myself into bed and constructed my usual cocoon of layers from jeans, t-shirts and a waterproof jacket, the rain began to fall. Heavy and angry, it lashed my tent unrelentingly, beating a fearsome tattoo. The thin canvas whipped and trembled in the wind and thunder roared all around, banishing any hopes I had of sleeping. I cursed myself for choosing such an exposed spot. Thankfully though, Satan didn't whisk me away on his evil stead and unlike St Pancras Church that fateful night, my tent held firm against the downpour. Occasionally a heavy droplet would breach the defences and drip onto my forehead but that was all. Eventually, after a seemingly endless siege, the sun rose and as the lingering drizzle ceased, a joyous peel of bells rang out from the church below, signalling the victory of the morning.
I wrapped up my soaking tent and wandered wearily back down the hill following the bells. When I got to St Pancras the parish was having a post-service cuppa and I noted gladly that the roof and tower both seemed to have survived the storm unscathed. I reread the poem hanging proudly on the transept wall, “If ever people had a cause to serve the Lord and pray, / For judgement and deliverance, surely we are they.” As the parishioners nattered away they certainly did look grateful.
I slipped out the back of the church and made my way down the lane and out of Widecombe-in-the-Moor grateful to be alive myself.
Part II next week.