WINTER MOORLAND

WINTER MOORLAND

Autumn Walk (from notes, one November)

As often happens, when we go for our first short autumn walk up on the edge of the moor above Trebartha, we are chased off by the weather.  

   So far we haven’t seen any of the winter thrushes in the hedges around here, but will often see them in the in-by pastures and the hawthorns dotting the moorland slopes. We went in search, and chose a morning of patchy blue among the clouds, following the rain and wind of the past couple of days. Parking in our usual gateway we at once spotted a fox making his way round a corner of bracken towards the woodland of Trebartha below. His coat shone brighter than the rain-soaked dark russet of the dying bracken.

  Going up the lane towards the moor, water gushes off the fields and issues from every orifice in the banks to join the overflowing gutters and we play our childish game of clearing the masses of dead leaves which clog the grids over the culverts and enjoy the rush of released water.

      The patches of blue sky begin to close as we negotiate the cattle grid and walk up onto the moor. The last in-by pasture was dotted with birds; mixed gulls and corvids and a whirling flock of starlings but they were almost the last birds we saw. Tony thought he had the merest glimpse of a woodcock swiftly rising from the bracken beside him before flitting out of sight.

      Rain was soon spitting in our faces as we walked into the chilly NW breeze. Crimson and orange wax-cap fungi studded the close-bitten turf and haws still covered their lichen-bearded trees.  A lone blackbird chacked in alarm as we flushed it from a gorse bush but nothing else stirred.

      We crested the rise, now in steady fine rain and the moor ahead was blotted out by an unrelenting pall of low cloud. The horizon from the north right round to the west was lined by horizontal bands of rain cloud of dark blue-slate through greys to a silvery shimmer.

      Time to leave, rejected once more by the fickle weather.

 

Gorse flowers all through the winter.

 

Bodmin Moor is smaller and more intimate than the great wilderness of Dartmoor. It’s more or less round with streams and sunken lanes radiating from its sweeping open upland. 

 

 

Streams and sunken lanes radiate off the moor.

Bodmin Moor with the highest point, Brown Willy on the right and further away, to the left, Roughtor (pronounced to rhyme with plough)

 

The horizon is punctuated by granite Tors.

The boulder-strewn clittery slopes were once quarried for stone.

Occasional ancient hawthorns feed the winter thrushes.

The clean damp air gives rise to abundant lichens.

Unfortunately these days, the uncompromising geometrical shapes of blocks of coniferous plantations jar the senses and I won’t go into the ecomomics of them, but have to admit that they do provide another habitat for wildlife, notably, in the more open replanted areas of a second or third generation of Sitkas, nightjars breed.

 

Smallacombe Plantation.

The high humidity also favours abundant mosses. Below, the Spruces in the plantation are bestrewn with moss.

 

Until a couple of hundred years ago it was known as Foy Moor, no doubt because the River Fowey (pronounced Foy) rises on the northern side of the moor, and flows some nine miles across it before tumbling off to the south and running towards the sea. Extensive mires spread across the hollows within the uplands, tufted with rushes and cushioned with bright green sphagnum or bog moss.

At most times you can hop across these mires, staying on top of the tussocks. Tony says, when I hesitate, "Just KEEP MOVING!"

 

Clumps of bright green Sphagnum (bog moss) betray the wetter places.

 

There are occasional pools of peat-stained water, but the only natural lake of any size is Dozmary Pool (this isn't it.)

 Several reservoirs have been constructed over the years,

Crowdy Reservoir with Roughtor in the distance.

and if you walk the shores when the water level is down, you can pick up an occasional tiny flint ‘microlith’, evidence of early man’s presence on the moor before conditions became colder and wetter and peat began to be deposited. These tiny flint artefacts lie below the peat, and show up where the water’s edge erodes the peat banks. This begs the question; granite is the native rock here. What trade, or movement of people was there, to givethem the flint for these little flaked tools ? This was back in the time of the hunter-gatherers, in the Stone Age.

Microliths are little flint flakes no more than a couple of centimetres long, with carefully-worked edges.

Unlike its Devonshire cousins, Bodmin is largely a grass moor with heathers growing mostly where the grazing pressures are less intense. Sheep, cattle and ponies have traditionally been kept on the moor and these days the numbers of winter-stocked animals are much reduced for the welfare of both the animals and the quality of the habitat. The moor is bisected by the A30 the main trunk road which largely follows the route of the old coaching road from Penzance to London. The sides of the road, fenced off from stock, are still heathery in places.

 Going upslope, one can look down on patches of regular green fields, the semi-improved in-by meadows surrounding an occasional farm, solidly built of granite, and its associated barns. In a few places. When the light is right, a low sun with show up the shadows showing the traces of mediaeval fields.

 Walking from East Moor in a south westerly direction one sees the dramatic spring called Rusheyford Water. A small deep pool has a gravelly bottom and a vigorous upwelling of crystal-clear water swirls the gravel in the centre. Much to our consternation, Tony dropped the lens of his camera in as he leaned over to look. He retrieved it of course but got a wetting! Further on we come to the stone and earth banks marking the remains of a mediaeval village. House enclosures and the walls bordering little tracks leading among them evoke vividly past times and the rigours of their isolated position.

 Walking the moor in winter, the clean crystal-sharp air is invigorating; the benign and rare totally windless days are balm; more often there are the uncertainties of rapidly changeable weather when sudden storms can be downright unpleasant!

 BLOWING THE COBWEBS AWAY (from December notes)

We emerged onto the moor into the teeth of a strong northerly wind in the clearance following several days of unremitting rain which had tied us to computers and indoor jobs. I was exhilarated  by the crystal clean air. The wind moaned in the telegraph wires strung out along the road, visiting each farm in turn; Ryland,North Bowda, Bowayland, Industry, till it reaches Tresellern. This atavistic sound at once gives me a feeling of connection right back to early man and I feel as one with the earth.

Tony got out of the car and said ‘It looks like rain.’ A couple of hundred yards up the road, and he said ‘I don’t like the look of that cloud’ and then a bit further on, the wind really tore into us as it blew ahead of the next shower. As we sheltered under a big clump of gorse, he said ‘There’s sleet in it too.’ A magpie looked uncomfortable as it was swept downwind, its tail blown sideways, before it plunged into the shelter of some firs by a farmhouse.  We realized, as we looked through cold-teary eyes, that behind each clump of grass on the moor stretching away from us, was a Golden Plover crouching, also sheltering. They squatted even lower each time a sharper gust of wind blew. The squall passed as quickly as it had blown in. After that, Tony’s cobwebs had been blown away and he enjoyed himself.

Ragged flocks of starlings hadn’t strayed far from their winter roost at Rough Tor. They battled into the wind, rising to skim over the road bank and low over our heads before settling in the next paddock. A big flock of sheep was strung out in a line, in the lee of the next bank of the in-by fields cut out of the moor’s edge. Fieldfares and redwings hurried from hawthorn to hawthorn, but the bounty is mostly over. They’ll have to go down into the farmland below to get more haws. A buzzard got up out of the grass and flew downwind a little, then banked and sidled crossways before settling again. But the farm flocks of jackdaws seemed to enjoy their brief flights up into the air, chacking cheerfully.

The wind has taken just about every tree leaf except for a few willows crouched in the ditches, their leaves yellowing but still plenty of them. Oddly, the occasional elder on the banks, had bunches of tender green, soft-stemmed leaves still intact and unseered, on the gaunt branches.

Blown off the moor in another mean gruel of rain and hail, we came back abruptly into a gentler world of autumn coloured hedgerow bushes and amber-leaved beeches in the farmland below.

Writing the moor.

Some years ago I spent several years in a ‘creative writing’ group and did an on-line course in short-story writing. Over the course of some months I wrote, among a lot of other stuff, three shortish stories based on the deserted village  up by  the great spring of Rusheyford Water and the small area around it and the edge of the moor. I set it in the Dark Ages because little is known about this time and I was able to give more leeway in my imagination without challenging myself about the accuracy or otherwise of any detail.It was a strange experience. I was totally immersed in my mental association with the whole project. I found it was like stirring a dollop of raspberry compote into a bowl of yoghurt: the physical facts of the situation combined with my imagination, produced a swirling mix  of the geography of the area with my imagination of the people within the stories. I even found, when walking up in that area for quite some time after I’d finished those stories, that I would pass a place and either wonder why such and such a simple building wasn’t there, or think ‘No! This should be marshy here’. I was still half-into the life I had conjured up in the stories!

 

 The moor is claimed to have traces of the most densely-settled area in Britain in prehistoric times and there is abundant evidence of hut circles, stone rings, cairns, cists or stone-line burial chambers. In one cairn a very rare example of a  Bronze Age gold cup was found in 1834. It now sits in the British Musuem. One feels like saying‘ bring back our Elgin Marble!’

One of the abundant hut circles.

 

Ninestones

The Rillaton Gold Cup

  

The boulder-strewn slopes with enormous part-buried grounders of good quality granite have long been exploited. Early quarries were simply based on splitting such huge boulders in situ and carting off the split shapes .

 

Split stone. This was abandoned, perhaps it split in the wrong place.

 

 There are numerous slightly bigger  18^th and 19^th Century quarries with traces still of old buildings and tracks, even small branching railways for carrying the shaped stone away off the moor. Dumps of discarded stone remain. The only working quarry where granite is still extracted is the big de Lank Quarry in the de Lank river valley to the west of the moor, renowned for its high quality stone.

 

 

 

Small quarry on south side of Kilmar Tor.

 

 

 Remains of old railway taking stone from moorland quarries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 In places, underlying volcanic activity has changed the feldspar content of granite into kaolin or china clay, once a major industry in Cornwall. This valuable mineral was also mined in the moor at the extensive Stannon works near Roughtor on the north side of the moor. This same vulcanicity also deposited veins of minerals particularly tin, and mining was another important industry on the moor in Victorian times.

Victorian tin mining, Gonamena.

Peat,a source of local fuel, was also cut from the deposits on the moor until about a hundred years ago. No wonder the moor has such a long history of settlement; the apparent wilderness has a lot of resources.

WINTER MOORLAND ( From more December notes)

We tiptoed over the cattle grid and headed onto the moor in the teeth of a needle-sharp north westerly. The road, narrow pot-holed tarmac, leads past three farms, each down its own side-track, and ending at a fourth, Tresellern, where the road gives way to a tractor-rutted mushy turf onto the moorland and then dissipates towards the ruin and tiny fields at Rushyford.

One farm is called ‘Industry’, an odd name ,perhaps referring to past mining or quarrying of the big granite grounders lying half buried in the peaty turf.

Another side turning leads down to the Bastreet Water Treatment Works. I hope it doesn’t ‘treat’ the water too assiduously. It takes its water from the Withey Brook which runs from Tresellern Marsh, with tributaries from Watery Moor to the north, and beyond Rusheyford Water to the West, but the main flow turns south at Trewartha Marsh to the Witheybrook Marsh just above Minions. By the time it reaches the treatment works on its way to join the Lyhner a couple of miles downstream, it runs deep and fast, with cushions of green weed trailing in the current of clear, weak-tea stained water, cold,  peat-soft water which we have always believed supplies our house.

The road passes in-bye fields of improved grass, with granite walls and the odd wind-riven hawthorn and oak. Away to the south, beyond the Withey Brook is the ridge of Hawks Tor and Trewartha Tor, and beyond again another ridge,  Kilmar Tor bounding Twelve Men’s Moor. Who are the Twelve Men? Do they refer to the tors and granite outcrops marking Kilmar?  I must count them. Or were they farmers wresting a living up there?

The grassy fields are home to mixed bunches of corvids, the odd Lesser Black-backed Gull, maybe a few Lapwings, black and white shapes among the rushes in a damp hollow. The bushy trees shelter Blackbirds, Fieldfares and Redwings, flying down to the grass and, easily spooked, back up into the trees again.

To the north of the road the ground rises up through a scrub of gorse and hawthorns. A couple of dozen small shaggy moor ponies, bay and skewbald, hide away from the wind, and then the ground rises higher, slopes pocked by granite clitters and a granite cross, before reaching the crest, a long dome called, appropriately, ‘Ridge’.

 

 

 

High in the sky, what seemed like a wisp of smoke resolved into a flock of  Golden Plover  flying fast, wheeling and twisting, plunging down but then up and away, glistening as they turned to catch the sun. At the side of the road lies a dead pony, the carcase muddy and bedraggled as if already sinking into the earth, its head thrown back and mouth open in a toothy rictus. But it can’t have been there long. Its eyes, the first to be taken by scavenging crows, are still intact.

Picking our way back through the scrub, we disturb Redwings feeding on the mummified remains of last year’s crop of haws. They flit from tree to tree with thin calls. We are retreating before the menace of slate-grey clouds over Halvana  far to the NW. Streaks and veils of cloud are being torn down to the ground; a squall is coming down-wind straight for us and soon the sleety hail is wetting our backs.

Near the cattle grid a Buzzard floats away from us. Had he been after frogs?  A lot of spawn has already been laid, showing as glutinous humps above the sodden turf and sphagnum of the boggy ground at the edge of the moor. It’s going to get left high and dry, even after the copious rains of the last two months, but there are bound to be a few survivors.

Winter Fieldfares (Kim Atkinson)