The Medieval Village of Carwethers. Bodmin Moor SX 098 794
The site of Carwethers is in the square in the middle of the bottom row on this map.
Why did they desert their village all those years ago? Did the weather deteriorate up there on the moor? Was it the Black Death? The skeleton of their homes and field boundaries still remain as low stone banks slowly subsiding into the moorland.
We walked up there in June, following the old stone-banked track as it went gently uphill. The great granite boulders at its sides were pretty with pink English Stonecrop, white Heath Bedstraw and bright blue Devil’s Bit. Up on the moorland at the top of the rise there was a white haze of Pignut flowers. The fresh north wind was crystal sharp, even on this midsummer day. We looked across the deep scrub- choked little valley below the Carwethers ridge, to the jagged outlines of Roughtor and Brown Willy on the eastern horizon. All looked very benign at this time of the year.
Looking north towards Camelford. The Devil's Jump is the rocky outcrop among the thick scrubby woodland and Carwethers village is on the rising ground to the left of this picture.
Looking SE towards Roughtor and Brown Willy from near Carwethers.
The humps and bumps of the village are all that can be seen now.
Tony had walked up here with the local Natural History group back in the previous winter when the rectangular shapes of the old dwellings and curving banks of the field enclosures were clearly seen. In summer the bracken, late up here, but already high enough to obscure the details of the structures, left a lot to my imagination. By October '22 it had died back again and obscure remains were showing.
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Archaeological survey showing boundaries of fields, garden plots and other enclosures.
I wondered whether the villagers had all left together, or whether gradually the young people went, leaving the elderly to find life was becoming too difficult to manage; or perhaps they slowly left the village in the harsher winters and only used the dwellings and grazing in the summers so it was over a course of several generations before the whole settlement became deserted, the roofs failing and then the walls crumbling.
The main part of the village, consisting of five longhouses and their ancillary buildings, became deserted in the 1600s but one longhouse was still in use till the early 1800s. Perhaps this was intermittently used by a shepherd.
And where was the water supply? It would be an arduous scramble down a steep hillside to the stream below.
Doing my homework, I learnt a little more about this remote settlement, although looking at the map, perhaps not quite as remote in the relatively easier days on the moors when the climate was better and there was a significant though scattered population on the moor. An extensive Archaeological survey of Bodmin Moor was done from 1979 to 1985 (one had to wait for the delayed publication till 1994 for the English Heritage report Volume 1 ‘Bodmin Moor. The human landscape to 1800 Archaeological Survey by Nicholas Johnson and Peter Herring.) This refers to at least thirty seven deserted villages on the moor but they weren’t necessarily all in active use at the same time.
The archaeologists think that the name Carwethers could refer to a settlement dating from very ancient times, but the abandonment may have been as late as the mid 16 hundreds or late medieval times. The surviving traces show fourteen structures including five longhouses, a corn-dryer and several other small ancillary buildings, small possibly garden enclosures next to the longhouses and beyond the settlement enclosure, the boundaries of a substantial medieval field system encompassing over 100 acres, most of which seem to have been cultivated. This practice is now long-regarded as being out of the question these days because of the deteriorating climate and changing economy. Aerial photos of some medieval fields show narrow strips of ground divided by low banks, indication the soil patterns which develop over years of cultivation. The surrounding boundaries are typically stone and earth banks constructed from the stone picked up to clear the field for ploughing.
The aspect of the settlement faces North East and the elevation is 227 metres above sea level.
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A Google Earth image of the village and its cultivated fields.
Longhouses retained their character for hundreds of years. Some are still in use on the moors of SW England. They are rectangular and built down-slope and have a doorway in the middle of each long side, opposite each other. The up-slope section with a hearth (and a chimney in a better-appointed dwelling) is the living area, sometimes with a ladder going up to a part-floored loft for sleeping or storage. The central area with the doors at each side gives access to the lower section where the animals are housed . All the drainage runs down-slope through the building and the cattle and humans share the warmth from their bodies and breath.
A Typical Longhouse.
The archaeological report refers to a ‘Corn drying barn’ so the people were growing corn in some of the field enclosures. The ears of corn were spread over a slatted floor warmed from below by hot air from a fireplace at one end of the building and drawn by an underground flue running below the drying floor.
The more I read, the more I realized we must go back there, especially in the winter when the plant growth has died back. I saw reference to a good spring to the North of the settlement.
The track up towards Carwethers in October
The spring in October 2022.
The sticks from old gorse bushes when dead, makes good firewood.
