Dan the Fishman operates out of Clovelly, the most famous of all Devon fishing villages and the only one that has to be entered through the gift shop, accompanied by a demand for £5.95 admission. The place itself is a wonder of conservation, thanks to the determination of the Hamlyns and Rouses, who have owned Clovelly Court since 1738. The cobbled steps tumble down to the sea past wattle-and-daub houses of infinite cuteness that have transfixed, delighted and horrified visitors for generations.
In 1925 Hilaire Belloc wrote the classic account, observing from the cliff top as
up that cleft swirled, surged, pushed, strenuously and unfailingly, one mass of packed, dark-clothed mortality, closely hemmed in by the cottages (I wondered that their walls stood the strain), and looking from where we stood very much like black pressed German caviare, the acrid stuff which is sold for the destruction of the race. This wedge had its base upon the seashore and was filled with a communal desire, with a mass mind, impelling it to attempt the height – a hopeless task! For the char-a-banc crowd above could not have been pierced by cavalry …
Nearly nine decades of mass tourism after that, on an early autumn afternoon, Clovelly was nowhere near so vile. A little unpleasant, perhaps – there was something peculiarly cynical about the gift shop – and my first instinct was to feel a deep sense of pity for the residents, who have only to step outside to be gawped at.
But Clovelly is also a source of wonder. Here, truly, is somewhere without cars – hence, in 1925, the parked chars-a-banc. The donkeys, who were the villagers’ beasts of burden, have been retired, so goods can only be delivered, and rubbish collected, by hand-pulled sledges. Heaven knows how you would get a fire engine or ambulance in an emergency, but maybe no one gets ill because the fitness regime of Dartmouth is, through daily necessity, even more strenuous in Clovelly. The street is slightly straiter and steeper than the equivalent leading down to the quayside in billionaires’ Dittisham. However – and it took me a little time to realise this – there is one huge difference. The houses are not for sale. A view and ambience that would be priceless anywhere else in Devon may be available to anyone at a very reasonable rent on application to the estate.
There are distinct downsides to this. For better or worse, residents sign away some of their rights as free-born modern Britons: they have to live in the houses, not just spend weekends there; they have to maintain the gardens; satellite dishes, problematic anyway because of the lie of the land, are allowed only if they are totally out of sight. Great, you may say. But the inhabitants also seemed not just sensibly reluctant to offer their names but scared witless, since their presence depends wholly on the squire’s goodwill. The idea that families have lived there for generations seems to be a myth; several sources told me that a lot of the residents were on housing benefit – that way the estate can be certain of receiving its rent. ‘I know they look nice,’ one unusually communicative woman told me, ‘but most of the houses are cold – no double glazing – damp and higgledy-piggledy.’
Still, she was not remotely unhappy. ‘Because the people all really live here, it’s a proper community. We do look out for each other. It’s very safe. No one ever locks their door.’
‘What, even with all these strangers around?’
‘Well, no one’s ever going to nick my telly. They’d have to carry it up to the top. Someone left the pub without paying last year. The police were waiting for him by the time he reached the car park.’
A few hours later – though it was a hell of a trek – I was back on the south coast, staying, thanks to the kindness of friends, in a different kind of idealised home: a rented holiday house officially described as ‘smart’. This meant that if you set foot outside your bedroom after midnight every light in the building came on. Naturally, none of us were smart enough to work out how to adjust the damn things.
But the view was, if anything, even more sensational than at Clovelly. This was Salcombe, where the entrance to the Kingsbridge River offers the nearest thing Britain has to Sydney Harbour. Or at least what Sydney Harbour might look like had we sent out the aristocrats and mill owners rather than the convicts. Across the bay is East Portlemouth, a village slightly less accessible than the South Pole, which was convulsed a couple of years back by a dispute about the construction of six low-cost houses for locals. The homeowners, few of them full-time residents, reacted as though the council had proposed siting the world’s entire population of refugees, Romanies and riff-raff by their beloved beaches. They lost the argument and the houses were built. There have, as yet, been no reports of riots in East Portlemouth.
Later I went to visit the publisher Tom Jaine at his base at Allaleigh, near Dartmouth, where he handed me a well-researched potted history. Allaleigh has not been more than a hamlet since the Middle Ages. In 1891 there were only eight inhabited houses and fifty-two people, all the occupations being agricultural save for one market gardener and one carter. Circa 2007 there were thirty-one people in ten houses, the residents including – besides a publisher – an agronomist, a gift manufacturer, a carpenter, a care worker, a retired art teacher, an estate agent, a film-maker, a silversmith, a doctor and a management consultant.
These conflicts and changes are played out, though usually more subtly than in Devon, throughout desirable Britain, and summed up by Steve Knightley in Show of Hands’ song ‘Country Life’:
… And the red brick cottage where I was born
Is the empty shell of a holiday home
Most of the year there’s no one there
The village is dead and they don’t care
Now we live on the edge of town
Haven’t been back since the pub closed down
One man’s family pays the price
For another man’s vision of country life.
But there is a paradox. The holiday homes are often there because the long-standing owners have taken their profits and gone where there is work. The film-makers and publishers are often sensitive and conscientious stewards of the land, and supporters of local shops and schools and pubs and sometimes even churches that would close down without them. Incomers are people too.
Back at Budleigh Salterton, the annual literary festival was just beginning. Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, was reading from her work in the Public Hall. She would make a plausible Madame Arcati, I reckon, but she was in the wrong place: she was just reciting poetry. The real Budleighan event was taking place up the hill at the Venture Hall, organised by the local spiritualist churches, with the role of Arcati played by Nick, a carpenter from Cullompton.
The venue was no more than a glorified Scouts’ hut, but it was packed: nearly a hundred crowded in and they had to hunt for extra chairs. Nick, a burly bloke with a crew-cut and the air of an affable copper, was nothing like the batty woman dabbling with darkened rooms and ectoplasm one might have hoped for. But then carpenters have a good reputation in spiritual matters, so there was no reason not to have faith. Until he started.
He did warn us: ‘Mediumship is not an exact science. It depends on the atmosphere, the energy in the room.’
Now, Budleigh is not a place obvious for its energy but the audience – overwhelmingly female, mostly d’un certain age – had not come to scoff. They had all, in the nature of things, lost loved ones. And they wanted news.
Nick, however, did not inspire a great deal of confidence. ‘We are separated by a thin veil, the veil of senses,’ he said. He rocked back, put on a pensive face, then implied that he had made contact with someone beyond. He singled out a woman in a striped jersey: ‘I feel there was a problem with his throat.’
‘No,’ came the confident reply. But a woman just in front nodded and caught his eye. Perhaps it was her father? Nick switched targets.
‘Thin white hair?’
‘White hair, not thin.’
‘He worked with his hands?’
‘No.’
‘A love of being outside? He loved chrysanthemums?’
‘No.’
<
br /> ‘The reason I said yes,’ the woman explained, ‘was that he’d had a tracheotomy and couldn’t speak. Perhaps you can’t hear him.’
And so it went on. Nick’s technique was to opt for short-odds favourites. ‘I feel a farming connection?’ ‘He wore braces?’ ‘Was there a military background?’ ‘An association with a crucifix?’ We were talking fathers and grandfathers who lived through the first half of the twentieth century: agriculture, military service, religion and braces were all pretty good bets. Even so, he struggled to pick winners.
He switched to a woman at the back, out of my line of vision.
‘Would you understand a father in the spirit world?’
‘No, he’s still alive.’
‘Would you understand a grandfather?’
‘No, they both died before I was born.’
‘I feel he lived near lakes.’
‘No, we were in Belgium.’
It was like watching a cartoon character – Tom chasing Jerry, maybe – climbing a sheer precipice, clinging on to stunted trees that kept snapping while he reached for the next and that snapped too. Occasionally, Nick got something close enough to a hit and then imparted a message from the spirit world, that they should love their family and make more space in their lives. Then he restored the veil and drew the evening to a hasty close.
Budleigh Salterton was not impressed. But they didn’t think he was a phoney. ‘He was a bit slow,’ one woman said to me on the way out. ‘This lady from Exmouth who’s coming next month, I think she’s very good.’
Me, I don’t feel the need for instructions from beyond. I would like some reassurance that heaven looks much like Devon (perhaps with a more trustworthy summer and less traffic). But, unlike Nick, I believe heaven also likes to guard its secrets.
August/September 2011
In March 2014 outline planning permission was granted for 106 houses on Hatherleigh market – livestock sales will cease, although there will be space for the pannier market to continue.
6. Here be bores, and boars
GLOUCESTERSHIRE
It was coming up to 9 a.m. on a late October morning; a cold autumn rain was falling and there were just a dozen of us on the riverbank outside the pub: ten adults and two children, plus a brown mongrel bitch who seemed to be relishing the occasion more than anyone.
We were there to witness Britain’s most extraordinary natural phenomenon, something so astonishing that if it happened anywhere more exotic we would fly off to see it, come home with our pictures and everyone would say: ‘Oooh, I’d love to see that.’
But it has a downbeat name and it isn’t even the Mississippi Bore or the Nile Bore or the Dordogne Bore. It’s the Severn Bore, and the nearer people are to it, the more blasé they get. The dozen on the bank had come variously from Cornwall, Sussex, Leicester, Leeds, Nottingham and Herefordshire. There was one young couple, from just up the road in West Dean. They admitted they were a bit unusual. ‘My dad’s lived on the river at Westbury for sixty-four years,’ said the bloke. ‘Never seen it.’ There are some exceptions to this rule, though: ‘Dave with the hot dog van at Newnham, he knows a lot about it.’
Twice a day the tide comes in from the Atlantic and funnels its way up the Bristol Channel, which has a huge tidal range, second only to the Bay of Fundy in Canada. When it heads through the estuary and towards the river, the space available gets both narrower and shallower. So the water forms itself into a wave. It then enters the Severn, which is placidly meandering towards the sea until it meets the wave, travelling north. On the road, that would produce a right pile-up. On the river, it produces the bore, which races up here – to the Severn Bore Inn outside Minsterworth – and all the way to Gloucester, where, ever since a series of weirs were built in the nineteenth century, it has faded away. In the old days, it could reach upstream to Worcester. Theoretically, the bore happens twice a day. In practice, it is only noticeable a hundred-odd times a year, and spectacular maybe a couple of dozen.
Similar phenomena occur on other rivers, about a dozen of them in Britain. But all are titchy in comparison with the Severn Bore except the one on the Qiantang River in China, which regularly causes mayhem among the small boats in Hangzhou Harbour. (Yes, it’s just the silver medal for England yet again.) But here we are in sleepy old Gloucestershire in an era when we have messed up almost everything on the planet. Yet the Severn Barrage – which would destroy the bore – is still just a fantasy. And so we have a continuing demonstration of nature’s raw, untamed power. Where the hell are the school geography classes?
Part of the problem, I suppose, is that it is not quite as spectacular as all that. It’s not a tsunami: it’s three to six feet high. It’s also unpredictable: the complex nine-year cycle that governs the bore is calculable from the tide tables, but the reality is affected by wind and water levels and what seems like sheer caprice. The Environment Agency and a few enthusiasts give bores a star rating in advance. But, as one expert put it, ‘it’s an art not a science’. This one was graded as two- or three-star, depending which website you used. For a four- or five-starrer in fine weather at a weekend, maybe a hundred would be here. But they could easily go away, shrugging: ‘Is that IT?’ And the timing is guesswork: it might be early, though in my experience of about half a dozen bores, it has always been late. It’s like waiting for a train on a dismal country platform. And this morning was particularly dismal.
But, as the rain beat down, there were a couple of bonuses. One was that expectations were low, as they are about most things in an English October. The other was that the powerboat owners who wreck the experience for everyone else with their racket (and allegedly dissipate the wave as well) had not bothered to appear. There were just half a dozen surfers in the water, waiting to ride the wave. And when it finally appeared, a mere twelve minutes late, it arrived with a very satisfying whoosh, and all the neophytes were contented. ‘That was really good,’ said one of the Nottingham party, heading into the pub for a well-earned full English.
The surfers were less happy. ‘Missed it, didn’t I?’ said one, as he trudged back through the car park. But he added, with a connoisseur’s eye: ‘Lovely peel on that one, though.’
‘That was NOT fun!’ said one of his mates.
‘Why not?’
‘Hit a bloody tree.’
The bore reaches 13 mph, and thus cannot normally outrun a car on the A48 to Gloucester, even with its 50 limit, so it is possible to drive north and catch the wave two or three times more. The surfers, their routine well honed, were heading up towards Thomas Telford’s old bridge at Over to have another go. After a quick sausage sarnie, I stayed, and stood alone to watch the aftermath.
What happens is that the tide rises for about an hour behind the wave, submerging much of the bank. In extreme cases, parked cars get drowned. The debris that had once wandered downstream was now rushing back up. Then very slowly, the river level fell again, and the tide grew increasingly languid. The branches and plastic bottles in the rearguard of this invasion slowed to a crawl and then to a halt. At that moment, the normal current reasserted itself and, reluctantly, they began to head back downstream – until the evening tide and the next bore arrives to hurtle them back again. Very disorientating for the bottles.
The corollary is that low tide on this river is very low. By mid-afternoon, all the sandbanks of the Lower Severn were exposed. I stood at Lydney Harbour, just above the original Severn Bridge and before the river starts to narrow, with John Thurston, a real Gloucestershire man, and stared across Saniger Sand towards Berkeley and the nuclear power station. There was far more sandbank visible than river.
‘I could walk across that, couldn’t I?’
‘You could’, he said thoughtfully. ‘You’d probably die, but you could’.
Later, an old riverman called Chris Witts warned me: ‘It’s Britain’s most dangerous river. Don’t ever be tempted. It just sucks you down, Severn mud.’ I heard a story about four salmon-fishing brothers, all of wh
om had drowned, separately. No one could confirm it; no one disbelieved it. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing for the predators that the salmon and the elver and the lamprey are all slowly disappearing from the river.
Gloucestershire has a human equivalent of the Severn Bore too. In Stow-on-the-Wold, perhaps the most self-conscious of all Cotswold towns (which is saying something), it happens every May and October. For fifty weeks a year the life of Stow, full of antiquery and teashoppery, meanders placidly on its own sweet way, just like the river. Then suddenly, whoomph, it is swamped by an onrushing tide. That’s how Stow sees it.
Stow Fair began in 1476, always held to mark the feasts of St Philip and St James in May and of St Edward the Confessor in October. It mutated from a hiring fair into a horse sale, with attendant funfair centred on the market square. But then the official horse sale moved elsewhere and a stabbing put paid to the funfair. What’s left, in a traveller-owned field just out of town, is, next to Appleby-in-Westmorland, the biggest Gypsy gathering in the country.
Most fairs of this size and antiquity send the local tourist information office into spasms of delight. Here the office (‘Go-Stow’) closes down. The pubs don’t just shut their doors, they slam them. The Bell, nearest the field, appears to have emptied all its furniture. Up the road, the Royalist Hotel, ‘the Oldest Inn in England, circa 947 AD’, must have withstood the Conqueror, King John, the Wars of the Roses, Cromwell and the Abdication and remained staunch. Stow Fair is too much, though. About half the shops have stayed open, but cautiously, with the owners or their security men looking vigilant. Some of the shops have found other reasons to close. One café says it will reopen on Saturday ‘because of work required in our bathrooms’. A clothes shop happened to decide it was stocktaking day. Greedy’s Fish and Chips, a business fairly resistant to shoplifting, always stays open and rakes in the cash.
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