Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  In his notes to the poem, Hughes, who lived and farmed at North Tawton in the heart of this Green Man/Nymet country, describes the ancient lineage of the North Devon farmers who were his neighbours: ‘Buried in their deep valleys, in undateable cob-walled farms hidden not only from the rest of England but even from each other, connected by the inexplicable, Devonshire, high-banked, deep-cut lanes that are more like a defence-maze of burrows, these old Devonians lived in a time of their own.’ ‘Devonians’ takes us back 360 million years, to the geological era when the first forests began to appear. The pun evokes the ancient, fossil feel of this country. A mere 2,000 years ago, the old inhabitants of this introverted country north of Dartmoor around the River Taw and its tributaries were the Celtic race known to the Romans as the Dumnonii: ‘the people of the deep valleys’. They are the clue to the cluster of Nymet or Nympton names here. These places were almost certainly named after the local sacred rivers. The River Mole, known to the ancient Celts as the Nemet, rises and runs close to the Nymptons. Nymet or Nimet is also the old name of the River Yeo, whose source is at Nymph, close to the modern East Nymph Farm, and which takes a course past at least six places named after it: Nymet Tracey, Broadnymet, Nichols Nimet, Nymet Rowland, Nymetwood, Nymphayes. Sources and springs are always specially numinous places. These present-day Nymet, Nymph and Nympton names share a Celtic origin, the Gaulish nemeton, Old Welsh nimet, Old Saxon nimid and Celtic nemeto- or nemitis all meaning ‘a sacred grove’. The local villages of Morchard Bishop and Cruwys Morchard take their names from the Celtic mawr coed, ‘big wood’, and another dozen places in the area called Beer, Bear or Beere are all modern versions of the Old English bearu, whose meaning is close to the Celtic nemeton.

  Nemetotacio is the name recorded for the fort the Romans built a mile or two away on the banks of the Taw at North Tawton, close to the Roman road from Exeter. It is an amalgamation of the Celtic nemeton and the Latin stationis, meaning ‘road station’ or ‘outpost’: ‘The Road Station of the Sacred Groves’. Designed to accommodate a cohort of 500, it was flanked by two more forts near by, at Okehampton and Bury Barton, as well as a marching camp less than half a mile off, big enough for half a legion: a force of 2,500 men. Such a concentration of military power in the area suggests the Romans encountered determined resistance from the native Dumnonii people, refusing to surrender their sacred woods and the holy rivers Nimet and Nemet.

  Flying over this part of Devon in the summer of 1984, the archaeologist Frances Griffith made a remarkable discovery through her aerial photographs of crop marks. Half a mile to the west of the village of Bow, close to a bend in the Yeo, she recognized, towards one corner of a cornfield, the dark outline of a prehistoric wood henge: a circular space up to 148 feet in diameter enclosed by a substantial ditch with openings to the east and west. Within the enclosure was an oval of nineteen pits, most probably post holes, each originally supporting a substantial timber. This was the first wood henge discovered in Devon. It has been carefully surveyed, and probably dates to the third millennium BC like others of its kind. The name of Bow has contracted over the last seven centuries from Nymetbowe and Nymetboghe. Its root is the Old English boga, a curve, describing the wide bend in the River Yeo near by.

  Just outside Bow, I climbed the gentle slope of a stubble field from the road and stood in the top corner looking down towards the rolling valley of the Nymet River, hidden in the fold of land between a dozen neat hedgerows. I could just detect the levelling of the ground within the invisible ring of the ditch. Its bank had long ago been ploughed out. I wandered about, scanning the balding stubble optimistically for signs of flint or bone, making a mental picture of the wooden circle as it might have looked, with deep ditches and steep banks, and the stark drama of timbers against the sky.

  Frances Griffith’s discovery of this timber circle echoed that of Woodhenge sixty years earlier by Gilbert Insall, a distinguished First World War pilot and one of the pioneers of aerial photography in archaeology. In December 1925, flying over Stonehenge at 2,000 feet in his single-seater Sopwith Snipe, he had spotted something in the corner of a field a couple of miles away: a large circle with oval rings of white spots in the centre. Leaning out of the open cockpit, he photographed it. By the following July, when the corn was up, he was able to take more photographs revealing the outline of six concentric ovals of pale spots. They were later revealed by Maud Cunnington, in her excavation of the site promptly begun in 1926, to be no fewer than 168 post holes, each holding a timber post, possibly of oak. She estimated that one of the largest posts would have been at least thirty feet tall, standing nearly twenty-five feet above ground and almost three feet in diameter. They would have been whole tree-trunks, grown tall and straight in dense woodland with a high canopy. The layout of Woodhenge appeared remarkably similar to that of Stonehenge a short way to the south, and in the central space, towards the back of the oval of posts, was the grave of a young child. Clearly the place had a ceremonial or ritual role.

  It was not too long before other wooden henges began to be discovered. In 1929 Gilbert Insall spotted and photographed one at Arminghall near Norwich with an oval of eight massive post holes up to three feet across. The following year Maud Cunnington found, and excavated, the Sanctuary, on the downs to the west of the great Avebury stone circle; smaller than Woodhenge, it had ninety-three post holes arranged in six concentric rings, with evidence of standing stones in the inner circle.

  The most dramatic discovery came in 1967, with Geoffrey Wainwright’s excavation of Durrington Walls, the biggest known henge enclosure in Britain, four miles from Stonehenge and close to the River Avon. It has now emerged as an integral part of a single interconnected system of monuments that seems to have included Stonehenge, its avenue, the lines of cursus ditch banks, the river and the hundreds of barrows on the downs. It is slightly bigger than Avebury and once enclosed circles of timber rather than stone. Woodhenge lies immediately to its south, apparently part of the same complex. Wainwright uncovered the remains of two timber circles within Durrington Walls. The larger one was over 120 feet wide, with a confusing mass of at least 200 closely spaced post holes. Opinion was divided at the time between those who thought the timber circles were open, free-standing wooden versions of Stonehenge, and those, like Wainwright, who thought the posts once supported a vast roof, probably open at the centre along the lines of a building like the Globe Theatre. But there was no evidence of the ground erosion copious volumes of rainwater would have caused in tumbling off such a mighty roof. Patterns of thought change all the time in archaeology, and the free-standers seem to have prevailed.

  The archaeologist and writer Mark Edmonds is interested in the way people experienced places like timber and stone circles in relation to their day-to-day lives and their own individual lifespans. He believes free-standing posts, which would have looked and felt as dense as any copse, may have allowed for the arrangement of people for ceremony. It is easy to underestimate, he says, the extraordinary numbers of people who would have congregated around the area of Durrington Walls at certain times of the year for feasting, exchange of goods and the immense communal work-effort that went into the long-term building of the monuments in the area. Great middens containing the bones of pigs and other animals have been found there. Huge numbers of the Late Neolithic people who made Durrington Walls and its timber henges would have come together from some distance out of small, scattered groups at particular times of the year, and Edmonds thinks the feeling of being part of something bigger would have been of great importance in their lives. Participation in the building of monumental henges, as well as feasting together, would have helped cement the bonds of kinship among the scattered Neolithic people.

  As Barbara Bender points out in her book Stonehenge: Making Space, the work was prodigious: an estimated 11,000 hours of work to position the southern timber circle at Durrington Walls and another 500,000 working hours to dig the perimeter ditch with antler picks. The felling of so many trees to fur
nish the henge posts would also have opened up tracts of the surrounding woodland. The archaeologists Aubrey Burl, Richard Bradley and others have estimated that the creation of Silbury Hill to the north of Stonehenge would have required 35 million basket loads of chalk and soil, or 18 million hours of work. Participating in the work itself must surely have been a highly important part of all the ceremonies and gatherings that went on around the monuments under construction.

  Why is Stonehenge, or any henge circle, where it is? In the Stonehenge car park, three white spots mark where the post holes that once held three massive pine poles have been concreted over. Aligned with them is a hole that may show where a big tree once stood. Radiocarbon dates from the post holes have revealed that they are very, very old: as old as the eighth millennium BC, when the last Ice Age was still receding from Scotland, and Salisbury Plain was still covered in pine forest. That the huge posts were of pine, not oak, is another sign of their vintage. The archaeologist Tim Darvill has woven a kind of creation myth in which the big tree would have given the place significance, and might have been the first landmark at the place we now call Stonehenge (or, at least, its car park) at a time when hunter-gatherers wandered the land. Some may have placed the timbers in line with the living tree to dramatize its importance to them as a place of remembrance and myth.

  No further marking of the place has, so far, been found for several thousand years until around 3100 BC, with the excavation of the parallel chalk banks and ditches of the cursus, and then, some 150 years later, the chalky, dazzling moon-milk-white of the circular bank and ditch enclosure of Stonehenge. From about this time, 2900 BC, timbers began to be raised, first at Stonehenge and later, from 2500 BC, across to the east near the River Avon at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge. So Stonehenge was first of all timbered, and even as stone gradually replaced wood from the Late Neolithic into the Bronze Age, it seems to have overlapped in time with wooden posts in the henge circle itself, and with the great timber henge at Durrington Walls. As Barbara Bender points out, at Stonehenge the stones were shaped and jointed using woodworking techniques: mortise and tenon, tongue and groove. The famous bluestones from the Presceli Mountains in Wales show signs of tenons and mortice holes that have been chipped away.

  The notion that Stonehenge and Durrington Walls were built as a single complex of complementary wooden and stone circles linked by the River Avon is the subject of the 2003–4 investigation of the area led by Mike Parker Pearson. It was inspired by an observation of his colleague, the Malagasy archaeologist Ramilisonina, that Stonehenge ‘was not built for the transitory living but for the ancestors whose permanence was materialized in stone’. Henges are often linked to rivers, and Stonehenge is no exception, linked to the Avon by an earthwork avenue. The south-eastern entrance of Durrington Walls opens on to the same river a little further upstream, and Parker Pearson and a team of over seventy have discovered a Late Neolithic flint-cobbled avenue leading from the Avon to the henge’s east entrance; sixty-five feet wide, including its banks, it is precisely aligned with the midsummer sunset. The avenue that leads from the river to Stonehenge is, conversely, aligned with the midwinter sunset. Parker Pearson is investigating the possibility that this might have been a funerary and processional route in the Late Neolithic. If stone commemorated the dead at Stonehenge, wood could have been the province of the living at Durrington Walls. To people who were prepared to lug bluestones 240 miles from Wales, spend thousands of hours quarrying chalk with antler picks or raise tree-trunks three feet thick in henges, natural materials were obviously of the greatest symbolic significance. Barbara Bender traces an elemental progression over time in the building of the monuments, from ditch banks of earth to chalk, to wood, and then to stone: both the relatively local sarsen and the bluestone from far away. Beyond these are the elements of sky, or air, and water in the alignments with the sun and moon, and the ways to and from the river, which led to other worlds, as well as geographical places.

  As the place of the dead, Stonehenge seems to have been left in peace much of the time. By contrast, Durrington Walls, whose element was wood, was full of life and activity. The flint cobbles of its road to the river are worn smooth along the middle by walkers, and it is clear from the trodden, compacted pathways on the ground that large numbers of people moved through the timber circle guided on a fixed itinerary by posts, corridors and screens that controlled sight lines and gave access to the centre. The cattle and pig bones heaped in the middens indicate feasting, yet at the same time people were placing offerings in formal, set patterns around the timber posts of the henge.

  In his influential An Archaeology of Natural Places, Richard Bradley argues that ‘It is quite clear that ritual permeates every part of [Neolithic] social life and that it can take place in a settlement just as it does in a shrine.’ He also believes that the Neolithic monuments of Wessex ‘have a quite specific structure, and this can be understood in terms of the movements of the people who went there.’ Radiocarbon dating has revealed that bones or artefacts placed as offerings beside the timber posts were sometimes already of some age. Others, such as axes, may have come from distant places: quarries high up in Langdale in the Lakes, or in the Presceli Mountains of Wales. Materials from distant places or distant times would have been symbolically charged in their new, formal, architectural context. Bradley goes on to make a vital recognition: ‘By bringing together elements that were otherwise deposited in quite different kinds of locations, these earthworks, and the buildings within them, eventually became a microcosm of the landscape as a whole.’ At the same time Bradley noticed that the formally ordered sequence of materials that would be seen on the guided way towards the centre of a timber circle amounted to a presentation of the history and evolution of the Neolithic people in Wessex. In the timber circle at West Kennet, the simpler, undecorated pottery vessels were placed in the entrance, and those with the most elaborate designs deep inside. In a variety of different circles, the general pattern of the sequence moves from the wild to the domestic. If rituals are a way of enacting a story, suggests Bradley, the narrative of the Neolithic monuments of Wessex is about history, origins and people’s place in the world. The story may well have been a creation myth, a singing up of the songlines of the land.

  The wood circle at Bow was once again a place of remembrance. Frances Griffith had put it back on the map. Until then, the antiquarian charts of Devon had shown plenty of ancient stone monuments all over the higher ground of Dartmoor, where granite was the natural material, but only a white space centred around the lower arable land of Bow and the Nymets. Sited in the Nymetbowe – the bend in the holy river – the henge was associated with the Yeo as Durrington Walls was with the Avon. In further work on the area, Griffith discovered a huge cluster of barrows and ring ditches surrounding Bow. She is convinced it was a major focus of ceremonial activity comparable with others up on Dartmoor, or further east on Salisbury Plain.

  A mile to the west at Broadnymet, at the end of a long track, Phil and Rachael led the way out of their farmyard through an orchard and a vegetable garden to the abandoned chapel of St Martin. It had once been a parish church, and for years it had been used to store old furniture. Now ivy spread veins across the stone gable wall and it stood empty, overhung by a tall beech and ash trees. Phil said there were two long barrows in the next-door field, scarcely visible now: ploughed out, and all the old hedges pulled up. The nymet places are perched on a slender lick of new red sandstone that runs out west from Exeter to Okehampton. It turns the fertile soil, and the cob walls of the barns and farmhouses, bright rusty-red with the occasional hint of pink at sunset. Dig, and you hit the sandstone a foot down. Trees spring up everywhere. ‘Oaks come up here just for fun,’ said Phil.

  Green light filtered into the little wagon-roofed church through the surrounding trees. The elaborately timbered roof contrasted with the fissured plaster tumbling off the walls. On the dusty stone floor lay the mummy of a barn owl beneath a nesting box in the rafters. I
t was a young one, fully fledged. ‘It died two days after the bloke from the wildlife came and climbed a ladder to the nest and ringed it,’ said Phil. He had lost his whole healthy herd during the foot-and-mouth through ‘contiguous culling’. The farms either side had the disease, so his cows were doomed too. Then Rentokil descended on the farm and poisoned all the rats and mice. That was the first time the barn owls died. A pigeon clattered out of the roof beams and disappeared through a shaft of light under the ridge tiles.

  Broadnymet’s name persists as a clue that it may have been particularly sacred to the early Devonians. ‘Broad’, descended from the Old English adjective brade, is still in modern usage to give emphasis, as in ‘broad daylight’ or ‘broad Yorkshire’. As an enthusiastic fourth-century converter of pagan shrines into churches, Martin of Tours would have been an apt choice as the parish saint. The stubborn survival of the Nymet names suggests a remarkable propensity for the old beliefs among generations of free-thinking Devonians. They have been leading double lives here for centuries.

  Going south towards the moor, I stopped to explore Cocktree Throat, a darkling lane with a ford at the bottom of a valley in a dense oak wood. At Taw Mill, the Cocktree Throat stream enters the Taw. Others arise and wind through boggy woodland in directions that defy my understanding. Some even seem to flow uphill. Beyond East Nymph and West Nymph I followed an oak wood called Trundlebeer: it flanks one of the source streams that will soon become mid Devon’s Ganges: the nymet-river Yeo.

  The car climbed south on to Dartmoor through the high-banked lanes, past the remote North Moor Arms to Gidleigh. At Scorhill, I struck out across the moor to the stone circle and its processional avenue of menhirs, the Stone Rows, then downhill for a mile over uneven gorse-topped tinners’ spoil-heaps in furrows of yellow, heathery purple and green, towards the thread of the Teign and the solitary, flat-topped may tree that marks the river pool at Teign-turn. There’s an old buzzards’ nest of woven heather twigs and wool in the thorn’s wind-bent tangle. Its twisted trunk, lichened in the crevices, is a rubbing post polished by sheep and ponies. Such lone trees are landmarks on Dartmoor, saviours in a winter mist, like the ur-tree at Stonehenge. The nearby hamlet of Thorn, in the parish of Chagford, grew up around such a tree. Richard Thorn, the great-great-grandfather of the famous landscape historian W. G. Hoskins, farmed the thirty-two acres there from which his ancestors had taken their name. First the old tree gave its name to the farm, then the farm gave its name to the first owners (Thorns had lived there since Robert atte Thorn in 1332). Richard Thorn was Parish Clerk of Chagford from 1800 to the end of his life, and was succeeded by his son, the village saddler and postmaster. The pair served for a continuous eighty-two years. Hoskins writes: ‘These things delight me when I come across them. This is the immemorial, provincial England, stable, rooted deep in the soil, unmoving, contented and sane. Those are my forebears, who have made me what I am whether I like it or not …’ The pool in the Teign was peaty, clear and cold, entered from a perfectly level grassy bank between clumps of reeds. Seen from water level, the thorn at the bend in the river filled the sky.