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If we spread out on the floor all the sheets of the first edition of the one-inch map of Devon we need a space of more than six feet each way to cover this large county from sea to sea. And as we survey this immense canvas of Devon, what sort of picture do we get?
The first impression beyond all doubt is of the extraordinary mass of detail on the map, much more so perhaps than in any other county. There is not a square inch of the map (except in the wilder recesses of central and northern Dartmoor and on the higher slopes of Exmoor) that is not studded with detail of fascinating interest to the local historian. The map is so thickly crowded that one discovers new things on it, new entertainment for the mind, even after years of use. It is like a painting by Breughel or a major symphony. No one book can do justice to the historical richness of such a canvas: one could write a book about every few square inches of it, about nearly every one of the
Then we observe the variety of the names on this crowded canvas: that many farms and hamlets are called hayes or hayne in the south-east of the county: that many are called worthy in the west and north-west: that scores have the suffix cott, especially in the north: that in nearly every parish there is at least one farm called barton.
On the same map and on the same bay one sees the tiny settlement of Tor Quay, a few houses around a minute harbour in the shelter of Warberry Hill, completely protected from the lashing south-easterly gales to which the bay is open. And one sees also what is obviously the original settlement at this end of the bay, about a mile back from the sea, the village of Tor Mohun, at the southern end of the hill (tor) which gave it its name. Where the drives and terraces of mid-Victorian Torquay now coil endlessly round the hills and headlands.
THE MEANING OF ‘DEVONSHIRE’
The earliest maps of Devon, beginning with Saxton’s map ofopography is the foundation of local history, and the one-inch map of the Ordnance Survey is the foundation of topographical knowledge in England. It is with the one-inch map of Devon that we begin this history of the county, for the map, as the curious and affectionate eye wanders over its intricate pattern, speaks an historical language of its own, though a language mostly of questions. It asks some questions and answers them almost at once—though the immediate answer is not always the right one—but it asks far more and leaves them unanswered. And these unanswered questions lead us back to the other records, to the immense wealth of documents from Anglo-Saxon times onwards, both local and national, so great a store that one man alone can no longer cope with them even for a single county.1575, are only of limited value as records: the information they give is meagre and sometimes misleading, though sometimes they may settle a small historical point. Donn’s great map of 1765, on a scale of one inch to the mile, takes us much further and was a triumph for one man working single-handed; but it necessarily had large blank patches between the chief roads and therefore still failed to give the complete text of the Devonshire landscape. With the first edition of the one-inch Ordnance map, published in 1809, we have as near a full text as any map on that scale can give. It gives no contours, it is true, but it delineates the variations of surface by a skilful hachuring which portrays the physical appearance of the county with great clarity. The absence of contour-lines and of certain other details (such as parish boundaries and footpaths) also throws up the details of town and village plans in a manner unrivalled by any modern map. Its only near rival as a clear picture of the landscape is the fifth (relief) edition of the one-inch map published in 1931-3, an edition which was abandoned before Devon was completed.430 or so parishes that make up the county.1809 there run smaller branch-roads, making a close network in the intervening country; and off these smaller roads there run, every few hundred yards, yet narrower lanes that penetrate along remote combes or deep into the flanks of some massive hill, to end in a nameless farmyard, with the unpathed fields beyond and all around. So many farmsteads in Devon lie alone at the end of a deep-sunken lane thick with mud in winter, stony and rutted in summer. Every lane has its own history: it is not there by accident: and every twist it makes once had some historical meaning, which we can sometimes decipher today, but not often.1809 are the clear black outlines of numerous small country towns and of large compact villages, closer to each other in the country east of the Exe than to the west, yet never so close together as the compact villages of the midland counties. West of the Exe, that fundamental dividing-line between the old rocks and the new (as we shall see in due course), these little market towns and nucleated villages are fewer. They may be anything up to seven to ten miles apart: and the wide intervening spaces are all the more thickly studded with isolated farms and hamlets, laced together by a fine network of lanes. Even east of the Exe, on the newer and more fertile rocks, this dispersion of human settlement between the villages is very noticeable.36), sometimes two or three: that in some parts of Devon the village as it is understood elsewhere in England hardly exists at all (plate 24). Only a lonely hill-top church with a single farmstead beside it gives its name to the thousands of upland acres that make up the parish. And the names of these parishes: the larger, more compact, settlements so often called after the river they stand on, like Crediton and Tawton, the smaller and more dispersed ones after the saint to whom the parish church is dedicated, as at Virginstow or Mariansleigh; and how, in the west of the county above all, these dedications are to Celtic saints—such as Germansweek, Petrockstow, and St Budeaux. The names of the towns, villages, hamlets, and farms, either reveal some detail of history at once or suggest questions that call for an answer.1809, too, drawn before the revolutionary changes of the 19th and 20th centuries had obscured their ancient pattern, the plan of the market-towns and the larger villages sets the mind working immediately. So often they are gathered around a large rectangular space (as at Bradworthy and North Lew) with the parish church on one side and roads entering this open space from all points of the compass. Why that particular plan? To what age does it belong?19th-century landscape! There they are, compactly gathered together within a small compass on an intelligible site, their streets beginning and ending abruptly and cleanly on the edge of the country, with not a trace of that shapeless mess of building on all sides that heralds their approach today. There is a most striking contrast, for example, between the neat, contained shape of Paignton in the year 1809 and the formless chaos of the seaside town of 1953, stretching back westwards in ribbons and clots for miles towards Totnes, and equally shapeless north and south along the ravaged shores of Tor Bay. On the older map one can see exactly why the village grew on that site, half a mile or so back from the shore for safety and shelter, at the foot of the inland hills as they die away into the coastal flats.1809 shows only open hills with an occasional farm in the warmer hollows—Ilsham, Hope Farm, and Torwood. The site of Exmouth is equally interesting on this early map, before the town had begun to expand as the seaside outlet for the city of Exeter. Over and over again one notices how the flourishing seaside towns of today originated as villages a mile or so inland and how, in the course of the 19th century, they have grown towards the sea and left the old village high and dry (as it was intended to be) around the parish church, as at Dawlish or Seaton, for example, on the south coast, or at Ilfracombe and Combe Martin on the north.19th century. The oldest towns of Devon lie safely away from the sea, at the head of a navigable estuary or the lowest bridging-point of the river, depending on one’s viewpoint, some seven to ten miles inland. Such ancient towns are the mother-city of Exeter—Isca Dumnoniorum—at the head of the Exe estuary and its lowest bridging-place until modern times; Totnes, in the same position on the Dart; and Barnstaple likewise on the Taw. The map of 1809 shows with remarkable clarity the plans of these early towns. Though their medieval walls had all but disappeared by that date, the influence they had had upon the shape of the town is still discernible. And in 1809 one could still see that the walled towns had quite a different shape from the unwalled inland towns that had grown up as market-centres in the post-Conquest period, as witness the contrast between the shapes of Barnstaple and South Molton (figs. 1, 2), or between Exeter and Crediton. These contrasts in the shapes of the old towns, so very evident still on the early 19th-century map, are striking enough to impel one to seek out the causes forthwith, and so from the map we find ourselves fairly launched into the unexplored seas of urban history.12th century. They were founded when the great age of the pre-Conquest migrations and invasions, an age when sudden attacks came oftener from the sea than overland, was over and done with; but even so they were not originally built on the sea-coast but a mile or two inside some estuary or bay. And even so they have suffered periodically and heavily from later attacks across the Channel.6-inch, on which the boundaries of the fields are shown, yet other questions arise. We notice curious differences between the field-patterns of one part of the county and another, and often indeed between different parts of the same parish. In places the fields are long and very narrow, with straight or gently curving parallel hedges, and they are grouped in bundles as it were, with one bundle of fields all lying one way and an adjacent bundle all lying at right angles to them. This kind of pattern closely resembles that of the midland counties, the classical home of the open fields; and then one observes also that it is best developed on the Devonshire map around the nucleated village of the midland type. Near such villages, again, one often finds long lanes running into the surrounding fields, occasionally making abrupt right-angled turns and apparently leading nowhere, in contrast to other lanes which run purposefully from one isolated farm to another, even if they wind all the way.6-inch map of Devon there lie profound differences of economic and social history whose roots go back to the dark centuries following the Saxon settlement in the 7th and 8th centuries. It will be one of our tasks to uncover this history so far as it can be done.6-inch map to the 25-inch map, our interest passes from the fields to the plan and lay-out of the farmstead itself. Here we are confronted with the single house, the smallest unit of human settlement, and here, too, just as much as in the plan of an old town or a compact village, the long process of human history is partly revealed to the inquiring eye, seeking to decipher the palimpsest of the Ordnance map. What is the age of this solitary habitation, lost among the trees in some little combe and far removed from the parish church, or high up on the frontier of the unbroken moor? Why does the farmstead follow this particular plan—sometimes a courtyard completely enclosed on all sides, sometimes an open space with buildings grouped around three sides but not joined together in a continuous series, sometimes a single rectangular building with dwelling-house, barns, and stables all under the same line of roof? Why is it here at all, far removed from the human warmth and security of the village? Often the name of this solitary farm will suggest part of the answer to these questions, if we know how to read it aright; but in the main the map asks questions that we cannot answer at first glance. We must pass on to the other records and seek the answers there.
The earliest reference to the shire by name is to be found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year
The Defnas, to trace the name further, derived their name from the British Dumnonii, the name of the Celtic inhabitants of south-western England, which was transferred to the Anglo-Saxons who conquered them.
851, when ‘the Alderman Ceorl with the men of Defenascir fought the heathen army at Wicganbeorg and after making great slaughter obtained the victory’. In 894 the form Defnum occurs, Defenum in 897, and Defenun in a charter of 955. Somewhat earlier, in 823, the Chronicle speaks of ‘the men of Devon’ as Defnas. This tribal name was transferred, as in several other English counties, to the territory inhabited by the tribe.1 And the Dumnonii in turn got their name from a Celtic root dumno- or dubno-, used adjectivally in the sense of ‘deep’ and as a noun meaning ‘world’ or ‘land’. The tribal name therefore meant ‘the people of the land’.2 The theory that the old name for south-western England—Dumnonia—meant ‘deep valleys’, which would suit the topography of the county well, rests solely upon the modern Welsh form for Devon of Dyfnaint, which has this meaning. This is a piece of folk-etymology but it has no other authority.3
Thus the name of Devon is derived ultimately from a Celtic tribal name—‘the people of the land’. Both the modern forms—Devon and Devonshire—are equally ancient, dating from the earliest days of the shire in the
9th century. Neither usage is more correct than the other. The form we use today is governed largely by the euphony required in a phrase and partly by custom. Thus we speak of Red Devon Cattle, and we used to speak of Devonshire cream.
BOUNDARIES OF DEVON
On the east Devon is bounded for the most part by the county of Somerset, with a few miles of Dorset at the southern end. The exact date of the fixing of this boundary is not known, but it has been suggested with considerable authority that Devon was one of the seven shires known to have existed in Wessex during the second half of the
8th century. Charters attested between 757 and 778 have the names of seven men, who are evidently the ealdormen of shires, of whom one Scilling was most probably ealdorman of Devon.1 But the boundary with Cornwall was probably not finally determined until the time of Athelstan (925-39), when it was fixed on the Tamar.2
The eastern boundary of Devon today is not the historic boundary. In
The western boundary of Devon has a curious history.
The great tongue of which we have spoken covers some nineteen square miles and consists of the two large parishes of North Petherwin and Werrington. These parishes have always been included in the archdeaconry of Cornwall for ecclesiastical purposes, but are still in Devon for all other purposes. They were already included in Devon in
It is almost certain that the Tamar had been the original boundary along its whole length, except for the parish of Maker at its mouth, and that the transfer of these nineteen square miles from Cornwall to Devon took place silently when Baldwin de Brionne, sheriff of Devon, held the farm of Harold’s and Gytha’s lands in Devon. As Werrington (the political name of this territory) was Gytha’s only considerable Cornish estate, it too fell under his administration. Such an arrangement suited the sheriff of Devon financially, for he paid an inclusive rent for the farm of the Devon lands and should have paid a further rent if Werrington had been officially known to be in Cornwall; and since the Exon Domesday returns were drawn up at Exeter under his supervision he had the opportunity also to set the official seal upon a deliberate fraud of the exchequer. The estate was therefore described under Devon in the final Domesday return, and as recently as
The parish of Maker, at the mouth of the Tamar and now so obviously a part of Cornwall, was in fact a part of Devon until
1842 and again in 1896 considerable changes were made, which took the parishes of Stockland, Dalwood, Chardstock, and Hawkchurch away from Dorset and added them to Devon, and transferred the parish of Thorncombe from Devon to Dorset. In addition, the parish of Churchstanton was transferred from Devon to Somerset. Before 1842 the two parishes of Stockland and Dalwood, deep in the Blackdown Hills, formed an outlier of Dorset surrounded by Devon, and Thorncombe was a Devonshire island in the county of Dorset.3 The Stockland, Dalwood, and Thorncombe transfers were made in 1842, the others in 1896.4 If we begin at its southern end, we follow the Tamar for half its length, to a point just north-east of Launceston. Here a great tongue of Devon, two or three miles wide and seven miles long, thrusts deep into Cornwall; but three miles farther upstream the river becomes the boundary again and continues (except for negligible breaks) to within a few yards of its source near the north coast. From this point a direct four-mile line down a steep, wooded combe brings one westwards to the Atlantic coast at Marsland Mouth.1086 and as they were entirely owned by the Devonshire monastic house of Tavistock it has been suggested that the abbot saw to it, when the boundary was drawn, that the whole monastic endowment on both sides of the Tamar was conveniently included in the one county.5 But until 1066, or shortly afterwards, this large estate had been included in the Cornish hundred of Stratton and was a part of the royal demesne which descended to Gytha, the wife of earl Godwin.6 Some time between 1066 and 1068, when Gytha left England for ever, she had transferred the estate to Tavistock abbey. There is evidence that it was still reckoned to be in Cornwall as late as 1084, but by 1086, when Domesday Book was compiled, the abbey had been deprived of it and it was included under Devon, where it has remained ever since.1929 a Cornish bill to restore the status quo of 1066 was defeated in a committee of the House of Lords.1844, when it was transferred. There can be little doubt that this curious enclave of Devon in Cornwall embodied a piece of history stretching back to the earliest days of the Saxon occupation (c.700), to a time when it was necessary to have a unified control over this important estuary.
AREA AND DIMENSIONS
The geographical county of Devon is the third largest in England, exceeded in size only by Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. It is, indeed, the largest single administrative area, covering (in
The population of the geographical county in
The greatest length of the county from north to south is about
Near the Foreland the Romans had established two signal stations to watch the Bristol Channel, one on either side of the headland. One was at Old Barrow Hill, to the east, and the other at the Beacon, in the parish of Martinhoe. These commanded the whole sea across to the Welsh coast.
From east to west, Devon is nearly as wide:
Within this great expanse of country lay some
In Devon the parishes range in size from tiny Landcross, whose
1939) 1,660,948 acres—nearly 36,000 acres larger than the administrative county of the West Riding and more than 300,000 acres larger than Norfolk or the North Riding, the next largest.1951 was 798,283. Of these, 284,000 live in the two county boroughs of Exeter and Plymouth, and a further 80,000 in the urban concentration of Torquay-Paignton on the shores of Tor Bay. Thus a total of 364,000 people live in the three largest urban concentrations. Outside these are three towns with 16,000 to 17,000 people each (Barnstaple, Exmouth, and Newton Abbot) and half a dozen smaller towns with 9,000 to 12,000 people. A number of small but historic boroughs, such as Totnes and Honiton, contain from 3,000 to 6,000 inhabitants. Finally, there are six more old towns which, though not boroughs for administrative purposes, have all the other attributes of a town, such as Ashburton and Crediton, whose population is between 2,500 and 6,000. Outside the three largest urban concentrations, however, one can say that the county is almost entirely rural, with large stretches completely uninhabited on Dartmoor, and wide areas in mid-Devon and west Devon only thinly peopled (25 to 100 per square mile).75 miles, from the lighthouse on the Foreland, that tremendous cliff that commands the entrance to the Bristol Channel, down to the southern look-out on Prawle Point, where Lloyd’s signal station reports all passing ships. Prawle, thrust well forward into the narrowing English Channel, has been a look-out station for well over a thousand years. To the first Saxons who made the rough passage round its point it was ‘lookout hill’: its Old English name was Prawhyll. In Domesday the hamlet behind the headland is called Prenla, but the form of Prahulle in 1204 is more recognisable. The modern English word ‘pry’ has the same Old English root.1 In Victorian London, before the days of the radio and the aeroplane, the message ‘passed Prawle Point’ was the first news of many a ship homeward-bound from the other side of the globe.73 miles from the Cornish border near Canworthy Water to the extreme eastern point by Birdsmoor Gate, that typical Dorset name—600 feet up on the downland, only two miles from the great Dorset landmark of Pilsdon Pen and all the Hardy Country below. The extreme western point of Devon is, however, not in the Petherwin-Werrington tongue, but on the Atlantic coast south of Hartland Point, on the cliff just north of Welcombe Mouth, with Hawker’s country all around and his parish of Morwenstow immediately to the south.450 ecclesiastical parishes, varying in size to a degree not found perhaps in any other English county.* We may broadly contrast the six square miles of the average Devon parish with the two square miles of the average Suffolk parish or the twelve square miles in Northumberland, but these bare averages are misleading. If we look at a map of Devon which shows us the skeleton of parish boundaries—and for this purpose the modern map showing civil parishes will serve adequately—we see beneath our eyes a pattern of lines that sets the mind asking one question after another. Such a map is as near a palimpsest as any map can be: its wavering lines, fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle, reveal to a patient scrutiny a good deal of early history which is nowhere else recorded. Averages conceal the truth; it is the variations that reveal it and kindle the historical imagination.331 acres are almost wholly contained within a bend of the Torridge above Bideford—so small that a curlew calling on the tidal mud can be heard all over the parish—up to the 17,650 acres of the parish of Tiverton which lie in two enormous halves on either side of the middle Exe valley.* There was at one time, indeed, a parish of only 52 acres—Broad Nymet, with its own rector, which was absorbed into Nymet Tracey hardly more than a century ago. At one end of the scale, eight rural parishes have fewer than 500 acres, and 36 have fewer than 1000 acres. At the other end, 12 parishes undulate across more than 10,000 acres, and these are by no means the wild and empty moorland parishes. Half of them are, but half are not, and to that extent they are historically interesting, in their very size and shape, before we begin with their recorded history. The way parishes fit together, the way they group themselves into compact blocks suggesting an older unit of settlement before parish boundaries were drawn, the relationship between tiny parishes and giant ones, the shape of parish boundaries and the way they run, all these matters of observation furnish clues to the early history of the colonisation of England in the centuries before written evidence becomes available, if only we knew how to decipher it all.
TOPOGRAPHY AND GEOLOGY
Devon is shaped like a trapezium, with its shortest side washed by the Bristol Channel and its longest by the English Channel. It is one of only three English counties—Cornwall and Kent being the other two—to possess a north and a south coast, and with the exception of Cornwall it has the greatest proportion of coastline to area of any county. The sea thus plays a large part in the climate and the history of the county from the Bronze Age onwards, the more so historically because Devon is connected with the rest of England only by a narrow neck of land between the mouth of the Parrett on the north coast and Lyme Regis on the south, a distance of
Not only was the connecting link with the mainland a narrow one; it was also difficult to traverse. The Somerset levels were always deeply flooded in winter, and beyond them to the west one saw (as one sees today from the Great Western railway near Taunton) the long dark mass of the Blackdown hills to the south-west and the less massive but wilder hills of Brendon to the north-west, almost meeting to block the way into Devon. There were, historically, only two narrow gateways into Devon from the rest of England: the northern gap between the Blackdowns and the Brendons, and the southern gap, less conspicuous, through the Axe valley. These are the historic landward entrances into Devon from Saxon times onwards; and in the
The contoured map of Devon makes an intricate picture, one which appears at first sight to defy any reduction to simple statements, with thousands of little streams in their combes, hills tumbling away in all directions, ragged and indented coasts, and a variation of surface every mile or so.
There are, however, a few fundamental facts which help to reduce the tangled mass of topographical detail to a semblance of order. Most important of all—the master-key to the topography of Devon—is the granite boss of Dartmoor, a broken tableland some twenty miles from north to south and fifteen from east to west. There are
This core is all that remains of an antique volcanic region which once formed either a single volcano or a series of cones. If the former it must, from the extent of its site, have constituted a Devonian Etna some
Dartmoor is the Great Source. Its granite produced the stone for votive columns, propitiatory altars, and sacred avenues; for huts and houses and barns; for burial chambers; for the walls of man’s earliest cornfields and cattle pounds; and long afterwards for his soaring church towers and his Christian tombs, and for London’s streets and bridges. Its lavas went to the building of the dark basalt walls of Roman Exeter in the third century, to the vaulting of Exeter cathedral in the thirteenth; its tufas to the making of Tavistock abbey and to the creation of modern Tavistock town, built of the green volcanic ash of Hurdwick. And its limestones have been altered here and there by heat and earth pressures, and contribute building-stones, marble monuments for churches, and the glistening rainswept pavements of Plymouth:
Never hath anger so much beauty made.
Behold his passion into marble cooled,
His burning ashes into fields allayed,
His frowns fair streams ...
From Dartmoor flow in all directions the chief rivers of Devon—all except Tamar, Exe, and Torridge, and even they are abundantly fed by Dartmoor streams. These radiating rivers enriched the fertile lowlands and attracted early farmers. Towns grew up where the rivers broke out of the Moor, as at Tavistock and Ashburton; and where they widened into estuaries little ports arose as early as the
Not only did the Moor yield stone for the expression of man’s religious beliefs—his pagan avenues and his Christian monasteries and churches—over a space of four thousand years, and for the building of his houses and the shelter of his animals. It collected on its broad back nearly all the water of Devon and dispersed it down the deep valleys at every point of the compass. And there was, too, the rich mineral treasure, produced by the acid vapours once given off by the granite at high temperatures. These vapours, penetrating the lodes and rifts, gave rise to tin and other metals, and also over large areas altered the granite itself by a process known as kaolinisation, thus producing china-clay. Mining has been carried on, from the
And on the Moor dwelt, in a kinder climate than today, the earliest settlers of whom we have any real knowledge, the farmers of the Early Bronze Age with their little corn-plots and their flocks and herds. Apart from the lone, nomadic figure of palaeolithic man, in numbers quite unimportant, we may regard Dartmoor as the earliest home of man in Devon, the beginning of forty centuries of continuous human occupation in the south-western peninsula of England.
The other fundamental fact about the topography of Devon is the dividing-line between the old rocks and the new—the so-called Tees-Exe line—which reaches its southern terminus on the shores of Tor Bay. The ancient city of Exeter stands at this great geological junction: and from the city walls one looks westwards over the Exe to the high, rolling, pastoral and wooded hills of the old Culm Measures, and eastwards over the lower, more gentle and more richly cultivated Permian and Triassic sandstones. It is sometimes said in jest that the Midlands begin at Exeter, and there is a geological sense in which this provocative remark is true: but it is truer to turn these words around and to say that the West begins at Exeter, with that steep climb out of the city into the emerald-green hills, from whose summit, only two or three miles from the cathedral, one sees the dark bastions of Dartmoor ahead; from Dartmoor the jagged outline of Bodmin Moor lies against the western sky; and from Bodmin Moor one looks on towards ‘dark Bolerium’, to where out of sight the Atlantic surges unrestingly against the granite of the land’s end.
This junction of the old and the new rocks is also the boundary between the Highland zone and the Lowland zone, a division of fundamental importance in the prehistory of Britain. The country west of the Exe closely resembles Cornwall in structure and topography, increasingly so as one goes farther westwards. In the Hartland peninsula of north-west Devon the landscape is almost purely Cornish in its appearance and feeling. East of the Exe, the new red rocks link Devon geologically with the Midlands, just as the cretaceous rocks of the extreme east of the county link it with southern and south-eastern England.
The Exe is, however, only an approximate boundary between the two great zones. A narrow band of the red rocks runs down to the shores of Tor Bay, at Paignton, where the red cliffs end; and immediately west of this band is the Haldon plateau, which is a detached remnant of the cretaceous plateau of east Devon. Moreover, the new red rocks thrust two tongues westward into the older landscape, one to the west of Tiverton and another, much larger, for over twenty miles through Crediton and North Tawton, as far as Hatherleigh. On the other hand, the older rocks appear some miles east of the Exe at Holcombe Rogus (near the Somerset boundary), south of Cullompton at Ashclyst Forest, and in the wooded hills immediately to the north of Exeter. These intrusive tongues have the effect of dovetailing together the old and the new rocks in Devon, and also produce some interesting local variations of scenery and of human settlement.
When we pass beyond this elementary division of the old and the new rocks, to look more closely at the details of the geological structure of Devon—for it is quite fundamental to an understanding of the prehistory and early history of the county—we are faced with a most complicated scene. The coloured geological map of Devon is a delight to the geologist and the topographer, with an eye to the infinite variety of its detailed changes and their effect on scenery, human settlement, and land-use. The historian, too, must face its complexities as resolutely as he can. Much of the pleasure and value of local history and topography remains beyond reach if one is content to remain ignorant of geology. There is hardly a single aspect of local history, whether we are looking at documents or the landscape itself, that is not illuminated to some degree, sometimes completely explained, by a knowledge of the underlying rocks. At times like these the arid jargon of the geologist, which we have laboured to understand, is transmuted into a kind of poetry. The carving of a Norman doorway in a small country church, still bold and clear because the Normans knew so well how to select the best stone from the quarry, gives us all the more pleasure if we recognise also the stone they chose and if we know its nearest outcrop, so that we can go on down the very lane up which they brought it when Henry II reigned at Westminster and Bishop Bartholomew reigned at Exeter, and push through the tangled undergrowth to the deserted pit itself. Here the red or purple or green rock still glows with colour in the afternoon sunlight, birds fly in and out of the trees and bushes that nearly fill the hollow, and sulphur-coloured butterflies flutter against the warm rock face. Out of this pit, we reflect, came the east gate of medieval Exeter, or the blood-red tower of the great collegiate church at Crediton, or the simple Norman doorway at Loxbeare, or the green and vanished splendour of Tavistock abbey. There are a score of building stones in Devon, and there are several hundreds of deserted quarries, in fields or hidden in woods, and their history is mostly written only in the buildings within a short radius of them. Very occasionally the stone came from outside Devon: to find the quarry out of which the noble
Nor is the importance of geology to the historian by any means confined to the visual. As one travels from church to church, noting the stone used in fonts, arcades, walls, mullions, towers, or in the larger houses and farm-buildings, one sees how far afield some particular stones were carried—especially granite and Beer stone—and one is led to speculate on the economics of the medieval building industry which could move such weights (often by road) over considerable distances, and on the economics of the society which could meet the cost of all this building, a burden far beyond the means of the impoverished
One may say, in the broadest outline, that north and south Devon consist almost entirely of slates and sandstones of Devonian age, which occupy altogether one-quarter of the area of the county. The whole of central and west Devon is covered by the carboniferous series known as the Culm Measures,
These three regions together constitute the ‘old rocks’ and cover about four-fifths of the county. East of the Exe we find the Permian and Triassic rocks, mostly red sandstones and marls, covering about
Altogether, the ‘new rocks’ make up only one-fifth of the total area of the county. The scenery which is so commonly regarded as typically Devonian—the deep and fertile red earths contrasted with a luxuriant green vegetation—occupies in fact only one-seventh of the total area. The greater part of the county shows landscapes that are strikingly different in their scenery and their agricultural possibilities from the ‘red land’. Large tracts of Devon were, and still are, relatively infertile, and their entire history has reflected this geological fact.
One other fundamental geological fact is less obvious: it is the existence of three great platforms at
The
The existence of these high-level platforms, particularly those at
Once again we see that the generally accepted ideas of the topography of Devon do not bear close examination. It has often been argued or implied, for example, that the open-field system, so characteristic of Midland agriculture, never existed in Devon—or certainly not on any appreciable scale—because the hilly surface of the county precluded it. But, in fact, great stretches of the Devon landscape are plateau-like, either flat or gently undulating for miles, intersected—sometimes closely but often only at great intervals—by steep-sided river valleys. This is particularly true of the Culm Measures country, which stretches from the Somerset boundary on the east to the Atlantic coast on the west, and from the shores of Barnstaple Bay southwards to the foothills of Dartmoor. Many other tracts of the county are also plateau-like, such as parts of the South Hams, where wide views disclose remarkably level horizons. We shall see, in fact, that the open-field system of agriculture was widely established in all parts of medieval Devon, though possibly in not quite the same form as the classic Midland pattern. It would indeed be truer to say that the topography of the greater part of Devon presented not the slightest obstacle to the development of the open fields. Neither the Culm Measures nor the Permian and Triassic landscapes offered any serious physical obstacle beyond those to be found in most parts of England.
35 miles. From the top of Windwhistle Hill, almost on this narrow neck, one can on a clear spring evening discern the sea shining to the north and to the south. Beyond this neck, the peninsula of south-western England thrusts westwards into the Atlantic for 130 miles or so, widening into a solid block in Devon, more than 70 miles across, and then tapering rapidly down the length of Cornwall.19th century the two main railway lines from London to Exeter tunnelled their way through the same gaps at Whitehall tunnel (G.W.R.) and Honiton tunnel (L.S.W.R.).300 square miles of visible granite, but if we add to this the aureole of altered rocks affected by the granitic pressure the central core covers some 400 square miles.18,000 feet high—a massif even grander than the Etna of today. If the latter, its active peaks, rising from the coastal waters of the Devonian Sea, may very well have resembled the Lipari Islands as we know them. In either case the underlying granite was itself lifted or thrust upward in course of time, and at all periods it was penetrated by veins and dykes of fresh intrusive lava, forming the elvans. The sequence of eruptive periods is thought to have continued into Carboniferous and post-Carboniferous times. The last act was a long process of denudation during which wind, frost, and rain (and possibly ice also),1 wore down the superincumbent rocks, through thousands of feet, to the granite itself—down to the original magmatic reservoir. The present average height of the Moor is only 1200 feet above sea-level. It is likely that Brentor, so like a volcanic cone as one sees it from afar off rising from the surrounding plain, is a fragment of a crater of this old volcanic region. Further evidence is given by the tufas or volcanic ash of western Devon, by the lavas of the Exe and Teign valleys, and by the far-carried ejectamenta found in the breccias. The deep-seated granite had cooled under enormous pressure, thus causing the wide-spaced joint planes which, on exposure, bring about the weathering into giant blocks. The more resistant of these form the tors which today rise from the whale-backed tableland (plates 27, 28). At times their demonic silhouettes resemble the man-made statues of Easter Island, most notably at Bowerman’s Nose near Manaton.10th century, as at Totnes and Barnstaple.12th century down to our own day, on the Moor and its foothills.14th-century arcades of Bratton Clovelly came, or that dove-grey south arcade of Sampford Courtenay, we have to cross the border into Cornwall and penetrate to the Polyphant quarry in the parish of Lewannick: but such a pilgrimage outside the county is not often necessary.20th century. A working knowledge of geology is indispensable for any study of the medieval building industry, for any detailed study of the settlement and colonisation of the countryside, and for its subsequent agrarian and mining history.1 which occupy rather more than two acres out of every five in Devon; and the granite boss of Dartmoor occupies one acre in nine.15 per cent; and east of these again is the cretaceous formation (mostly a high greensand plateau) covering rather less than 5 per cent. Small post-Tertiary deposits make up the remainder of the surface. South-western England was never covered by ice-sheets, and the drift deposits which are so important in other parts of England are wholly absent in Devon and Cornwall.1,000 ft., 750-800 ft., and 430 ft., respectively. All these platforms are of unknown age, arising from maritime erosion of older surfaces over a wide area, the wearing-down of ancient hills and mountains, with the worn and levelled surface subsequently uplifted to its present height. The 1,000-ft. platform is best seen around Moretonhampstead. Some of the waste material from this area has filled the deep basin around Bovey Tracey, which yields brown coal like that of Germany, but is more important for its valuable ball-clays, used in local and distant potteries.750-800-ft. platform is seen most clearly on the western side of Dartmoor, where the famous Lydford Gorge has been cut deep into it. The 430-ft. platform is most evident in Cornwall, but is traceable in many parts of Devon, especially in the coastal topography. The subsequent uplift of this plateau led to the rejuvenation of the drainage, with the result that the rivers rapidly deepened their valleys, so giving the characteristic steep-sided gorges of Devon and Cornwall (best seen in Devon at Lydford Gorge and Lustleigh Cleave). Successive uplifts also led to the drowning of the lower valleys of many rivers, so producing a number of magnificent, sheltered deep-water inlets of which those of the lower Tamar and lower Dart are the most notable.430 ft. and 750-800 ft., has had a profound effect upon land-use in Devon and upon agrarian history. Over large tracts of the county the flat surfaces of these platforms are responsible for the bad drainage of the land, despite its elevation, above all on the poor soils of the Culm Measures. Then, too, the deep valleys incised in these platforms are generally too steep for arable cultivation, which is restricted to the drier plateau areas between the valleys. On the other hand, the depth of the valleys protects them from the strong winds, especially from the west, and produces thick woods. Trees are infrequent on the plateau, more and more so as one goes westward towards the Atlantic coast, and most farmhouses and villages seek the valleys or some sheltered dip in the plateau. And finally, the drowned valleys carry the moderating influence of the sea far inland, giving relative security from frosts in the valley-bottoms and encouraging the growth of flowers and fruit, as, for example, in the extensive plum-orchards at Dittisham on the Dart estuary, and the large strawberry fields of the lower Tamar valley. One should go to Tavistock in June to appreciate this best.
CLIMATE
The climate of Devon is as complex as its topography when we look into it closely. In general, however, it is governed by the geographical position of the south-west peninsula of England, thrust well forward into the mild, rain-bearing winds of the Atlantic. The county has two long coastlines, and a number of river estuaries running far inland, all of which help to spread the climatic influence of the sea. The other major physical fact is the existence of masses of high land in the peninsula which attract a heavy rainfall. In central and south Devon the great mass of Dartmoor, rising to summits of just over
Within the county the climate varies greatly from place to place, according to height above sea-level, situation in relation to open water, and comparative shelter or exposure. There are such local sayings as ‘as cold as Challacombe’: Challacombe is nearly
The highest parts of Dartmoor receive more than
Temperature and sunshine are the other climatic factors which are historically important. The south-western peninsula is the mildest area in Britain, its climate being tempered almost everywhere by the sea all the year round, though there is a greater range of temperature as one goes inland. The mean annual temperature inland is
Though the Devon climate is generally equable, extreme temperatures occur, as in all parts of Britain. In January
Snow is rare over most of lowland Devon: it lies less than five mornings a year on low ground, rising to more than twenty days on the higher parts of Dartmoor, and perhaps to more than thirty days on the
The south coast of Devon is one of the sunniest regions of the British Isles, though not quite so sunny as that of Sussex. On the north coast the daily average of sunshine all the year round is
The humidity and cleanness of the air all over the south-western peninsula encourage the growth of lichens and mosses, even more so in Devon than in Cornwall owing to the great variety of the geological strata, and this adds to the colour and tone of buildings in any kind of stone. Much of the rich winter colour of Devon arises from the brilliantly coloured lichens, which stand out all the more prominently when the trees are more bare.
The climate of Devon has been an important historical influence in various ways, above all in determining the kind of farming that has been carried on for centuries, and hence the kind of settlement over wide areas; and later in attracting a considerable class of people of independent means along the whole of the mild, southern coast, and well inland in the Vale of Exeter. The influence of this class upon the architecture and social life of the county during the past
2,000 ft., and in north Devon the tableland of Exmoor, rising to over 1,500 ft., both have more than 60 inches of rain a year. The high tableland of north-west Devon, so near the sea, gets over 50 inches, and the Blackdown plateau of east Devon over 40. The peninsular position of Devon, coupled with its highlands being so near the sea, gives it in general a mild, wet climate, with rapidly changing weather.1,000 ft. up, in a fold of Exmoor, and its Old English name means ‘cold valley’. Or they say that ‘the devil died of the cold at North Lew’. Now, North Lew is only 400 ft. above sea-level; but the wind pours for uninterrupted miles across the plateau of cold yellow clays round here, bringing fifty inches of rain with it. At the other extreme are the sheltered south-coast towns between Sidmouth and Torquay, mildest of all being Salcombe in the extreme southern tip of the county.80 inches of rain a year. At Princetown the average annual rainfall is just under 82 inches but a fall of over 100 inches is not uncommon. In 1882, 115 inches were recorded. At the other extreme, the estuary of the Exe, from Exeter down to the sea, gets slightly under 30 inches a year, and the greater part of the red-earth lands in the Vale of Exeter less than 35 inches. In general, however, a great part of Devon receives 40 inches or more annually, including a belt which stretches from the north coast at Clovelly almost to the south coast at Dartmouth, and thence westwards to the high ground at the back of Plymouth. All the high ground of north-eastern and east Devon similarly receives over 40 inches. Most of Devon can therefore be classed as a wet area, with something like twice the annual rainfall of the Thames valley (20 to 25 inches).50.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and 51.5 degrees on the coast, at sea-level in both cases. The mean annual temperature for January at sea-level is 42 to 44 degrees, as compared with 38 to 39 degrees over most of eastern England. The difference is slight numerically, but very real indeed to Devonians transplanted to eastern or midland England, and the winter landscape of Devon, still full of colour and life when the midlands are bleached with cold, speaks vividly of the difference of temperature between the two regions.1940, 30 degrees of frost were recorded at Cullompton, and 16 degrees even at Torquay. The severe frosts of the winter of 1946-7 ruined many fine sub-tropical gardens on the sheltered south coast. In summer, temperatures of over 90 degrees have occasionally been known: at Killerton, in the Vale of Exeter, 94 degrees were recorded in July 1923. Generally, however, a heat-wave in Devon is many degrees cooler than a heat-wave elsewhere in England.2,000-ft. summits of the Moor. Memorable falls of snow have occurred in January 1881, March 1891, Christmas 1927, and February 1929. In the great blizzard of 1891, still a vivid memory to old men all over Devon, which they resurrect in detail whenever the young exclaim at some modern snowstorm, many trains were embedded in snow all round Dartmoor, and the Princetown train was out of sight, except for the funnel, for several days on end.4½ hours; on the south coast it rises to 4.90 hours at Salcombe and 4.87 hours at Torquay. Even Plymouth, with nearly 37 inches of rain a year, averages nearly 4.6 hours of sunshine daily. At Ilfracombe, on the north coast, the corresponding figure is 4.22 hours. Fog is rare everywhere in Devon, except on Dartmoor.150 years has been very marked, and they are still an important and characteristic element in the population, much more so in the south than in the north; though even in the north the towns of Bideford and Barnstaple have a little of the flavour of Sidmouth and Torquay. And the holiday resorts of the south coast, especially, are almost the creation of the Devon climate, and have now become the major industry of the county.
Reproduced by Kind Permission of the History Press Ltd. An extract of A History of Devon by Hoskins, ISBN-13: 978-1845883942 .
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If we spread out on the floor all the sheets of the first edition of the one-inch map of Devon we need a space of more than six feet each way to cover this large county from sea to sea. And as we survey this immense canvas of Devon, what sort of picture do we get?
The first impression beyond all doubt is of the extraordinary mass of detail on the map, much more so perhaps than in any other county. There is not a square inch of the map (except in the wilder recesses of central and northern Dartmoor and on the higher slopes of Exmoor) that is not studded with detail of fascinating interest to the local historian. The map is so thickly crowded that one discovers new things on it, new entertainment for the mind, even after years of use. It is like a painting by Breughel or a major symphony. No one book can do justice to the historical richness of such a canvas: one could write a book about every few square inches of it, about nearly every one of the
Then we observe the variety of the names on this crowded canvas: that many farms and hamlets are called hayes or hayne in the south-east of the county: that many are called worthy in the west and north-west: that scores have the suffix cott, especially in the north: that in nearly every parish there is at least one farm called barton.
On the same map and on the same bay one sees the tiny settlement of Tor Quay, a few houses around a minute harbour in the shelter of Warberry Hill, completely protected from the lashing south-easterly gales to which the bay is open. And one sees also what is obviously the original settlement at this end of the bay, about a mile back from the sea, the village of Tor Mohun, at the southern end of the hill (tor) which gave it its name. Where the drives and terraces of mid-Victorian Torquay now coil endlessly round the hills and headlands.
THE MEANING OF ‘DEVONSHIRE’
The earliest maps of Devon, beginning with Saxton’s map ofopography is the foundation of local history, and the one-inch map of the Ordnance Survey is the foundation of topographical knowledge in England. It is with the one-inch map of Devon that we begin this history of the county, for the map, as the curious and affectionate eye wanders over its intricate pattern, speaks an historical language of its own, though a language mostly of questions. It asks some questions and answers them almost at once—though the immediate answer is not always the right one—but it asks far more and leaves them unanswered. And these unanswered questions lead us back to the other records, to the immense wealth of documents from Anglo-Saxon times onwards, both local and national, so great a store that one man alone can no longer cope with them even for a single county.1575, are only of limited value as records: the information they give is meagre and sometimes misleading, though sometimes they may settle a small historical point. Donn’s great map of 1765, on a scale of one inch to the mile, takes us much further and was a triumph for one man working single-handed; but it necessarily had large blank patches between the chief roads and therefore still failed to give the complete text of the Devonshire landscape. With the first edition of the one-inch Ordnance map, published in 1809, we have as near a full text as any map on that scale can give. It gives no contours, it is true, but it delineates the variations of surface by a skilful hachuring which portrays the physical appearance of the county with great clarity. The absence of contour-lines and of certain other details (such as parish boundaries and footpaths) also throws up the details of town and village plans in a manner unrivalled by any modern map. Its only near rival as a clear picture of the landscape is the fifth (relief) edition of the one-inch map published in 1931-3, an edition which was abandoned before Devon was completed.430 or so parishes that make up the county.1809 there run smaller branch-roads, making a close network in the intervening country; and off these smaller roads there run, every few hundred yards, yet narrower lanes that penetrate along remote combes or deep into the flanks of some massive hill, to end in a nameless farmyard, with the unpathed fields beyond and all around. So many farmsteads in Devon lie alone at the end of a deep-sunken lane thick with mud in winter, stony and rutted in summer. Every lane has its own history: it is not there by accident: and every twist it makes once had some historical meaning, which we can sometimes decipher today, but not often.1809 are the clear black outlines of numerous small country towns and of large compact villages, closer to each other in the country east of the Exe than to the west, yet never so close together as the compact villages of the midland counties. West of the Exe, that fundamental dividing-line between the old rocks and the new (as we shall see in due course), these little market towns and nucleated villages are fewer. They may be anything up to seven to ten miles apart: and the wide intervening spaces are all the more thickly studded with isolated farms and hamlets, laced together by a fine network of lanes. Even east of the Exe, on the newer and more fertile rocks, this dispersion of human settlement between the villages is very noticeable.36), sometimes two or three: that in some parts of Devon the village as it is understood elsewhere in England hardly exists at all (plate 24). Only a lonely hill-top church with a single farmstead beside it gives its name to the thousands of upland acres that make up the parish. And the names of these parishes: the larger, more compact, settlements so often called after the river they stand on, like Crediton and Tawton, the smaller and more dispersed ones after the saint to whom the parish church is dedicated, as at Virginstow or Mariansleigh; and how, in the west of the county above all, these dedications are to Celtic saints—such as Germansweek, Petrockstow, and St Budeaux. The names of the towns, villages, hamlets, and farms, either reveal some detail of history at once or suggest questions that call for an answer.1809, too, drawn before the revolutionary changes of the 19th and 20th centuries had obscured their ancient pattern, the plan of the market-towns and the larger villages sets the mind working immediately. So often they are gathered around a large rectangular space (as at Bradworthy and North Lew) with the parish church on one side and roads entering this open space from all points of the compass. Why that particular plan? To what age does it belong?19th-century landscape! There they are, compactly gathered together within a small compass on an intelligible site, their streets beginning and ending abruptly and cleanly on the edge of the country, with not a trace of that shapeless mess of building on all sides that heralds their approach today. There is a most striking contrast, for example, between the neat, contained shape of Paignton in the year 1809 and the formless chaos of the seaside town of 1953, stretching back westwards in ribbons and clots for miles towards Totnes, and equally shapeless north and south along the ravaged shores of Tor Bay. On the older map one can see exactly why the village grew on that site, half a mile or so back from the shore for safety and shelter, at the foot of the inland hills as they die away into the coastal flats.1809 shows only open hills with an occasional farm in the warmer hollows—Ilsham, Hope Farm, and Torwood. The site of Exmouth is equally interesting on this early map, before the town had begun to expand as the seaside outlet for the city of Exeter. Over and over again one notices how the flourishing seaside towns of today originated as villages a mile or so inland and how, in the course of the 19th century, they have grown towards the sea and left the old village high and dry (as it was intended to be) around the parish church, as at Dawlish or Seaton, for example, on the south coast, or at Ilfracombe and Combe Martin on the north.19th century. The oldest towns of Devon lie safely away from the sea, at the head of a navigable estuary or the lowest bridging-point of the river, depending on one’s viewpoint, some seven to ten miles inland. Such ancient towns are the mother-city of Exeter—Isca Dumnoniorum—at the head of the Exe estuary and its lowest bridging-place until modern times; Totnes, in the same position on the Dart; and Barnstaple likewise on the Taw. The map of 1809 shows with remarkable clarity the plans of these early towns. Though their medieval walls had all but disappeared by that date, the influence they had had upon the shape of the town is still discernible. And in 1809 one could still see that the walled towns had quite a different shape from the unwalled inland towns that had grown up as market-centres in the post-Conquest period, as witness the contrast between the shapes of Barnstaple and South Molton (figs. 1, 2), or between Exeter and Crediton. These contrasts in the shapes of the old towns, so very evident still on the early 19th-century map, are striking enough to impel one to seek out the causes forthwith, and so from the map we find ourselves fairly launched into the unexplored seas of urban history.12th century. They were founded when the great age of the pre-Conquest migrations and invasions, an age when sudden attacks came oftener from the sea than overland, was over and done with; but even so they were not originally built on the sea-coast but a mile or two inside some estuary or bay. And even so they have suffered periodically and heavily from later attacks across the Channel.6-inch, on which the boundaries of the fields are shown, yet other questions arise. We notice curious differences between the field-patterns of one part of the county and another, and often indeed between different parts of the same parish. In places the fields are long and very narrow, with straight or gently curving parallel hedges, and they are grouped in bundles as it were, with one bundle of fields all lying one way and an adjacent bundle all lying at right angles to them. This kind of pattern closely resembles that of the midland counties, the classical home of the open fields; and then one observes also that it is best developed on the Devonshire map around the nucleated village of the midland type. Near such villages, again, one often finds long lanes running into the surrounding fields, occasionally making abrupt right-angled turns and apparently leading nowhere, in contrast to other lanes which run purposefully from one isolated farm to another, even if they wind all the way.6-inch map of Devon there lie profound differences of economic and social history whose roots go back to the dark centuries following the Saxon settlement in the 7th and 8th centuries. It will be one of our tasks to uncover this history so far as it can be done.6-inch map to the 25-inch map, our interest passes from the fields to the plan and lay-out of the farmstead itself. Here we are confronted with the single house, the smallest unit of human settlement, and here, too, just as much as in the plan of an old town or a compact village, the long process of human history is partly revealed to the inquiring eye, seeking to decipher the palimpsest of the Ordnance map. What is the age of this solitary habitation, lost among the trees in some little combe and far removed from the parish church, or high up on the frontier of the unbroken moor? Why does the farmstead follow this particular plan—sometimes a courtyard completely enclosed on all sides, sometimes an open space with buildings grouped around three sides but not joined together in a continuous series, sometimes a single rectangular building with dwelling-house, barns, and stables all under the same line of roof? Why is it here at all, far removed from the human warmth and security of the village? Often the name of this solitary farm will suggest part of the answer to these questions, if we know how to read it aright; but in the main the map asks questions that we cannot answer at first glance. We must pass on to the other records and seek the answers there.
The earliest reference to the shire by name is to be found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year
The Defnas, to trace the name further, derived their name from the British Dumnonii, the name of the Celtic inhabitants of south-western England, which was transferred to the Anglo-Saxons who conquered them.
851, when ‘the Alderman Ceorl with the men of Defenascir fought the heathen army at Wicganbeorg and after making great slaughter obtained the victory’. In 894 the form Defnum occurs, Defenum in 897, and Defenun in a charter of 955. Somewhat earlier, in 823, the Chronicle speaks of ‘the men of Devon’ as Defnas. This tribal name was transferred, as in several other English counties, to the territory inhabited by the tribe.1 And the Dumnonii in turn got their name from a Celtic root dumno- or dubno-, used adjectivally in the sense of ‘deep’ and as a noun meaning ‘world’ or ‘land’. The tribal name therefore meant ‘the people of the land’.2 The theory that the old name for south-western England—Dumnonia—meant ‘deep valleys’, which would suit the topography of the county well, rests solely upon the modern Welsh form for Devon of Dyfnaint, which has this meaning. This is a piece of folk-etymology but it has no other authority.3
Thus the name of Devon is derived ultimately from a Celtic tribal name—‘the people of the land’. Both the modern forms—Devon and Devonshire—are equally ancient, dating from the earliest days of the shire in the
9th century. Neither usage is more correct than the other. The form we use today is governed largely by the euphony required in a phrase and partly by custom. Thus we speak of Red Devon Cattle, and we used to speak of Devonshire cream.
BOUNDARIES OF DEVON
On the east Devon is bounded for the most part by the county of Somerset, with a few miles of Dorset at the southern end. The exact date of the fixing of this boundary is not known, but it has been suggested with considerable authority that Devon was one of the seven shires known to have existed in Wessex during the second half of the
8th century. Charters attested between 757 and 778 have the names of seven men, who are evidently the ealdormen of shires, of whom one Scilling was most probably ealdorman of Devon.1 But the boundary with Cornwall was probably not finally determined until the time of Athelstan (925-39), when it was fixed on the Tamar.2
The eastern boundary of Devon today is not the historic boundary. In
The western boundary of Devon has a curious history.
The great tongue of which we have spoken covers some nineteen square miles and consists of the two large parishes of North Petherwin and Werrington. These parishes have always been included in the archdeaconry of Cornwall for ecclesiastical purposes, but are still in Devon for all other purposes. They were already included in Devon in
It is almost certain that the Tamar had been the original boundary along its whole length, except for the parish of Maker at its mouth, and that the transfer of these nineteen square miles from Cornwall to Devon took place silently when Baldwin de Brionne, sheriff of Devon, held the farm of Harold’s and Gytha’s lands in Devon. As Werrington (the political name of this territory) was Gytha’s only considerable Cornish estate, it too fell under his administration. Such an arrangement suited the sheriff of Devon financially, for he paid an inclusive rent for the farm of the Devon lands and should have paid a further rent if Werrington had been officially known to be in Cornwall; and since the Exon Domesday returns were drawn up at Exeter under his supervision he had the opportunity also to set the official seal upon a deliberate fraud of the exchequer. The estate was therefore described under Devon in the final Domesday return, and as recently as
The parish of Maker, at the mouth of the Tamar and now so obviously a part of Cornwall, was in fact a part of Devon until
1842 and again in 1896 considerable changes were made, which took the parishes of Stockland, Dalwood, Chardstock, and Hawkchurch away from Dorset and added them to Devon, and transferred the parish of Thorncombe from Devon to Dorset. In addition, the parish of Churchstanton was transferred from Devon to Somerset. Before 1842 the two parishes of Stockland and Dalwood, deep in the Blackdown Hills, formed an outlier of Dorset surrounded by Devon, and Thorncombe was a Devonshire island in the county of Dorset.3 The Stockland, Dalwood, and Thorncombe transfers were made in 1842, the others in 1896.4 If we begin at its southern end, we follow the Tamar for half its length, to a point just north-east of Launceston. Here a great tongue of Devon, two or three miles wide and seven miles long, thrusts deep into Cornwall; but three miles farther upstream the river becomes the boundary again and continues (except for negligible breaks) to within a few yards of its source near the north coast. From this point a direct four-mile line down a steep, wooded combe brings one westwards to the Atlantic coast at Marsland Mouth.1086 and as they were entirely owned by the Devonshire monastic house of Tavistock it has been suggested that the abbot saw to it, when the boundary was drawn, that the whole monastic endowment on both sides of the Tamar was conveniently included in the one county.5 But until 1066, or shortly afterwards, this large estate had been included in the Cornish hundred of Stratton and was a part of the royal demesne which descended to Gytha, the wife of earl Godwin.6 Some time between 1066 and 1068, when Gytha left England for ever, she had transferred the estate to Tavistock abbey. There is evidence that it was still reckoned to be in Cornwall as late as 1084, but by 1086, when Domesday Book was compiled, the abbey had been deprived of it and it was included under Devon, where it has remained ever since.1929 a Cornish bill to restore the status quo of 1066 was defeated in a committee of the House of Lords.1844, when it was transferred. There can be little doubt that this curious enclave of Devon in Cornwall embodied a piece of history stretching back to the earliest days of the Saxon occupation (c.700), to a time when it was necessary to have a unified control over this important estuary.
AREA AND DIMENSIONS
The geographical county of Devon is the third largest in England, exceeded in size only by Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. It is, indeed, the largest single administrative area, covering (in
The population of the geographical county in
The greatest length of the county from north to south is about
Near the Foreland the Romans had established two signal stations to watch the Bristol Channel, one on either side of the headland. One was at Old Barrow Hill, to the east, and the other at the Beacon, in the parish of Martinhoe. These commanded the whole sea across to the Welsh coast.
From east to west, Devon is nearly as wide:
Within this great expanse of country lay some
In Devon the parishes range in size from tiny Landcross, whose
1939) 1,660,948 acres—nearly 36,000 acres larger than the administrative county of the West Riding and more than 300,000 acres larger than Norfolk or the North Riding, the next largest.1951 was 798,283. Of these, 284,000 live in the two county boroughs of Exeter and Plymouth, and a further 80,000 in the urban concentration of Torquay-Paignton on the shores of Tor Bay. Thus a total of 364,000 people live in the three largest urban concentrations. Outside these are three towns with 16,000 to 17,000 people each (Barnstaple, Exmouth, and Newton Abbot) and half a dozen smaller towns with 9,000 to 12,000 people. A number of small but historic boroughs, such as Totnes and Honiton, contain from 3,000 to 6,000 inhabitants. Finally, there are six more old towns which, though not boroughs for administrative purposes, have all the other attributes of a town, such as Ashburton and Crediton, whose population is between 2,500 and 6,000. Outside the three largest urban concentrations, however, one can say that the county is almost entirely rural, with large stretches completely uninhabited on Dartmoor, and wide areas in mid-Devon and west Devon only thinly peopled (25 to 100 per square mile).75 miles, from the lighthouse on the Foreland, that tremendous cliff that commands the entrance to the Bristol Channel, down to the southern look-out on Prawle Point, where Lloyd’s signal station reports all passing ships. Prawle, thrust well forward into the narrowing English Channel, has been a look-out station for well over a thousand years. To the first Saxons who made the rough passage round its point it was ‘lookout hill’: its Old English name was Prawhyll. In Domesday the hamlet behind the headland is called Prenla, but the form of Prahulle in 1204 is more recognisable. The modern English word ‘pry’ has the same Old English root.1 In Victorian London, before the days of the radio and the aeroplane, the message ‘passed Prawle Point’ was the first news of many a ship homeward-bound from the other side of the globe.73 miles from the Cornish border near Canworthy Water to the extreme eastern point by Birdsmoor Gate, that typical Dorset name—600 feet up on the downland, only two miles from the great Dorset landmark of Pilsdon Pen and all the Hardy Country below. The extreme western point of Devon is, however, not in the Petherwin-Werrington tongue, but on the Atlantic coast south of Hartland Point, on the cliff just north of Welcombe Mouth, with Hawker’s country all around and his parish of Morwenstow immediately to the south.450 ecclesiastical parishes, varying in size to a degree not found perhaps in any other English county.* We may broadly contrast the six square miles of the average Devon parish with the two square miles of the average Suffolk parish or the twelve square miles in Northumberland, but these bare averages are misleading. If we look at a map of Devon which shows us the skeleton of parish boundaries—and for this purpose the modern map showing civil parishes will serve adequately—we see beneath our eyes a pattern of lines that sets the mind asking one question after another. Such a map is as near a palimpsest as any map can be: its wavering lines, fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle, reveal to a patient scrutiny a good deal of early history which is nowhere else recorded. Averages conceal the truth; it is the variations that reveal it and kindle the historical imagination.331 acres are almost wholly contained within a bend of the Torridge above Bideford—so small that a curlew calling on the tidal mud can be heard all over the parish—up to the 17,650 acres of the parish of Tiverton which lie in two enormous halves on either side of the middle Exe valley.* There was at one time, indeed, a parish of only 52 acres—Broad Nymet, with its own rector, which was absorbed into Nymet Tracey hardly more than a century ago. At one end of the scale, eight rural parishes have fewer than 500 acres, and 36 have fewer than 1000 acres. At the other end, 12 parishes undulate across more than 10,000 acres, and these are by no means the wild and empty moorland parishes. Half of them are, but half are not, and to that extent they are historically interesting, in their very size and shape, before we begin with their recorded history. The way parishes fit together, the way they group themselves into compact blocks suggesting an older unit of settlement before parish boundaries were drawn, the relationship between tiny parishes and giant ones, the shape of parish boundaries and the way they run, all these matters of observation furnish clues to the early history of the colonisation of England in the centuries before written evidence becomes available, if only we knew how to decipher it all.
TOPOGRAPHY AND GEOLOGY
Devon is shaped like a trapezium, with its shortest side washed by the Bristol Channel and its longest by the English Channel. It is one of only three English counties—Cornwall and Kent being the other two—to possess a north and a south coast, and with the exception of Cornwall it has the greatest proportion of coastline to area of any county. The sea thus plays a large part in the climate and the history of the county from the Bronze Age onwards, the more so historically because Devon is connected with the rest of England only by a narrow neck of land between the mouth of the Parrett on the north coast and Lyme Regis on the south, a distance of
Not only was the connecting link with the mainland a narrow one; it was also difficult to traverse. The Somerset levels were always deeply flooded in winter, and beyond them to the west one saw (as one sees today from the Great Western railway near Taunton) the long dark mass of the Blackdown hills to the south-west and the less massive but wilder hills of Brendon to the north-west, almost meeting to block the way into Devon. There were, historically, only two narrow gateways into Devon from the rest of England: the northern gap between the Blackdowns and the Brendons, and the southern gap, less conspicuous, through the Axe valley. These are the historic landward entrances into Devon from Saxon times onwards; and in the
The contoured map of Devon makes an intricate picture, one which appears at first sight to defy any reduction to simple statements, with thousands of little streams in their combes, hills tumbling away in all directions, ragged and indented coasts, and a variation of surface every mile or so.
There are, however, a few fundamental facts which help to reduce the tangled mass of topographical detail to a semblance of order. Most important of all—the master-key to the topography of Devon—is the granite boss of Dartmoor, a broken tableland some twenty miles from north to south and fifteen from east to west. There are
This core is all that remains of an antique volcanic region which once formed either a single volcano or a series of cones. If the former it must, from the extent of its site, have constituted a Devonian Etna some
Dartmoor is the Great Source. Its granite produced the stone for votive columns, propitiatory altars, and sacred avenues; for huts and houses and barns; for burial chambers; for the walls of man’s earliest cornfields and cattle pounds; and long afterwards for his soaring church towers and his Christian tombs, and for London’s streets and bridges. Its lavas went to the building of the dark basalt walls of Roman Exeter in the third century, to the vaulting of Exeter cathedral in the thirteenth; its tufas to the making of Tavistock abbey and to the creation of modern Tavistock town, built of the green volcanic ash of Hurdwick. And its limestones have been altered here and there by heat and earth pressures, and contribute building-stones, marble monuments for churches, and the glistening rainswept pavements of Plymouth:
Never hath anger so much beauty made.
Behold his passion into marble cooled,
His burning ashes into fields allayed,
His frowns fair streams ...
From Dartmoor flow in all directions the chief rivers of Devon—all except Tamar, Exe, and Torridge, and even they are abundantly fed by Dartmoor streams. These radiating rivers enriched the fertile lowlands and attracted early farmers. Towns grew up where the rivers broke out of the Moor, as at Tavistock and Ashburton; and where they widened into estuaries little ports arose as early as the
Not only did the Moor yield stone for the expression of man’s religious beliefs—his pagan avenues and his Christian monasteries and churches—over a space of four thousand years, and for the building of his houses and the shelter of his animals. It collected on its broad back nearly all the water of Devon and dispersed it down the deep valleys at every point of the compass. And there was, too, the rich mineral treasure, produced by the acid vapours once given off by the granite at high temperatures. These vapours, penetrating the lodes and rifts, gave rise to tin and other metals, and also over large areas altered the granite itself by a process known as kaolinisation, thus producing china-clay. Mining has been carried on, from the
And on the Moor dwelt, in a kinder climate than today, the earliest settlers of whom we have any real knowledge, the farmers of the Early Bronze Age with their little corn-plots and their flocks and herds. Apart from the lone, nomadic figure of palaeolithic man, in numbers quite unimportant, we may regard Dartmoor as the earliest home of man in Devon, the beginning of forty centuries of continuous human occupation in the south-western peninsula of England.
The other fundamental fact about the topography of Devon is the dividing-line between the old rocks and the new—the so-called Tees-Exe line—which reaches its southern terminus on the shores of Tor Bay. The ancient city of Exeter stands at this great geological junction: and from the city walls one looks westwards over the Exe to the high, rolling, pastoral and wooded hills of the old Culm Measures, and eastwards over the lower, more gentle and more richly cultivated Permian and Triassic sandstones. It is sometimes said in jest that the Midlands begin at Exeter, and there is a geological sense in which this provocative remark is true: but it is truer to turn these words around and to say that the West begins at Exeter, with that steep climb out of the city into the emerald-green hills, from whose summit, only two or three miles from the cathedral, one sees the dark bastions of Dartmoor ahead; from Dartmoor the jagged outline of Bodmin Moor lies against the western sky; and from Bodmin Moor one looks on towards ‘dark Bolerium’, to where out of sight the Atlantic surges unrestingly against the granite of the land’s end.
This junction of the old and the new rocks is also the boundary between the Highland zone and the Lowland zone, a division of fundamental importance in the prehistory of Britain. The country west of the Exe closely resembles Cornwall in structure and topography, increasingly so as one goes farther westwards. In the Hartland peninsula of north-west Devon the landscape is almost purely Cornish in its appearance and feeling. East of the Exe, the new red rocks link Devon geologically with the Midlands, just as the cretaceous rocks of the extreme east of the county link it with southern and south-eastern England.
The Exe is, however, only an approximate boundary between the two great zones. A narrow band of the red rocks runs down to the shores of Tor Bay, at Paignton, where the red cliffs end; and immediately west of this band is the Haldon plateau, which is a detached remnant of the cretaceous plateau of east Devon. Moreover, the new red rocks thrust two tongues westward into the older landscape, one to the west of Tiverton and another, much larger, for over twenty miles through Crediton and North Tawton, as far as Hatherleigh. On the other hand, the older rocks appear some miles east of the Exe at Holcombe Rogus (near the Somerset boundary), south of Cullompton at Ashclyst Forest, and in the wooded hills immediately to the north of Exeter. These intrusive tongues have the effect of dovetailing together the old and the new rocks in Devon, and also produce some interesting local variations of scenery and of human settlement.
When we pass beyond this elementary division of the old and the new rocks, to look more closely at the details of the geological structure of Devon—for it is quite fundamental to an understanding of the prehistory and early history of the county—we are faced with a most complicated scene. The coloured geological map of Devon is a delight to the geologist and the topographer, with an eye to the infinite variety of its detailed changes and their effect on scenery, human settlement, and land-use. The historian, too, must face its complexities as resolutely as he can. Much of the pleasure and value of local history and topography remains beyond reach if one is content to remain ignorant of geology. There is hardly a single aspect of local history, whether we are looking at documents or the landscape itself, that is not illuminated to some degree, sometimes completely explained, by a knowledge of the underlying rocks. At times like these the arid jargon of the geologist, which we have laboured to understand, is transmuted into a kind of poetry. The carving of a Norman doorway in a small country church, still bold and clear because the Normans knew so well how to select the best stone from the quarry, gives us all the more pleasure if we recognise also the stone they chose and if we know its nearest outcrop, so that we can go on down the very lane up which they brought it when Henry II reigned at Westminster and Bishop Bartholomew reigned at Exeter, and push through the tangled undergrowth to the deserted pit itself. Here the red or purple or green rock still glows with colour in the afternoon sunlight, birds fly in and out of the trees and bushes that nearly fill the hollow, and sulphur-coloured butterflies flutter against the warm rock face. Out of this pit, we reflect, came the east gate of medieval Exeter, or the blood-red tower of the great collegiate church at Crediton, or the simple Norman doorway at Loxbeare, or the green and vanished splendour of Tavistock abbey. There are a score of building stones in Devon, and there are several hundreds of deserted quarries, in fields or hidden in woods, and their history is mostly written only in the buildings within a short radius of them. Very occasionally the stone came from outside Devon: to find the quarry out of which the noble
Nor is the importance of geology to the historian by any means confined to the visual. As one travels from church to church, noting the stone used in fonts, arcades, walls, mullions, towers, or in the larger houses and farm-buildings, one sees how far afield some particular stones were carried—especially granite and Beer stone—and one is led to speculate on the economics of the medieval building industry which could move such weights (often by road) over considerable distances, and on the economics of the society which could meet the cost of all this building, a burden far beyond the means of the impoverished
One may say, in the broadest outline, that north and south Devon consist almost entirely of slates and sandstones of Devonian age, which occupy altogether one-quarter of the area of the county. The whole of central and west Devon is covered by the carboniferous series known as the Culm Measures,
These three regions together constitute the ‘old rocks’ and cover about four-fifths of the county. East of the Exe we find the Permian and Triassic rocks, mostly red sandstones and marls, covering about
Altogether, the ‘new rocks’ make up only one-fifth of the total area of the county. The scenery which is so commonly regarded as typically Devonian—the deep and fertile red earths contrasted with a luxuriant green vegetation—occupies in fact only one-seventh of the total area. The greater part of the county shows landscapes that are strikingly different in their scenery and their agricultural possibilities from the ‘red land’. Large tracts of Devon were, and still are, relatively infertile, and their entire history has reflected this geological fact.
One other fundamental geological fact is less obvious: it is the existence of three great platforms at
The
The existence of these high-level platforms, particularly those at
Once again we see that the generally accepted ideas of the topography of Devon do not bear close examination. It has often been argued or implied, for example, that the open-field system, so characteristic of Midland agriculture, never existed in Devon—or certainly not on any appreciable scale—because the hilly surface of the county precluded it. But, in fact, great stretches of the Devon landscape are plateau-like, either flat or gently undulating for miles, intersected—sometimes closely but often only at great intervals—by steep-sided river valleys. This is particularly true of the Culm Measures country, which stretches from the Somerset boundary on the east to the Atlantic coast on the west, and from the shores of Barnstaple Bay southwards to the foothills of Dartmoor. Many other tracts of the county are also plateau-like, such as parts of the South Hams, where wide views disclose remarkably level horizons. We shall see, in fact, that the open-field system of agriculture was widely established in all parts of medieval Devon, though possibly in not quite the same form as the classic Midland pattern. It would indeed be truer to say that the topography of the greater part of Devon presented not the slightest obstacle to the development of the open fields. Neither the Culm Measures nor the Permian and Triassic landscapes offered any serious physical obstacle beyond those to be found in most parts of England.
35 miles. From the top of Windwhistle Hill, almost on this narrow neck, one can on a clear spring evening discern the sea shining to the north and to the south. Beyond this neck, the peninsula of south-western England thrusts westwards into the Atlantic for 130 miles or so, widening into a solid block in Devon, more than 70 miles across, and then tapering rapidly down the length of Cornwall.19th century the two main railway lines from London to Exeter tunnelled their way through the same gaps at Whitehall tunnel (G.W.R.) and Honiton tunnel (L.S.W.R.).300 square miles of visible granite, but if we add to this the aureole of altered rocks affected by the granitic pressure the central core covers some 400 square miles.18,000 feet high—a massif even grander than the Etna of today. If the latter, its active peaks, rising from the coastal waters of the Devonian Sea, may very well have resembled the Lipari Islands as we know them. In either case the underlying granite was itself lifted or thrust upward in course of time, and at all periods it was penetrated by veins and dykes of fresh intrusive lava, forming the elvans. The sequence of eruptive periods is thought to have continued into Carboniferous and post-Carboniferous times. The last act was a long process of denudation during which wind, frost, and rain (and possibly ice also),1 wore down the superincumbent rocks, through thousands of feet, to the granite itself—down to the original magmatic reservoir. The present average height of the Moor is only 1200 feet above sea-level. It is likely that Brentor, so like a volcanic cone as one sees it from afar off rising from the surrounding plain, is a fragment of a crater of this old volcanic region. Further evidence is given by the tufas or volcanic ash of western Devon, by the lavas of the Exe and Teign valleys, and by the far-carried ejectamenta found in the breccias. The deep-seated granite had cooled under enormous pressure, thus causing the wide-spaced joint planes which, on exposure, bring about the weathering into giant blocks. The more resistant of these form the tors which today rise from the whale-backed tableland (plates 27, 28). At times their demonic silhouettes resemble the man-made statues of Easter Island, most notably at Bowerman’s Nose near Manaton.10th century, as at Totnes and Barnstaple.12th century down to our own day, on the Moor and its foothills.14th-century arcades of Bratton Clovelly came, or that dove-grey south arcade of Sampford Courtenay, we have to cross the border into Cornwall and penetrate to the Polyphant quarry in the parish of Lewannick: but such a pilgrimage outside the county is not often necessary.20th century. A working knowledge of geology is indispensable for any study of the medieval building industry, for any detailed study of the settlement and colonisation of the countryside, and for its subsequent agrarian and mining history.1 which occupy rather more than two acres out of every five in Devon; and the granite boss of Dartmoor occupies one acre in nine.15 per cent; and east of these again is the cretaceous formation (mostly a high greensand plateau) covering rather less than 5 per cent. Small post-Tertiary deposits make up the remainder of the surface. South-western England was never covered by ice-sheets, and the drift deposits which are so important in other parts of England are wholly absent in Devon and Cornwall.1,000 ft., 750-800 ft., and 430 ft., respectively. All these platforms are of unknown age, arising from maritime erosion of older surfaces over a wide area, the wearing-down of ancient hills and mountains, with the worn and levelled surface subsequently uplifted to its present height. The 1,000-ft. platform is best seen around Moretonhampstead. Some of the waste material from this area has filled the deep basin around Bovey Tracey, which yields brown coal like that of Germany, but is more important for its valuable ball-clays, used in local and distant potteries.750-800-ft. platform is seen most clearly on the western side of Dartmoor, where the famous Lydford Gorge has been cut deep into it. The 430-ft. platform is most evident in Cornwall, but is traceable in many parts of Devon, especially in the coastal topography. The subsequent uplift of this plateau led to the rejuvenation of the drainage, with the result that the rivers rapidly deepened their valleys, so giving the characteristic steep-sided gorges of Devon and Cornwall (best seen in Devon at Lydford Gorge and Lustleigh Cleave). Successive uplifts also led to the drowning of the lower valleys of many rivers, so producing a number of magnificent, sheltered deep-water inlets of which those of the lower Tamar and lower Dart are the most notable.430 ft. and 750-800 ft., has had a profound effect upon land-use in Devon and upon agrarian history. Over large tracts of the county the flat surfaces of these platforms are responsible for the bad drainage of the land, despite its elevation, above all on the poor soils of the Culm Measures. Then, too, the deep valleys incised in these platforms are generally too steep for arable cultivation, which is restricted to the drier plateau areas between the valleys. On the other hand, the depth of the valleys protects them from the strong winds, especially from the west, and produces thick woods. Trees are infrequent on the plateau, more and more so as one goes westward towards the Atlantic coast, and most farmhouses and villages seek the valleys or some sheltered dip in the plateau. And finally, the drowned valleys carry the moderating influence of the sea far inland, giving relative security from frosts in the valley-bottoms and encouraging the growth of flowers and fruit, as, for example, in the extensive plum-orchards at Dittisham on the Dart estuary, and the large strawberry fields of the lower Tamar valley. One should go to Tavistock in June to appreciate this best.
CLIMATE
The climate of Devon is as complex as its topography when we look into it closely. In general, however, it is governed by the geographical position of the south-west peninsula of England, thrust well forward into the mild, rain-bearing winds of the Atlantic. The county has two long coastlines, and a number of river estuaries running far inland, all of which help to spread the climatic influence of the sea. The other major physical fact is the existence of masses of high land in the peninsula which attract a heavy rainfall. In central and south Devon the great mass of Dartmoor, rising to summits of just over
Within the county the climate varies greatly from place to place, according to height above sea-level, situation in relation to open water, and comparative shelter or exposure. There are such local sayings as ‘as cold as Challacombe’: Challacombe is nearly
The highest parts of Dartmoor receive more than
Temperature and sunshine are the other climatic factors which are historically important. The south-western peninsula is the mildest area in Britain, its climate being tempered almost everywhere by the sea all the year round, though there is a greater range of temperature as one goes inland. The mean annual temperature inland is
Though the Devon climate is generally equable, extreme temperatures occur, as in all parts of Britain. In January
Snow is rare over most of lowland Devon: it lies less than five mornings a year on low ground, rising to more than twenty days on the higher parts of Dartmoor, and perhaps to more than thirty days on the
The south coast of Devon is one of the sunniest regions of the British Isles, though not quite so sunny as that of Sussex. On the north coast the daily average of sunshine all the year round is
The humidity and cleanness of the air all over the south-western peninsula encourage the growth of lichens and mosses, even more so in Devon than in Cornwall owing to the great variety of the geological strata, and this adds to the colour and tone of buildings in any kind of stone. Much of the rich winter colour of Devon arises from the brilliantly coloured lichens, which stand out all the more prominently when the trees are more bare.
The climate of Devon has been an important historical influence in various ways, above all in determining the kind of farming that has been carried on for centuries, and hence the kind of settlement over wide areas; and later in attracting a considerable class of people of independent means along the whole of the mild, southern coast, and well inland in the Vale of Exeter. The influence of this class upon the architecture and social life of the county during the past
2,000 ft., and in north Devon the tableland of Exmoor, rising to over 1,500 ft., both have more than 60 inches of rain a year. The high tableland of north-west Devon, so near the sea, gets over 50 inches, and the Blackdown plateau of east Devon over 40. The peninsular position of Devon, coupled with its highlands being so near the sea, gives it in general a mild, wet climate, with rapidly changing weather.1,000 ft. up, in a fold of Exmoor, and its Old English name means ‘cold valley’. Or they say that ‘the devil died of the cold at North Lew’. Now, North Lew is only 400 ft. above sea-level; but the wind pours for uninterrupted miles across the plateau of cold yellow clays round here, bringing fifty inches of rain with it. At the other extreme are the sheltered south-coast towns between Sidmouth and Torquay, mildest of all being Salcombe in the extreme southern tip of the county.80 inches of rain a year. At Princetown the average annual rainfall is just under 82 inches but a fall of over 100 inches is not uncommon. In 1882, 115 inches were recorded. At the other extreme, the estuary of the Exe, from Exeter down to the sea, gets slightly under 30 inches a year, and the greater part of the red-earth lands in the Vale of Exeter less than 35 inches. In general, however, a great part of Devon receives 40 inches or more annually, including a belt which stretches from the north coast at Clovelly almost to the south coast at Dartmouth, and thence westwards to the high ground at the back of Plymouth. All the high ground of north-eastern and east Devon similarly receives over 40 inches. Most of Devon can therefore be classed as a wet area, with something like twice the annual rainfall of the Thames valley (20 to 25 inches).50.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and 51.5 degrees on the coast, at sea-level in both cases. The mean annual temperature for January at sea-level is 42 to 44 degrees, as compared with 38 to 39 degrees over most of eastern England. The difference is slight numerically, but very real indeed to Devonians transplanted to eastern or midland England, and the winter landscape of Devon, still full of colour and life when the midlands are bleached with cold, speaks vividly of the difference of temperature between the two regions.1940, 30 degrees of frost were recorded at Cullompton, and 16 degrees even at Torquay. The severe frosts of the winter of 1946-7 ruined many fine sub-tropical gardens on the sheltered south coast. In summer, temperatures of over 90 degrees have occasionally been known: at Killerton, in the Vale of Exeter, 94 degrees were recorded in July 1923. Generally, however, a heat-wave in Devon is many degrees cooler than a heat-wave elsewhere in England.2,000-ft. summits of the Moor. Memorable falls of snow have occurred in January 1881, March 1891, Christmas 1927, and February 1929. In the great blizzard of 1891, still a vivid memory to old men all over Devon, which they resurrect in detail whenever the young exclaim at some modern snowstorm, many trains were embedded in snow all round Dartmoor, and the Princetown train was out of sight, except for the funnel, for several days on end.4½ hours; on the south coast it rises to 4.90 hours at Salcombe and 4.87 hours at Torquay. Even Plymouth, with nearly 37 inches of rain a year, averages nearly 4.6 hours of sunshine daily. At Ilfracombe, on the north coast, the corresponding figure is 4.22 hours. Fog is rare everywhere in Devon, except on Dartmoor.150 years has been very marked, and they are still an important and characteristic element in the population, much more so in the south than in the north; though even in the north the towns of Bideford and Barnstaple have a little of the flavour of Sidmouth and Torquay. And the holiday resorts of the south coast, especially, are almost the creation of the Devon climate, and have now become the major industry of the county.
Reproduced by Kind Permission of the History Press Ltd. An extract of A History of Devon by Hoskins, ISBN-13: 978-1845883942 .
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