Remains of a Year

By Bernard F. Carter

Delightful accounts and keen observations taken during walks and journeys capturing month by month the essence of the seasonal changes taking place over a year in the countryside. This eclectic collection of short narratives also encompasses some interesting character portrayals ranging from an impoverished tin miner, to an Earl and his family seat, along with personal recollections and a goodly dose of nostalgia.

These imaginatively written narratives have been likened to `a series of pictures painted with words' embracing such sights as a humble Dartmoor stream where `strands of green weed waved like the flowing tresses of a child running in the wind' to the sombre grandeur of Glen Coe where `dreary clouds were gashed asunder permitting a crimson stain to seep through like blood from a battle wound'.

This is a book to be enjoyed by all who appreciate the countryside and the treasures it reveals, if you only take the time to stop and look.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456778835

Bernard F. Carter

Bernard F Carter has a photographic background, but spent much of his working life as a Botanical Artist and Illustrator. Both professions allowed him to travel, observe and experience everything around him, thus was born his great love of the outdoors and in particular his passion for the English countryside. His imaginative and illustrative style of writing has been very much influenced by writers of the 19th and early 20th century, such as Richard Jeffries, Edward Thomas, Flora Thompson and Mary Russell Mitford to name but a few, all of who had a keen eye for intimate detail and highly descriptive prose. He is the author and illustrator of The Floral Birthday Book (Webb & Bower) and the small collection of Short Essays of the Tamar Valley. Over the years he has had numerous magazine articles published along with some poetry.

Book preview

JANUARY

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JANUARY

The evening sky was flushed burgundy, pink and bronze with gun-metal grey clouds intricately outlined in gold as they massed billowing like smoke along the horizon. The earth already frozen grew even colder as rime crept stealthily over the countryside creating in the half light a scene that glistened and twinkled like the night lights of a far away city; and in the valley white vapour hung as it had done so all day gripped by the frosty air that lurked in the shadows untouched by what little warmth the sun had brought during the day. A small flock of twittering starlings gathered among the naked branches of a sycamore, plumage fluffed out against the freezing air of dusk as if waiting for a signal that would send them off to a roosting place for the night. Night crowded in from the east transforming the sky to a deep cobalt blue that descended to a fiery orange along the black, silhouetted outline running along the edge of the world. Darkness and frost encroached together silently beneath a black cloak, pin-holed with bright stars and hosting a luminous hoar-rimmed moon that silvered the frosted rooftops. It poured white light over everything producing sharp-edged shadows upon a landscape devoid of colour, and in the stillness of the night floated the distant sound of revellers and an occasional thump of fireworks as a new year was heralded in.

A few days later a dark, sombre sky pressed down upon the land and the first snowfall of the year began. At first it fell as small insignificant flakes drifting aimlessly on the wind past my window, hesitant as if uncertain of their role and reluctant to land on the frost hardened ground. However, within a short time the snow gathered momentum and large silent flakes fell purposefully from the sky snuffing out almost all visibility in a quest to cover everything in white. It fell with a vengeance and many things disappeared from the scene whilst familiar objects took on different forms as the snow smoothed out surfaces and rounded off edges with a plumped-up whiteness. Trees stood stark and naked, their fanned twiggy branches held out to catch the snow that highlighted them like a sketch in chalk and charcoal. When the heavy flurries of snow ceased for a brief respite a pale sun eased itself between thick grey clouds. The countryside was transformed to a sparkling whiteness stretching beyond the patchwork fields laid out on the distant hillside like squares of linen napkins sewn along their edges with dark lines of hedgerows, to the far away moors that rose and fell in frozen waves of hazy white. In a nearby tree two plump wood pigeons like corpulent business men squatted on a branch to view perhaps with concern the snow covered world that lay before them.

I

It was late in the month when I stood opposite the church of St. Thomas a Becket, the slanting winter sunshine falling on the ancient stones of its squat, square tower. The church is perched loftily on a hillside, a sentinel to the sleeping souls that lie beneath the cold grey headstones, veined with shadows cast by the leafless branches of the churchyard trees. Gathered around a few of the stones in patches of light, stood groups of fragile snowdrops, their heads glowing white and bowed in silent reverence. There was still some warmth to be felt from the weak sun as I set off up the stony track that lead over the confines of a railway bridge onto the soft green slopes below a tor. As I picked my way around the rocks on the short ascent to the trigonometry plinth, both my legs and my lungs informed me that I had spent too long in the studio since my last walk on Dartmoor. I gasped my way to the top the cold air making my teeth ache, but worth the slight discomfort for the view back over the vale and beyond. Gaining my second wind I trudged away in the direction of Great Links when I came upon a walker who had stopped to harness his wilful collie who quite obviously harboured notions of mischief. The man peered out at me with pale eyes from beneath a wide-brimmed hat that shaded his face, thin lipped and sallow like taught parchment. As he fastened his dog to a leash he informed me that although the dog was harmless the collie had developed a penchant for boots in a strictly playful manner, regardless of whether the boots were occupied or not. Some walkers in the past had found this to be a little disconcerting causing a few to become rather unsteady on their feet as the dog mischievously clamped his teeth onto their boot. The two of them ambled away up the hill which I had just descended with only the dog looking back wistfully having been denied a tussle with my boots. I walked on and somewhere below in the valley, beyond the sound of bleating of sheep came the noise of people shouting and dogs barking to the rallying call of a hunting horn. Above me a few tossed clouds hung in an otherwise blue sky that was speared by the flashing silver tips of two jet planes crossing the vast emptiness leaving in their wake snail trails of white vapour.

Before long the finely grazed turf gave way to a stony track that was wet from overnight rain causing it to sparkle in the bright light like beads of scattered quicksilver. Running alongside was a small, gurgling stream of peaty water tumbling down the hillside on its momentous journey from moorland bog, to rushing river, to the expansive open sea. Looking west, layered clouds with bases skimmed flat hovered above the last hills and valleys of Devon merging effortlessly and unnoticed into the infant slopes of Cornwall. It was here that I passed the smooth rounded mass of Great Nodden, rising out of the earth like the humped back of a sleeping beast, its thinly worn, drab-green skin stretched tightly over its bulk revealing on the flanks, balding patches of grey granite scree. Cutting across the rough I waded amongst the grass tussocks, their heads covered in long, flowing manes like hair, dry, wind-combed and brittle. Soon I reached my second trigonometry point of the day. I leaned against the concrete obelisk and looked towards Cornwall as the chilling wind tore at my clothes and smarted my eyes. Although not a great summit at a mere 586 metres, it did however, serve to remind me how different it had been on the last such summit that I had stood upon over a year ago in the hot wind that blew across the top of Ayers Rock in the red centre of Australia. I had climbed the steep chain assisted and very exposed face of that huge sandstone mass in the heat of early afternoon up to its shoulder then crossed and skirted the numerous deep undulations, some of which held puddles of warm water in which swam what appeared to be sizeable tad-pole type creatures. Did they fall from the sky? On reaching the summit cairn I was rewarded with a 360 degree panoramic view of vast empty bush-land interrupted only by the nearby risings of the Olgas.

The grass carpeting the rocks of Great Links Tor, which resembled a folded heap of dirty grey washing, had been cropped to velvet by countless sheep, a dozen of which greeted my arrival with vacant stares before fleeing nervously in all directions. I sat with my back against a rock to eat a meagre lunch and scribble a few lines before the numbing cold penetrated my fingers. Stretching away to a distant horizon lay the sun-sculptured empty hills of Dartmoor and further still through a fine haze the sea gleamed like a strip of polished tin. Tranquillity settled all around as I took in the view spread out before me recalling how Daniel Defoe in his tour of Great Britain (1724-1726) was so dismissive of Devon as a ‘wild, barren, poor country’, which is rather condemning considering the fact that the nearest he came in contact with the moors was in passing through Okehanpton in the north and through Plympton in the south. Within earshot of a gurgling brook I came upon the isolated ruin of the aptly named Bleak House, its fragmented corner wall of dressed quoits rising in defiance against the yearly onslaught of wind and rain. It was a sobering thought to muse on lives being lived here in this shallow, isolated valley with little in the way of comforts apart from the fires that would have burned in the now cold and rubble strewn gaping hearth. It was built in this remote part of the moor to house the manager of the nearby peat works, and despite the costly venture of constructing a railway across the moors to connect the works with the local mainline station, it functioned for less than three decades before closing. It would seem that the moor has a history of discouraging money-making schemes. missing image file

I headed north to a distant flagpole and sat awhile in the sunshine of late afternoon the silence broken only by the croaking of a solitary crow passing overhead that flapped away to oblivion and the clinking of a hauling chain against the iron pole like a ships rigging blowing in the wind. The brown rusting pole that sometimes flew the red military warning flag was flaked and scabrous having been slowly eaten by wind, rain, snow and ice, and stripped of its paint to reveal the hard, cold bones of iron. Turning now in the direction of another tor I passed several dark gashes of peat in the hillside, where the moor unveiled a little of its age, crumbling like rich fruit cake and slightly warm to the touch. In the past, banks of peat like this would have been systematically cut away and used as fuel in the homes of remote moorland dwellers. The smell of fired peat is particularly distinctive. It burns with a warm richness that embraces the senses like the bouquet of a full bodied wine to such an extent that there is almost a colour to the smell. A fire of peat blocks will burn slowly with a steady glow and release a haziness that in the past would have hung like mist in the darkened room of a Hebridean black house, clinging to the skin and permeating the very fibre of your clothes. Unlike the harmful, choking smoke of a coal fire, peat enfolds you in a vapour that curls lazily upwards releasing the aroma of the age old earth as it glows within a circle of white ash. Suffused within its aroma is a simple nostalgia and I have smelt its fullness carried on the winds that play among the bleak mountainsides of Connemara. It was here where Morton on his travels around Ireland encountered the wild girls with flying black hair, flapping skirts the colour of blood, white naked legs and bare feet stained brown from the peat bogs that covered the harsh terrain like nimble fauns as they carried bricks of turf back to their rude hillside cabins. They may often have gone hungry, but nature always provided them with warmth.

A ragged gully filled with forested colonies of dark green moss that cloaked the sides like pine covered mountain slopes in miniature, brought me to the stacked rocks of a tor, blistered with crackled pale green lichen and surrounded by the brown spikes of last years reed grass. The air was now beginning to cool rapidly and it was time to be homeward bound. I took one final look over my shoulder at the distant grey outline of Great Links tor, the low sun striking its western haunch whilst above it a large lone cloud, silvered around its edges, hovered like an enormous airship darkening the rocks below with its shadow and plunging the tor into winter gloom. Within a few hours all would be engulfed by the darkness of night and only the sugar frosted grass would glisten in the light of a raw haloed moon and tenacious moorland sheep, misty breathed and sleeping would huddle for warmth in a sheltered hollow to escape the icy wind.

II

A few days later I travelled a road that closely hugged the edge of the moors. To begin with it snaked along the floor of a valley following the river amongst somnolent winter trees whose sturdy limbs, numbed by the cold and partly clothed in mittens of dark ivy pointed at the sky with crooked twiggy fingers like the bony, outstretched hands of a witch. Unexpectedly, a searching shaft of sunlight probed the hedgerow and fell upon heaps of curled beech leaves lending a false sense of bronzed warmth to an otherwise chilled, grey day. Leaving behind the cold, sheltered coomb the road now climbed a long hill to the tops where it ran alongside bleak, drab, washed-out high ground lightened only by a dusting of snow, like sieved flour powdering the rocky tors and their attendant slopes.

After dipping into a steep, woody hollow and crossing the river I turned off and parked. It is here that the lively river having been nudged off-course by the great bulk of a hill finally escapes the moors and no longer answerable to its demands, flees beneath a bridge to enter a short valley beneath trees that lean across the water to touch each other in a sylvan affinity. A little further on the river hurls itself headlong with untamed abandonment into a series of hidden chutes and deep, water-sculptured cauldrons, a place of concealed seclusion where in summer the dense canopy of trembling leaves whisper the secrets known only to them and to the flitting birds that play among the branches. Above the falls the waters ripple darkly over a pebbled bed under the stone arch of a disused and neglected bridge that once carried the traffic of centuries between Plymouth and Okehampton. It no longer feels the leaden footfalls of travel weary folk, or echoes to the clip-clopping of hoofed feet and the rumble of iron-shod wheels of carriages overhead; or the shouts of drovers guiding their herds of lumbering cattle, or a shepherd driving before him a turbulence of bleating sheep. No more does the pedlar, wise in his trade pass this way, or the unskilled tinker looking for a menial task at a cottage door; or a traveller’s vardo with a mahogany-faced driver and a lithesome, bare-footed young gypsy girl, head held high, skipping alongside with tresses of raven-black hair falling across her bare shoulders; and no longer does the gentleman of the road, the humble tramp clad in worn out clothes and worn-out boots, sleep out the seasons in his thin sackcloth, beneath the ash boles, beneath the sky, with a closeness to the earth, perhaps more so than any man. All once passed along this ancient footpath, track, roadway, perhaps seeking fortunes, perhaps following dreams, or quite simply finding life, whilst beneath the bridge a centuries old ford, still used today by livestock, once witnessed the passing corteges of the dwellers of remote moorland farmsteads, who crossed here bearing their dead onwards across the fields to be buried at the parish church that lies less than a mile to the east. Nature has since decorously claimed back the road for herself and it is now a highway for the fox or the badger to cross on their clandestine hunting forays, or for a nervous deer, ears cocked, ever alert that leaves only his cloven hoof prints in the soft earth and for the twitching nosed rabbits that burrow a home into the sides of the bramble strewn ramparts.

The old lane having swept down the hillside to cross the bridge where serpent-like tree roots prise apart its weary stones, rises to an old outhouse only to lose itself beside a tangled quince bush and an early burst of pale primrose. The stone outhouse holds the purpose of my visit for inside in the half-light is a stack of wood ready for logging. Sawn limbs along which once ran the pulsing life of great trees once outstretched and leafed to catch the sun now lay in an amputated pile, dry and dusty like old bones in a mausoleum. But now as everything outside is mantled in the blackness of night and the rain throws itself relentlessly at my windows in a frenzy of noise and the wind moans high in the chimney, those same logs of resin-scented pine and smooth skinned ash settle in the grate, crackling and hissing to the dancing curl of yellow flames spreading a glowing pool of warmth into the room. Here I sit in comfort, isolated from the world beyond the room and beyond my reach, reading Edward Thomas’s, ‘The South Country’, and conjuring in my mind the bucolic images that his prose so illustratively describes of times long passed, pleasantly enticing me away from the numbing realities and insensitivities of the present day.

III

The day was still held in the enveloping shroud of night and although I was travelling east it was some time before the sun appeared above the land to announce what was to be a cold, but bright day. During the night freezing air had silently frosted the countryside so that it now sparkled on the naked branches of the trees, the deserted fields, the tangled hedgerows that enclosed them and the tiled rooftops of farms and cottages as a dazzling sun made a sluggish effort to rise into a clear sky. Everything was still and hushed as if waiting for a call, or a sign that would herald the start of another day, for even the few sheep that I passed on my way, standing motionless in fields seemed frozen to the ground, their very existence released as misty breath that hung in the cold air. Away across the fields an isolated farmstead lay entombed in frost, but inside the shelter of the milking parlour warm bodied cows shifted impatiently in their stalls filling the air around with floating motes and sweet, hay-scented breath. In the yard outside a mountainous midden steamed warmly in the frosty air like the smouldering funeral pyre of a valiant warrior, who in the aftermath of a great battle was embarking upon his final journey to Valhalla and the magnificent halls of Asgard. Before me in the road, flying away only at the last second with flapping black wings like harbingers of death were two carrion crows feasting on the bloodied corpse of a rabbit that had become a victim of the night traffic.

As the morning got slowly underway the Dorset hills bathed in early light and shade and neatly dovetailing into each other rolled away on either side of me as I travelled past signposts that pointed enticingly down narrow lanes disappearing into Thomas Hardy country in search of villages and hamlets with such diverting names as Puddletown, Piddletrenthide, Hazelbury Bryon and Turners Puddle; lanes and hedgerows that have probably changed little over the centuries despite the changing world around them. Further along the road I passed the Dorset Red Signpost pointing to The Winterbournes Anderson and Bloxworth. This post along with two others were painted bright red, or so the story goes, to enable the often illiterate jailors escorting prisoners from Dorchester gaol to locate Botany Bay Farm where they would spend a night on their forced march to Portsmouth and eventual transportation to Australia.

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For much of the morning, white vaporous mist lay settled in the valleys pierced now and then by slender spires of ancient churches touched by sunshine and floating islands of