Tree visits

We chose Hembury Woods for our last outing from Ashburton from our Landranger map, on which it was marked as a nearby chunk of National Trust woodland, with a car park, bordering yet another bit of the River Dart. Landranger maps being, to my mind, the best of their kind in the world. Just the thing for the discerning holiday maker. Better and much more easily obtained than their French or US equivalents (these being the parts of the world that I know about). My theory is that we are just the right sized country for this scale of public service map - an inch and a bit to the mile - to work. A point to bear in mind if the Scots decide to leg it. Will the independent Scots lose their loss making, peat bog covering Landrangers?

One attraction, although we did not know it at the time, was the fact (culled this morning from the National Trust web site) that 'perched at the top of Hembury Woods with far reaching views over Dartmoor, the iron-age Hembury Hill Fort gives you a real sense of what it would have been like to live in a protected palisade'.

Found the car park without too much trouble, it turning out to be a very low tech affair, not even sporting one of those stone pillars doubling as a money box for those people (unlike ourselves) who are not paid up trusties.

Headed north east, down through the woods to the Dart, running approximately southeast at this point. Head up the river, then head back up west to the hill fort. There are some large beech trees, but a lot of the woodland is quite young, and remnants of dry stone walls tell us that much of the land was pasture until fairly recently. There are also quite a lot of signs of chain saw activity, with the managers of these woods having the same bee in their bonnet about mixed environments as the managers of our Epsom woods. So many people who are not content to leave well alone. I associated to a recent Simon Jenkins piece in which he suggested that there ought to be room for a party manifesto which promised to do nothing. Just to let things alone and stop the avalanche of legislation and regulation, for a while at least. Make all MPs promise to shoot grouse all year, rather than busying themselves in public affairs. I suppose letting them get into a lather about foxes is a step in the right direction.

And thinking of our dire balance of payments, we were not best pleased to find that the National Trust buy their padlocks from Brazil, from the outfit who sail under the brand name 'Papaiz'. Can they not find some heritage padlock maker, perhaps a company which has been hammering out padlocks in the depths of the Forest of Dean since the time of Henry VIII?

And so to the hill fort, graced with the sign illustrated and the site chosen for our picnic. For once I went along with the chain saw action, the motte and a ring around it having been cleared, which gave one a much better sense of what it might have been like. It was also the highest point for miles around with splendid views more or less all around.

At reference 1, I had been thinking of the Romans pushing into the wilds of Scotland. On this occasion I thought of the Normans pushing into the wilds of Devon, with this fort being some 5 to 10 miles northwest of the rather more substantial and roughly contemporary castle at Totnes. With one thought being that 5 to 10 miles was quite a long way to march and a small garrison perched on this hill above the river would not survive an organised attack by the surrounding & disaffected Saxons - who would not take prisoners. Were these Saxons on the edge of the Saxon world rather weakened by an admixture of surviving Celts, Celts who were there first and did not much care for either Saxons or Normans? Were the Saxons weakened by the loss of many of their leading men at Hastings? Was this small number of heavily armed and well trained Normans more than a match for any number of rabbling Saxons? A bit like us, rather later, at Rorke's Drift.

Back home I turn up my copy of Chibnall (1986), where there are no words spent on this fort, but Totnes gets a few mentions. It seems that Totnes was there as much to protect against raids from Ireland (to where many Saxons repaired in a huff after Hastings. What trace did they leave on the gene pool there?) and Brittany, as to hold down the grumpy population of South Devon. I also read that a lot of the Norman soldiers would have been paid, and might have served a lord many years in the hope of a bit of a farm at some point, rather as Roman legionaries were settled on the land when they had done (and survived) their 25 years with the colours. Quite a stretch given the life expectancy in those times, but not unlike, perhaps, the forty years that civil servants used to have to put in before they got their gold watches & pensions. But pay which would have to be found from somewhere, and one where to find would be to conquer new lands and levy a geld, following the viking precedent. Which was fair enough, given that the Normans were not that far from being vikings themselves.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/britannia.html.