by Rod Mengham
This simple act of restoration was the small tip of a large floe of renovation schemes. Two years before Sabine’s birth in 1834, his uncle Charles had remodelled Lewtrenchard church. All the medieval oak pews and the rood-screen were removed and replaced with deal box-pews, in keeping with early nineteenth-century taste. Seventeen years later when the boy was fifteen, he visited the family home and unearthed the remains of the old woodwork. At once he made himself a promise to restore the church, and hid the medieval carpentry where no one would find it. When he returned thirty-two years later, he reconstructed the rood screen, using the old fragments and a water colour drawing of the original arrangements. Local craftsmen were employed to produce this replica, which took twenty-six years to complete. Original works were also introduced into the scheme, and the church gradually filled up with an eclectic range of paintings, stained glass windows, lecterns, chandeliers and a great brass cross; all collected during Baring-Gould’s sorties across Europe. There were artefacts from Munich, Switzerland, Brittany and Belgium. The ensemble did not reflect the cultural history of a Devonshire church but the eccentric career of a dilettante.
Much the same was true of Lewtrenchard House, which underwent a complete transformation. The exterior was refaced with local stone; the interior remodelled according to Baring-Gould’s own design – he never engaged an architect for any of his building schemes. He introduced a projecting porch and built a library and a ballroom projecting at either end of the old hall, to produce the effect of an E-shaped Elizabethan house. It was a complete pastiche, and even incorporated a ‘1620’ date stone into the new work over the main entrance. The stone had been taken from another building altogether. Yet when the makeover was finished, Baring-Gould reputedly exclaimed, ‘It is lovely to be living at last in a genuine seventeenth-century house.’6
He indulged himself, yet earned a good reputation as both squire and rector. But he must have made frequent use of curates, given the amount of time he spent outside the parish. He was for many years the key figure in the Dartmoor Exploration Committee, and led many of its expeditions. The Grimspound excavation report was its first publication. And from 1890 onwards he was also heavily engaged in collecting the folk songs of Devon and Cornwall. The huge corpus of songs he amassed was later edited by Cecil Sharp, and Sharp’s reputation as a musicologist has certainly eclipsed that of his predecessors. But there is no doubt that Baring-Gould was responsible for the legwork, for jogging the memories of his aging and ailing informants (some of whom were bedridden and crack-voiced) and for recording their words.
But he was also tempted to change their words – and gave into temptation enough times to obscure the very unblurry line between what came out of the communal voice of popular culture and what came out of the mind of the cleric. His day job was the moral and spiritual instruction of his flock; and so he bowdlerised the songs of the West. Torn between preserving the authentic imprint of cultural memory and his own aversion to profanity, he suppressed everything that was obscene in content and toned down what was coarse in expression. The effect was acquiescent in the prudishness of the times, but it was also a bid to keep in circulation as much as possible of the sound and feel of a disappearing world. Baring-Gould’s folk song project turned out to be a very successful failure: it publicised the legacy of the ‘song men’ (and a couple of women) of the western counties; but only in his edited version. Plymouth Library holds a copy of the songs exactly as they were transcribed, and in some cases, the final versions are totally different. The corpus was published – with the specious subtitle ‘a collection made from the mouths of the people’ – in 1892, two years before the expedition to Grimspound.
Baring-Gould led the attack on Grimspound with his own reconstruction programme at Lewtrenchard under way, and his rehabilitation of the folksong project in the bag. He arrived fully prepared to edit, revise, repair and reimagine anything that stood in his way. He had already appointed George French as foreman, having worked with him before at Broadun Ring, another Bronze Age settlement site. French had recommended himself by displaying an enthusiasm ‘not surpassed by that of any of the members of the committee’, but his real value to Baring-Gould was his ‘long experience in wall-building’. This, and his ‘general practical knowledge, rendered his judgment in disputed matters of the highest consequence’.7 The conjunction of ‘disputed matters’ and ‘wall-building’ shows that there was opposition to the idea of restoring the ruined hut circles, although one of the larger huts, number three, was comprehensively restored. Lesley Chapman mentions in his guide to ‘The Ancient Dwellings of Grimspound and Hound Tor’ that the Dartmoor Exploration Committee also ‘repaired or rebuilt part of the enclosure wall’ and that ‘there were some members of the Committee who disapproved of the rebuilding’(Crediton: Orchard Publications, 1996). In his report Baring-Gould edits out all signs of disquiet or disagreement, and even presents the restoration process as an expression of shared purpose:
Owing to the remarkable condition of preservation in which this hut was, the Committee resolved to re-construct the walls where fallen, to bank them up with turf, and then to enclose the whole with iron hurdles; and to leave the floor exposed, with hearth, dais, and cooking hole, for the enlightenment of visitors interested in the pre-historic antiquities of Dartmoor.8
One such visitor, only seven years later, was Conan Doyle, whose imagination had no difficulty populating this stageset with the dramatis personae of his work-in-progress. But there are signs that Baring-Gould was bothered by the resistance offered by some members of the committee, in his repeating the same point about the system used to displace certain of the wall stones of Grimspound, but not others:
The turf was taken off from the entire surface within the ring, then the ‘meat earth’ was removed, and such stones as had fallen in were by this means exposed. Such stones, when loose and small, were thereupon placed on the walls, but all such as seemed earth-fast were left untouched.9
The Committee have been most careful not to destroy anything during the investigations. No earthfast stone has been consciously moved; only such fallen stones as were obviously out of place have been removed from the soil they covered; and the floors of the huts cleared of the accumulations of rubbish that lay on them… When the grass springs again, Grimspound will be as it was, excepting only that it has yielded up some of its secrets, and that it can be looked upon with an intelligent understanding of its purpose and the cultural stage to which it belonged, and no longer with vague wonder.10
Sheltering behind ‘the Committee’, Baring-Gould validates the repositioning of fallen stones – under the licence provided by the mere presence of George French, with his wall-building expertise – but the insistence that no ‘earthfast’ stone has been consciously moved is a refinement on the initial assertion that any stone fixed in the ground was left in place, and reads like the stirring of a guilty awareness that no system is foolproof. Moreover, Baring-Gould recruits ‘intelligent understanding’ in the service of reconstruction, mocking the ‘vague wonder’ of responses to the site before investigation. He also takes the unusual step of specifying how many committee members were present to supervise the workmen:
A further decision was arrived at that, whenever possible, two members at least should be present each day during the investigation… On three days only during the course of the explorations was a single member in charge, on six there were two to watch the proceedings, on six days there were three, and on one day five. On a single day only were the workmen engaged without a member of the committee being present to supervise…11
Out of a total of seventeen days, there were seven when supervision was satisfactory, six when it was no more than adequate, three when it was badly lacking, and one when it was totally lacking. The roll-call is not as reassuring as Baring-Gould would like it to be. Without proper supervision, the local labour would have reverted to unconscious habits of drystone building with the best material to hand, using stones that were the righ
t size and shape; tempted perhaps by ‘earth-fast’ stones that seemed loose enough to them.
As supervisor-in-chief, Baring-Gould had his own ‘wonder’ issues. The scale of Grimspound was enough to sponsor an imaginative reconstruction of the site that made it the pivot of the region and the epitome of a social and cultural revolution that would extend over a continent:
When, moreover, we consider that the circumference of the wall measures over 1,500 feet, it becomes obvious that such an extent presupposes some two hundred defenders. Presumably, Grimspound was not a fortified village, any more than it was merely a cattle pound, but was the oppidum, the place of refuge for the scattered population on Hookner and Hameldon, and the twelve householders within the enclosure were the oppidani, the guardians in time of peace. This was, as we know, the system among the Gauls, and the Gallic men of Iron who invaded the land now called France, almost certainly adopted this system from the Neolithic and Bronze race which they overcame, and whose land they occupied, and whose rites and superstitions they adopted.12
Baring-Gould adds one speculation to another; transforming a pound for stock animals into the last redoubt of a people whose social structure is conjured up out of Roman campaign reports written down a millennium later, with the anomaly removed by his own theory of cultural assimilation. His imaginative re-enactment of the Grimspounders’ last stand is the default mode of the historical novelist. By contrast, Robert Burnard’s report of the excavation he directed at Broadun and Broadun Ring over three weeks in August and September 1893 is a model of scientific restraint. In point of fact, the circumference of the wall at Broadun is greater than that of Grimspound, which casts a shadow over Baring-Gould’s daydream about Grimspound being the regional oppidum. Burnard’s approach is to describe and measure every feature of every hut circle; to list the inorganic materials used, and to analyse the organic materials (for example, to determine the exact type of wood charcoal found in any given hearth). Artefacts, such as worked flints, are carefully assessed. The record is meticulous and exhaustive. There is no speculation; no hypotheses about the inhabitants’ cultural identity or customs. The only comparative observation refers to a contemporary anthropological account of the cooking practices of the Assineboin people of North America, because like the Bronze Age inhabitants of Dartmoor, they too use cooking stones in cooking pits filled with water, rather than cooking vessels on open fires. And this single departure from what is otherwise an exhaustive inventory of finds, is only there to shed light on the total absence from both sites of even the smallest fragment of pottery.
One page into his report, Burnard discloses that ‘in my digging operations, I was accompanied for the most part by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould’,13 but there is no doubt that Burnard owned this operation and the way it was conducted. Their attitudes and objectives, their styles and methods, could not have been more different. Though opposite in many ways, both were natural candidates for leadership of the Dartmoor Exploration Committee. It seems most likely that Burnard would have been first to disapprove of Baring-Gould’s appetite for rebuilding parts of Grimspound. We do not know how this rivalry played out in the dynamic of the Committee and its various expeditions. In their reports, there is no indication of a power struggle, but it would have been bad publicity to reveal any evidence of discord in a society that brought recognition and respect to all concerned.
It was a different matter when someone else was authoring the report. Nearly twenty years after the initial excavation, Grimspound was made the highlight of the transactions of the Devonshire Association. After three and a half days of scholarly papers, public speeches and Council business, the fifty second annual meeting of the Association was rounded off with a visit to the site. Members of the Royal Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland had arranged to meet them there, to hear in situ a paper on the excavation. This was a big moment for Devon’s finest, when they could show off their best practice and gain national recognition. Naturally, Sabine Baring-Gould was asked to do the honours. He accepted, but on the actual day, Friday 25 July 1913, was ‘prevented’ from doing so ‘owing to an unfortunate accident’. What species of accident this was, is unclear, but it did not prevent him from attending – he was ‘well enough to be present at this historic gathering’. He must have known that his place would be taken by Robert Burnard – and it was.
Perhaps Baring-Gould had taken stock of what purpose this visit served for the Royal Archaeological Institute. They were there to check up. Before the local man was given a chance to open his mouth, the President of the Institute, Sir Henry Howorth, read the Riot Act. His delegation did not visit the provinces for their own amusement, but to bring the provincial societies into line with national standards of excavation. He admitted that ‘methods of archaeological research had improved’ in Devon since his own last visit to the county – which was a relief: for ‘there is nothing more wicked in the world, than the destruction of antiquities by antiquaries’. He then emphasised that ‘a great many churches had been utterly desolated by methods of what was called restoration’. This might have been aimed directly at Baring-Gould, in which case, the charge of wickedness would have stung the rector in him. Howorth then drew a parallel between church restoration and certain styles of archaeological excavation: ‘it was similar in the case of prehistoric monuments, where in many cases, people would dig in a most extraordinarily stupid way… What they now wanted was that the work of every cubic yard should be carefully mapped out.’ Cue Robert Burnard. Howorth’s ultimatum was a direct challenge to those thinking of excavating a site such as Grimspound:
‘Let me implore you,’ he concluded, ‘whatever plea you get for digging the site of a mound or any monument of primitive times, put an absolute embargo upon it unless the man in charge is a scientific man who understands scientific digging.’14
Burnard then stepped forward and coolly gave everyone an object lesson in precise and thorough description, before offering some conclusions that cancelled out Baring-Gould’s vision of Grimspound as the beating heart of an entire region – the sacred precinct of the guardians of the race. This was a summary dismissal of his colleague’s most cherished theory:
As in the case of the majority of Dartmoor ‘circles’, it could not be said that the finds and the state of the original floors of the huts gave any indication that they were occupied for any lengthened period. This confirmed the theory that Grimspound was never finished, and that the intention – if it ever existed – of making the place a kind of protected village, instead of a mere animal fold, was never completely carried out.15
As soon as this demolition order had been handed out to Baring-Gould’s dream construction, which had made a kind of Bronze Age Camelot out of an animal fold, Howorth stepped forward and heaped praise on its author, acclaiming Burnard’s paper as a ‘masterpiece for the amount of information it contained in a brief space, and its clarity’. Burnard carried himself with a professional restraint at all times and presumably would not have made a show of his pleasure at this public recognition of his qualities. But Baring-Gould must have been in a state of tumult.
And worse was to come. Howorth then turned aside to acknowledge his presence among them, an unexpected pleasure given the ‘unfortunate accident’ that prevented them from hearing a paper by him. The President of the Royal Archaeological Institute then paid him the savagely back-handed compliment of being ‘one of the most fertile and picturesque antiquaries in the realm’. In other words: we recognise Baring-Gould as part of the problem: that of ‘the destruction of antiquities by antiquaries’. He has an overactive imagination, and his concrete actions are governed by a desire to enhance the aesthetic dimension of the ‘visitor experience’ – as in the rebuilding of hut three for the ‘enlightenment of visitors’; or the rebuilding of his own home to arrive at a feeling of what it was like to live in a ‘genuine’ seventeenth-century house. The Rector of Lewtrenchard must have seen his life flash before his eyes at this point. And it was true t
hat much of it, from the age of fifteen at least, had been spent in pursuit of his own dreams – some of which took fictional form while others had been material interventions in actual sites and buildings.
The past itself was hidden behind versions, some scientific, some not. Baring-Gould knew that the most compelling versions fired the imagination, and that history would give way to legend, when the time was right. The time was the last long hot summer before the Great War, when his race theories were soon to break surface in the present, like an ancient organism spewed out by a peat bog. When the organism formed the basis of a superstition – like that of the Hound of the Baskervilles – careful, scientific reconstruction could expose it as a sham; but when it let slip the dogs of war, it played havoc with the real, and groaned for burial.
3 Rev.S.Baring-Gould, ‘President’s Address’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature, and Art [South Molton, July, 1894] (Plymouth: William Brendon and Son, 1894) pp.38–9.
4 Ibid, p.47.
5 Ibid, pp.47–8.
6 Bickford H.C.Dickinson, Sabine Baring-Gould: Squarson, Writer and Folklorist, 1834–1924 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), p.107.