by Tom Fort
The straight and blessedly level coast road runs between Slapton Sands and a beautiful and mysterious lake. This is Slapton Ley, the largest natural freshwater lake in south-west England. The upper section, east of the bridge that takes the lane inland to the village of Slapton, is not really lake at all, being choked by reeds and banks of mud with narrow channels of water twisting between. The lower ley, extending to Torcross, is open water fringed all around by reeds, very clear and mostly shallow, with one or two deeper holes. On the far side, away from the road, the reed beds are backed by trees with fields rising steeply behind.
The Ley has long been a haven for waterfowl. Our way is to nurture and cosset them and peer at them through powerful binoculars, but the inclination of the Victorians was to shoot them. For a long time the Royal Sands, a fine example of that now extinct institution, the sporting hotel, stood at the top of the lower ley near to what is now a car park. Built in sturdy stone, its walls thickly clad in creeper, it catered to the requirements of a steady flow of whiskered sporting gentlemen.
They were catholic in their tastes, those nineteenth-century shooters. Pretty much anything that flew or swam past their gunboats was considered fair game. Bitterns, bean geese, greateared owls, ospreys, great northern divers and other scarce birds were shot without a second thought. In 1863 a pair of Pallas’s sandgrouse exhausted by their flight from Central Asia were incautious enough to seek refuge at the side of the ley, and were promptly slaughtered – ‘it seems sad to reflect that these distinguished visitors should have met with so inhospitable a reception,’ a local historian commented.
But the chief quarry at Slapton Ley was the humble coot, which thrived there in great abundance; and the great event of the year was the Ley Day in January. A line of boats was stretched across the water near the hotel, each with a boatman and two sportsmen in it, each sportsman equipped with two guns. At a signal the line advanced, driving the coots towards the Torcross end of the lake, where more guns awaited them on the shore. Gradually the birds became more and more tightly packed until panic took hold. In the words of William D’Urban and the Reverend Murray Mathew, authors of The Birds of Devon: ‘The unfortunate coots . . . rose in one dense mass, churning the water with their wings, affording a spectacle long to be remembered by all those who have been fortunate enough to witness it . . . after rising, the birds swept back over the boats, being saluted with volleys from the gunmen . . . the execution was very great and the water was soon covered in the dead and the dying.’
As many as 1700 coots were killed in the course of the Ley Day. But the effect, in the opinion of the authors of The Birds of Devon, was largely beneficial: ‘We learn that notwithstanding the slaughter, the coots are almost as numerous as ever and the thinning out of the old stock has improved the health of the survivors.’
The angling was as highly prized as the coot shooting. There are records of ninety-one pike being caught in a day by one rod, and 800 perch to two rods. A delightful old-fashioned book called The Pike-Fisher by Edward F. Spence looks back over many thrilling days on the Ley. It was nothing unusual to catch twenty in a day averaging six pounds each, and there were plenty of bigger fish. His biggest took a wobbled rudd deadbait: ‘The rod was almost torn from my unexpecting hands and when the catch was on the reel it screamed like a heretic being cross-examined on the rack.’ Twenty-two pounds she weighed, ‘with a face on her as wicked as an Army mule’.
Alas there are no boats on the Ley any more, no fishermen, no fishing. The bird lobby, in the ascendant as usual, has decreed that the mating of great-crested grebes and other sensitive species would be disturbed by the company of anglers. The fact that grebes and fishermen coexist perfectly happily elsewhere, and that anglers have been denied a wonderful setting for their entirely peaceful and spiritually nourishing pastime, counts for nothing. The birders with their ’scopes and glasses and impregnable righteousness run the show. One consequence, inevitably, is that there is now no useful information about how the pike, perch, rudd, roach and eels are doing.
On the beach at Torcross I watched a lone fisherman sort his net close to the sea’s edge. He had already been out and had come back with a box of plaice, a sack of good Dover sole and a large ray, which these days is sold as skate. He was a one-man operation, generally fishing a mile or so out most days when the weather was not too fierce, selling his catch directly to the pubs and restaurants and doing all right. While he methodically untangled and straightened and folded his net, a sizeable boat was working very close to the beach not far away. He said it came from Brixham and was dredging mussels. The regulations were that they could only take mussels on the drift, with the engine cut, and not under power. There are a lot of regulations, he said. The bane of the poor fisherman’s life.
He was the last regular left, last in a long line. A hundred years ago the shore in front of the three villages of Torcross, Beesands and Hallsands was thick with boats and nets and fishing paraphernalia. Fishing the seine net was a co-operative venture. Acting on the signal of a lookout above the beach, the boats – four men to each one, three rowing, one to pay out the net – swept the water on the ebb tide. When the flood was running, the two ends of the two thousand yards of rope were rowed into the beach for the retrieve to begin. In rough weather trained Newfoundland dogs would be sent out through the waves to bring the rope ends in.
The catch – mainly of mullet, and of sole and other flat fish – was auctioned on the beach. The custom was for the oldest fisherman to take a handful of fine shingle and let it slip through his fingers. Whoever was bidding when the last grain fell took the catch.
Seining alternated with setting pots for crab and lobster along the crustacea-rich ledges west of the Skerries and between Start Point and Prawle Point. The pots were woven from lengths of pliant willow cut from age-old communally owned withy beds maintained in damp groves inland. As recently as the 1960s the willow saplings were still being cut in late winter and stacked to dry out before being woven into pots. But the old ways were on their way out; synthetic materials made for more durable pots, and mechanical winches made it possible to set and retrieve much longer strings than could be managed by hand.
Hallsands was the southernmost of the Start Bay villages. Charles Harper described it as being ‘built into the tall, dark cliffs just as house martins plaster their nests against the eaves’. It was precariously placed, but the village lived and breathed and fished (there was no other livelihood). There was a pub, the London Inn, and a shop, and thirty-seven houses with a population of around 120.
It is a grim tale. In 1896 the government’s Board of Trade gave the marine engineer John Jackson – later Sir John Jackson – permission to take sand and gravel from the seabed off Hallsands for use in enlarging the Royal Dockyard at Devonport. Dredging began the following year, after Jackson’s agents had given assurances that the excavations would soon be filled by shingle naturally shifted from elsewhere on the seabed. Over the next five years 650,000 tons of aggregate were removed, and the Hallsands beach began to sink. By 1903 the fishermen’s slipway was three-and-a-half feet above the beach; a year later the drop was six feet. By then the sea wall in front of the London Inn had slipped forward, the road had collapsed and the cottages nearest the sea were disintegrating. Thereafter each winter’s storms saw more and more of the village devoured, and in 1917 the decision was taken to abandon it altogether.
Even a hundred years later, the callousness and deceit of the authorities retain the power to shock. Even as Hallsands was literally sliding over the edge into oblivion, the Board of Trade officials were still insisting that it was all due to ‘natural causes’. A memorandum from the Treasury warned the inquiry into the tragedy that ‘if we offer a grant at once we shall only be pressed for more – the Hallsands fishermen are masters in squeezing.’ The masters in squeezing had been offered £1000 compensation between them, later increased to £3250 – less than £30 per person for the loss of everything they had ever known. ‘What are we
going to do?’ asked one of the dispossessed. ‘We have spent the whole of our lives here fishing. We know no other trade and we are useless.’
Although most of the village was lost, a few of the houses highest up survived. The last resident of Hallsands, Elizabeth Prettejohn, clung on until her death in 1964; there is an extraordinarily poignant British Pathé News film of 1960 showing her at the age of nearly eighty in headscarf and long skirt, feeding her chickens, while the sea that destroyed her community crashes away below the ruins of the other empty houses.
The Prettejohns were one of the long-standing Hallsands clans. Another were the Trouts, three of whom – all sisters – later ran a hotel on the clifftop. The last of them, Edith, lived on there as a recluse long after the deaths of the other two and the hotel’s closure. She died in 1975, by which time it was semi-derelict. The site is now occupied by a gleaming block of anywhere architecture called Prospect House and divided into ‘New England style’ luxury apartments.
Below the balconies and tennis courts and swimming pool and electronic security gates, the shattered vestiges of Hallsands still cling to the rock face. At the bottom the sea sucks and swirls over what was once the beach where the fishing boats were pulled up. Looking at the scene from the viewing platform – even the footpath has now been closed – it seems incredible that anyone could ever have lived here, and their way of life seems as remote as that of our Stone Age forebears.
19
POINTS, HEADS AND TAILS
2003 was the summer of superlatives: the hottest for a generation, the driest, the sunniest. The heatwave did not last as long as the one in 1976 but over the month of August the temperatures were higher. Across continental Europe it was the most intense for five hundred years. Forest fires raged, crops withered and perished, thousands of elderly people died of dehydration.
The Forts were short of cash that year so we decided to holiday cheaply. We bought a big tent on eBay and booked a pitch for a fortnight at a campsite a mile or so inland from Lannacombe Bay, which is roughly halfway between Start Point and Prawle Point. I had never camped before. I had no idea how to put up a tent, how to organise camp life, how to live cheek by jowl with strangers, how to cope with shared showers and fridges and the like.
In many ways it was like being back at boarding school, in the lack of privacy and quiet and in the consuming nature of the institution. We made friends with the family next door, the kind of friendship that of geographical necessity is suspended when the fortnight is up. I found, to my surprise, that I loved the simplicity of the life, the demands of the routine, the physical closeness of the grass and the earth. I also found the study of my fellow campers infinitely absorbing.
Each morning the sun rose somewhere over Start Point into a pale, flawless sky, irradiating the dew and the night’s cobwebs. Each night it sank beneath a band of crimson somewhere beyond Prawle Point, leaving the stars to prick the deep-purple sky. Each day we went down to Lannacombe Beach, a small wedge of pale sand caught between rocky outcrops at the end of a narrow, wooded combe between humps of grazing land.
The sea temperatures that summer were the highest yet recorded (the record was beaten in the summer of 2014), and the swimming in that clear blue sea was pure bliss. The oyster sand, the waving kelp, the rolling shoals of sand eels flashing like coins at your feet, the water easing around legs and shoulders, the sun warm on your head, shouts and splashes, children poking in rock pools, toddlers shaping castles in the sand, grandfathers bowling tennis balls at grandsons, grandmothers in chairs under umbrellas knitting or studying horoscopes, the lap of gentle waves on dark rocks, the feel of salt drying on your skin and of sand between your toes, the lengthening shadows and inescapable weariness of the return – these were just some of the elements of another enchanted day at Lannacombe. Fortunately memory combs out the other stuff – rows, tantrums, sunburn, gashed knees, altercations over bad parking and the rest – and leaves only the enchantment.
This stretch of coastline – hard Devonian schists broken and blasted into jagged, misshapen teeth – readily presents other, less kindly faces. The Start itself, with its white lighthouse, thrusts a fissured fist of rock out towards the Skerries, causing a rip of tide across its foam-white knuckles. On the balmy day of our visit to the lighthouse, the guide reeled off a litany of the ships that had come to grief in this treacherous place, and it all seemed rather interesting and slightly far-fetched. But take, for instance, a night in March 1891, the 9th, to be precise.
A collision between a high pressure weather system over the Atlantic and a deep low over northern France drove a succession of blizzards on a furious easterly gale against the coast of south Devon and Cornwall. With the light almost gone, the wife of one of the Start Point lighthouse keepers glimpsed a cargo ship looming out of the snow just beyond the rocks. As she reached another window she saw the SS Marana strike and begin to break in two. The crew managed to launch their two lifeboats into tumultuous seas. One foundered and all on board were lost. The other was forced east towards Prawle Point and was smashed against a ledge. Five men managed to reach the shore, of whom one died of his injuries, one froze to death and three survived to tell their appalling tale.
But the horrors of that night were not finished. A few hours later a Liverpool sail ship, the Dryad, with twenty-two men on board, was also driven onto the rocks below the Start Point lighthouse. Only one man succeeded in struggling ashore, but when the rescuers threw him a rope he had not the strength to grasp it and was swept away.
Prawle Point is faced across the mouth of the Kingsbridge estuary by the equally stern and rugged heights of Bolt Head. Sitting in a self-satisfied way at the narrowing of the estuary is Salcombe. I have been to Salcombe many times and have usually enjoyed myself there: netting prawns in the creek at the back of town near the slipway, watching lines of boys and girls crabbing off the walls, slurping at ice creams, walking out on the cliff road to the lovely gardens at Overbecks. But I have never been there without thinking that if there were to be a revolution, Salcombe would be as good a place as any to start it.
I am sure there are genuine Salcombites born and bred and resident year-round but in the season they are hardly to be seen. The town is occupied by Genus salcombii, blonde women in skinny jeans and £200 haircuts engaged in deep conversations about school fees, A-level choices and au pair problems; blokes in pastel polo shirts, shorts and canvas shoes nodding over their smartphones or discussing the preposterous cost of property in a purposeful way, as if they were actually thinking of buying. To encounter them swanning along the narrow streets with their intensely tutored offspring filling the air with their Sloanese drawling is to feel again for a moment the keen longing of forty years ago to change the world.
The climb from Overbecks to Bolt Head is a strenuous one, very strenuous if you are encumbered with a bike. The problem I was encountering as I went further south-west was the absence of suitable lanes or bridle paths to get me to where I wanted to be. This left the coastal path, which you are not supposed to cycle. I admit that I did cycle some stretches when I felt I had to. I always felt slightly uneasy doing so, as I am by nature law-abiding, but not that uneasy. When walkers objected, as happened once or twice, I always dismounted out of respect for their injured feelings and did not get on again until they were out of sight.
On a day in high summer 1588 thousands gathered on Bolt Head, eyes trained on the terrifying spectacle at sea. They had heard that the King of Spain, wherever that was, had sent a fleet, an Armada he called it, to conquer England because he was a Catholic and considered it his divinely appointed duty to overthrow our religion and replace it with obedience to Rome. It was a sight to inspire terror and awe: a crescent of great galleons, galleys, galleasses, hulks and support ships, 150 vessels in all; seven thousand sailors, 19,000 troops, enough firepower to sink the very much smaller English navy several times over. The spectators must have thought they were witnessing the prelude to catastrophe, and how nearly right they were
.
The Armada had first been sighted off the Lizard on 19 July. The English fleet under Lord Howard and Francis Drake put out from Plymouth but did not engage, keeping their distance as the Spaniards laboured up the Channel. It must have been during that manoeuvre that the Armada passed Bolt Head. On 23 July there was an indecisive engagement off Portland Bill, and four days later the Spanish fleet anchored off Calais. It was supposed to escort the Duke of Parma’s invasion force across the Channel to England, but neither the Duke nor his army were ready. Ten days later the Armada was decisively defeated off the port of Gravelines, and England and its Protestant Queen could breathe again.
It is small wonder that the Spanish became convinced that God had turned against their crusade. Poor preparation and leadership on their side, and superior English seamanship on the other, were certainly factors in the disaster. But they also suffered an ill-fortune with the weather so consistent and extended that divine displeasure seemed the only possible explanation. As it was, the wind that gave Lord Howard’s ships the weather gauge at Gravelines then turned into a full-blown westerly storm. The Channel blocked, the Armada sailed north, for home as they prayed; and the storm turned into a near hurricane, and half the ships were lost on the coasts of Scotland and western Ireland.
A footnote to the calamity was the fate of one of the Armada’s two hospital ships, the Saint Peter the Great, which somehow or other managed to find herself back in the Channel in November and was wrecked at the entrance to Hope Cove, a few miles west of Bolt Head. Her medical supplies and valuables were thoroughly plundered by the locals, but her starving and demoralised crew and officers were looked after kindly and eventually sent back to Spain. It is said that the timbers from the wreck were incorporated into a number of houses at Hope as well as the roof of the school in Tiverton and the pulpit of Exeter Cathedral.