Adding a coracle to our fleet of transport opened up the landscape to us in a whole new way. Much like having a kayak or a stand-up paddleboard, the coracle has given us access to the hundreds of kilometres of rivers and lakes across the country that are often difficult to access on foot. Powered only by the soft movement of the oar (if you paddle too manically you just go round in circles), its quiet nature has allowed us to get closer to nature and become more immersed in the wild landscapes of our waterways.
In spring we decided to spend a long weekend along the English Riviera, complete with a long-awaited visit to Agatha Christie’s house Greenway on the banks of the sparkling Dart estuary, now managed by the National Trust. To finish the weekend, we brought the coracle along in the back of the camper van, hoping to find a quiet stretch of the River Dart for a voyage under the golden light of a summer evening. I love Dartmoor. The last time we visited I bought a book of ghost stories and folk tales that had arisen from the vast moorland over thousands of years of human civilisation. Besides pixies, headless horsemen and numerous appearances by the Devil, Dartmoor had come to be known as the lair of the yeth hound, the spirit of an unbaptised child that had taken the shape of a black, headless dog after death. He was thought to roam the forests at night, wailing into the trees – despite his lack of a head – returning at dawn to his master, the Devil.
Historians believe that Sherlock Holmes author, Arthur Conan Doyle, was inspired by the yeth hound when he wrote his bloodcurdling 1902 tale, The Hound of the Baskervilles. This story terrified me from a young age – not because of the story itself, but because we had the 1982 Ladybird version on our family bookcase, complete with a ghoulish green canine apparition on the front. The plot is believed to have been based not only on the yeth hound but also on the legend of a seventeenth-century squire called Richard Cabell who was known as a monstrous man with a thirst for hunting and was rumoured to have murdered his wife. He lived in Brook Hall on the edge of Dartmoor, and on the night he was laid to rest in the sepulchre, a phantom pack of hounds came baying across the moor to howl at his tomb. From that night on, Cabell and his hounds haunted the moors; in an attempt to lay his soul to rest, the villagers placed a huge slab over his tomb and erected a building around it.
However, we didn’t only need to look to fiction to work out why Dartmoor had such an eerie reputation. It was also the home of a 200-year-old prison, once thought to be inescapable and originally built to house prisoners of war during the Napoleonic War with France. At this time, thousands of soldiers were taken prisoner and kept in derelict ships called ‘hulks’, but they were so unsafe that an isolated facility was built on the remote moors of Dartmoor, and at its peak the prison population rose to 6,000 French and American soldiers. More than 1,000 of these died from the horrific conditions inside; their bodies were buried first on the moor, then exhumed and buried again in two cemeteries behind the prison. After the war the prison lay empty for years before being reopened as a minimum-security civilian prison. It became a holding centre for conscientious objectors during the First World War, and was then reopened in 1920 as a facility to hold some of Britain’s most violent and dangerous criminal offenders. This gave it the reputation it still holds today for being a merciless, powerful and inescapable fortress – a reputation that is not only inaccurate (prisoners have escaped in the last century) but also disregards the fact that it has an effective rehabilitation and education system where prisoners are able to earn a living, learn new skills and pursue an education to prevent them from reoffending, thereby allowing them a second chance in the outside world.
Dartmoor was undoubtedly an eerie place, but within that eeriness lay its beauty. Dave and I loved visiting the West Country, and I knew that if ever I were to move away from south-east England, I would like to live somewhere between the crumbling, fossilised cliffs of Lyme Regis and the cobbled lanes of St Ives. The last time I’d been down here, however, was not with Dave but to visit my friend Tom the weekend after I’d built my coracle. Tom writes books about cats and people and landscapes, and he had kindly offered to show me the wild beavers that had started breeding on the River Otter, just a few kilometres up the coast in the village of Otterton.
On the River Otter, there are currently around 25–30 Eurasian beavers, a native mammal that disappeared from English waters 400 years ago when they were hunted to extinction under the watch of Henry VIII. In a mysterious twist, the beavers have now returned to the river and nobody knows how, but many people believe they escaped or were deliberately released by conservationists. Now the wild beavers are here, Natural England have issued a licence to the Devon Wildlife Trust for a five-year study to measure their impact in England, and I couldn’t wait to get down there and meet the latest additions to our rivers for myself.
Like all wildlife that has evolved in our ecosystems over thousands of years, the beaver has an important role to play in river maintenance in Britain. Contrary to popular belief, they are vegetarian and do not eat fish, but instead snack on plants like the invasive, non-native Himalayan balsam. They also create a wide range of extra habitats within river systems, like small pools and riffles, and by reducing the amount of sediment coming down the river they can help keep their habitats more stable and reduce the risk of flooding. All in all, research has shown that the reintroduction of beavers increases the biodiversity of our landscape, creates and expands precious wetland areas, improves water quality and minimises the impact of high or low water flows.
I was reminded of the gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, where scientists claim the wolves’ reintroduction has restored the ecological balance that disappeared when they were eradicated in 1926. A native resident of the Rocky Mountains, in which Yellowstone is situated, gray wolves were nonetheless seen as a dangerous predator and were hunted without restraint, along with coyotes, bears and mountain lions. After the last individual was shot, the population of elk began to rise and to overgraze on aspen, cottonwood and other woody, deciduous species of vegetation. Park rangers then had no choice but to cull elk numbers to protect the biodiversity of the park – a task that wolves, which had evolved as a natural predator of the elk, would have once undertaken. In the 1990s, a selection of captured wolves were brought in from Jasper National Park in Canada, and left to see if they could tip the balance back to a more natural, sustainable Yellowstone habitat. After some time, conservationists observed that not only had the wolves started preying upon the elk, but their presence drove the elk away from places where they could be easily trapped, such as gorges, valleys and rivers. With fewer elk to overgraze these areas, the vegetation started to regenerate, with the height of some trees increasing fivefold in just six years. With more trees came more songbirds and beavers, and when the beavers built dams along the rivers, otters, waterfowl, reptiles, amphibians and fish arrived, drawn in by the microhabitats created by the beavers. The wolves also killed coyotes, which increased the numbers of their prey species like rabbits and mice, and with their increase, large mammals and birds of prey started to arrive. Even more amazingly, the newly regenerated vegetation helped to stabilise the riverbanks, stop the sides collapsing, and stop soil eroding into the water, changing the entire shape of the river.
If an entire National Park in America could be affected by a handful of wolves, I couldn’t wait to see how the beavers might change our landscape to the benefit of wildlife and people. So, after a long ramble around the Dartington estate and a pint of dry cider, we drove to Otterton at dusk and walked along a path leading out of the village and onto the banks of the Otter. Beavers are crepuscular creatures, emerging at dawn and dusk to fulfil their chores before returning to the lodge – marked by a ramshackle heap of twigs – to sleep in the day. We waited for the sun to sink away fully while a woodpecker on the far bank entertained us and then, as darkness fell, we wandered over to the lodge built into the bank and settled down, examining the paw prints and gnawed logs nearby. All was quiet. Another pair of wildlife watchers
nearby looked over at us knowingly, their eyes radiating the unspoken question: ‘Will they appear tonight?’
Soon the sun had disappeared and the river had grown quite dark … and then plunk. Two beavers emerged from the lodge and slipped into the water. If I hadn’t known what they were I’d have sworn they were otters, their oily coats gliding through the river like mottled boats. The female of the pair swam to the bank to fetch a strand of balsam, which she crunched off with her teeth and carried back with her to the lodge, head raised above the water like a dog. She then slipped off to an overhanging tree, crawled out of the water and sat roundly on her haunches, pulling leaves from the low branches and gathering them up in her paws.
Meanwhile, the male had disappeared down the river, so we crept along the bank in search of him. He floated along like a log lost in the current. I lost sight fairly quickly but, stepping down closer to the water, soon heard a soft growling sound that forced me to look down. An angry beaver was sitting a metre from my boot, blatantly irritated that I had disturbed his evening routine. In the twilight his fur shone like wet gold, nose wriggling in the air and flat, leathery tail resting on the bank.
For a while we watched them sweep up and down the river, gathering plants and bustling about in the waterway, until it grew so dark that we were forced to leave them behind and return to the village. It was wonderful to see them swimming so freely in the river, a creature that – despite its persecuted history – had found its way back to the British landscape and set up its own pioneering colony like explorers in a new world. A few years ago it was announced that every county in England now had otters in its rivers, a species that had previously declined due to habitat loss and river pollution. The idea that beavers might flourish as well as our otters, might return to our lands and spread across the country, is a warm and happy thought among the many ecological disaster stories we now face.
I’d wanted to visit Agatha Christie’s house in Devon for years, so we left early on the Saturday morning after picking up the coracle from the farm (fortunately the piglets were asleep), and drove for three and a half hours down to the Devon coast.
Agatha Christie has been ever-present in my life. When I was younger, Sunday evenings were spent with my mum and sister watching Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple solve crimes in mansions and cottage gardens, surrounded by dazzling costumes, devilish villains and poisoned coffee cups. Nowadays, being a twenty-something freelance creative person, I often rely on Poirot and Marple to get me through my day. Freelancing is heaven in so many ways – and I hope I never have to go back to any other way of living – but sometimes your work looks rubbish, nothing’s coming out right and you get stuck in a vortex of frustration. On those days, I put my favourite Agatha Christie audiobook or TV series on and find myself comforted by the same characters and stories that have been with me since I was a child. Suddenly my painting looks prettier, that paragraph sounds better, and I make a cup of tea and carry on with my day feeling strangely reassured by a fictional world of arsenic cocktails and beautiful scenery. It’s amazing how much these psychological connections can comfort and revive us – random programmes, books, places, food and people that have hooked themselves into our brains when we were at our happiest, so that we can remember them later and feel the same way.
It isn’t just her stories that have inspired me, however, but also the woman herself. The most widely published author of all time, Agatha Christie was fierce, independent and passionate. During the war, she trained to be a nurse and enlisted in the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and acquired a knowledge of poisons during a short time working at the University College Hospital, London. She then threw over a number of suitable young male suitors to shack up with Colonel Archie Christie, a handsome vagabond who could fly planes, ride a motorcycle and dance like a professional. She loved roller-skating, swimming, dancing and travelling, and during a trip to Hawaii she and her husband were among the first Britons to try stand-up surfing. In 1928 she was abandoned by Archie and left to raise her daughter alone, a single mother with an income fuelled predominantly by her writing. Later, during a trip to Baghdad on the Orient Express, she met archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 years her junior, and married him. They travelled the world together and Agatha often worked on his archaeological digs with him, enjoying a happy marriage until her death in 1976. In the 1971 New Year Honours list, she was promoted to Dame Agatha Christie, just three years after her husband had been knighted for his contributions to archaeology; they remain one of the few married couples where both have been honoured to this rank in their own right. She has now become one of the greatest icons of the British literary canon, and Greenway has been immortalised as the summer home of her and Max’s friends and family.
One night in December 1926, shortly after Archie had confessed to having an affair, Agatha Christie climbed the stairs of her home in Berkshire, kissed her daughter goodnight, walked outside to her Morris Cowley and drove away into the darkness. She would not be seen again for 11 days, turning up at a hotel in Harrogate with no recollection of what had happened since her disappearance. The media went berserk, with some claiming it was a publicity stunt for her latest novel and others suggesting her philandering husband had murdered her. Arthur Conan Doyle, a great believer in the otherworldly and paranormal, even took one of her gloves to a clairvoyant to see if the spirits could assist with the search.
At the time, the police decided that, overwhelmed by her husband’s disloyalty, she had crashed her car on the steep slope in Guildford (where it had been found abandoned but unscathed) and then boarded a train to the spa town of Harrogate, where she checked into the Swan Hydro hotel under the assumed name of Theresa Neele, her husband’s mistress. Years later, with the help of new medical knowledge, a fresh theory has been put forward by her biographer Andrew Norman, who believes she was in the grip of a rare mental condition called a ‘fugue state’, an out-of-body amnesic trance induced by the stress and trauma of the breakdown of her marriage.
We may never know what happened that night in December 1926, but that doesn’t matter. Perhaps the amnesia story was a screen to escape more questions, or maybe she had other intentions that night. Either way, our visit to Greenway was free of the troubles that had haunted her past. The house was bought by her and Max, who enjoyed a happy marriage and had independently successful careers. Wandering through the house, it felt like the family had just gone out for a walk. It was full of colour and strange, beautiful objects they had collected over the years, as well as trinkets that had inspired various characters and plots within her stories. One embroidered picture entitled ‘A Sad Dog’ is thought to have been the inspiration for Bob, the Fox Terrier in her novel Dumb Witness.
We walked through the gardens at Greenway all afternoon, bursting with foxgloves, fig trees and wild strawberries, a peach house and vinery, hidden pools and statues, and a boathouse overlooking the sparkling Dart estuary. This had been the filming location for the murder in Dead Man’s Folly, one of my favourite episodes because it features the character Ariadne Oliver, the fictional novelist who is believed to be an autobiographical depiction of Christie herself. Afterwards we sipped elderflower cider in the garden and watched the birds in the beech trees, and then, waving goodbye to the estuary, we finally left the grounds of Greenway and drove inland to Ashburton, the place we had chosen to set sail on our coracle later that night.
As we drove through the forests of Dartmoor, Dave recognised the place as being near an old recording studio where he and his old metal band Vallenbrosa had recorded their first album. As the drummer, there were some afternoons when guitar or vocals were being recorded and he wasn’t needed for a few hours, so he would leave the studio and explore the woods outside. One day he managed to get his hands on a scabby dinghy, which he repaired with duct tape so that it would float, and later he found himself sailing down the Dart, vaguely listening to warnings from other people about rapids ahead. He also met a group of kayakers who travelled to the river in the evening
to sneak in a night sail down the rapids. They told him the power of the water was so strong during high rainfall levels that it was technically illegal to kayak down certain parts of the river, but that these dangerous parts were the best parts to sail down and were impossible to resist. Fully equipped with head torches and safety gear, the kayakers would head out onto the river under the cover of darkness. Dave didn’t venture out in the dark, and thankfully he survived his river adventure long enough to return to the recording studio and finish their album.
We arrived at the edge of a small common and parked the camper van under the trees before unloading the coracle from the back. It’s not a large boat but with all that wood it can be heavy to carry, especially after being in the river and laden with the water that had soaked through, and we were usually tired after sailing in it anyway. We changed into our costumes and carried the boat a few metres across a meadow occupied by a flock of jays and then over to the water’s edge, together with a towel and a few bottles of cider. The sun had already started setting and was casting a warm glow over the entire place so that every insect buzzing across the surface of the water was illuminated like a firefly.
A few other people nearby were interested in what we were doing, which is one of the best things about it if you’re in the mood for conversation. They were finishing a BBQ and about to head home, when one man came over and said excitedly how he had seen a documentary about coracles, and how he had learned they were often built by poorer people who couldn’t afford to pay the toll to cross a river; apparently it was cheaper to build a brand-new boat than to pay the extortionate tolls. They chatted to us for a while and then returned to their camp, and we were left in our corner of the riverbank with nothing but the sun, cider and a river to explore. Dave launched the coracle out onto the river and climbed inside, bobbing about for a while as I slipped into the water beside him and went for a swim.
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