West Country

John Payne

Description

The English West Country is a land of exceptional landscapes: many miles of wild, unspoilt coastline and vast expanses of wild moorland; great cities such as Exeter, Plymouth, Bath and Bristol; and market towns, villages and hamlets. Farming, mining, quarrying, fishing and trade are the traditional industries of the counties of Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall.On one level, the West Country is the most English of all English regions, home of clotted cream, thatch, church spires, folksong, hobby horses and Cecil Sharp. Yet the area was trading with Mediterranean Europe before the Romans. For many years Bristol was the centre of the slave trade, and many of its great mansions were built on the proceeds of slavery. Great swathes of land in Dorset, Wiltshire and Devon are still used by the military and are off-bounds to visitors. And within the West Country is the special case of Celtic Cornwall, and the even more remote Isles of Scilly. People lived in the West Country long before Britain, or England, were invented. From the great stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge in Wiltshire to the menhirs of Cornwall, and the wealth of prehistoric remains on the Isles of Scilly, this has always been an inhabited landscape, crafted by men and women working closely with nature and natural forces. John Payne explores this culturally rich and varied region, revealing many facets of its distinctive and much-loved identity.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Sudoeste de Inglaterra
• South West England

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 10 novembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908493507
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Title Page




A Cultural History


JOHN PAYNE


Signal Books
Oxford




Landscapes of the Imagination


The Alps by Andrew
Beattie Provence by Martin Garrett
Flanders by André de Vries
The Thames by Mick Sinclair
Catalonia by Michael Eaude
The BasqThe Country by Paddy Woodworth
Andalucía by John Gill
Patagonia by Chris Moss
The Cotswolds by Jane Bingham
The Andes by Jason Wilson
The French Riviera by Julian Hale




Publisher Information


First published in 2009 by Signal Books Limited
36 Minster Road, Oxford OX4 1LY
www.signalbooks.co.uk

Digital Edition converted and distributed in 2011 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com

©John Payne, 2009
he right of John Payne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.
A catalogThe record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover Design: Devdan Sen
Production: Devdan Sen

Cover Images: fotoVoyager.com/istockphoto.com; John Payne
Illustrations: John Payne i, 16, 38, 60, 68, 55, 98, 147, 155, 171, 207, 230; dreamstime.com

xiii, xx, 1, 11, 21, 41, 49, 61, 88, 101, 125, 132, 139, 144, 160, 191, 198, 213, 224, 234;
istockphoto.com xiv, 81, 115, 169, 187, 233









Preface


This book is about the five south-western counties of England. From east to west they are Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. There is perhaps something arbitrary in the choice of these five counties. Others might prefer to include sea-going, cricket-loving Hampshire and the lovely city of Winchester, ancient capital of the kingdom of Wessex. Still others will be shocked to find Gloucestershire excluded, and this perhaps requires rather more comment. Most of Gloucestershire is Cotswold country, where everything seems determined by the underlying limestone beds. The villages lurk among the rolling hills, like a chameleon fading into the grey stillness of a winter afternoon or the golden brightness of a summer morning. Much of the history of the English Arts-and-Crafts movement, a subject dear to my heart, intertwines with the history of Cotswold England, one of the few places where vernacular architecture is still the chosen style for most new house building. Yet the Cotswolds do not respect boundaries: they intrude into Warwickshire and the English Mid- lands, into Oxfordshire and the headwaters of the Thames and into Oxford itself. It seemed wise to devote a whole volume in the Landscapes of the Imagination series to the very complicated English phenomenon of the Cotswolds.
Bath, of course, which was a Roman city and then a Cotswold city long before it was a Georgian city, has always been in the historical county of Somerset, and the bishop from his cathedral and palace in little Wells still retains the title of Bishop of Bath and Wells. Besides, the author was born, brought up and educated in Bath, and the Queen of the West remains a personal starting-point for these explorations. Bristol is unique in having had county status since the Middle-Ages, yet its importance to the economic and cultural history of the West Country demanded its inclusion. The West Country is not just villages and market towns, but also cities such as Bath and Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth, Poole and Penzance.
So what then do these five counties chosen here to represent the English West Country have in common? Well, they are distant. Distant that is from London and the ways and thoughts of the metropolis. Yet they have been linked from earliest times to the rest of England by track- ways, and later by turnpikes, canals and railways. This tension between belonging and not belonging, between local distinctiveness and participation in a wider world is of the essence of the West Country. Even before the Romans, Cornwall was trading tin with Mediterranean Europe. During the Roman period a settled Roman way-of-life grew up here, with important cities at Exeter and Bath, copper and tin mines in Cornwall and Devon, and lead and gold in the Somerset Mendip Hills. Later, North Devon kept Catholic, Mediterranean Europe supplied with salted fish for Friday observance.
The “British” people, driven west by post-Roman invasions of Anglo- Saxon tribes, have given the West Country a stronger Celtic patina than any other part of England. Cornwall retained its own Celtic language until the dawn of the Railway Age and widespread schooling in English. In recent years the language has been revived, local politics has been invigorated and most Cornish towns and villages are linked through twinning arrangements with more obviously Celtic Brittany. Old Cornwall Societies promote links with the Cornish diaspora, especially in Australia and the United States.
There are other distinguishing features to the West Country, not least the strength of non-conformity which created a great cleavage in many communities between “church” folk, often directly dependent on the local squire, and “chapel” folk - small farmers and weavers and other independent tradesmen. And then there is the sea, never far away, the sea that eats into people’s minds and makes them restless, for this is a land of fishermen and women, of explorers, of traders and slave-traders, of smugglers, and more recently of tourism and holiday homes. Much of the most beautiful coastline in the south-west is now owned by the National Trust, and it will be obvious to the reader that I have drawn rather more on the National Trust as a protector of the countryside and coastline, than as a pre- server of great country houses, which are only a fragment of our heritage.
But in the end this is not a book that has any great desire to preach to people, to define and to distinguish. It travels the byways as well as the highways of our cultural history, is interested in the environment and industry and religion, as well as art and literature and music. Much has been left out, there is much more to say, but I hope that what remains will intrigue and entertain readers in equal measure and make them want to delve further beneath the glittering beauty that is the English West Country.




Acknowledgements


Mark Adler of the Mendip Times
Caroline and John Birkett-Smith at Hunting Raven Bookshop in
Frome
Ama Bolton for permission to use her poem “Mendip Waters”
John Boxall who escorted my wife and me to Lundy
John Channon at the National Trust Estate O ffi ce, Killerton
Nickomo and Rasullah Clarke and Frome Community Choir
Sue Cli ff ord and Angela King of Common Ground for so often being my guides and mentors in matters of local distinctiveness
Edmund Costelloe and Viscount Raymond Asquith at Mells
James Crowden for permission to use his poem “Somerset Light -
Winter”
Helen Date and Susan Wynter, voice-artists, who helped me with
Coleridge and the Wordsworths
Carole Elliott, Administrator, Holnicote Estate O ffi ce
Richard Emeny of the Edward Thomas Fellowship for permission to re-use material previously published in the newsletter
Martin Graebe for his perceptive comments on an early draft
Tim Graham, Millstream Books
John Grey, Long Sutton Meeting
Martin Haggerty who encouraged me
Charlotte Hanna of hermae Bath Spa
John Hardy, Visitor Services, Studland National Trust
Nancy Harrison for showing me the Quaker graveyard in Bath
Kate Hesketh (Netherhay Methodist Chapel) and the Purbeck Quire
Mrs W. Hillgrove, Torquay Museum Society
Satish Kumar for permission to quote from his film “Earth Pilgrim”
Mike Nelhams at Tresco Abbey Garden
The Packhorse Bookgroup, Frome
Jacqueline Peverley for talking to me about Dartington
Paul Prescott, who walked with me from Morwenstow to St. Ives in the spring of 1984
Rob Salvidge and his sister Katy at Bristol Ferry Boats
Roger Saul and Rachel Fearn at Sharpham Park
Jean Saunders at the Richard Je ff eries Museum in Swindon
Chris Smaje, walker, gardener and writer
Phil and Linda Taylor for talking to me about Robin and Heather Tanner
Sta ff at the High Moorland Visitor Centre, Princetown, Dorset County Museum in Dorchester, Falmouth Art Gallery, Glastonbury Abbey Museum, Penlee House Art Gallery in Penzance, and Torquay Museum
My travelling companions, especially members of my own family Sta ff at Frome Library and Bath Central Library. Somerset County Library service for the best inter-library loan service in England National Trust sta ff and guidebooks at individual properties
Tourist Information Centres all over the place
The sta ff at Trebah Garden, Cornwall, for lending me an electric wheel-chair when I needed it.
The authors of all the books included in references, both living and dead; each in their own way have helped me to puzzle out why the West Country is so special.
And countless other people whose little, unremembered kindnesses helped to make my field-work such a pleasure.

John Payne
Frome, Somerset
February 2009




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