The congestion started slowly and then built fast. The sound of voices floated up from the tarmac path as it descended to the river. A couple of people strode towards me on a direct collision course from the meadows to the right. Their unleashed dog ran ahead of them, anxious to investigate this sudden stranger.
As is the way in these straightened times, the couple halted to let me pass before they joined the track behind me. Ahead was a bridge, formed of metal. Painted a rusty cedar colour it masqueraded as ancient wood, flanked by what in other lands would be a religious shrine. Here, rather prosaically, this white domed structure merely formed the doorway to the hidden woodland garden of the house above us, the house itself perching grandly at the top of the steep escarpment.
More noise. At the far end, another couple, another dog. Trapped by the rules of pandemic engagement, the human elements of the congestion ground to a halt whilst the sequence of proceeding were telepathically negotiated. The dogs were having none of it and raced towards each other, meeting in the middle of the span, sniffing, shaking and shedding fur and potentially virus laden particles all along the way ahead.
There was no hope for it other than to stride through the cloud of fluff and possible pathogen. The two couples, clearly well known to each other, shared pleasantries about the climate and their canine wards. The dogs, equally well mutually aquatinted, lost interest in the lone walker and raced off along the bankside. The path cleared, and I strode past into the field beyond.
An hour or so prior to this encounter, I had been walking north on the A377 from the centre of Exeter using a high footpath beside what, even in the shutdown times of 2020, was still a busy road. At times the path was 15 feet above the road. Ironically, whereas in past times this was a source of refuge from the roaring traffic below, its narrow width left no room for manoeuvre around those walking in the opposite direction. Pedestrians, not vehicles, were the greatest source of danger now.
Further on, conventional danger awaited. Once the pavement had descended to a more usual relationship with the road, the route veered left at a roundabout across a series of rail and river bridges. The latter one, immediately before a blind bend, arched with a dip on both sides. Fifty metres long it was totally denuded of pavement. Biding my time, I chose a hopeful moment to begin the dash across. As could be predicted, with no more than half of the span completed, around the bend hurtled a speeding delivery truck. Initially it pulled out across the line dividing the carriageways, only to encounter an oncoming vehicle approaching over the crest. The hiss of airbrakes signified the driver’s intention to spare my life. With mutually thankful smiles and rueful waving of arms I was across.
Happily, it was no more than a five minute trembling arrhythmic stroll before the road turning right to Bramford Speke promised a respite from the speeding drivers on their ‘essential’ journeys; a further five minutes more to the beginnings of a path away from the road, passing to the right of the small lodge house of the Pynes estate. This metalled and then gravelled track curved around the grand entrance drive to Pynes House itself, a Grade II listed Queen Anne style country house built between 1700 and 172. In her novel Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen’s is said to have drawn inspiration for Barton Park from Pynes House.
It was not long before other senses and sensibilities came to the fore. Home Farm, the working element of the estate, barred the way, diverting the path on a dog leg around some enclosed barns. One did not need to be a vegan, vegetarian or mere animal lover to be affronted by the porcine factory, inserted squarely into the Devonian countryside. The snorts and shrieks of pigs forced to live their entire lives on beds of concrete; the stench of their squalid existence left no doubt that here ‘local produce’ meant intensively reared meat for pared down prices and profit.
This was not the only example on the walk of the clash of values between hiking visitors and resident land users. Immediately after the congested bridge below Bramford Speke the map showed a path wandering alongside the river. Sadly, the reality on the ground was instead a plethora of keep out signs and barred gates. What dispute, change of ownership or catastrophic event could have precipitated the padlocks? The intention to prevent encroachment was in no doubt, however. A few yards further one, beyond the obstruction and across a stile, was another sign entreating the walker to take the ‘hedgerow path ahead, rather than head left towards the river as the map suggested.
A combined bloody mindedness and desire to see the meanders compelled me to stride left towards the river, a decision validated by the oncoming of another dog walker engaged in a loud business conversation, her mobile turned to speaker phone. Social isolation and home working takes many forms.
The river was worth my perversity. Here, only the buttresses remained of a once mighty river crossing for the Exe Valley Railway, which once linked Bristol and Exeter to stations in Somerset, closed as were so many in the mid 1960s. Nonetheless, even here the barbed wire was strung along the bank preventing access to the beachside below. A charitable explanation would be that this prevented cows from falling into the river. However, the presence of carefully flattened and bent cider cans laid over the barbs, hinted at a different rationale, one rejected enterprisingly by the local youths.
Further evidence of the clash between ownership and access that so bedevils land in the UK continued across this section of the walk. Shortly after the old bridge, the way was barred again by more wire, necessitating a trudge back down the opposite side of the field to rejoin the ‘hedgerow path’ and a left turn to the other side of the obstruction. Contrariness continued, for the bank of trees and bushes along which I had just walked was no more than a few feet wide and presented no justifiable reason for wire. Ahead was a herd of brown cows, dozing in the sunshine, perfectly able to wander up both sides of the hedgerow, but like me, prevented from walking through.
At least the cows had the good fortune to spend some part of their lives roaming free. The pigs of Home Farm enjoyed no such benefits, firmly locked up in their concrete prison below a steaming iron roof. In Devon the refrain is often to reduce food miles and buy locally produced food. This tug at the moral heartstrings does not, however, mean a jot about animal welfare or compassionate farming. The ethical consumer is left to balance impossible conudrums of free range, organic welfare, transport costs and environmental impacts in a confusion of moral dilemmas.
Thankfully, the path beyond Home Farm headed out across an escarpment above the broad Exe Valley with Stoke Hill to the east. Briefly, wild flowers abounded before the path made a short sojourn through a wood and emerged on a broad stoney track in the valley itself. Turning left along this valley, the water meadows were more like peat bogs, sodden even after weeks of little rain. Vain attempts had been made to drain the land here, but to little avail. Standing water lay in the runnels and channels where tracked vehicles had attempted to cross. This area floods frequently and appeared to have little value to the farm behind me.
At a signpost, festooned with options, the Exe Valley Way which I was following, headed up a hillside, the path not so much indistinct as invisible. However, on cresting the hill the way obviously led to a tiny stile, a track crossing and across another stile into the next field. Soon afterwards, it joined an initially stony and then metalled track into the village, where of course occasional delivery vans passed me by, the only traffic now common on Devon’s roads.
The Exe Valley Way and its sometime companion the Devonshire Heartland Way take a mixture of quiet roads, farm tracks and walking paths as they head through the country. Visiting a range of villages, small and large, picturesque and functional, they conceive of a country idyll yet hide nothing of the realities of rural life from the observant walker. There is much sterility of land and habitation here. Close enough to the city’s employment sites, the villages are quiet and dormitory like, the land often a blank and infertile canvas for chemically enhanced growth. Although there is beauty in the villages, it is a beauty that lies pickled under protective paint layers, adorned with chocolate box tropes.
The land in particular is bent to an increasingly mechanised human will. Yellow, the preferred colour of the earthmover, is not hard to find. On the return path from Bramford Speke to Upton Pyne, a noisy and very large industrial instrument was laying waste to a hedgerow, merrily unconscious of nesting birdlife or wildlife migration routes. Its driver sat in insulated comfort in an enclosed cab, unconnected to the destruction being wrought by his mechanical behemoth. As I watched, saddened by the unconcerned mayhem, I could only conclude that the additional few feet being torn from the hedge and turned into field might make the difference between profit and loss. But at what cost?
After my adventure with bridges and barbed wire I found a way to the end of the river’s meanders and onto a series of quiet country lanes that led eventually to the outskirts of Stoke Canon. Here was where the extinct branch line, whose skeletal crossing remnants I had come across earlier, had commenced its journey north. Rather than enter the village, I chose to take the remains of this railway track along an embankment above the low lying, and flood prone, land below, heading back towards Bramford Speke.
Although there is a pub in Bramford Speke, there is no shop. As I walked along the old track I came across a villager who was returning to Bramford Speke. He carried a bright orange shopping bag, full of provisions he had bought from the small supermarket in Stoke Canon – the nearest place open. Another example of the sad loss of community space and facilities typical in these villages, housing only people that wish to escape from the city and yet who paradoxically spend most of their time in urban work.
There is no road bridge across for miles north and south, the river dividing these two sides of the Exe Valley, This track spoke of connections and movement harking back to a different time. A time when villages communicated with each other through the propulsion of legs not wheels, hearts and lungs not engines. Ordinarily, people one meet seem to have little connection with husbandry or land. The strolling shopper, in contrast, had an accent that told of connection and rural lineage. He lived here, not merely resided. A man of, not in.
The path returned to the faux wooden bridge and back up the tarmac into Bramford Speke. Here, the centre of the village continued the illusion, a parody of itself. Ancient dwellings wherein the poor might previously have been squashed several families at a time, had now been converted into pristine spacious houses decorated and festooned with the paraphernalia of the English cottage garden. No productive land here, a feast for the eye not the stomach.
In contrast, Upton Pyne, reached through a simple ridgeway path accessed from the right of the road heading back towards Exeter from Bramford Speke, has a considerably more mixed appeal. Turning left at the end of the path, the village is a melange of ancient and weatherbeaten thatched cottages, dirty farmhouses, a church and village social club – all speaking of age and experience – that quickly gives out onto rude modern houses built when English councils were allowed to do such things for their poorer inhabitants. The village stands as a window into the passage of history and attitudes, its initial attractions dented by the realities of rural life and poverty in a newer age. No townie, envious of the rural life, will convert these modern versions of the country cottage into desirable executive dwellings.
At the end of the housing estate, the road crested a rise and headed downhill towards the valley of the River Creedy, which joins the Exe at the bridge where I had had my previous near-death experience. I took a path off the road to the right in order to cut off a corner of the road. This benefit had to be balanced against a further death defying manoeuvre in passing over the single track railway on an unmanned crossing as it ran parallel with the river. A vision of a past world, reminiscent of the Railway Children, the route beyond finally left yet another quaint reminder of old Devon and simpler times for the main road.
Thereafter, eschewing the pleasures of another 50 yard dash along the main road, I made my return to Exeter via the back road towards Exwick, on the west side of the River Exe. Despite multiple blind bends, sharp rises and the complete absence of footpaths, traffic tends to be respectful of the dangers from coming face to face with oncoming cars along the narrow single track road, an attitude also conducive to pedestrian survival.
With vehicles so infrequent, the sound of two weirs crashing below the steep land to the left was one final reminder that this countryside is far from virgin. The land, the river, the pasture, all are tamed and bent to the will of humankind. To walk in this environment provides as little a glimpse into it as does living here. All walkers and dwellers, whether residing, working or passing through, interact with the land at the most superficial level. The terrain is stripped of nutrients, torn of unwanted growth, flattened for the foundations of farm factories or merely a temporary site of residence. Few that live and work here are more a part of it than those that visit.
The spires of Exeter beckoned. I left the countryside behind and entered the city across Flowerpot playing fields. Into an environment where equivocation is absent; unlike the land, unambiguous in its identity. A city that is what it says it is, from a countryside that is unsettled in its unresolved identity.
