Summary, Reviews, Index

In this the fourth volume of Unforgotten Exmoor, four more venerable characters, all Exmoor born-and-bred, share their life stories and photographs.

Gerald Down was born in 1938.

His grandfather was the stone-cracker on the roads in Brendon parish and sexton at the church where he dug the graves and rang the bells. He also spent considerable time on the common digging turf (peat) for the family fire, and Gerald remembers being sent as a boy with hot cocoa in a bottle with a sock round it to keep it warm and a beetroot sandwich for his grandfather’s lunch.

Gerald’s father was the groom at Oare Manor and had taught the owner who had lost both his legs in the first world war to ride again.

Gerald’s first job on leaving school was as a full-time rabbit trapper travelling continually round each farm on the coastal trapping circuit .  The rabbits were sent to Dulverton railway station hung in special hampers to catch the the ‘rabbit express’ for the London markets.

Gerald then became stockman to Simonsbath Barton, one of the Fortescue farms, and describes life on this extremely remote hill farm in the very centre of exmoor.

Tony Richards’ family had farmed the coastal strip of Exmoor for generations.

He gives a detailed account of early farming customs and techniques including describing the annual sheep-shearing parties where everyone descended on each farm in succession, shearing all day, and then drinking, singing and feasting late into the night.  He tells of how the fleeces were often stored in rooms within the farmhouse itself until the following year when it was hoped they would fetch a higher price.

He describes how weather forecasts were made before the days of regular reports on the wireless, and how the common was used to supply their almost every need including rushes, bracken and peat.

At an early age he became church warden to Culbone church, so remote that even today it is only accessible on footpaths through the woods, and he gives a series descriptions of early characters and customs associated with the tiny church – the smallest complete parish church in the country.

Marion Graham was born in the Rockford pub which her grandparents had owned since 1919.

She recalls her grandparents’ descriptions of gangs of labourers coming to the pub from their tented camps at Blackpits where they were building the Brendon-two-gates road over the common, and of the arrival of electricity at the pub which was generated from a home-made water-wheel.

She talks of the last of the horse drawn stagecoaches which regularly stopped at the pub on the way to the Lorna Doone valley, and how her father had later moved with the times and fitted a petrol pump outside the pub as private motor cars became ever more popular.

She married George Graham whose family were descended from one of the original Scottish shepherds who’d come to Exmoor by sea at the end of the 1800s. They’d brought with them their dogs and their sheep which were driven out to Larkbarrow, one of the most remote holdings on Exmoor, where the family started their new life.

Marion’s chapter includes original photographs and extracts of letters from her husband’s side of the family – one of the original Scottish shepherds – describing life at Larkbarrow during this early part of Exmoor’s history.

Lilian Moffat was born during the first world war at the house of the midwife in West Porlock.

She grew up at Birchanger farm where her grandfather would carry thirteen children up to bed at once, clinging onto each except the baby whose nappy he gripped between his teeth.

She describes the huge fireplace in which the family sat and the fire that never went out.  She also talks about the separate fire that was lit actually inside the bread oven itself once a week and used for a series of different things over the following twenty four hours as the heat within slowly ebbed away, beginning with the bread and ending with drying the feathers they used in all the feather beds.

She delivered milk in panniers on a pony to the houses of West Porlock, measuring it out into people’s jugs, and she describes some of the characters living there including the family of fern-gatherers who collected ferns to be sent for the window displays of the London fishmongers.

She also describes the many activities undertaken by her whole family, including the gathering of oak bark from the trees on the steep coastal strip which were used in preserving the hides at the Porlock tannery.

Unforgotten Exmoor Volume Four:
ISBN Number 978-1-7397944-3-9