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River Story 1
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River Story 2
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River Story 3
Just then the steersman called, ‘OK, rest your paddles !’ And Longbow, his 9 metre canoe with us 4 adults and 8 children aboard drifted silently as we stretched arms, shifted on the benches and looked around.
‘Why’ve we stopped, Mum? Are we there yet ?’ asked one child.
‘Why’s it so quiet ?’ said another.
It was very quiet. Only the riffling of the water and the call of curlew, oystercatcher and gull to be heard on the murmuring wind. Sunlight sparkled the water.
We were three families sharing a holiday outing. An hour or so ago we’d joined Longbow on the slipway beside the Maltsters Arms at Tuckenhay where the steersman fitted everyone with buoyancy aids and paddles and gave us a canoe good conduct briefing. We had paddled two miles and then stopped in at Stoke Gabriel for ice creams on the quay. Now we were going further, to find a riverside picnic spot.
Standing up in the stern, the steersman was speaking again. ‘The piece of land sticking out ahead of us is called Pig Hole,’ he said.
The canoe drifted at an angle so we all could see where he meant. It looked about half a mile off.
‘It’s called Pig Hole,’ he said, ‘because in the days of sail, if you were coming downriver along here with only a light breeze and no engine, the tide would set you into it. And it was a pig of a hole to get out of !’
A blue mooring buoy hurried past going upstream. It looked as if something underwater was pulling it along. The far bank of the river seemed a mile away.
‘Mummy, why’s that going so fast ?’ asked a child.
‘If you look across to starboard, river-right as we go,’ the steersman was saying, ‘everywhere you look you can see the results of the work of man.’ He was standing in the back of the big long canoe, the blade of his long wooden paddle trailing in the water, ‘All the fields you can see, with hedges dividing them, way up and over the tops of the hills, upriver and downriver. The sheep and cattle, tree plantings, barns, houses, the old church tower. ’
The canoe swung so we could comfortably see across the river around or between each other. It began to swing the opposite way. Nearer on that side, river left as we went, was a long narrow seaweedy shingly beach with a low crumbly red-brown cliff along the head of it. It was crowned its full length and up out of sight by a hill of green forest, green and bright in the sunlight. There were smells of salt and seaweed and the breeze was friendly.
‘But on your port hand, just here,’ said the steersman, ‘River left as we go, observe the red rock exposure along the head of this beach underneath the trees, and you are instantly looking back millions of years, completely untouched. It looked like this to Queen Elizabeth the First when she came up here in a royal barge to stay overnight at Dartington Hall. It looked like this to the Phonecian sea traders, if they came inland this far. It looked like it to early man when he came, in his skin boats. The forest looked like this because it has been left alone for centuries so’s gone back to natural growth. But the ground is soft so it’s always creeping downhill. There’s not many trees here get to even a hundred years old before they fall.’
A grey heron stood sentinel at the wateredge. I glimpsed a cormorant flying quick, black and close to the water away in mid-river heading upstream against wind and tide. The children watched the heron.
‘But the valley today was never always like this,’ the steersman said. ‘Right now we’re floating over the channel of the ancient river that cut this valley. The tide runs best here. When Dartmoor was first thrust up by tectonic action, the overburden on top went as high as the Alps are today. Then it started to rain, and erosion gradually washed everything down, forming the roundy Devon hills that you see, while the softer material oxidised into the famous Devon red soil.’
The sun warmed us. We were going slower and close in to the shore. A heron ahead took wing. The cries of circling buzzards came overhead. There were many rocky red scars where trees had fallen from the little red cliff. Many looked ready to fall. One lucky oak, set on a hard rock outcrop, had grown fatter and older than all the others. I saw treestumps on the beach.
‘Then came the Ice Ages, followed by a tropical time,’ said the steersman. The children were listening. His voice softened. ‘To picture it, imagine you have a state-of-the-art Photoshop in your head.’ He paused. ‘Take a sample of the trees and, in Photoshop, carry it across to the other side of the river and paste it to cover all of the fields, all the houses, everything on land, cover it with trees. And click Save.’ One or two young heads moved left and right. ‘Next, take a sample of the water, and with that, cover all the buoys and all the boats, so there’s just ourselves, drifting in the canoe entirely surrounded by water with a great green forest on every side.’ A pause. ‘Click Save.’ Another pause, then, ‘We have gone back in time roughly twelve thousand years. ’
Everyone was silent. The canoe was lying almost at right angles to its direction of travel. We had slipped past the Pig Hole point, the river widened, at least a mile it seemed to me, and we carried out into the empty middle without paddling. In my mind we were in the canoe on the bright river entirely surrounded by forest – not the least gap anywhere.
‘Now’s the tricky bit,’ said the steersman. ‘As the Ice Ages ended there came a tropical period but the water stayed frozen into Polar and Continental ice sheets so the sea was a hundred and forty something feet shallower than it is now. This river, the Dart, met up with the River Teign and the Exe and the Thames about thirty-five miles away to the East. So, the next Photoshop trick is, simply copy and delete all the water you can see.’ He paused again. ‘And now, we are floating in the air fifty-sixty feet above a wide ice-melt river rushing down from high Dartmoor. It snakes across the valley, cutting the valley from the hills as it goes. The air is warm. Trees grow right down underneath us to the edge of the river’s flood plain. There’s hippopotamus in the quiet pools, there are buffalo and giant red deer. There’s golden eagles in the sky. There are wolves and bears in the forests. There is a small, hairy, straight tusked mammoth called stegadon grazing. And not far away, perhaps you can see it stalking, is a sabretooth cat.’
The smallest child snuggled tight against her parent, big eyes peeping.
‘We know about these animals from the bone cave in the limestone at Buckfastleigh on the edge of Dartmoor. The river eroded caves in the limestone, and one day the roof of such a cave collapsed and many animals fell in and died there. A chap called Pengelly discovered it. There’s a similar cave in Wales. A sabretooth could take a child for a snack between breakfast and lunch ! Would anyone like to hear what happened to them ?’
‘I would !’ called a boy from the front.
‘OK,’ the steersman said, ‘But I have to bring in my Granny, because it was she who told me the next part of the story. Does that sound alright ?’
‘Yes !’ came the reply.
‘Good, because the next creature to arrive was man. Us. We came with stone tools, and we knew how to make fire, and traps, and how to hunt. We discovered that stegadon the little mammoth was not very bright, and could easily be driven into a pit with spikes set in the bottom, or over a cliff, so it could be killed. It was good eating and plenty of it. The skins made strong footwear and good clothing. Quite soon the humans helped stegadon towards extinction and the sabre toothed cat along with it. You can’t catch rabbits and squirrels too well with sabre teeth, can you ? Without stegadon the sabrecats got hungrier and hungrier.’
A motorboat came puttering along noisily from astern. We waited for it to pass. The Longbow curtsied softly to its wash.
‘My Granny, who knew all about everything, or said she did, she reckoned there was something extra to the sabrecat. She said, of all the creatures, they must have had brains and could think, and they got together in a mass and held a great pow-wow of wailing and wrowling for days and nights, until the Great Spirit came to see whatever was the matter.’
“The two-legs with the dancing flower have stolen all the stegadon, Great Spirit,’ the cats wailed, ‘We are starving ! We can catch nothing small with these teeth which You gave us ! Rabbits laugh at us ! We can’t even get past the dancing flower to eat two-legs when its asleep ! Yowl, wowl, wail !! Please, please help us !”
“Um, yes, thank you for bringing this to My Attention,” said the Great Spirit. “I do in fact have a plan for you. It will take a little while, you will be hungry for a bit, and you will have to get smaller. But, you will recover, and I will also give you a power over the two-legs with the dancing flower, as you call them. Make good use of it !”
‘And the Great Spirit was gone,’ said the steersman.
‘But, so it was,’ he continued, ‘a long time later, as Granny told it, on one fierce cold stormy night when the two-legs were sitting at their cave entrance with a bright crackling fire to keep warm and to keep the wild animals at bay, it was then the little girl of that family heard the strangest squeaking sound, very near, at the edge of the firecircle. As she watched and listened, a small wet bedraggled furry animal dragged itself towards the warmth where she was. Carefully she touched it and picked it up. It was a scrawny, tiny kitten.
‘The girl warmed and dried it in her lap and fed it a scrap of meat. It licked her finger and began to purr.’
“Oh Mum !” she said, “look what I’ve got ! Look at its little face, Mum ! Can we keep it Mum ? Oh go on , Mum, please Mum ! Can we keep it ?’
‘And that, Granny said, was how the first cat first joined a family, and came to dominate it in the way that only cats can, as anyone that’s ever had a good cat will tell you.’ He paused. ‘And it happened just around here, by the Dart.’
Then it was time to start paddling again.
CanoeAdventures
Harberton 2011
First published July 2011 By the Dart