The Watching Place

This is Beetor Cross on Dartmoor. It's on the B3212 that crosses the moor from Moretonhampstead to Yelverton. 

It's also known as The Watching Place, and there are several stories in circulation as to why this might be the case. 

The first is that it was the haunt of a highwayman called John Fall, whose speciality was leaping out at his victims and taking them by surprise.


Then there's the theory that it marked the point beyond which French and American officers on parole from Dartmoor prison during the Napoleonic wars and living in Moretonhampstead were not permitted to proceed. 

Or that in mediaeval times it was the site of the gallows, where relatives or friends of the condemned person would watch and wait for permission from the Lord of the Manor to cut down the corpse.

My favourite story is that the name dates back to an outbreak of plague in 1626, which was spread by soldiers and sailors travelling between Barnstaple and Plymouth via the Mariner's Way. Some of the inhabitants of a settlement called Puddaven, near Beetor Cross, were afflicted, and as they were no longer able to care for themselves, every evening neighbours placed provisions for them on a flattish stone at some distance from the house. They would then retreat to wait and watch. If the food was removed, fresh supplies would be left the following day. On the fifth day no one came and the food stayed where it was, so the neighbours understood that the last survivor had died. So, having approached the house, with no response to their shouts, the neighbours set fire to the thatch and burnt it down in the hope that this would stop the plague spreading further. From this time, it is said, the area became known as the Watching Place.

Something about this old story, the solidarity shown by neighbours during a time of great fear and uncertainty, lifted it above its rivals and prompted me to start writing a story of my own. As part of my research, I read all the folklore I could connected with the moor, and found several other stories associated with outbreaks of plague.

Notably, there was the story told about Merrivale by the celebrated chronicler of Dartmoor, William Crossing, who recalls that the area of Bronze Age relics on Longash Common was once known as Plague Market, the tradition being that during outbreaks of plague at Tavistock,

food would be left there by moor folk for townspeople to collect. 

And another that attaches itself to sites all over the country, but on Dartmoor to the ruins below Hound Tor: that the mediaeval village was abandoned during the Black Death.   

I visited and was moved not just by the deaths of the villagers but by the detail of their lives also, such as the fact they built their houses into the side of a hill, with livestock housed in the shippon at the lower end, and a gully cut to drain the slurry  ... 

... and the step leading up into the cramped communal sleeping chamber.  

And I read and wrote, and wrote and read, and after seven years there was a coming-of-age novel ... 

... and after a few more years, during which it sat on my laptop while I wrote poetry, and won a prize to have a collection published, it finally emerged into a largely oblivious world under my publishers' Tamar Books imprint.

I picked up a copy the other day and read the back. Swine flu ... avian flu ... SARS ... We are frequently warned of imminent, drug-resistant pandemics. But what is it really like to wait for the end of the world?

I flicked through. Social distancing. Self-isolation. It's all in there, centuries before these practices were formally identified and their names coined.  

There's even a scene involving frenetic hand washing, though no emphasis on that as a way of avoiding infection, because my characters, stuck in 1349, wouldn't have known that. And besides it's fleas they should mostly have been avoiding. 

Every day on Twitter there are countless stories of selflessness, bravery and idiocy surrounding Covid-19, and I'm reminded again and again that while pandemics come and go, and technology and medical treatments improve, people are essentially the same as they've always been. We're all in the Watching Place now, and I feel a renewed closeness to characters that were such a big part of my life for so long.




Illustrations by Dru Marland

The Next Big Thing

David Clarke has kindly tagged me in an on-going project called ‘The Next Big Thing’. This involves writers answering a set of questions about a book which has been or is about to be published. They then tag other writers who keep the chain going.  If you follow the links up and down the chain, it will be like going on a jaunt without even leaving the settee. It turns out that my preferred tag-ees - Roselle Angwin and Alison Lock - have already done it: you can read their respective responses here and here. 

The book I’m going to talk about is my novel, ‘Dart’, a story about a family living on Dartmoor during the Black Death.  It’s due to be published on 4^th February 2013 by Tamar Books, which is an imprint of Indigo Dreams Publishing.

1. Where did the idea for this book come from?

I have a passion bordering on obsession for Dartmoor and I think the idea came to me in snippets of information that I gleaned while reading up on walks that I was preparing to do.  For example, I was intrigued by the fact that there's an area at Merrivale known as Plague Market, where the townsfolk of Tavistock would collect food stuffs placed there by moor-dwellers during times of contagion, leaving money for what they took.  And that the crossroads called 'The Watching Place' outside Moretonhampstead is believed to have been so named because it's where villagers watched to see whether the inhabitants of a plague-affected longhouse were dead before burning it to the ground in an attempt to halt the spread of infection.  These details gradually coalesced inside my head into a story.  

2. What genre does your book fall under?

I suspect that it's a  novel for young adults first and foremost, but please don't tell my publisher, Ronnie Goodyer, because he doesn't publish children's books!  I think it kind of slipped in under the radar:  Ronnie and his partner, Dawn Bauling, were already publishing my collection of poetry, Communion, and since we had all bonded over our shared love of Dartmoor and border collies, I resolved to submit the requisite three chapters anyhow, in the hope that the location might blind him to what I believed my target audience to be.

That said, 'Dart' explores many themes which will also resonate with a more mature readership, such as coming to terms with loss; remembrance and continuity; finding one's voice; and the triumph of the spirit in times of adversity.  I like to think that it will also appeal to the crossover and/or reading group market.  And in any event, as Tolkien observed in 'On Fairy Stories', we impose a false dichotomy between adults and children in terms of story-telling and the use of the imagination. 

3. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Well, I'm sure Lauren Ambrose, who played Claire Fisher in Six Feet Under, would make a fabulous red-haired witch!  Though to be honest, I feel it would be a mistake to cast stunningly beautiful Hollywood stars.  People just didn't look like that in England in 1348!  So I'd be on the look-out for ordinary people with interesting faces who could be dressed down a lot.  

4. What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

And I thought writing a three page synopsis was hard enough!  Erm ... The End Of The World Is Nigh!

5. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

When I started writing it, my four kids were much younger and more demanding of time than they are now, so I had to fit my writing in around them and my part-time job. I'd try to set aside one day per week during term time for research - I did an awful lot of reading up to get the historical and geographical detail right - and writing.  (During the school holidays, when I couldn't write, I marched them over Dartmoor instead, checking out locations and mapping my characters' movements.)  I don't know about the first draft - I can't remember - but I do recall that it was seven years between the germination of the story and the point at which I felt it was ready to make its way in the world, several drafts later. 

6. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Dartmoor was a huge inspiration, as I've already mentioned.  I also wanted to write it for my inner seven year old, who wanted nothing more than to become an author when she grew up.  I'd lost track of her over the years and wanted to do something kind for her.

7. What else might pique the reader's interest?

Well, we're constantly being told by the media that we are overdue a pandemic.  If one actually comes along, it would increase my story's topicality no end!

8. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

As I mentioned before, it's being published by Tamar Books.  As far as arranging readings goes, I'm the person to contact as I don't have an agent - in fact, I'd be surprised if any poets of my lowly stature do.  That's what I see myself as first and foremost - a poet who happens to have written a novel.  In fact, I'm putting together a putative second collection of poems right now and falling in love with the whole process all over again.  

 Illustrations by Dru Marland.