The Evening Hill Diaries: December 2016

December Devon Cycling – a Hardyesque experience.

Every proper rural pub needs a rustic, a habitué of the tavern who is always there to make oblique remarks and to give advice that you never really needed. So it was in December in a remote village in East Devon: the houses thatched, the economy agricultural, and rough roads running red with mud in the rain. Just as Mark Clark in Hardy’s ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’ was ‘a genial and pleasant gentleman, whom to meet anywhere in your travels was to know, to know was to drink with, and to drink with was, unfortunately, to pay for’, there was a local who was keen to recharge his glass with the excellent Otter beer and converse. Having introduced me to the landlord’s parrot, Captain, and displayed some of his teeth, he was of a mind to know my business. I explained that we were embarking on a bicycle ride in East Devon, with a somewhat challenging hilly circular route. ‘Are you goin’ to Spreyton’, he enquired. Yes, I did believe that we were passing through there, and indeed I had heard of Old Uncle Tom Cobley. ‘He’s buried in the churchyard there you know.’ I confessed I had not been aware of the last resting place of Uncle Tom. I explained that we were starting off by heading north to Copplestone and then on to Morchant Bishop, thence to North Tawton, and thus to Spreyton. He stared at me in disbelief. ‘You don’ wan’ ter go that way’ he advised. I tried to explain the validity of a circular riding route, but he was adamantly against it. ‘To get to Spreyton you ought to go to Colebrook and then up to North Down, or maybe up to Copplestone but then down through Hillerton’. I nodded assent. I felt sure that he was about to suggest abandoning the bikes altogether in order to get to the hostelry which he assured me was equipped with excellent beer with all possible speed. The next day was unfortunately a Monday, with weather that explained why the grass was so green. Having drawn a blank with The Fountain in North Tawton, we arrived at the Uncle Tom Cobley Tavern to find that it was also closed at lunchtime on a Monday. It is a sign of the 21^st Century that many rural pubs fail to open on a Monday lunchtime, and in our cycling routes guide, which dates from the 1990s, many directions such as ‘At the Fox Inn turn left’ are completely redundant, the pub having closed, and if one is lucky there might be a residual rusty oblong of metal gently swinging from the front wall to indicate what the original purpose of the bijou thatched cottage might have been. The farms with their lowing livestock en route seemed Hardyesque; only the mud-spattered modern machinery giving the lie to my belief that we were not undertaking this journey 150 years earlier. But it seemed refreshing to know that rural England still existed.

500 Words

The above was going to be an entry in the Telegraph ‘Just Back’ 500 word travel writing competition but it seems that this is in abeyance, so it forms the core of a short description of two days’ cycling in East Devon. On our first day, we reached Ottery St Mary from Poole and started cycling at 12 midday. The weather could not have been more different. It was icy, clear, with a low sun against bright blue sky. Through country lanes and villages with names like Tipton St John, we gradually made our way towards the estuary of the Exe, which was shrouded in fog, skirted through Exmouth and on to the more attractive and upmarket Budleigh Salterton. Thence generally parallel with the tranquil River Otter back northwards to Ottery St Mary again. We felt after this very short break that we had actually done something a little different to pre-Christmas shopping, eating, drinking, and writing Christmas cards, but the website of the Tom Cobley Tavern does look appealing, so perhaps one day we will be back. The 30 mile bike ride felt more like 50 though, and the ‘rolling hills west of Crediton’ as advertised in the book resulted in two and a half thousand feet of climbing! Most of my friends who have accomplished the Land’s End to John O’ Groats ride have stated that Scotland has nothing on Devon for difficulty!