ESTUARIAL ELISION

A funny sort of word elision and, well, I think I’m using it correctly. The place names of the Estuary seem to attract it starting with Exter. Then there are Topsam and Limson (Topsham and Lympstone). A seventeenth century token actually has Limson stamped upon it and the nineteenth century penny token commentator writes that the residents of the place still use the form. Exmouth is predictably Exmuff and Starcross seem unassailable but Cockwood next door is the most curious of all.

The Wart, the future King Arthur, and Kay, the future Sir Kay, were in the woods when they met with Little John. “ ‘Oh!’ cried the Wart in delight. ‘I have heard of you, often , when they tell Saxon stories in the evening, of you and Robin Hood’ ‘Not Hood,’ said Little John reprovingly. ‘That bain’t the way to name ‘un, measter, not in the ’ood.’” Robin’s name, Little John goes on to tell the boys, should be Robin Wood… “‘Aye Robin ’ood. What else should un be, seeing as he rules ’em. They’m free pleaces the ‘oods, and fine pleaces’….” It all seems a bit contrived but this suppression of the ‘W’ is recorded as common in Kentspeak. T. H. White, the author of The Once and Future King, was possibly just having his fun but it looks to me like he must have heard or read about ’ood’ being a form of ‘wood’. But was it known here in the West? There are parallels. For example‘will’ becomes ‘ull’ as in ‘us ull see.’ and there are other marvellously suppressed or at least transposed first letters in Devonspeak like ‘urd’ for ‘red’ and ‘urdgment’ for regiment. 

 Did anyone round here ever talk about ‘the ’oods’? It sounds a bit unlikely. All of which brings us back to Cockwood, the village on the west bank of the Estuary, which, by ancient tradition, is to be pronounced, and sometimes written, ‘Cockood’. This suppression of the ‘W’ must have been a matter of a local usage but where are the other examples of it? 

 The harbour at Cockwood is called ‘the Sod,’ perhaps only because where now is harbour there once was marshland. The Cockwood marshes are also called ‘sod’. It is not easy getting in and out of Cockwood harbour under the twin Brunel railway arches. It’s not too bad in my little boat where you simply unstep the mast, but if you have to mess about with stays or shrouds it’s a bit of a sod.

JOHN THE FERRYMAN

John Carder was an Exmouth ferryman. As ‘John the Ferryman’ he became something of a local character, loved and remembered by visitors. Shortly before he died he was portrayed, standing in his little rowing boat, in a wonderful Murduck postcard. He had a bushy white beard and he mostly wore his famous, very jolly, bowler hat. He rowed passengers to and from the Outer Warren. In 1913 he fell into Exmouth dock after a happy night on the cider and drowned. The morning light showed only his bowler hat floating over his watery grave.

In the days when Exmouth welcomed careful drovers, there was a beast market where now is Market Street. Exmouth men would get up early and walk out sometimes as far as Exeter to drive sheep and cattle and other beasts back to market. For centuries, however, some of the beasts also came across the Estuary from Dawlish carried by ferry from the Outer Warren to the Point.

John Carder had started work as a ferry crewman in 1861. Up until his death he was still ferrying. He was rowing holidaymakers and the numerous Warren bungalowdwellers back and forth across the race. But in his early years he had worked on a ferry that must have been a sizeable vessel. In the Exmouth Journal of August 29th 1908, he is reported as telling how on market days in Exmouth the ferryboat would regularly carry over sheep and horses from Dawlish and would bring even carriages across. There must once have been a considerable traffic between Dawlish and Exmouth with sheep being herded and horses being ridden and carriages being driven over the sandy dunes and levels.

MR TROUT'S BITTEL

Daniel Charles Trout was the Harbour Master at Topsham Quay from 1902 to 1918. In May, 1918 he fell to his death while working in the hold of a three masted schooner. In the words of his grandson, Daniel, as recorded by Sara Vernon in the nineteen-eighties, “he was killed alongside the Quay, fitting new beams into the Leader, standing on a twelve-inch wide beam to drive the top one in with a bittle. They think there must have been a bit of rope hanging out over and it hitched in the bittle so that he lost his balance and fell six feet and broke his back. He died twenty-four hours later.”

Jim Voysey, then eleven years old, witnessed this tragedy. He remembered walking home from school on that fatal day with Daniel’s son Les, and seeing the broken man being carried from the hold. They were “bringing him in on a plank of wood.”

‘Bittle’ ,or perhaps better ‘bittel’, is another word of the Estuary not to be found in dictionaries and in danger of being lost. It means a wooden mallet. Standard English has the word as ‘beetle’ but this kind of beetle is a rare species. A few trades still recognise beetles and the tautologous ‘beetle mallet’ but the word ‘bittel’ was until recently the preferred word for a mallet in these parts.

Shakespeare uses ‘beetle’ once, but only once: “fillip me with a three man beetle.” exclaims Falstaff. And the groundlings would have laughed at the image of that great tun of a man on his back and being battered by the Elizabethan equivalent to a tamping rammer! But the Devon word is more recognisably descended from a standard Anglo Saxon word for hammer, bītel. As so often, the Devon word more closely echoes the meanings and the language of the Old English.

The Leader ended up, like many another vessel, stranded and left to rot in the mud on the far side of the river from Topsham. Some think of her as being Daniel Charles Trout’s memorial.

DRIFT NETTING BY NIGHT

It is the top of a calm night tide on the Estuary. Two people are necessary and sufficient. One plies the oars gently to pull the boat across the tide. The other lets the drift net slip out over the stern. A moonlit night is favoured. The spring tide of the full moon promises a depth of water under the net and a good light. When the length of the net is a shadowy line stretching across the glinting waters, the oarsman keeps it so by lazily dipping his oars and pulling across. Only once in a while does he need to pull hard. The night is suffused with light and peace. If any words are spoken they are spoken quietly. The Estuary is a temple.

The net drifts with the tide and the boat drifts with the tide. The netsman, with his fingers on the line, can feel the subtle tugging when a fish tangles in the mesh. But when a salmon comes his way he can cry with Osric, ‘A hit, a very palpable hit’. The drift lasts for so long as there is no fear of moots or moorings. Then the net is hauled aboard and cleared. The leaping, moonlit fish are disentangled. They delight the eye. The tide is falling now and the boat has just about taken herself home.

Nothing more can be done tonight. The village is dark and deserted. A bed would be a fine thing.

But first, of course, there is just time to return that magnificent salmon to the river.

DRIFTING

When we went drifting down the night,
while our tide filled to its brim,
the net ran out, the line set tight
when we went drifting down the night,
working by the moon’s green light.
The long oars creaked, the boat rode trim
when we went drifting down the night
while our tide filled to its brim.

Now we go drifting down the years,
tide by tide and moon by moon,
we run our hopes out and our fears
now we go drifting down the years.
Pleasure, pain and joy and tears,
all will be as nothing soon,
now we go drifting down the years
tide by tide and moon by moon.

ROCK PIPITS

I like the Rock Pipit. He’s another bird that stands still long enough for you to admire him. Despite his essential pipitiness he is well qualified as a bird of the Estuary. He, in his habits, as T. A. Coward tells us, “more nearly approaches the shore-haunting waders than any ‘land bird’.” At this time of the year I see him or his mate or both of them every time I walk beneath the red cliffs and along the shingle from Lympstone’s Green to Sowden End.

The Rock Pipit gives me the impression that he likes my company. I think I’ve seen the last of him and then he flutters past me and perches on the cliffs ahead and waits. He is a fearless climber on the cliff face but then I suppose we would all be pretty fearless climbers if we had wings to our backs! Nevertheless the way he keeps his balance without a flutter and hops about and shuffles sideways on the stormsculpted sandstone is remarkable. He is a very chamois among birds.

How he can skip it
that pretty Rock Pipit!

When the tide is falling he ventures out onto the mud flats and finds good things to eat in the rock crevices and in the seaweed. The cold breeze ruffles his Royal Marine olive plumage but like a bold booty he feels not a thing. There are plenty of birds scuttling about on the mud pecking at things but the Rock Pipit more or less has the whole length of the cliff wall to himself. The kestrel that used to hover and hunt there I haven’t seen for a couple of years. He is probably hovering above a motorway these days. There have been winter days when I have glimpsed a kingfisher along these cliffs but not lately. Most days there are fat woodpigeons perched high in the bushes but they don’t do a lot.

CAPTAIN PEACOCK'S SWAN

The Illustrated London News of October 13, 1860 described her as ‘an elegant yacht , the very similitude of a gigantic white swan which may now often be seen sunning its wings on the shining waters of the estuary of the river whence it derives its appellation.’

Captain Peacock’s ‘Swan of the Exe’was the strangest vessel that ever sailed these waters. This fantastic 'pleasure yacht' was designed by Captain Peacock of Starcross and built by Dixons of Exmouth. She was launched in September 1860 and every inch of her lived up to her glorious name.

See now where the famous inventor, Captain Peacock, peruses Bewick’s ‘History of British Birds’ and takes the measurements of the mute swan that he finds there and scales them up fourfold.

This gives Captain Peacock a yacht only seventeen feet six inches in length but so broad in the beam that he has room for a table in the saloon large enough for ten persons to dine in comfort. While his guests sit at table they can dangle fishing lines through small oval apertures in the table which open to the water beneath. When a fish is caught it can instantly be cooked in a ‘multum in parvo cooking apparatus’. The smoke from this stove is drawn up the neck of the swan and is breathed out through the swan’s nostrils.

Imagine! It is a sunny afternoon on the Estuary. Captain Peacock’s ‘Swan’ is bearing down on us. Her vicious head rides sixteen feet above the dancing wavelets. Her wicked, beady, black eyes are looking straight at us. She is now so near that we can read, worked in letters of gold upon a silken azure banner, pendent from a brass rod which the bird carries in her bill, the proud name: ‘Swan of the Exe.’ Someone at the dinner table must have got lucky for as the great bird looms towards us she is breathing smoke.

Quick! Out of the way before the bugger pecks us!