Chase Over the Moor: Following the Footsteps & Tracking Texts of Beatrice Chase

 Sun it out; Spring is round the corner. Time to think of exploration and of trips out finding dream-sites on Dartmoor; and of paper chases; or, rather, tor and textual chases after the infamous Dartmoor based writer Beatrice Chase, who has always both  eluded and irritated me. I did once try to get to grips with her - to establish what kind of person and writer she was - and wrote Triune, in which she appears. Other than that, I have mostly avoided her. Aunts used to talk about her, mostly emphasising her eccentricity. They all remembered her from the twenties through to the forties, when a  picnic trip to Widecombe in the Moor, where she lived at nearby Venton, inevitably meant seeing her at her infamous Dartmoor window.

The reason for my slight antagonism towards Chase came from finding in Women Against the Vote that at the beginning of the C20 she was one of the handful of women writers who were anti-suffragist. Having been of my baby-boomers generation, staunchly feminist in inclination, this left me slightly irritable. Added to that, on the infrequent times I have tried to read the few books of hers that are easily obtainable, their archaic style and wordiness and oddities have put me off. It may be a hasty judgement, but as yet I have not been able to take her work too seriously.

However, there is no doubting the moor's influence on Chase. It is at the heart of her best known work Heart of the Moor (1914). In it, Dartmoor is the source of Chase’s interior vision. It is a magnet; it compels; it is her muse. Once she had moved to the folds of the moor, the writer stayed there for the rest of her life, living and breathing its essence and writing a series of Dartmoor inspired books, including Through a Dartmoor Window. 'Moor' became for her an archetypal mother-goddess earth presence, a source of mystical mystery and awe. Given the contemporary fascination with alternative spiritualites and healing perhaps it is surprising that modern readers have tended to view Chase as an eccentric and her books as outmoded. Beneath the sugary, rather archaic surface of her texts, the words still speak of the eternal, ethereal presence of the moor.

Here is a little extract typical of her style; it gives the flavour of Chase's writing and comes from Pages of Peace, which was published in 1920 and can be read online:

This will be a winter book. It is now the heart of the winter, and everyone who visits Dartmoor when she is clothed to her chin in her seal-brown robe of dead heather, loves her more in that guise than in any other. One of the winter joys are the lunches with certain beloved pilgrims at the Old Inn. On the morning when someone is expected, I rush through my mail to be free at noon when they arrive swathed to their eyes in fur. First, there is a delighted run round Venton, a peep into the room of shadow and of sunshine a glimpse through the Dartmoor window at the winter glories of the Moor, the visit to the White Chapel with its love-red Rose Lamp and then we dash away to the Old Inn for the cosiest of meals in the dear little familiar room with its huge log fire and its air of utter peace and seclusion.

... So I took a day out this week; meanwhile had found by chance, just after I decided to blog Beatrice, (or Olive, which was her real name) that she moved down to the moor a little over one hundred years ago - probably in 1902. Her home, at Venton, was just south-east of the village of Widecombe in the Moor, and Rugglestone Inn was between the two. Chase was the same generation as Mary Patricia Willcocks, who also, during part of her life, lived near and wrote about the moor. But I imagine Chase to have been a very different sort of person and writer; for one reason, Willcocks was sympathetic to  female emancipation; for another, she was a much more gifted and multifaceted writer. However, Chase, (or 'My Lady of the Moor' which was the title bestowed on her, in a novel, by John Oxenham), had the notoriety of being cast as eccentric, and in her later life, recluse. She campaigned vigorously for Dartmoor's preservation and took to her grave the legacy of one or two unsolved  'mysteries', which still have the capacity to interest and engage a variety of people, giving the moor-lover an excuse to take time out on the moors; there, one can be child again, finding her magical moor-nooks and crannies, climbing a selection of tors, paper-chasing her favourite sites.

Like other people of her generation Chase thought nothing of walking miles and miles, and knew the moor like the back of her hand by the time she wrote Heart of the Moor,  in which she mentions a secret experience, a 'vision of white'. which happened to her on 'Bellever Tor, the 'central tor of Dartmoor - the core of the heart of the moor'.  She adds that 'Only one who ever reads this book will understand the meaning of this ... and I doubt if even he knows that he alone holds, and always will hold, my heart in the hollow of his hand'.

 Another enigma  is  the whereabouts of Chase's specially named 'Dream Tor', which she mentions several times in Heart of the Moor. There she
 'lays full length on the dry turf at the tor's feet listening ... for vibrations of the countless forms of life that she [moor] bears within her', can 'watch for the first swallows' and 'listen for the first cuckoo'. But, she continues,
 'The tor's real name is not of course, Dream Tor, or anything like it. I call it that, because it is my favourite home tor: on it I have seen my sublimest visions, dreamt my divinest dreams. It is not marked upon any Ordnance map, thank heaven, and no tourist ever comes near it from year's end to year's end'.

 You can find more about the tor, a description and suggested/probably location on the legendary Dartmoor site.

We missed eating at Rugglestone, Chase's favourite pub, but trekked to both Wind Tor (picture above) and Top Tor on our day out exploring her scenic-sites.   
However, we did not come up with any definitive solution as to which was the location of her 'dream-site'. What did strike me on this clearest, sunniest and bluest-sky day, was how right Chase was when she said:

 'moor round my Dream Tor is clothed in the robe of gold and purple, intermixed with the blue-gray of many boulders and scarlet of whortleberry .... this vividly embroidered foreground against the sombre ... severity of the wine dark distance ... I wonder if there is any land which surpasses Dartmoor for brightness and depths of colour'.

For, on this early March day the intensity of dream on the moor is everywhere; there is no one magical tor, but the energy of the wilderness is captured in its amazing dream-coat colours. And today, the olives, russetts, browns, golds, greens and whites of the early season are set off by the startling black tonal mood that pervades the place: Dartmoor ponies, galloway cattle, dark-snake of the Dart, thickets of gorse-stubble, and coiffs of black smoke from ongoing swaling: air is heavy.

But we are not. This is Spring air. Everything is in renewal. We watch distant figures on several tors determinedly reach the top-most rock, reach high, rise, lift their bodies as if kites and outstretch their arms so they can send out this eternal moor's secret message, like semaphore.

Beatrice Chase's grave is in Widecombe churchyard: it is well worth a visit, if nothing else to see the Spring vista of moor swirling up from the flower-filled churchyard; on my visit snowdrops and crocuses dappled the corners under budding trees. A lone bee floated over the heather that surrounded the grave.

Following Father’s Footsteps; Freya Stark & Dartmoor

 

Scenes of Dartmoor

            Over to the far west, beyond the Tamar border, Virginia Woolf’s love affair with the far west of Cornwall was largely prompted by her father’s relationship with the locality around St Ives. The writer inherited his love of walking and of place and in 1905 ‘tramped the Cornish landscape in her Father’s manner’.¹
              Woolf was not the only woman writer who spent time in the south-west whose affinity with her father prompted and inspired her own work. Freya Stark’s account of her childhood in Devon has a similar resonance; she loved to stride across the wide Dartmoor spaces, metaphorically stepping in and over her Father’s footsteps, whilst ostensibly projecting onto the moor a maternal ambiance, which is expressed in this extract by Beatrice Chase, another well-known Dartmoor writer:

And with the inspired thanksgiving came the comprehension of the magnetic attraction, the irresistible spell of Dartmoor. I felt her, like a living thing, twining herself round my very heart strings. Then and there I realised that this place was my fate, that if ever I left her she would draw me back to her heart, and that if I should resist her my own heart should break. 

            These writers’ presentation of their loved territory in their own texts is viewed through their father’s lens. He’s the one who symbolically has ownership of the land-space; she is psychically obligated to follow in his footsteps. Freya Stark spent her adult life travelling to real, far away places and writing about them. Yet for all the exotic appeal of such locations as Turkey and Arabia she  was intensely aware of the moor and of its lifelong effect on her. In 1950 Stark wrote of her early acquaintance with the moor in Traveller’s Prelude:

‘I must have been very small – perhaps six years old. Our land ran into Dartmoor and held in its heathery edges stone circles where people brought flocks and lived through forgotten summers before the Romans came. I would play in and out of the boulders they had propped up to make their houses.’

          In 1902 when Beatrice Chase, another well-known Dartmoor writer, 28 years old, had just moved to Widecombe in the Moor, Freya was nine. Already her nomadic way of life had been established; her parents were always travelling with their family; from Asolo in Italy; to Cornwall; to Paris. They also frequently stayed in various farm lodgings in the Chagford district, so she had ample opportunity to explore the moors. However, her father was by now completing the building of Ford Park, the last of a series of properties that Stark constructed in the Chagford area during the 1890’s and it was Ford that became the place Freya chose to call her home, although she only stayed there for short periods.

Around Chagford

         It was from Robert Stark that Freya inherited her deep passion for Dartmoor. He had

‘walked [there] as a boy, [it] was to him a dark and refreshing well, from which the water of life was drawn. It gave him silent serenity, and a sort of patient endurance very like its own high and gentle, cloud receiving hills.’

Stark’s daughter’s stays at Ford Park were crammed with magical encounters in the midst of the intoxicating landscape around her. Some of these were imaginative dreams, perhaps instigating and foretelling her future travelling compulsion. Sitting in the bay of her bedroom, she

 ‘looked over the granite boulders of a rockery … to where Meldon Hill, cone-shaped like a volcano, dreams in moonlight on summer nights’.

Or, playing in the grounds, she and her sister

‘had the run of the woods and were let loose there, to climb every mossy tree we liked, and to live the Mowgli stories …’

Other experiences left her with more understanding of the sometimes harsher aspects of life on Dartmoor. Their father took them for picnics

‘jolting in a cart that met the heather as a clumsy creaking fishing-boat meets the waves, and would fry a pancake mixture from a jar over a fire of heather stalks … we carried a little bottle of ammonia with us in case an adder bit our feet. The dogs’ noses would get bitten and they would be doctored with brandy and nearly die, until they were bitten a third or fourth time and became immune.’

Freya was introduced to the moor’s archaeological features, to stone rows and circles; those of Middle Tor and Kestor became ‘favourite playgrounds’, yet she was sensitive to the aesthetic and geological aspects of her surroundings:

‘The granite oldest of rocks, rounded by weather, wrinkled and rough to the hand as some old grandfather’s cheek, has written itself into me so that it seems part of my being, a thing like our bones that we carry till we die; and I can think of nothing purer and cleaner than the wind-whipped pools mad by the whirling pebbles on the summit, where the rain-water keeps the rock creamy white amid the surrounding weather-darkened grey.’

         Freya couldn’t bear to be stuck indoors, at parties organised by her mother, who ‘turned away from the moors’. Stark’s deep identification with her father and the moor left her with a passion for wild open spaces; it became a place where she could roam to her heart’s content, letting her untrammelled self fly free. Five years later, when she was 14, the family returned to Ford Park for a long idyllic summer. The girls were encouraged to camp out by the river Teign,

‘sleeping on a mattress of dried bracken in an old caravan, where the river dropped through woods from pool to pool’.

          Many of Stark’s travel writings interlace comments about the foreign place with special memories of places on Dartmoor; its landscape had become an indelible part of her mind. Moor is a playground for her adult journeying and seems subconsciously ever-present, even when she is in more exotic climes. Stark grew up ‘a child of Dartmoor who acquired in its solitude a lasting love for the uncommon and the wild’.² And yet, without the foregrounding influential passion of her father, it is intriguing to consider whether she would have developed similar preoccupations.
                                              ………….. 
My poem about Freya Stark is part of a longer piece called Triune which was published in Shearsman

Freya
is Artemis attuned to earth
new land    cone-shaped    a volcano
opens every morning over the eastern brow
of Meldon Hill    nose to peat ground
she’s discovering buried cities in the husks of silt
and sand   yet curiously oblivious to lost voices
of invisible fates   she’s immersed in this landscape
the source of the starting points of life’s journey
a future for travel yet grounded in moor
and steeped with its bones    Stones
in her pocket weigh forever her way
salt to dust-earth   Moor is her playground  Prelude
Treasure   later she will make her own map
text uncoiling in a long ravishing italic sigil
over shadier foreign lands   At last Arabia!

---

1.  Simon Trezise. 2. Andrew Rothovius.