“Look to! Treble’s going … she’s gone.” The treble ringer made the traditional call and led the other seven bellringers in a series of rounds and call changes before the morning service at the parish church of All Saints, Winkleigh. Sunlight falling through the stained glass window of the ringing chamber cast the ringers in silhouette, but illuminated some of the memorabilia traditional in these places: framed photographs of teams of ringers from former days; a certificate celebrating success at a contest at High Bickington in the 1930s.
I had bumped into several of the ringers, whom I rang with many years ago in this village, at the monthly produce market. We stood chatting – surrounded by tables laden with local organic vegetables, fruit, bottled juices and hand-made Christmas cakes and decorations – remembering past times and now passed acquaintances. This market is a relatively new event, for a village whose charter for a fair was granted in 1262, but the hall was busy with intent shoppers.
Winkleigh is at the hidden heart of mid-Devon, the high plateau between Dartmoor and Exmoor dissected by rivers that wind almost reluctantly northwards. Looking south from the churchyard towards the granite mass of Dartmoor, ranks of ridge-lines corrugate a mosaic of pasture, woodland and hedgerows – a working landscape where the views are sweeping and weather prospects legitimately dominate discussion. A tangle of lanes, deeply hedged and often with grass growing between the wheel tracks, provides access to the core of this countryside.
Heading east towards Eggesford, the softer profile of Exmoor appears briefly before you drop steeply through forest into the valley of the river Taw. The riverside trees still carried a rich palette of colours, but occasional leaves were now on the surface of the water, marking the swirls of the current around the piers of the old stone bridge. On such a quiet morning I had been hoping to catch a glimpse of an otter, but only a heron, with guttural cry and improbably slow flight, passed while I stood there. It was good enough.
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