Buckfastleigh: Steam, Apples and the Hounds of Dartmoor 10.10.26
I took myself off to explore Buckfastleigh, following winding lanes through scattered hamlets and out into the green folds of the Devon countryside. Old houses stood behind stone walls and weathered gates, their gardens softened by the passing seasons. Sheep grazed the lush fields, and apple trees stood scattered across the landscape, their branches bearing the quiet promise of harvest. Through the villages the air was filled with those unmistakable Devon accents shaped by generations of life among these hills and valleys. It was a lovely part of the world to explore on foot, where the lanes invited wandering and every turn offered something new to discover.
I arrived at a viewpoint just as a steam train began its passage through the valley below. I’m no railway enthusiast; I couldn’t tell you its number or identify the finer points of its engineering, but I just had to watch. The engine laboured along its track, sending great white plumes of steam billowing into the air. Against the wooded slopes and open fields, it seemed to belong to another age, when the railway was a powerful agent of change, carrying people, goods and the products of industry through a landscape that had known a far quieter existence. I watched until the train slipped from sight, its steam dissolving above the trees, and the valley settled back into stillness.
Yet Buckfastleigh’s pastoral appearance tells only part of its story. The rivers and streams that thread these valleys once powered a thriving woollen industry, transforming fleece from the surrounding countryside into cloth. By 1838, around 700 looms were operating in the town, sustaining generations of spinners, weavers and mill workers. Water, wool and human industry had combined to make this a busy working landscape, its prosperity bound to the rhythms of the mills. Today, the machinery has fallen silent, but the relationship between land and trade remains visible in the sheep grazing the same green fields, their wool still carrying an echo of the industry that helped shape the town.
There were other, more contemporary discoveries along the way, among them Luscombe Drinks, a favourite of mine. Founded in 1975, the company began with cider and apple juice before expanding into a range of drinks that includes its Sicilian lemonade. There was something particularly fitting about encountering a drinks maker in this apple-growing corner of Devon: a business whose beginnings lay in the fruit of the countryside, even as its ambitions reached beyond the county to find new flavours and inspiration. The old agricultural landscape and the modern enterprise seemed, in their different ways, to share the same instinct for making something worthwhile from the produce of the land.
Buckfastleigh, however, has another, darker story, one that had caught my attention on an earlier visit when I climbed the hill to the ruins of Holy Trinity Church. There, amid the weathered stonework and the quiet of the churchyard, I encountered the tomb associated with Richard Cabell, a seventeenth-century local squire whose name has become inseparable from one of Dartmoor’s most enduring legends.
Cabell died in 1677, leaving behind a reputation that folklore would darken considerably. He was remembered in local tales as a cruel and wicked man, said to have sold his soul to the Devil. According to the legend, on the night of his burial, a pack of supernatural black hounds swept across the moor and gathered around his tomb, their howling disturbing the darkness. Such stories seem to rise naturally from Dartmoor itself. Here, where ancient tracks disappear into sudden mists, where tors stand black against a lowering sky and the distances between settlements can feel immense, the landscape has long lent itself to tales of restless spirits, spectral hunters and things best left unseen after nightfall.
It is little wonder that the Cabell legend has become associated with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Published in 1902, the novel draws its atmosphere from the wild and sometimes forbidding landscape of Dartmoor, where an ancient family curse and a terrifying hound lie at the heart of a celebrated mystery. The precise origins of Doyle’s inspiration are more complex than any single local tale, but the story of Richard Cabell is frequently cited among the influences associated with the novel. Standing among the ruins above Buckfastleigh, it is easy to appreciate how a story rooted in one Devon churchyard might travel far beyond its beginnings, gathering new life in the imagination of a writer and becoming part of the wider literary mythology of the moor.
The ruins of Holy Trinity Church are a striking contrast to Buckfast Abbey, which stands not far away in the valley below. The Abbey’s history reaches back to around 1018, when a monastic community was established here. Its life was brought to an abrupt end during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, and for centuries the site lay in ruins. Then, in 1882, Benedictine monks returned and began the remarkable work of rebuilding the Abbey. The church was completed in 1938, the result of decades of labour and devotion.
My wander through Buckfastleigh brought together more than I had expected from a day spent following country lanes!
What a magical day.
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