“DOING DARTMOOR” - A talk given in 1863

by Colin Burbidge

Reverend John Ingle, Rector of St. Olaves church in Exeter was a man of many parts, combative priest, incessant letter writer, pamphleteer, occasional lecturer, and soon to be a landowner at Murchington. In November 1863 he gave a talk on “Dartmoor”

View of Dartmoor from Scorhill stone circle

On November 6th, 1863, The “Western Times” published a witty review of his lecture.

 “DOING DARTMOOR” 

“The pleasantest three half hours the Literary Society and its friends have enjoyed at a lecture for a long time were spent on Wednesday night hearing the Rev. John Ingle give a free and easy account of his rambles and scrambles on Dartmoor. John Ingle is a favourite in the lecture room as was proved last night by the crowded state of the theatre which was thronged from floor to ceiling.

A Dartmoor Tor

He has a manly presence, a goodly crop of beard flourishes in the soil meant for its growth: his voice is clear, and he reads well, though he is no slave to his manuscript, makes himself at home with his audience; lightens his graver talk with gleams of wit and humour. Would you believe it, if you were not told that this same genial clever “companion de voyage” is that Priest Ingle the curate of St. Olaves who delivered that poor bit of half-popish talk about All Saints Day! How two such ill-agreeing characters should be beneath one hat must move our special wonder.

Doing Dartmoor is becoming quite the fashionable thing in Exeter, as many a weary leg, wet jacket and wasted purse could bear witness this last summer. A “Handy Book of Dartmoor” is likely to become a desideratum. Mr. Ingle’s lecture would furnish the substance of such a book. He describes how you might get there –by steam, by team or by ten-toes.

Nor does he forget the commissariat, it is no land where meagre diet or short commons are agreeable; and it is not a land flowing with milk and honey.

His counsel is that intending travellers to Dartmoor bethink them of the claims their stomach will make on them and provide accordingly. He and a friend were there for four days, and bacon and egg, egg and bacon was all the variety they had to play upon.

Mr. Ingle generously offered to give the benefit of his experience to anyone intending to make a tour of our Dartmoor Alps. This brings me back to the Handy Book – let him compile such a book and the traveller will find the convenience of having it always to hand. The lecturer was heartily applauded.”

View across Dartmoor

Three-and-a-half Murchington sisters: Mary, Louisa, Catherine…and little Annie

It’s very likely that at some point when he was leaving or arriving at St Olaves, in the early 1870s, the Rev John Ingle would have noticed the three little girls who lived in a nearby Murchington farmhouse - the three Dicker sisters. Mary, the eldest was born in April 1862, Louisa was just eighteen months younger and born in November 1863 and the little one, Catherine, was born two years later in October 1865.

They are all recorded as living in Murchington in the 1871 census, and we might imagine them in the spring of 1871 skipping along the lane together, Mary aged nine, Louisa aged seven and Catherine aged five.

Perhaps they walked with their father, William Dicker, through Providence and Forder and along Deave Lane to the church in Throwleigh. Or more likely they got dressed up in their Sunday best and had a horse and cart, to take them along the narrow lanes to Church.

Sadly their mother Susan Litton Dicker (née Nickels) had died of consumption in January 1869, she was only 36 years old. William and Susan had married just seven years and one month earlier in Throwleigh Church, on Christmas Day 1861.

Throwleigh Church - Spring 2020

By using the enumerator’s records from the decennial population census we can get some fascinating glimpses into these girls’ lives. We know that in 1871 they lived not just with their father William (age 33) but also with their grandparents John Dicker (age 73 ) and Johanna Dicker (age 66), all born in the parish of Throwleigh. In addition there were two boys lodging with the family – Robert Cann (14) and Alfred Leamann (10) who helped with the farm.

The lane from Murchington to Providence

It is tempting to imagine the girls walking down the hill and up again to the small school at Providence, which can be seen so clearly now from the lane that leads from Higher Murchington to Blackaton Brook and Blackaton House. However, this school was not built until 1877 so it is more likely that the three girls were taught in the school room, added to the Providence Chapel in 1869, or perhaps at one of the other small ‘dame schools’ operating in the area before the 1870 Education Act began the shift to universal elementary education. 

It is difficult to piece together the fragments of these three sisters’ childhoods, but we do know that their father married again in March 1872 (to Mary-Ann Clarke), and on the 1st May 1876 their new baby sister was born – Annie Dicker. By the time of the 1881 census William and Mary-Ann were still living in Murchington, but William’s father John had died in 1874. Louisa (17) and little Annie (4) were still with the couple, and they also had two farm lads (William and Arthur Perriman) living there. But by spring 1881, Mary was nearly 19 and working as a governess in Bury Barton near Crediton and Down St Mary. Fifteen year old Catherine Dicker also seems to have been living away, possibly at a boarding school (this would be consistent with her occupation recorded in 1891 and her older sister being employed as a governess – a responsible position that could not be secured without more formal education than provided at a local elementary school). By the time of the 1891 census Catherine Dicker is back living at home in Murchington (with her father and step-mother, her older sister Louisa and Annie). In 1891 Catherine is described as an Ex-Schoolmistress, while Louisa as a ‘farmer’s assistant’.

Violets and Primroses in a Murchington garden

It is tempting to wonder whether the three Dicker daughters welcomed their new step-mother and whether they were pleased to have a little sister to play with. The Dickers were a well-established farming family with deep roots in the parish, but they would not have been so wealthy that the girls were exempt from helping out on the farm. It is likely they would have played a full part in important rituals like churning butter, and they might also have helped with milking, feeding and other daily chores of a Devon hill farm. They would have needed to learn such farming skills to ‘marry well’ in this remote community, but equally they would probably have escaped the hardest labours as the daughters of a well-to-do farmer. Perhaps they had enough free time to do well in their school work, and even to wander the Dartmoor lanes enjoying the wild flowers and the bird song. 

Wildflowers in Murchington hedgerows

Murchington

Hand-tinted postcard of Murchington’s main street, c. 1910 showing Woodland Farm and the Anglican Chapel

The hamlet of Murchington lies just outside the parish of Chagford, which is bounded on its northern edge by the course of the River Teign. But though it lies within the parish of Throwleigh, the pull of the larger, and much nearer settlement of Chagford must always have ruled here. Even before Chagford Bridge was first built at the bottom of Walland Hill (probably in the early thirteenth century), the Teign was no real barrier as it could be forded at various points hereabouts.

1884 OS 6-inch map showing Murchington and the course of the River Teign

For much of the nineteenth century, Murchington was also significantly more populous than the village of Throwleigh, thanks in part to its proximity to the small town of Chagford with its textile factories and growing tourist business. In 1841 there were 158 people living in Murchington, compared with just sixty in Throwleigh. Those passing through Murchington on their way to Gidleigh might be surprised (then and now) that the handful of homes on each side of the road could house so many people. Much of Murchington is slightly hidden from the incurious traveller who sticks to the road. Besides the main farm there have long been a cluster of dwellings at Higher Murchington, to the north of the main Gidleigh road, and the narrow lane that disappears beyond the post box in the centre of the hamlet leads to a further group of cottages: St Olaves―a hamlet within a hamlet. Until the late 1860s there were even more cottages here.

The front of St Olaves in c.1910 - the extension to the left was finished in 1906.

In addition, we can see from census records that households were much bigger in the mid-nineteenth century than they are today. In 1841 farm labourer George Dicker, 55, headed a household of nine. This included his wife and their son and three daughters aged between 15 and 20, an older couple (another farm labourer and his wife) and a 5 year old child with a different surname (possibly a grandchild born out of wedlock). Next door, local farmer John Dicker aged 40 (possibly a relation) headed a household of seven including his wife Johanna, their three children and two farm hands. John Dicker’s three-year-old son William lived and farmed in Murchington for the rest of his life. He went on to have four daughters by two wives and in 1909 was buried in Throwleigh Churchyard next to his first wife Susan Litton Nichols, who had died in 1869.

Page from the 1841 Census showing part of the return for Murchington including the two Dicker households

The local economy, like that of much of West Devon, was overwhelmingly agricultural, but the hamlet also boasted a pub, a blacksmiths and for a while a working quarry.  There was talk of Murchington being more unruly and irreligious than most Devon settlements, presumably because it lacked the powerful controlling influence of a big landowner or resident parson. But things began to change from the late 1860s with the arrival of a succession of wealthy, non-resident landowners attracted by the hamlet’s remote beauty and the sporting possibilities of its upland river and dense woodland.

First on the scene was the Reverend John Ingle, an Exeter-based Anglican priest associated with the High Church (opponents said ‘papist’) Oxford Movement. Ingle was the vicar of St Olave’s Church, a Saxon foundation in the medieval heart of Exeter, when, in 1868, he bought fifty acres of Murchington farmland, including farm buildings and three rows of labourers’ cottages. He renamed his new estate St Olave’s in honour of his parish church (this hamlet within a hamlet survives, but as ‘St Olaves’ having mysteriously lost the apostrophe).

A photograph believed to be of Rev John Ingle in the early 1860s

Ingle demolished many of the properties he acquired, presumably evicting the poor tenants, and renovated the finest cottages to provide a spacious country retreat (although according to the Chagford Parish Magazine of June 1868, his original plan had been to build ‘an elegant Elizabethan mansion … on a lovely site overlooking the vale of Holy Street’). The 1840 Throwleigh Tithe map records a range of properties called ‘Waste Houses Court’ on precisely this site―their swift demolition by Ingle may have been intended to facilitate his grand building plans. Ingle quarried stone from the site and used this to help build the enormous granite retaining walls that can still clearly be seen from the top of Nattadon or Meldon Hill. He also began planting specimen trees imported from around the world, starting the collection that now includes the stands of Giant and Coast Redwoods, Grand Firs and Douglas Firs that are equally visible from afar. Part of this collection of specimen trees can also still be seen in the adjacent Milfordleigh plantation, then part of the estate but now owned by the National Trust (see 1884 OS map above).

A section from the 1840 Tithe map of Throwleigh parish (Waste Houses Court is plot 207)

Ingle sold up within a decade, never realising his ambition to build a fine mansion. He was succeeded by a series of other rich clergymen who further developed the estate as a gentleman’s country retreat. They used their wealth and influence to strengthen the Church of England’s presence in the hamlet, including supporting the construction of Murchington’s small Anglican Chapel, finished in 1890. The Sutton family, who owned St Olaves from 1907 to 1960, were also strong supporters of Anglicanism―indeed Edmund Sutton bought the right to appoint Throwleigh’s clergy at the same time as he acquired his Murchington estate.

However, the family’s influence in the district waned considerably after Edmund’s son Ralph suffered a stroke in the early 1950s.  Between 1954 and 1971, the estate was gradually broken up, returning more or less to its original constituent parts. Milfordleigh plantation was sold off, Murchington Farm lost its land-holdings, the farm’s outbuildings became separate dwellings, and the various cottages and outbuildings that had formed the Suttons’ private residence were reconstructed as four separate properties.

A plan of the proposed Anglican Chapel for Murchington

Murchington Chapel also experienced a re-incarnation with the passing of the Suttons. In 1975 it was finally decommissioned as a place of worship and sold for redevelopment. Sympathetically restored, it is now a private residence and the only holiday let in the hamlet.

But if Murchington has not succumbed to the curse of second homes, it has nonetheless changed drastically in recent years. In the nineteenth century there were at least five separate farms in Murchington, mostly small-scale mixed farms of between twenty and seventy acres run by local families with deep roots in the area. There was also a pub and a small shop. Today there is only one working farm, and a small-holding – the other farms, along with the old pub, have become private residences for people drawn to the area by its beauty and relative tranquillity; just as Ingle, Radford and the Barkers had been in the nineteenth century.

Jon Lawrence

(drawing on research by Colin Burbidge and Judy Moss)