BARNSTAPLE
Barnstaple is a pleasant English country town, with that air of
cleanliness and quiet prosperity, of excellent sanitation and odd
historic corners, side by side with big new modern buildings and
exquisite green gardens where the old gnarled apple-trees are afroth with
blossom in the spring, which is the peculiar flavour of an English
country town. The incongruity is the charm; you step from a modern
drapery store, with a respectable display of plate-glass, on to the clean
narrow pavement, and find yourself looking down a small dark passage
opposite, into a sunny paved court, where the houses are cream-washed,
and the roofs are atilt in odd delicious angles, and the casement windows
have still the old diamond panes of Elizabeth's day, and the sun lies
slanting across the pots of wallflower, and the small boys play marbles
as they played marbles there when the Armada sailed. Barnstaple is a
thriving little modern town, but it has many such charming scenes to the
visitor with an observant eye--a narrow cobbled street, with an irregular
sag of gabled houses either side, the cream and rose-coloured walls
mellow and sunny in the late afternoon, or a cluster of really beautiful
half-timbered houses of the sixteenth century, with carved oak doorposts
and beam-ends, such as those which are known as Church Row, and stand
back from the road, between Boutport Street, and the High Street, by St.
Peter's Church and St. Anne's Chapel. St. Peter's Church, which stands
between these two main streets in the very centre of the town, is of the
fourteenth century, and has a fine leaded spire, considered to be one of
the finest in Europe, which the nineteenth century was anxious to
abolish, and replace by a western tower of the more ordinary type.
Fortunately Sir Gilbert Scott was called in to restore the church, and
refused to have a hand in destroying the spire, so the old parish church
stands as it was built, but with its spire drawn curiously out of the
perpendicular by the action of the sun's rays on the lead.
Within a few yards of St. Peter's stands the grammar-school, where Bishop
Jewel and his neighbour and enemy, Thomas Harding, went to school in the
early sixteenth century, and the poet Gay in the beginning of the
eighteenth. It was originally a chapel of St. Anne, and became a
grammar-school on the suppression of the chantries by Henry VIII. The
upper part of the building dates from 1450, but the crypt is much older,
and it is conjectured to be a Saxon foundation. The beauty of these
buildings--the church, the grammar-school, and the old houses--consists
so greatly in their surroundings, in the green of the grass and the
unfolding chestnut-trees against the old grey stone, the twinkle of
blossom by the angle of a house, and the soft sky of Devon above, that it
is difficult to reproduce; it is a beauty of atmosphere rather than of
outline, of sentiment and association.
I like, too, this lack of the "picturesque cult" which one finds in these
English towns; the beautiful is allowed always to be the useful, and the
family washing hangs on a line outside many a Tudor house as easily as in
a London slum. In Boutport Street--that old street that runs more than
halfway round Barnstaple, "about the port"--stands the Golden Lion Hotel,
which was formerly the town house of the Earl of Bath, and was enriched
in the seventeenth century by most beautiful moulded plaster ceilings and
fireplaces, made by Italian craftsman who were brought over from Italy.
The front of the building has been altogether modernized, but much of the
beautiful decorated interior work remains, to enrich the rooms where the
many unseeing visitors take their meals. The Trevelyan Hotel, in the
High Street, which presents to the street a most unpretentious exterior,
and where, indeed, the principal rooms are the Victorian of Dickens, with
ugly curtains and carpets, wall-papers and furniture, Victorian pictures,
and Victorian bronzes on the coffee-room mantlepiece, has treasures
hidden away up its dark staircases and in its cheaper and more modest
bedrooms--defaced and disregarded, alas!--an Italian ceiling of fine
scroll-work cut in half by a partition boarding, and a fine mantlepiece,
with figures in relief, being built half over, and gas-jets thrust
through the moulding. They showed me a great open hearth, with decorated
mantle, which must have been that of the dining-room; at present the room
is used for lumber. Half of it has been pulled down to build a
staircase, and the low casement windows are blocked by a lean-to
coalshed, making the room so dark that I could barely see the plaster
modelling of the wall.
This, I confess, is a vandalism, but I still consider it as the necessary
penalty we pay for not putting all the treasures of our past into
museums, labelling them neatly--and never looking at them.
The Penrose Almshouses in Litchdon Street, a beautiful small quadrangle,
with a low colonnade surmounted by an ornamented lead gutter and steep
dormer windows in a red-tiled roof, are still kept to their old uses.
They stand the wear and tear of time as well as its mellowing, and, like
language, if they are here and there vulgarized by the usage of every
day, without it they would be a dead language.
Queen Anne's Walk, overlooking the river, and close to the town station,
is a small colonnade of the Renaissance style, which is most familiar to
us in the architecture of Bath; it has an outlandish look, with its
classical lines seen against the background of the smooth river and green
Devonshire country, and has not the homely charm of Elizabethan or Stuart
building.
It has, however, its peculiar beauty; it is suggestive of red-heeled
shoes and powder, and an artificial world of beaux and belles. It must
have been a pleasant enough place to walk in, until the railway came
between it and the river, and its earlier name of the Merchants' Walk (or
the Exchange) gives more of its character than its present name.
One must beware, however, in the present popular quest for the "antique,"
of overlooking the beauty of modern things; the market, for instance,
which is a vast rectangular building standing on the High Street, has a
strange and individual charm when you come into it out of the glare of
the white street. The windows are fitted with light green glass, which
gives a sort of ghostly twilight to its bare spaciousness, with heavy
masses of gloom among the pillars of the flanking colonnade. It has no
pretence to artistic ornament of any kind; it was built for a specific
purpose, which it answers admirably, and when it is crowded with stalls
on market-days, and noisy with buyers and sellers, it is a scene of
bustle and movement which would arouse the enthusiasm of a traveller if
he came upon it in some distant city of the East, though the difference
of language and costume is all there is between the two. But when it is
empty, with its bare walls and bare floor and high dark roof, sun and
shadow make from it a beauty which it is worth a moment's pause and
stepping aside to see.
The Athenaeum, also, which stands in the open space at the head of the
Long Bridge, which is a noble structure of the thirteenth century, is a
modern building, endowed by the late Mr. Rock, and possessing one of the
best libraries in Devonshire. It is a plain, unpretentious building; on
the ground-floor a geological museum, very useful for a student--for it
contains a complete collection of Devonian rocks and fossils--and the
library upstairs. Sitting there on a summer afternoon, and seeing
through the open windows the smooth sunlit curve of the river below, and
the gentle slope of wooded hills beyond, the Athenaeum has a charm--that
charm of weather and daily custom--which architectural description fails
to convey for any building, whether it is the Parthenon or a farm-house.
Without it, places lack their intimate personality, as photographs lack
the personality of men and women. My memory of the Athenaeum Library is
of the familiar, slightly musty smell of books, of the faint creaking of
the librarian's boots, and the hum of bees and the whirr of a mowing
machine, of the smell of an early summer afternoon, the white glare of
the North Walk stretching beside the river, and the reflection of
anchored boats, very perfect on the still water.
Barnstaple is a very ancient borough; it is spoken of in the Devonshire
Domesday as one of the four "burghs" of Devon, and as early as the reign
of Henry I, before the election of Mayors had become part of English
municipal life, it was entitled to elect a chief magistrate for its own
government. It was a fortified place under the Saxon Kings, and a large
grass-grown mound in the centre of the town (near the town station) marks
the site of Athelstan's castle. Athelstan is supposed to have come to
Barnstaple in the early tenth century, when he was engaged in driving the
British out of Devonshire, beyond the River Tamar, which marks the
boundary between Devon and Cornwall for the greater part; and this was
only done by him, Westcote affirms, after he had exhausted every means of
gentleness and clemency. The Taw, the Torridge, the Tamar, and the Tavy,
all comprise some form of the same syllable, "Taw"; and "Tamar" is a
corruption of "Taw-meer," which Westcote takes to mean the
river-boundary, "Taw" occurring in the names of the four principal rivers
"of these parts."
There was a Saxon church at Barnstaple, probably on the site of the
present parish church of St. Peter's, and the tithes were given to the
Abbey of Malmesbury. The original ecclesiastic seal bore the seated
figure of King Athelstan. After the Conquest the barony of Barnstaple
(which comprised the church) was given to Judhael of Totnes; from him it
passed to the famous family of Tracy, from them to the Martins (whose
name remains in the little village of Martinshoe, near Lynton), and from
them, again, to the Audleys.
It was a Lord Audley who distinguished himself so greatly in the Battle
of Poitiers, and, as his family were then in possession of Barnstaple, it
appears that the town changed hands frequently in the first three hundred
years after the Conquest. The story told of Lord Audley is that he had
made a vow that he would strike the first stroke in a battle for Edward
III or for his son, and that at Poitiers he fought with such desperate
courage in the forefront of the battle that he was carried off the field
severely wounded. After the battle the Black Prince inquired after him,
and was told that he lay wounded in a litter. "Go and know if he may be
brought hither, or else I will go and see him where he is," said the
Prince; so Audley had his litter taken up by eight of his servants, who
carried him to the Prince's tent. The Prince took him in his arms, and
kissed him, and praised him for the best and most valiant Knight of all
that had fought that day, nor, though the wounded Knight disclaimed it,
would he admit of any refusal, but gave him a yearly grant of 500 marks
out of his own inheritance. Lord Audley, being carried back to his own
tent, summoned his four esquires and divided the gift among them. The
Black Prince, presently hearing of this, had Sir James once more brought
before him, and asked if he did not consider the gift worthy of his
acceptance, or for what other reason he had so disposed of it.
"Sire," said the Knight, "these four esquires have a long time well and
truly served me in many great dangers, and at this present especially, in
such wise that, if they had never done anything else, I was bound unto
them, and ere this time they had never anything of me in reward; and,
Sire, you know I was but one man alone, but by the courage, aid, and
comfort of them I took on me to accomplish my vow; and certainly I had
been dead in the battle had they not holpen me and endured the brunt of
the day. Wherefore, whenas nature and duty did oblige me to consider the
love they bear me, I should have showed myself too much ungrateful if I
had not rewarded them . . . but whereas I have done this without your
licence, I humbly crave pardon. . . ."
The Black Prince once more embraced him, praised him for his generosity
as much as for his valour, and granted him a further 600 marks in place
of what he had given away.
I have transcribed this episode because it seems to me a pretty tale of
chivalry, of valour and courtesy, of generosity and noble, if fantastic,
ideals.
Under King Athelstan's rule Barnstaple was governed by two Bailiffs, "one
for the King to collect his duties, the other for the town to receive
their customs." Under Henry I it was granted a charter, which was
confirmed by John and enlarged by Elizabeth.
The earliest industries of the town seem to have been pottery and
weaving; the pottery has always been of the cheaper, coarser kind, and
although some attempt was made at the close of the last century, when the
industry was revived, to bring it to a higher artistic level of colour
and glaze, it still, to my mind, continues mediocre, and has neither the
highly finished beauty of such work as the Ruskin pottery, nor the
genuinely simple lines or colouring of "peasant pottery," such as that
from Quimperle in Brittany. The Barum ware has a sort of bourgeois
mediocrity between these two different types, and there is room for a
bold innovator to reform the present models and methods. It is a pity,
perhaps, that he has not yet arisen, for a local industry of this kind
adds greatly to the vitality of a town.
Of the weaving industry, what Westcote calls "lanificium," "the skill and
knowledge of making cloth, under which genus are contained the species of
spinning, knitting, weaving, tucking, pressing, dying, carding, combing
and such-like," we have records from the twelfth century; though until
the reign of Edward IV only friezes and plain coarse cloth were made. In
Edward's reign an Italian, "Anthony Bonvise," is reputed to have taught
Barnstaple the making of fine "kersies," and spinning with a distaff;
doubtless this was looked upon by the older generation of conservatives
as a deterioration to luxury and soft living; they would hark back to the
standards of a simpler age, when a King's breeches cost him no more than
three shillings, and "friezes" would be good enough for the noblest. For
Robert of Gloucester, in his Chronicle, tells us of King William Rufus:
"As his chamberlain him brought, as he rose a day,
A morrow for to wear, a pair hose of say,
He asked what they costned; three shillings said the other.
'Fie, a devil,' quoth the King, 'who say so vile deed?
King to wear any cloth, but it costned more:
Buy a pair of a mark, or thou shalt be acorye sore.'
A worse pair of ynou the other sith him brought,
And said they were for a mark, and unnethe so he bought.
'Yea, bel ami,' quoth the King, 'they be well bought;
In this way serve me, or thou ne shalt serve me not.'"
It was King Stephen, I believe,
"who was a luckless clown;
His breeches cost him half a crown;"
but King Stephen had to contend with rebellion and civil war the whole of
his unhappy reign, so doubtless popular sentiment would assign him a
smaller share of the world's goods than King William Rufus.
In Westcote's time, in the early seventeenth century, the wool that was
worked here in Devon was brought from all over England--Dorset,
Gloucester, Wales, London, and also Ireland; and clothmaking had become
so large an industry that agriculture had suffered considerably. "And
every rumour of war or contagious sickness . . . makes a multitude of the
poorer sort chargeable to their neighbours, who are bound to maintain
them . . . the meanest sort of people also will now rather place their
children to some of these mechanical trades than to husbandry, whereby
husbandry-labourers are more scarce, and hirelings more dear than in
former times."
[Illustration: Woody Bay and Duty Point, West Lynton]
This little passage in Westcote is, I think, of great interest, as
showing the difficulties which had already arisen in the time of James I,
with the extension of industry, which must always flourish at the expense
of agriculture, and which seems to tend, nevertheless, both to personal
and to national prosperity.
It is a problem for which we have not yet found a solution, and at the
present time it comes before us with especial vividness and force.
Westcote gives a list of the various fabrics that are made in Devon; some
of them seem to be materials no longer in use, from the unfamiliarity of
the names. Exeter manufactured serges, both fine and coarse; Crediton
(the famous locality of the burning of Crediton Barns, in the Middle
Ages) made kersies; and Totnes a stuff called "narrow pin-whites," which
is, I believe, a coarse, loosely woven white material; Barnstaple and
Torrington were noted for "bays," single and double (perhaps of the same
texture as our modern baize), and for "frizados"; and Pilton, adjacent to
Barnstaple, was notorious rather than celebrated for the making of cotton
linings, so cheap and coarse a stuff that a popular "vae" or "woe" was
locally pronounced against them. "Woe unto you, Piltonians, that make
cloth without wool!"
It was in the woollen trade that the family of De Wichehalse, afterwards
so intimately connected with Lynton, made the fortune that enabled them
to become one of the leading houses of Barnstaple, and to acquire the
beautiful estate near Lynton, which is now known as Lee Abbey. It may,
perhaps, be of interest to the "curious-minded" to give an inventory of
his shop, taken in 1607 at the death of Nicholas de Wichehalse, who had
married Lettice, the daughter of the Mayor of Barnstaple.
The following are the chief items of the inventory, collected from
manuscript records by Mr. Chanter for the Devonshire Association:
182 yds. of coloured bays at . . . . . . 1s. 4d. a yd.
49 " kersey at . . . . . . . . . . . 2s. 4d. "
broadcloth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8s. 0d. "
147 yds. of coarse grey ffrize at . . . 11d. "
buffyns in remnants (whatever
they may be!) . . . . . . . . . . L1 9s. 4d.
Also lace, silk, black velvet, broad taffeta, leaven taffeta
. . . and 5 small boxes of marmalade.
Mr. Chanter conjectures that this last item is marmalade, and can read it
as nothing else, though he was not aware that it was a preserve of Queen
Elizabeth's time, nor why, even if it were, it should be in De
Wichehalse's shop.
It was the prosperity of the De Wichehalses, the Salisburys, the
Deamonds, and other enterprising merchants, which beautified the town
with public buildings, almshouses, and their private residences--for the
enrichment of which, as I have already stated, Italian workmen were
brought over--and the seventeenth century was the time of the town's
greatest importance and prosperity, when Barnstaple traded with Virginia
and the West Indies, the Spaniards in South America and on the Continent.
The Customs receipts show a very great import of tobacco, and there was a
considerable manufacture of pipes, as a branch of local pottery. "The
Exchange," or "the Merchants' Walk," as Queen Anne's Walk was then
called, before it was rebuilt, must have witnessed the inception of many
a venture, been paced by many an anxious foot when the weather was bad
and the returning ship was long overdue, and seen many a bargain struck
by richly dressed merchants, with pointed beards lying over their ruffs,
gravely smoking their pipe of "Virginny" over the deal.
That picturesqueness of dress and custom has passed away, but Barnstaple
is still a prosperous and pleasant city, lying on the sleek curve of the
River Taw, and surrounded by low smooth hills. Seen from the opposite
side of the river on a spring afternoon, from the steep road that leads
to Bishop's Tawton over Codden Hill, it has a fair aspect. The tall
modern Gothic tower of Holy Trinity stands out commandingly above the
clustered roofs by the river, and beyond the town, which is small enough,
seen from this height, to come within a single glance, lie the green and
fertile fields, and gentle, wooded hills. The road to Bishop's
Tawton--which was formerly an episcopal seat of the Bishops of Exeter--is
a typical Devonshire road, steep and stony, with high green banks and
hedges, which, on such an afternoon in spring, are starred with primroses
and clumps of dog-violets, celandines and wild-anemones, and wonderfully
green. It climbs from the London and South-Western Station, after
crossing the great thirteenth-century bridge from the Square, and within
a few minutes all signs of a town have dropped away, and we are in the
country of fields and farms. In less than a mile, indeed, we come upon
an old fortified farm; the massive whitewashed wall, three feet thick,
rises steeply from the hilly road. At one corner a giant yew has thrust
out part of the wall with its knotted roots, which are so huge that some
recent owner of the farm has cut a little summer house out of them, with
a thatched roof. The dwelling part of the farm faces this way, and,
being built on the hillside above the road, I catch only a glimpse of
steep gables and tall brick chimneys; but I looked in the open gateway of
the cobbled yard, and saw the great thatched barns, and the massive white
walls which surrounded them. The rear of the farm presented an almost
blank surface, save for one small door, which was open, a sudden black
oblong of shadow in the mellow whiteness. A cat sat cleaning itself in
the mild sunshine; otherwise there was no life nor movement. It looked
an enchanted place.
Farther on I came to a fork of the road, where a little stream ran
swiftly past the thatched and whitewashed cottages, their tiny gardens
profusely bright with flowers--hyacinths, daffodils, forget-me-nots, and
the deep red of climbing japonica. In one of them an old woman in a pink
sunbonnet was leaning on a stick gossiping with a neighbour, while two or
three sunburned children with yellow hair were dabbling in a brook. It
was idyllically and typically English, that ideal England of artists
which is dreamed of and loved by the sons and daughters of the Colonies,
who, thinking of "home" which they have never seen, think of such a scene
of verdant and homely peace.
Just beyond was a great barrow, a steep green mound perhaps twenty feet
high, with a little cottage beside it, and the small garden encroaching
on its green sides. I asked a child what she knew about it, wondering if
some local legend still lingered round the spot; but she told me "they
had dug a pond, beyond there, and this was the earth they had thrown up."
I did not explain to her the unlikeliness of such a heavy undertaking,
with a clear stream running by, but went on, wondering what British
chieftain or maraudering Dane lay buried under that great mound, awaiting
the last trump.
Bishop's Tawton is said to have been the seat of the Saxon Bishops of
Devon, established here in the tenth century; a farm now occupies the
site of the old episcopal palace, but the church is Perpendicular, and
the only Saxon remains I could discover was the base of a stone Saxon
cross in the churchyard. On the opposite bank of the river is Tawstock
church, standing in the grounds of Sir Bourchier Wrey, and close to his
house. The church is built on rising ground, and set round by trees in
which rooks have built; clamorous and noisy, they fly round and round the
old grey tower morning and evening. When the October gales are tossing
the trees, and the rain-clouds are gathering on the hills their cawing
has a sound of ill-omen, which makes them seem the unresting and
malignant spirits of those fierce lords of the Dark Ages, evil-doers and
unrepentant.
From Barnstaple to Lynton there are several methods of travel. Either
one may take train to Ilfracombe, and there take coach, following the
coast-road through Watermouth, Lydford, Combe Martin, Trentishoe, and the
Hunter's Inn, twenty miles of the most magnificent coast scenery in
England; or, if one has the courage to take pack on back, one may walk
it, past Watermouth Castle, and the tiny land-locked harbour beneath,
which was said by Kingsley to be the safest harbour on this coast, smooth
and sheltered always, however high the seas are running outside; past the
tiny village of Lydford, which bears the same name and reminds one of the
seventeenth-century poem of "Lydford Law," though the poem was written of
the town on the Lyd, near Tavistock. But here are a couple of verses:
"Oft have I heard of Lydford law,
How in the morn they hang and draw,
And sit in judgment after.
At first I wondered at it much,
But since I find the matter such
As it deserves no laughter.
"They have a castle on a hill;
I took it for some old wind-mill
The vanes blown off by weather.
To lie therein one night 'tis guessed
'Twere better to be stoned or pressed
Or hanged, ere you come thither."
"Lydford law" and "Jedburgh justice" seem equally to have been synonyms
for arbitrary and summary punishment.
But, leaving this digression, we proceed on our way, past Berrynarbor and
the old farm of Bowden, where Bishop Jewel was born, and the beautiful
church where he was baptized, with its great Perpendicular tower, built
of red and grey sandstone, rising above the wooded combe, and its old
lich-gate, set in the thickness of the churchyard wall, and almost hidden
by the luxuriant summer foliage; past Combe Martin, famous for its
ancient silver-mines rather than its beauty, yet with a very beautiful
church, with a Perpendicular tower even higher than that of Berrynarbor,
soaring above the sheltering elms, and throwing its long shadow across
the stream which curves round the church-yard among the old yew-bushes--a
church worth stepping aside to see, with a fine carved oak screen in the
interior, of the fifteenth century, the doors of the screen made in such
a way that they will not entirely close, in order to show plainly forth
to all sinners that the gates of heaven are always open; past Martinhoe
village, which was the scene of one of the most cruel and cold-blooded of
all the Doone murders, when they carried off the wife of Christopher
Badcock, a small tenant farmer, and, in rage at finding nothing in the
poor home but a little bacon and cheese, murdered her baby in a fit of
senseless brutality, reciting over it this couplet:
"If any man asketh who killed thee,
Say 'twas the Doones of Bagworthy."
And so we come to Heddon's Mouth, and of the seven miles from there to
Lynton I shall speak in the next chapter.
[Illustration: The Shepherd's Cottage, Doone Valley]
But the twenty miles of hilly road may prove too much even for good
walkers, and as the coach service between Ilfracombe and Lynton is
suspended at present, owing to the war, it is best to take the little
narrow-gauge railway that runs from Barnstaple to Lynton. There might be
many more unfavourable ways, too, of seeing this stretch of country. The
narrow line twists and winds across the hills, seeming to hang,
sometimes, on a tiny viaduct, while many feet below a mountain stream
pours down its rocky bed, and, owing to the narrowness of the gauge and
the steepness of the gradients, the train progresses hardly quicker than
a horse-drawn carriage, and one has leisure and opportunity to observe
all that one is passing.
From Barnstaple to Chelfham the railway runs along the valley of the Yeo,
through the woodyards and past the whitewashed cottages of the town, and
then alongside of the river itself. This valley is most beautiful. I
came through it on a hot afternoon in spring. Just beside me ran the
clear brown water, breaking into swirls and eddies over the white stones;
on my right hand the hills rose, steeply wooded, with the lovely and
various colours of many trees, the rich brown of the yet unopened
beech-buds, the black buds of the ash, the twisted grey of alders, the
green of hawthorn, and yet more vivid green of early larches, the
delicate silver of palm, the bare branches of oak; on my left hand lay
the rich green pasture of the valley, and beyond the bare hills, brown in
the afternoon sunshine. Ten minutes away from Barnstaple Station, and I
saw a hawk hovering above the hillside, so quickly do the signs of
habitation drop away among these hills and valleys.
We leave the valley of the Yeo, and climb the steep gradients to Bratton
Fleming and Blackmoor Gate, across the wind-swept open moors, bare and
brown in the afternoon sunshine. Fold behind fold lies the countryside
in great brown curves, here a cluster of trees in a sheltered valley,
there a lonely farm; sometimes a group of whitewashed buildings under
thatched roofs, more often a bleak granite building, built to withstand
the buffeting of winter storms, grey amid its setting of bare grey
ash-trees or twisted grey alders, with the brown hills behind and the
brilliant blue of the sky overhead. The air here is keen and brilliant;
there is an edge to all outlines, and a keenness to all colours, which
the softer and more humid air of sheltered country does not give. The
yellow of the primroses which cluster thickly in hollow and on bank has a
brilliance and delicacy which I have never seen in valley primroses, and
I cannot describe the exquisite clear rose of apple-blossom, above the
gnarled and twisted grey trunk, seen against this background of sombre
brown and dun, and the penetrating blue of moorland sky.