When we left Sedgemoor Services we still had about another 50 miles to go before we reached the end of the motorway and so – as I find motorway travelling a bit boring – I decided to settle down and have a little sleep. That turned out to be a good idea as when I opened my eyes again we were just skirting round the edge of Exeter and about to leave the motorway behind us.
To be honest, I was a bit sorry that we didn’t have time to stop in Exeter for a little while as I’d been before and thought it was a very nice city…
…and also a good friend – who is now a big fan of my blog – lives near there and we could maybe have met up.
But with nearly 90 miles still to travel before we reached our hotel, we drove straight past Exeter and made our way towards Okehampton.
Now Mum told me that when she first went to Cornwall by road in the early 1980s Okehampton was a real bottleneck. There were only two main roads between Devon and Cornwall and one of them went right through the town centre. It was more than busy enough during the quieter times of year, but in summer it used to get jammed solid with holiday-makers trying to travel through in cars and coaches.
Then, after much controversy and debate, a by-pass was finally opened to the south of the town in 1988, right on the northern boundary of the Dartmoor National Park, and this speeded up the journey to and from Cornwall.
And as we rode along it that day Mum asked me if I knew the connection between Dartmoor and Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels written around the turn of the 19th century.
I had to say no and so she started to tell me about the third of Sherlock Holmes’s four adventures which took place in 1889. Titled The Hound of the Baskervilles, it was published in 1902 and was mainly set on Dartmoor where legend said each new head of the Baskerville family would meet his death on the moor in an encounter with a huge and ferocious dog.
Of course – in the way of all good traditional detective stories – Sherlock Holmes and his colleague Doctor Watson were able to solve the mystery and bring the story to a satisfying end. And, over 120 years later, people are still enjoying reading it, seeing it as a film or listening to it as an audio-book – and some in the UK are even studying it for GCSE in English Literature.
By the time Mum had finished telling me that story, we were well on our way to passing another place with literary connections. That was Jamaica Inn, high on Bodmin Moor…
Mum told me that an inn has stood on that site since at least 1547, though the present building dates from 1750, when it was at the side of the main road to Bodmin from the west of Cornwall. It was built as a coaching inn, where travellers could eat and rest and the coach horses could be changed, ready for the next stage of the journey.
At this time the remote inn also had a reputation as the haunt of smugglers who could store their illicit goods there, well away from the prying eyes of the revenue men.
This trade eventually died out and Jamaica Inn became just another country pub – until 1930 when the future novelist Daphne du Maurier (1907-1983) took shelter there after becoming lost on the moor in a fog.
Fascinated by the tales she was told then, she used them as the background for her fourth novel, which she called Jamaica Inn. Set in 1815, it was published in 1936 and made into a film with the same name three years later.
But Daphne du Maurier wasn’t the only author to be associated with Jamaica Inn, as it was actually owned for a while by Alistair MacLean (1922-1987) who was the author of many best-selling thrillers and adventure stories, such as The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare and Force 10 From Navarone.
By the time Mum had told me all this, we were getting close to Newquay and I was gathering up my belongings ready to get off the coach, but then she said she had another story for me – and this one wasn’t from the past but was happening in the present day. Because I love Mum’s stories, I was all ears, but then she started to tell me about a creature who was said to roam on Bodmin Moor and was known as the Beast of Bodmin. People who’d seen it said it was like a huge black cat – maybe even as big as a panther – but there were no close-up photos and not much real evidence.
To tell the truth, I thought she was making it up, though, after she’d told me, I did see occasional newspaper reports from different parts of the country with people claiming to have seen similar creatures.
Then in the summer of 2008 me and Mum were driving home from Granny Betty’s at about 10 o’clock in the evening and, because of the time, there were no other cars on the road which had fields to either side. And, as we came round a slight bend, a large, smooth-haired, black animal came out of the hedge to our right, walked carefully across the road in front of us and slipped away through the hedge to our left…
…it walked like a cat and carried its long tail like a cat, but stood taller than the bonnet of Mum’s car – and its ears were rounded, just like those of a leopard or a tiger.
And suddenly my mind went spinning back to Bodmin Moor and I began to think Mum had been telling me the truth after all on our way to Newquay…
I’ll have to tell you more about Cornwall in my next post, however, as I’ve written enough for today. So please take care, stay safe – and look out for some more tales from me soon!
Follow my next blog: 291. MY MUM THE STORY-TELLER – PART ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-TWO
30/11/2023
Wilf the bear-faced blogger 