Heaven and Home

You should see the carved oak panelling in the pub at Winkleigh. Connoisseurs would call it crude or rustic in execution, but only because it’s vaguely asymmetrical. Besides, there’s pleasure to be found in the visible handiwork; the scrape of each irregular chisel. You can see what the carver was trying to do, and you can see where he fell short. Measuring the distance between these two points, you can sit beside the panelling and drink cider for as long as you like. 

When I was there in January, men came in from their day’s shooting and left their guns at the bar. Somebody dropped a glass to a shattering pall of laughter, and I felt ashamed of my pen and paper. Not much has changed in that pub over the years, but when you look at the dings and dents which have been driven into that beautiful panelling, you can see the maker’s process never ended. The wood is still changing and settling into itself. If that carver came back and stopped in for a pint one night, perhaps he would not recognise his own handiwork after two centuries. 

By the time I came away from the pub, stars were sparking sharply over the church and the thatched rooves. I walked to the graveyard and then dropped down below the wrought-iron railings to a hedge and the end of a field. Turning back, the village stood above me and hills rolled away in a pattern of empty table-tops. A handful of jackdaws churned in the twilight, and then a moon rose towards the Cornish border.

There are many memorials to the life and work of Ted Hughes. They’re found all over the world, but I’ve had my fingers burnt by taking literature too literally before. I’ve been to the house where Burns was born, and I’ve seen Yeats’ grave at Sligo. More often than not, it has only confused me to see these places. Reading inspires me to imagine things which never survive the bump of reality. It’s jarring, because you’re meant to reach for that feeling in your own life and lie beside it. If you want to see it for yourself, you’ve missed the point.

I chose to visit Winkleigh because Hughes lived nearby at the time he was writing Moortown Diaries. Nearby is close enough, without any weight of guidebook expectation or blue plaques on the wall. I have no reason to believe that Ted Hughes ever sat in the Kings at Winkleigh, but he certainly walked down these streets, looking up through the same gaps in the buildings to the first stars beyond them. So having sought him out, I watched him from the corner of my eye, belching cider into the rising damp.

If there is some sign or indication of Hughes at Winkleigh, I never saw it. Despite its sense of timelessness, it’s not his Devon anymore. His people have gone; his cows are dead or eaten. Of course there are other people now and different cows to replace them, but everything is lost in the swap. Moortown Farm has become an offroad driving centre – when the time came to leave, I took a different road so that I wouldn’t even drive past the road end. So while the mud clicked wetly and the afternoon’s rain drained endlessly to the Taw, the cold air was little more than latent potential, like an instrument which used to play sweetly and now could do anything.

Flushed from the yews below the church, a satellite rose to sweep across the reinventing sky.