Literary Soap-Box

By Natalie Crawford

I’m not sure what the editors at Hodder Children’s Books are thinking. Despite still being one of the top selling children’s authors 42 years after she pulled up a comfy chair in the sky, Enid Blyton’s books are due for a contemporary revamp. Shiny new covers and a re-edit of some of Blyton’s language is apparently the way to get young readers chomping at the bit. I can appreciate that when children’s literature is saturated with vampiric tales and otherworldly delights, situations involving naïve and, dare I say, childish, whimsical japes adventures may not automatically be first choice (Golly Gosh!). The more time I spend in the children’s section of Waterstones, the more I believe that Hodder’s marketing department might have got it wrong.

I am not a Blyton purist; far from it. As a child, having these books forced upon me by a Great-Aunt simply made me cringe. I was too busy devouring works by Dick King-Smith and Roald Dahl, books with magical intrigue and imagination. But that is not to say I don’t think they have their place. Blyton’s books are a cornerstone of classic children’s literature and should be treated as such, with some form of reverence and respect – not tarted up to look Americanised and fake. 

I don’t like the idea that her words are going to be changed to make the pages more ‘accessible’ to children. This shows a huge underestimation of their target market. Through reading, children begin to learn what it is to put themselves in another’s shoes; to imagine different times and places; to discover different cultures and understandings of the world. Increasingly, their view of the world in many matters is becoming quite narrow and only ever contemporary; ideals of a simpler, family orientated life with lasting friendships and ‘lashings of pop’ are being replaced with bloody battle games and face-to-screen socialising. If we remove these literary snap shots of the past and make everything ‘modern’, what lesson will children learn?

And where will it end? Will publishers suddenly decide that Kenneth Grahame’s immortal Wind in the Willows is too ‘wordy’ and therefore too difficult for these tiny precious minds to cope with? Suddenly, his delicate and poetic descriptions will be hacked into pieces until Ratty’s river is simply just nice. Or maybe Political Correctness will over turn Roald Dahl’s depiction of Miss Trunchbull and her rather violent teaching methods (I suspect there may also be a rewrite within this rewrite to establish clearer guidelines for those wishing to adopt magical orphans). My favourite will come on the modernising of Jane Austin’s words with Mr Darcy declaring Miss Eliza Bennett as, “Well fit.” A sad day for her ‘fine eyes’.

Perhaps they plan to relocate all stories into a modern day, familiar context. Sally Gardner’s Silver Blade will no longer tell a forgotten tale of the French Revolution but be depicted somewhere around a park bench in Manchester – plenty of swashbuckling action there.

I know the Blyton re-edit will not be taken to such an extreme; the Famous Five’s caravan holiday will not be altered to a self catering apartment on the Costa Del Sol – I hope. I appreciate that some of the ‘lingo’ is outdated, but surely that is part of the charm? No, altering the language is not the answer to making even more money from these books. Neither are the frankly atrocious covers that the art department have ‘developed’. The market has been missed.

Famous Five in particular, currently appear to be aimed at boys (from the covers) aged 7 to 9. Wrong, wrong, wrong. No boy is ever going to pick this book up. And 7 year olds? Not interested – give them pirates and animals and fairies. Aim a little higher. The fact that Blyton’s works have slipped into the ‘classic’ genre means the audience has changed. Maybe in the fifties and sixties junior children picked up these books – of course they did, television was not child friendly and the computer non existent. Now though, they need to be aimed at girls no lower than the age of nine or ten. Girls that devour anything you put in front of them; Girls who are broadening their horizons and able to understand how and why these books are different to contemporary blockbuster novels; Girls that have patience and love series books; Girls that are beginning to appreciate the ‘classic genre’ and glimpses into our own past. This market is ridiculously huge. But the reinvention of the Famous Five threatens to miss this revenue-rich mass. 

Of course, I am not an editor, a publisher or marketeer. I am simply a lowly, opinionated school teacher with a slight obsession with language, literature and all things children’s fiction. I can’t possibly begin to know what is best for Blyton’s books, particularly when the market is as competitive as it currently is. What I do know though is that Enid Blyton is a national treasure and her books a British institution. If the recipe for her success has been correct for all this time, why now take something away? 

And maybe Hodder could try a children’s focus group next time?

Natalie Crawford is currently writing a children's novel set in the English Civil War.  You can read more of her book and film reviews on her own blog, The Writer Side of Life

Confessions of a One-Off Archaeologist

by Alex Keller

I had never intended to study Archaeology at university. Despite telling people “I want to be an archaeologist,” whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up when I was much, much younger*, I had never set out to study the subject. When it came to picking my course at Exeter, what I really wanted to do was Ancient History. However, in order to gain a straight Ancient History degree, I would have had to study either Latin or ancient Greek. At this point in my life I was under the impression I was terrible at languages (being English), so in order to avoid certain failure, I opted to do a dual subject course degree, and chose Archaeology.

Off I went, and for the first year it was a pretty straightforward subject, barring the lecturer in “experimental archaeology”, whom we were fairly sure spent his weekends wandering Dartmoor in nothing more than a loin cloth and stone spear in the name of science. However, over the first summer holiday, we were expected to take part in some kind of Archaeology-related fieldwork to go towards our final degrees. Many people chose to do some work in a museum. I chose Bulgaria.

A few friends and I had heard that Nottingham University were running a training dig in Bulgaria uncovering Roman ruins. My friend Anton, a giant Swede and possibly one of the most decent people I have ever met, jumped at the chance as he had a fascination towards Rome that mirrored my dinosaur love when I was six, and as I had nothing better planned, I thought I'd come along too. It'll be different at least**. I'm not sure what I was expecting from this trip, but I can say in all honesty I was not prepared for what those five weeks would involve.

Part One: The Dig Itself

Field Archaeology, for those that have never caught an episode of Time Team, basically involves being stuck in a ditch scrabbling away in dirt/sand/bogs looking for anything that appears old. Essentially, you try to get into the least uncomfortable position possible, pick up your trusty towel, and get to it. This would be reasonably acceptable work during the average English summer, but in Bulgaria, it was another story. 

Bulgaria at this time was experiencing a heatwave. The first thing that springs to mind when thinking back to this trip was that due to the hot weather, we had to get to the dig site as early as possible. Post 2pm, the heat was liable to knock you dead if you weren't careful. This danger was well highlighted when nearby fields would spontaneously set on fire.

At the time, we students were staying in a small village called Nikyup that consisted of three bars, a town square, and a large amount of farmyard animals with a poor grasp of personal space. Every morning, we forced ourselves to get up and stagger zombie-like through Nikyup's pot-holed streets to a waiting bus at 5:30am, where we would be driven for another half hour to the dig-site. For some, this daily ritual was almost tolerable. However, I am not a morning person. Ideally, any activity prior to midday is only done under the most extreme of circumstances***, and my natural routine was to rouse around ten, then enjoy a gentle snooze to build up my strength for that final push into wakefulness at exactly twelve-ish****. A five-thirty start was not easy.

Anyway, after a cold water face-wash and the morning fun of watching Anton fall asleep and wake up startled over and over and over as the bus trundled to its destination, we were awake enough to begin digging. The problem was: the staff who were meant to be guiding us didn't seem to have a clear idea of what it was we were meant to dig. For the first two weeks, after we had each been placed in small groups, we painstakingly cleaned away what we were told was the floor to a Roman supply base. Being excited and naïve (if sleepy), we set to work in complete faith that our leaders, being proper archaeologists, knew exactly what they were doing. Sadly, once these first couple of weeks passed, the veil was lifted and we learned they were not quite as on top of it as we students first thought. Essentially, we were told that what we had actually been agonising over was backfill*****. As you can imagine, we were not happy. They then gave us a pick-axe each and told us to dig down as fast as possible until we hit something interesting. Having spent so much time making the backfill look pretty and watching other groups uncover entire walls and other interesting things, we perhaps attacked the ground with rather more energy than was necessary.

For the final three weeks we got a fairly good understanding of the time it would take five people to dig a swimming pool had one of us wanted one.  We shifted dirt like nobody's business, until we have uncovered walls of our own and even found a gold coin, the only one found at the site. This cheered us up no end.

To Be Continued...

*Unfortunately, because I had a serious obsession with dinosaurs and no one had told me what a palaeontologist was.

**Also, a girl I had a mild crush on was going as well, which sealed the deal.

***Like fire alarm drills and the occasional toilet run.

****This lifestyle was aided somewhat by being an arts student, where I would only need to attend six hours worth of lectures a week and most of them were thoughtfully timetabled for after lunch.

***** Most dig sites are not left open to the elements when people are not working on them. Once a team has finished for the year, the site is reburied in order to preserve it.

Alex Keller's first novel, Haywired, a Steampunk Fairy tale, will be published in September by Mogzilla.

Of Wooden Ships and Iron Men

By Andrew Gorton

Today the Norfolk village of Cromer held its annual lifeboat day. I stood in the boathouse at the end of the pier and watched the vaguely Thunderbirds-style launch of the new state-of-the-art Tamar class lifeboat. I was duly impressed, along with the rest of the crowd, as, engines growling, the RNLB Lester thundered down its slipway and into the water with a dramatic splash.

I have always admired these crews, most of them ordinary people with 9-5 jobs, and often with no maritime background whatsoever, who get no financial reward for their acts.  I have recently found out about the local history of the forebears of these men and women, and have gained a much deeper appreciation of the RNLI. In April I started working at a new museum at Sheringham, a few miles north of Cromer. Sheringham is unique in the country for possessing four of its historic lifeboats.

The J.C. Madge and crew.

What particularly drew my attention was the town's last rowing lifeboat, the J.C. Madge, powered only by the strength of its 18 crew of fishermen, (or ‘Shannoks’ as the natives of Sheringham are known) or by a lug sail if need be. I found it particularly amazing that the open boat was still in service until 1936, when the town got its first motor lifeboat. The Madge would have been in service during World War One, as were most of the RNLI's rowing boats. As a lot of the younger men had been called away to fight, most of the call-outs would have been crewed by men in their 50s. Some of the most dramatic rescues involved lifeboat men who were well into their 60s and 70s, rowing for all they were worth in terrible conditions to go to the aid of complete strangers. It is very humbling!

Henry Blogg.

There is one particular Cromer man who stands out.  Henry Blogg (1876-1954), the most famous and most decorated of the lifeboat men. He joined the family crab fishing business at 11, joined the lifeboats at 18, and served until the age of 71, 11 years after the usual retiring age. In his 53 year service he and his crews saved over 870 lives.  Among other medals, he won the George Cross, as well as the RNLI Gold Medal 3 times, and the RNLI Silver Medal 4 times.  Yet for all this he was a very shy, retiring man, who nobody seemed to know well.

I don’t want to start moaning about celebrity culture, but I find people like Mr Blogg and his fellow lifeboatmen much more fascinating and inspiring.


Andrew Gorton is an Open University student, London born but now living on the north Norfolk coast.

Bee Mail

The Solitary Bee now has it's own e-mail address in case any readers would like to contribute something of their own.  We welcome short pieces (500 - 2000 words seems about right) on as wide a range of subjects as possible, although please don't send religious tracts, party politics, new age nonsense or stuff that shamelessly infringes copyright laws.  Interesting content is more important than fine writing.  Film and book reviews are always good, but we'd rather read recommendations of things you like and think are underrated than hatchet jobs on things you hate and think are overrated.  Random pieces on science, art, history, or anything else you happen to know and care about would be great.  Rude Words will be ****ing censored.

There are no deadlines, and there's no hurry.  I'll try to keep updating the blog once or twice a week, and choose from whatever is available at the time.  I suppose it's possible that I may now be swamped with bee-mails and unable to cope with editing and posting them all; it's also quite likely that there will just be an embarrassing silence.  Either way, I'll keep you posted...

Thanks for reading!

thesolitarybee@gmail.com

Standing Up for Nigel...

Philip Reeve salutes the definitive Dr Watson.

Everybody seems to like the BBC's new, modernised Sherlock Holmes, although I have to admit I haven't yet watched it.  I don't have any problem with up-dating the stories to a modern setting - Holmes is a character strong enough to hold his own in any era, and I'm rather fond of the other current up-dating of him, House.  Much as I like the foggy late-Victorian settings of the original stories there would be little point in another period-detail-heavy dramatisation of them (there is none at all in the steampunk funfair-ride of the recent Hollywood version.)

No, what stopped me watching the new Holmes was those three dread letters BB and C.  I've sat down so often in the past to watch their much-hyped and/or much-praised new shows, and ended up enduring whole episodes of Spooks, Survivors, Merlin, Torchwood, Robin Hood, sundry ham-stuffed re-imaginings of Dickens and Austen, and that poisonously stupid thing about the Pre-Raphaelites that was on last summer.  It's reached a point where the BBC logo that appears on screen at the start of their dramas seems to serve the same purpose as the warning symbol on a container of toxic waste.

Still, as I say, everybody seems to like Sherlock, and I've not seen it yet, so I must give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that the Beeb has done something decent for once.  The only reason I mention it at all is because, in the pre-publicity interviews and write-ups that have been circulating this past week, the writer and producer of the new show have been keen to explain that they are setting out to portray Dr Watson as the brave, resourceful, intelligent chap he was in Conan Doyle's stories and not the bumbling old duffer played by Nigel Bruce in the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies of the 1930s and '40s (which were also mostly up-dated, of course).

This is a complaint that you hear repeatedly from serious Sherlock Holmes afficionados (I expect they're  called Holmesians, or Holmies, or Holmesosexuals or something).  Somehow, the image of Nigel Bruce's Watson clowning around and blustering "Good Lord Holmes!" in a bunch of slightly ropey black and white films has seeped into the public consciousness and eclipsed the Dr Watson of the stories so completely that even people who have never seen the films themselves assume that Watson was, well, a bit of a twit.

"Great Scott, Holmes, you don't mean...!"

Which is indeed sad in some ways, and fair play to the makers of the Sherlock for wanting to rectify it.  But I would like to stand up for Nigel Bruce and his blundering Watson.  It was a very good comic performance by a very loveable actor, and the whole idea of pairing the super-intelligent Holmes with an amiable numbskull is a very funny one.  As well as permanently skewing our perception of poor John Watson MD, I suspect it has fed into that comedy tradition, which stretches through Morecambe and Wise and The Goon Show to Blackadder and The Mighty Boosh, in which a would-be clever-dick is undercut at every turn by his dim-witted sidekick.

"Ooo-err, Holmes..."

Indeed, the fact that it has had such a strong effect on subsequent generations' image of Dr Watson suggests that it's actually a much more powerful creation than the original.  Writer Mark Gatiss, interviewed abut his new version recently, said that Holmes wouldn't be friends with someone stupid because 'that's what weak people do', and I suppose in the terms of modern, psychological drama that may be a workable argument (although I'm not sure Bruce's Watson is stupid, just bumbling and very, very English).  But Sherlock Holmes doesn't have to play by the rules of modern psychological drama.  Almost as soon as Conan Doyle first unleashed him on the pages of the Strand magazine he became a folklore character; the modern equivalent of King Arthur or Robin Hood, the hero of an ever-expanding series of unlikely and often non-canonical adventures.  But where Arthur has Merlin and Lancelot and Robin Hood has Will Scarlet and Little John, Holmes had only Dr Watson; a doughty enough Victorian gent, handy with his service revolver but (whisper it) kind of dull.  What dear old Nigel Bruce did, whether by accident or design, was to find an idea of Watson that was powerful enough to stand beside Holmes; opposite and complementary to the great detective; perhaps not fit for purpose in a serious, modern re-imagining of the stories, but still the Watson who walks with Holmes through our imaginations, often tripping over and constantly saying, "But I say Holmes, how do you do it?"


The Bee says: Well played, sir!

Next time:  Why Roger Moore was the best James Bond.

Dean Spanley

Philip Reeve suggests you all rent Dean Spanley (Toa Fraser, 2008).

This is a film that I came across by accident, knowing nothing more about it than that it stars Peter O'Toole and was set in Edwardian England.  We saw the trailer for it on another DVD we'd rented, and since we're always struggling to find things to put on our rental list we thought we'd take a punt on it.  Peter O'Toole; Edwardian outfits; surely it would while away a wet evening?  To my surprise, it turned out to be the best film I've seen all year, and possibly all century.


It started a little unpromisingly (it's a New Zealand/British co-production, which, perhaps unfairly, suggests state-aided stodge to me, and the opening scenes are all gloomy interiors).  Peter O'Toole plays a grumpy, curmudgeonly old man, obsessively set in his ways, who refuses to admit to any grief over the death of his wife, or of his favourite son, killed in the South African war.  His surviving son, played by Jeremy Northam, dutifully pays him a joyless visit once a week, and one day, in an effort to vary the routine, persuades him to attend a talk on reincarnation.  There they encounter Sam Neill's Dean Spanley (who's the Dean of a cathedral, not just someone called Dean) and Bryan Brown's Australian jack-the-lad, Wrowther.  From that point the story veers off in a rather strange and unexpected direction involving vintage tokay and some dogs.   The dour, oppressive mood of the early scenes lightens, broadens, and by the end it has become extraordinarily sweet and touching.

I won't go into any more detail about the plot, for fear I might spoil it for you.  All you need to know is that this is a film worth seeing.   Peter O'Toole is superb, of course, but Sam Neill is magnificent too; we've so often seen him phoning in performances in tripe like Jurassic Park that it's easy to forget what a good actor he is.  And how nice to see a fantasy film (and Dean Spanley is a fantasy, of a particularly Edwardian type) which doesn't rely on effects or shocks but just unfolds in a series of conversations between four men.

It may make you want to buy a dog.

Alien Swarm

Our computer-game and firearms consultant Jeremy Levett pits his wits against the gribblies in

Alien Swarm (2010)  The Bee says, "Take off and nuke the whole site from orbit: it's the only way to be sure."

Valve Software are known for three things: making near-perfect games, finding and hiring the best independent talent, and taking forever and a day to release anything. Alien Swarm, released for free on the 19^th of July without warning or fanfare,* breaks with their tradition in two ways. Here’s a hint: it’s not the independent talent thing.

The story of Alien Swarm is very similar to that of Left 4 Dead. Both were being created independently, as mods, before Valve employed their developers to make full games. Both are four-player cooperative games in which you and three friends take on hordes of computer-controlled gribblies. Both are fairly bare-bones, story-wise, playing through campaigns shooting things with a minimum of background or narrative. But where L4D was a first-person shooter, Alien Swarm is top-down third-person; where L4D joyfully embraced every zombie cliché in the book, Alien Swarm is every Aliens cliché; and where L4D was superb in every way, Alien Swarm isn’t.

The game is free to play, and has minimal content: a single campaign and a decent set of weapons, characters and achievements. The SDK** was released at the same time as the game. The message is clear: make your own campaigns. Valve are known for encouraging community-made content, and here it seems they’ll be relying on it completely to flesh out this skeleton of a game.

The single official campaign, “Jacob’s Rest,” is excellent. You fight through the set of Aliens in a storm of familiar tropes: advancing through a creepily abandoned station, covering one of your number while he welds a door shut to delay alien monsters, using sentry guns to hold off hordes of critters while your tech hacks frantically at a computer, riding a cargo lift that descends ever so slowly while aliens leap down from the walls and ceiling, and one hugely satisfying mission in which you’re given a flamethrower, sent to a large nest of alien eggs/parasites/biomass, and told to cleanse and purge. The graphics are gorgeous, and the gameplay is fairly polished throughout, aside from a few issues like the truly aggravating facehuggers parasites, who kill you unless your team medic uses a lot of healing supplies very quickly (and sometimes, regardless of even that) and the seriously overpowered enemy-freezing, near-infinite-ammo Tesla gun.

As in L4D, you and your fellow marines communicate via voice chat, typing or a rather good set of pre-programmed lines. There are four classes, distinct though not nearly as different or specialised as in Team Fortress 2; each is a space marine with a rifle, plus some extra stuff. A basic XP and levelling system, with the bulk of the XP awarded for completing missions rather than killing things, allows access to more and more weapons. I can’t see why anyone would want to play as anything but the Special Weapons trooper, but they each have plenty going for them: Special Weapons, who is tough and gets by far the best basic weapon (a powerful auto-aiming machine gun taken directly from Aliens’ smartgun); the Medic, who wears a natty white spacesuit and is the only one who can drop healing beacons (and, later, use a healing gun on teammates); the Officer, who provides boosts to his teammates and gets a special shotgun, and the Technical, who gets a special rifle, bonuses for using welders and sentry guns, and is required to hack doors, fiddle with computers and progress through the game. Unlike L4D, there are no respawn points, so if you or one of your teammates dies they’re out for the rest of the chapter. If the tech marine dies, you usually have to restart, as you can’t finish the puzzles without him. Although in single player mode the other three marines are controlled by the computer, in cooperative mode there are (again unlike L4D) no bots – you need four people, and it’s considerably harder to drop in and out of a game.

The biggest problem with Alien Swarm is that it’s so generic. It takes the time-honoured clichés of space marines and alien bio-horrors we know so well from Cameron’s Aliens, Verhoeven’s version of Starship Troopers and the million “space marine fights aliens” computer games that have aped them, and... replicates them exactly without doing anything new or creative. There is no real story or characterisation, nor are there any gameplay elements we haven’t seen before a thousand times. Valve, renowned for excellent character design, writing and voice acting, have here created an utterly forgettable set of faceless space marines with one-word names, who spout hackneyed, staticky “badass” lines at scripted moments and are distinguishable only by the colour of their armoured spacesuits. Each character is just a set of bonuses, a portrait and a short, poorly written bio, scattered alternately with pulp-SF tropes and painfully silly lines like “the soul of a medic.” Even worse are the weapon descriptions, which take the bog standard guns (assault rifle, dual pistols, shotgun, machine gun, flamethrower, sniper rifle, sci-fi thing that vomits lightning everywhere) with bog standard generic sorta-futuristic designs and bog standard stupid, meaningless descriptions clearly written by someone who just didn’t care.*** Everything is riddled with mistakes and generally amateurish writing.

But you get what you pay for, and this is free.

Taken as a game, Alien Swarm isn’t all that great; it has reasonable gameplay, but lacks both polish and substance. Taken as what it’s meant to be – a cheap’n’cheerful way to get lots of people using Steam and playing with their friends – it’s very clever, and bound to be successful. In a couple of months, when community developers have put together some good new campaigns, and Valve have addressed some of the gameplay problems, it’ll be a perfectly competent space-marines-shoot-aliens co-op.

But it could have been so much more.

Alien Swarm’s technical details, and the game itself, can be found here on Steam   

* The game was announced a couple of days before launch. The release was, of course, delayed several hours, and resulted in the Steam download servers completely keeling over. I don’t understand why they even bothered to announce a release time.

** Software Development Kit, basically the tools used to make the original game. Very useful for modders and third party content makers.

***Knowing the first thing about firearms terminology (a personal hobby-horse) has never been a strong point of the gaming industry, but “semi-automatic bolt-action” is going a bit too far. Though it conjures an amusing mental image of a gun extending a small robotic arm to work its own bolt.

'Up The Bottom'

Roger Whale has lived and worked on Dartmoor for fifty years, both in agriculture and the holiday industry.  His self-published novels The Damson Tree and The Yellow Sapphire are filled with his knowledge of the moor, and sell in quantities that would make mainstream publishers envious.  Here he guides us on a short walk up the banks of the West Webburn.

I consider myself very fortunate to live in a beautiful part of the country, in the hamlet of Ponsworthy, a collection of twenty three dwellings in the valley of the West Webburn on Dartmoor. At one end is a T-junction and three much-photographed thatched cottages. A stream runs across the road, forming a water splash for cars to drive through, and there is a little clapper bridge with iron hand rails for those on foot. A hundred years ago the local blacksmith, Richard Nosworthy, lived in the third cottage up from the bridge, where he had his blacksmith’s shop. He it was who made the wrought iron hand rails, and although they have never been painted they are still as sound and rust free as they were on the day they were made.  


At the foot of the sign-post in the middle of the junction is a spring called 'The Golden Spout'.  This was the sole water supply for the nearby cottages until mains water was brought to the area in 1971.

Beside the first cottage is a gate across a lane, now a part of the Two Moors Way, that leads to the next hamlet a mile upstream called Jordon. Originally a footpath for locals, it ran for most of its length beside the stream and was also used by fishermen fly fishing for trout. It is probably only a mile long and can be walked in twenty minutes, but who wants to rush a pleasant experience? 

‘What is this life if full of care

We have no time to stand and stare?’

 The other day, a warm sunny afternoon, we walked ‘up the bottom’ as we call it. Through the gate we went, with its weighted chain to pull it shut, and down the green tunnel of a lane, in places having to duck under the low, overhanging branches. Beside us the little stream was tinkling away, also in a green tunnel of ferns and nettles. Then out into a meadow with butterfly-covered knapweed, and grasshoppers filling the air with their song. Brambles in full flower gave promise of rich pickings in a month or two, as did the hazel bushes with their yet unripe nuts.We passed on into the next meadow, now almost entirely full of shoulder-high bracken. To think that seventy years ago these two meadows would have been cut for hay. A stand of toadflax in full flower shone like a light orange beacon against the backdrop of the dark green bracken.


The gate at the far end of the second meadow was formed of two horizontal bars that slid into slots on the side of the gate posts.  Through this and we were into the wooded area where the path now ran beside the river. There is something special about walking beside running water; the sound of the splashing and slopping; the constantly changing patterns on the moving surface and the wildlife in, on and all around. A shaft of sunlight shone down through the water, turning the pebbles on the river floor brass, copper, and bronze. Reflected sunlight off the water made dancing patterns on the underside of the sycamore leaves. A little further on a huge old oak tree had fallen across the river; its upturned base forming a cartwheel of earth, stones and broken roots; its ivy covered trunk and branches partially damming the flow. Winter rains can cause the river level to rise dramatically, washing the banks, eroding the soil from around the roots of the trees, weakening their hold. The tangle of exposed roots across the path make walking difficult and the weight of the snow on the trees these past two winters has brought down several trees.  

We came to a pool in a small clearing and stopped to watch the fish lazing in the We sunlight water. Small trout, half a dozen of them, were gently flicking their tails, keeping them facing upstream in the same place. Every now and then one would turn and drift a few inches downstream and then turn again, to be followed one by one by the others. In small curves in the bank sand has been washed and there are often the foot prints of small animals. Once I saw what I felt sure were the tracks of an otter; they have been seen in the river but unfortunately not by me. However I have seen foxes, badgers, rabbits and deer and countless birds. In the mornings the dawn chorus is truly wonderful, an orchestra of song.


A few yards further and we heard a whining from a small building on the opposite bank. This noise was coming from a hydro-electric generating plant that an enterprising farmer had built. By diverting part of the river water along a leat, he had gained enough height for the fall of water to be powerful enough to generate enough electricity for his needs and some to spare. Despite the constant noise, a dipper makes his nest in the generator house every year. The dipper is a fascinating bird a little bit bigger than a robin; dark brown, almost black, with a white breast, his colours perfectly matching the wet rocks and the white foam on the water. He flies straight and low along the river and then lands on a rock, bobbing and curtsying. Then he opens his wings slightly and walks upstream into the water and along the bottom picking up caddis fly larvae and all sorts of grubs for himself and his family. We always look out for him; for some reason we think it lucky to see him; but this day there was no sign.

Just above the generator are the remains of the weir that formed the head of the leat that fed the mill at |Ponsworthy, turning the water wheel that provided the power to grind the corn. In the pool above the river floor is made of long rocks, all lying in the same direction as the flow of the water, all a rust red colour. There were several more fallen trees across the river and I was reminded of a day two winters ago when we walked down from Jordon after a fall of heavy snow. Trees of all sizes were across the path and we had to alternately climb over and duck under them, for all the world like human shuttles in a loom of trees.


Then after a few yards of open ground the path turned away from the river into a young wood of trees planted some twenty-five years ago; oak, ash, Spanish chestnut, sycamore and silver birch. Here the woodland floor still had the pale green stems and seed pods of the bluebells that bloomed so brightly a couple of months before. In a large old oak at the edge of this woodland a pair of buzzards build their nest each year. On a bright day last winter we were delighted by a group of six long-tailed tits which gave us a display of acrobatics, like women gymnasts, in one of the silver birch trees.


Just before we reached Jordon there is an island, about thirty yards long, with a number of trees growing on it, and on each tree is a nest box for the birds. One of these boxes was inhabited a few years ago by a swarm of hornets. Then we were out into the open again, the path running  between tall bracken until we reached the river. We crossed it on the wooden foot bridge (or 'clam' as such a structure is called in these parts), entering the hamlet of Jordon with its old mill on our left and three cottages and the old manor house on our right. Jordon or Dewdon as it was once known is one of the six manors in Widecombe parish, a small hamlet with its own tale to tell... perhaps another day.

Roger Whale's books are available from his website,  www.orcapublishing.co.uk

The Ruins of Old Dartmoor: No.1

By Philip Reeve, with photographs by Sarah Reeve.

Dartmoor is often described in guide books as a wilderness, and much of it does feel pretty wild, but when you walk or ride on the moor you can't go far without passing the signs of past human activity.  There are bronze age hut circles and stone rows, abandoned mediaeval villages, old boundary works, and tin mines and quarries which in some cases were working well within living memory.  These pictures record a walk we took to one of the moor's more recent ruins.  This Ballardian object is the old rifle range which stands southeast of Rippon Tor, close to the road between Halshanger and Cold East Cross.  

Dartmoor has long been used for military training, although most of it now happens on the bleaker western side.  This range was built at the beginning of the Second World War, and was in use until the mid-1960s.




This huge brick wall was the 'receiving end'; shots would have been fired into the bank behind it from four large mounds spaced out across the hillside to the east...

Author included for scale.  (Note hip-hop pixie from the Dartmoor Massive.)


The rusting machinery below would once have raised and lowered the targets...

When the range was in use a red flag would have been flown and 800 square metres of the surrounding moor would have been closed to public access.  There are still rifle and artillery ranges on the moor; from time to time we hear the guns booming, and sometimes we go for a walk over on the western side only to discover that the red flags are up.  There are people who object strongly to the moor being put to this use, but live firing days are actually quite rare, and I've always felt that it adds no end to the odd sense of mystery and danger which still clings to these hills.

Next time: some interesting chimneys.

Dear Esther

There must be a hole in the bottom of the boat. How else would new hermits have arrived?


Jeremy Levett reviews the computer game Dear Esther (2008), with Helpful Footnotes for those of us who still aren't quite sure what a computer game is...

There is some furore over whether a computer game can ever constitute “art”. I’m not really interested in the debate (a sort of Punch and Judy “Oh no they aren’t!” “Oh yes they are” back-and-forth between old people who don’t understand what computer games are exactly but feel vaguely threatened by them and young people who spend far too much of their lives playing games and need validation for it, and anyway “art” is such a vague and disputed term as to be totally meaningless. But if I thought I knew what art was, and I needed a game to wave at the naysayers that would make them shut up, sit down and possibly shiver, my first choice would be Dear Esther.

Not that it’s exactly a representative sample. Beyond the most basic information (a first-person, single-player mod for the Source engine,* created by University of Portsmouth researchers) Dear Esther is infuriatingly difficult to define; what is it? An interactive audiobook with visual cues? A first person ghost story? “Redefines how we think of games” is a line that’s been misused so much it’s now just another part of the stupid marketing buzz-phrase lexicon, to be smeared at random over the boxes of the next FPS summer blockbuster, but in this case it actually applies. The controls are those of a shooter, but there are no guns, no enemies, nobody but you and a few gulls. Player participation is minimal, but essential. The entire story is given by disembodied narration and visual cues, uncovered as you wander a barren Hebridean island.

And a strange story it is. The game is the very model of an unreliable narrator; most of the audio triggers** have more than one piece of relevant narration, each one choosing at random from a handful of voice clips. Here the game’s writing really shines; even with different narration each time, it is consistent. The story is abstract, open to interpretation, but strangely satisfying; certain turns of phrase repeated in different contexts stand out, and these broad, sometimes overlapping brushstrokes gradually make up a strange but beautiful picture. By the end of the game you will have, if not a complete story, a wonderfully constructed, interlocking piece of lucid madness.

Sound is a powerful medium, and Dear Esther uses it to its fullest. The narration (which would be of remarkable quality for a commercial game, let alone a free mod put together by university researchers) is brilliantly written, brilliantly performed and accompanied by haunting music. The atmosphere it creates has you leaping at shadows or passing gulls. It helps that I’ve been playing with FPS controls so long they’ve become instinctive, but a particularly intense moment had me finding a corner in the rocks and hiding in it, crouching to make myself as small as possible. The greatest challenge of games is eliciting an emotional response from their players. This game literally made me run and hide. That is immersion.

It is far from perfect. The game design is very “My First HL2 Mod”, scattered with invisible walls and unnecessary physics objects. The navigation is at times opaque and directionless, a particular flaw in a linear game, and between the widely spaced audio cues and the sluggish walking speed, the pace is excruciatingly slow (never have I played a game which made me quite so aware of my own footsteps.) The graphics are plain and functional. All these drawbacks are especially pronounced in the earlier stages. I’ve read some comments that wonder if this is intentional – to emphasise the difficulty in beginning any journey worth taking – but it strikes me as just cheap, mediocre level design, by people focusing on more important aspects. In any case, it gets better and better as you progress through the game.  A rework of the game is currently in progress, aiming to remedy the pacing and navigation issues, as well as adding some of the most amazing graphics ever seen in the Source engine. It’s due for release sometime in late 2010, though as a free release being made entirely in someone else’s spare time, it might take a while longer.

I’m not sure whether to say “wait for the rework, because it looks like perfection” or “play this game now, because you have to.”

* For any non-techy types who might be reading, the “engine” is the essential bit of software on which a game is built. Think of it as the skeleton of the game, giving basic functionality, with everything the player actually sees – graphics, textures, level design, audio and so on - the flesh and blood. Source is a game engine made by Valve Software, which is used in a tremendous number of homemade mods and games.

** Points at which the game detects you have arrived and plays a relevant piece of narration or runs a scripted sequence. Imagine an invisible line; crossing it makes a voice clip play.

Dear Esther is a free mod which can be downloaded here. It requires Half-Life 2, which is worth your time anyway, being one of the greatest games ever made.

EDIT (August 2012) A version of Dear Esther is now available for Mac. PR