Tamar Islands

The Garlandstone, Morwellham. Photo by Pen

A landscape of massy, oak covered hills. Ridiculously steep, squashed together as tight as currant buns, fresh from the oven on the baker’s tray. They fall down through ancient woodland to the Tamar River on the border of Devon and Cornwall. I had thought of thatched cottages, bucket and spade holidays and cream teas. And of Daphne du Maurier’s 1937 best seller, Rebecca: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

Kit Hill. Photo thanks to Kit Hill organisation.

Kitt Hill, above Cotehole, stands 1,095 feet high. A gorgeous wild place. Powerful: at least eighteen prehistoric burial mounds at the summit. Mine chimneys stand up incongruously above a billowing sea of oak woods. There’s a hint of sinister. There’s arsenic in these hills. Patches of ground where nothing will grow.

It’s not easy land to travel, the hills pose a challenge. Life was easier in the valleys. The Romans called the people around here the “Dumnonni”, from the Celtic “dubno” - as an adjective deep; as a noun world: “deep world people”. The Dumnonni, living down in the valleys, knew the value of the fertile river meadows. From the iron age to the end of the nineteenth century the rivers were by far the best way to get around.

A gorgeous sunset light on a Friday night traffic jam, thank you Google maps. Photo by Pen

On the last Friday of the school holidays the motorway had been a glittering silver ribbon of pent up frustration: stop starting, fumes rising in the sunshine.  The A roads were clogged with family cars with tired children, hefty campervans and the usual country traffic. Google maps invites you to take short cuts but they’re best avoided. Steep sided lanes may cut corners but today they’re a nightmare. Holiday drivers maddened and bewildered by what can happen on a single track lane that must go down a thousand feet to some ancient little river bridge before it shudders its way back up.

Last night I had turned down to the river at Calstock to find it crammed with tourists, the cacophony of their voices filtering up through the greenwood. I’d parked up in a huge gritty carpark crushed solid with pub goers and vanners, crisp packets and beer cans, the air rancid with chip fat. In the early evening the 12 tower span of the railway viaduct was ethereal, the sun sinking behind it as rosy as a toffee apple. The river beneath was dirty ochre with suspended mud, the surface mushed and rafted with soft reed growth, plastic bottles and foam-bergs.

Calstock Viaduct, started building in 1872 for the railway. Photo thanks to Baz Richardson

My plan had been to use Calstock as a base. To use the ebb tide to potter down the Tamar and Lynher checking out various possible islands I had identified on maps and Google Earth, ending up at Plymouth and Drake Island. I intended to get off at Devonport, leave my boat at my nephew’s home on the dockside and catch the little train back to Calstock. Going over that viaduct was an important part of the journey. It’d had seemed a good enough plan.

One look at the river told me it wasn’t going to work. The opposite bank and as far as I could see downstream was a jelly slide of mud. Any possible landing spots were fenced off by ugly, impenetrable rushes. From my research I knew there were slips all the way down river, for example at Cotehole and Weir Quay but casual landings would be impossible. My hoped for islands would be unreachable.

I walked past crowds of pub goers to check out the slip. At three hours after high water it was drowned in mud. It would be quite disgusting to use except for a few hours around high water. I wouldn’t be able to launch until mid-afternoon the next day. At that moment I just wanted to get out of there and go home to our quiet Welsh hills.

Calstock was alive with happy Dumnonni. I, by contrast, sat grumpily, fighting the longing to go home, watching the filthy yellow water. An old fellow took a seat beside me braving my sour demeanour. “Do you want advice on kayaking?” Well no, I didn’t not at all. Politeness dredged up a smile and ”Absolutely, yes, what would you advise?” “Go over to the Social Club and ask for Mattos, he’ll know, he was in Poldark, you see.” I didn’t know what Poldark was. I've researched since. But the advice of a kind stranger shouldn’t be refused.

Back to the Social Club and Mattos. The low sun is blinding so I move so I can actually see him. He’s got dark glasses on, the reflective kind. “Is there a problem?” he asks, a bit flirty challenging. He can’t be flirting with me so I guess it’s just a habit. “Would this be better?” he asks, sweeping the dark glasses off. Oh my goodness. This is the most handsome man I ever saw. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the reaction he is used to but I take a step backwards in horror. Such fine bones. His eyes…well they don’t make them like that for normal people: sparkly Persil whites and such sparkly hazelness. Phew. Later I read that he’s a big hit, Captain Poldark, a heart-throb for women of a certain age. But not for me.

"Be there pilchards out in Hampara Bay Captain Poldark?" Photo pinched by Pen

It’s a bit much for this tired, grumpy old bat so I ask him the island question and yes, he comes up with three, which is surprising and one of them, he says, is pretty. Then he goes into some more further down into Cornwall which just need climbing gear to land on and a head for heights. His pal looks doubtful and so am I but his islands are worth a try so that’s it. The quiet hills of Wales will have to wait.

A night in the carpark was as bad as I thought it would be. High white lights glare out the moon and the stars. Posh young men lean into each other trying to decide which of them is the least drunk and therefore most able to drive someone’s mother’s car. In the morning it’s a relief to drive back up through the oak woods in search of breakfast, I can’t launch till the afternoon anyway.

Wet Devon Lane. Photo by Pen

Four miles along there’s a sign off to Morwellham Quay and Museum. I could be a proper tourist. And maybe there’s a cleaner slip here to launch from. Give it a go? The lane narrows abruptly, sinks between damp, earthy banks, a tunnel clothed with pennywort, mosses, violet leaves, seeding primroses and ferns. I’m in a comfort of intensely green light, ancient and quiet. I stop the van, turn off the radio and open the windows. Silence flows over me. At eye level thick, time old oak roots form a living trellis that frame and beam the bank. The air is soft with the smell of leaf mould and wet ferns and above us sweet honeysuckle and wild rose. High crooked branches make a cathedral roof above. The light is luminous. Into the silence comes the drama-queen thrash of wood pigeon’s wings. Silence again. The liquid call of blackbird. Silence. For the first time in twenty four hours I am at one with the world.

And ferns. Photo by Pen

At river level the road opens out into a wide shallow bowl. A village: paved alleys, a terrace of houses, a perfect pub. Big granite walled docks with cast iron bollards. Narrow gauge railway lines snake down to the quays and the timber framework of an inclined plane snakes twenty feet above my head. The boundary to it all is the Tamar.

Morwellham village. Photo thanks to Morwellham Facebook page.

In 1960 a remarkable man, Frank Booker, the editor of a local newspaper recognized what this place was when he came upon it strangled in brambles and birch saplings, the docks: “lost amid a desolation of slime and ooze”. His description of Morwellham in his classic book “Industrial Archaeology of the Tamar Valley” inspired the restoration of this powerful place of Victorian engineering, industry and entrepreneurship. If it weren’t for him Morwellham would have been lost. As he writes “It was the busiest inland river port in Britain. Sailors from the Baltic knew it as well as ships’ captains from the new world.”

Leaving the van below a line of well-chosen old fashioned apple trees I feel instantly part of a show. And a show it is. This is a life sized museum of extraordinary scale and ambition. Nothing here is for sale on RightMove. There’s no price on the handsome barns, ripe for conversion to desirable riverside dwellings. But consummate taste and considerable capital has at one time been spent on their renovation.

Listen to the quiet. Breathe the air: a little bit of river, the sweetness of windfall apples - and oh! good coffee. Martin, who draws me a mug of excellent coffee has been managing the museum for a year. And yes, he says I can use the slip. And park the van up while I’m off on my islands. And just feel at home. Stop a while. Take a look. Spread out. I feel instantly welcomed and at home.

The Ship Inn with the grassy narrow slip reaching right up to it. Morwellham Facebook.

I set Ethel out beside the grassy slip that reaches right to the heart of the village. She is fully loaded for two nights camping and ready to go and I still have hours to wait for the tide to float her. There’s a far corner of the village where nobody comes. It’s by a nearly dry dock that has been dredged of reed and brambles. The walls are home to tight rosettes of fern. Just a shallow slick of waterworld remains. Ducks and coots make alleyways through marsh plants. It’s pretty. Grass and yellow vetch have softened the lines of the paved quay.

Ferns. Photo by Pen

Where I lie now, enjoying the buzz of dragonflies and bumblebees there was once huge wealth and activity. There was never less than 4,000 tons of ore on the quay floors.” Morwellham’s great prosperity was directly linked to the massive Devon Great Consols mine. It was the largest copper producer in Europe by the 1860s. In 1858 a railway was built to convey the ore to the docks and more land developed to store it.

By the end of the nineteenth century 750,000 tons of copper ore and 72,000 tons of arsenic had been shipped through Morwellham along with tin, lead and manganese. Timber from the Baltic, Canadian and Pacific forests, coal from S Wales, iron, ropes, linseed, salt, lime and bricks came through this port, this hive of Victorian entrepreneurship in the Tamar valley.

There would have been the noise of the blacksmith forge, the big waterwheel thumping and powering the manganese mill, the cooper making barrels for the manganese. Morwellham was licensed for a weekly market. Children would have played and run and tumbled before the mines claimed their young bodies for labour. There would have been no place for me to be lying in the sun here, snoozing off.

Photo thanks to Morwellham Facebook page

The two inclined planes still come down on wooden tramways to the docks. The mine railway brought trucks of ore from the 8 levels of the George and Charlotte Mine, the railway being powered by a great overshot water wheel. The underground tunnel bringing Tavistock Canal runs into the village still. It revolutionized trade by halving the cost and time of travel from the mines of Tavistock to these docks and thence to the world. Back then there would have been many boats at a time in one of the docks here. It was one of the busiest ports in Britain. In 1861 the census records 12 vessels lying alongside. Twenty years later only 2. Twenty years later again the port was closed. Railways finished off canals - and Morwellham. The veins of copper were all but exhausted. Morwellham, which had been such a powerhouse, such a magnet for talent and hard labour, was closing in on itself. The export now was of people, families, labour skills.

The Garlandstone in her not quite dry dock. Photo by Pen

And here is the graceful ruin of a fine boat, the Garlandstone. Not just any boat this. In 1909 she was the last boat out of the Goss shipyard, down river at Calstock. She was almost the last merchant vessel built in the south of England. She was designed by the shipyard owner James Goss and her excellence was an accumulation of all the skill that he had accumulated in a lifetime of boat building.

Goss shipyard, 1908. The viaduct and boat under construction. National Maritime Collection

She was a ketch built to carry cargo under sail, made of English elm from the Cotehole estate below Kitt Hill, with a teak keelson and pitch pine deck. She is 76 foot long and beamy, designed to navigate this very river. Garlandstone’s a strange name for a Tamar boat. It’s the great rock at the NW corner of Skomer Island in Pembrokeshire. I know it well. If you take the right angle across Jack Sound you can pootle along the north coast among the puffins as happy as you like. But go round the Garlandstone and you find yourself in more lively water. There are races all the way to Skokholm including the white crests of Wild Goose Race, challenging for a boat such as this.

The Garlandstone was sold to a Captain Russian and first registered in 1909 at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire. She was bound for trade between Wales and Ireland as well as carrying loads of copper to Swansea and coal back to Morwellham.

The Garlandstone has been much loved. Her last commercial owner, Captain Murdoch, used her on the Irish trade routes. His crew deserted him in Ireland, refusing to sail back to England. Murdoch was by then an elderly man but a strong and determined character. He set sail alone after rigging and casting off with the aid of a local boatman. He sailed the Garlandstone back single handed, probably passing right over the wartime minefield at the mouth of the Bristol Channel, to King Road, off Portishead, where he anchored her after 48 hours straight, alone at the wheel. The crew of a passing tug helped him take in the sails and the Garlandstone was towed up the Severn to Lydney and laid up.

The Garlandstone at Barmouth. National Historic Ships.

After that a sad life of decline. Somehow she found her way back to Aberamffra Harbour at Barmouth, an area known as the Graveyard. And there in the 1970s she was discovered by David “Dai” Williams. Here’s a thing, Dai was from Llanfyllin, Powys, the same obscure little Welsh town that I live by. He went to the same school my daughters went to - though some years earlier of course.

Dai made a living from buying and selling, from dealing. He liked a smart car so people got used to seeing him in anything from a double decker bus to an E Type Jaguar. Quite often his travels took him to Barmouth and his eye would be drawn to this boat: “Don’t ask me what I was thinking." He wrote. “The idea of acquiring a shipwreck was enough to get me committed.” But that was what he did even though, or maybe because he knew absolutely nothing of boats.

Dai paid for his boat in £500 cash, to be paid over six months, a collection of wrist watches and a Vauxhall Victor car. His Dad was horrified. “You don’t mean you’ve got rid of your car, your collection of watches and a load of money you don’t own in exchange for this wreck!” But calmed down, rolled up his sleeves and set to with helping to resurrect her.

Dai brought a Morris Minor van which he lived in while he worked on the boat. Such was his charisma and the appeal of the Garlandstone that people were inspired to pitch in and help. The shipyard that had originally built her advised him on how to caulk the timber, his mate Walter Mytton helped him dig her out of the mud, his mate Jack Jones “brought a strong piece of timber from Welshpool” to prop her up. Jim said “he wouldn’t go till the engine was working!” And so he did.

Friends came to look and stayed to help. Strangers stopped by and did the same and became friends for life. All “for the love of the ship” Dai said. I would say for him as well. It turns out there are some strong characters in the world of rescuing boats. Tilly, Major Tilman was one of these. He went from boat chat on the quay to being a prime mover in the boat’s recovery. Tilly happened to have a great quantity of the right sort of paint. Tools were made, engine parts bodged. Ken Jeffs, coxswain of the Barmouth lifeboat fixed the clutch and, next morning loosened the mooring ropes and ran her back and forth on the engine. One day a yellow Rolls Royce came by and a lady passenger stepped out for a chat. At Dai’s suggestion she washed the mugs and made them all a nice cup of tea. That was Diana Dors.

The Garlandstone coming into Porthmadoc Harbour. Photo from Madoc Sailing Club.

So, with charm, resourcefulness and determination Dai restored the Garlandstone to seaworthy  condition. In 1973 he sold her. Around this time someone called Jack Hayward brought the SS Great Britain back from the Falkland Islands where she had been scuppered. Most people thought he was crazy. It took years to restore her. But she now stands proud, Bristol’s number one tourist attraction and goes from strength to strength.

The Garlandstone has had a chequered career since Dai sold her. At one stage she was in such a bad way that the engine was taken out and offered back to Dai. He had taken so much trouble over it, polishing and painting, getting it running. He didn’t have the heart to collect it, he was too upset.

Garlandstone looking good in her early days at Morwellham. National Historic Ships.

“It is my wish” he wrote “that the Garlandstone is close to her original builder, that she can be restored yet again.” And that has happened. She is just 3 miles upstream of Goss’s Shipyard now, back on the Tamar at Morwellham. She has been restored again, at least once, brought back to a state of beauty above and below deck. It took 13 years and considerable expense, completed in 2000.

Today, just 24 years later, she is a peeling skeleton. Her fine lines speak of her grace and beauty but she is derelict. Barmouth mud may have been kinder to her than this dryish dock. It would take more than caulking and rags to make her water tight again. The great elm timbers that came from the Cotehole estate in 1900 and were worked green are dried up and dessicating. Do they float as dust back to their beginnings?

I’m thinking the unthinkable: “How much does that matter?”  She was built on spec by Goss’s shipyard owner to provide work for his men. But demand for this type of boat was already past. Railways were the new thing. The copper industry was done for. Can we, should we fight? There is no sentiment in the march of progress.

Daphne du Maurier writes movingly about the passing of time: we can never go back. The great gates of Manderley are padlocked and rusted, the windows of the lodge house gape forlorn, the woods had triumphed in the end, “they crowded dark and uncontrolled”.

Sitting there in the quiet afternoon sun, I find I am examining the skin on the top of my feet. It is finely etched with a million tiny lines. It’s like a silky stocking that is just a shade too big for me. Who’d’ve thought you could have wrinkles there! I remember my cousin Jeanie and I swearing we would never get old and wrinkly! Well we were wrong and maybe I’m a bit weird but I don’t really mind, I quite like it. My body works well, it allows me to do almost everything I want to do. Dear children, dear younger friends, dear grandchildren know this: if you’re lucky time will pass and you will get soft silky wrinkles all over the place.

Maybe this beautiful boat should be allowed to subside gently and proud into the Tamar mud, a beautiful monument of things past, a warning against nostalgia. Don’t try to hold on friends. Just take hold of life and love it!

Himalayan Balsam flowers look like sweetie wrappers floating down river. Photo by Pen.

And so to paddling and islands and sleeping on them. Well I did! And it didn’t take long.

Launching on to the Tamar close to high water I used the wide eddies on the ox bow bends to paddle against the flow, downstream as far as Calstock viaduct. I saw a graceful woman in a pretty dress stand up paddling with the flow. She looked like a river nymph.

Captain Ross' Island. Photo by Pen

Turning back upstream I took the last of the flood tide, taking a ride back up with its payload of jetsam, past the first island Cap’n Ross had told me about. It is marked on maps all the way back to 1821. It is neither land-able nor desirable. But below Gunnislake weir, a few miles up, we hit the jackpot. Thank you Cap’n. The island is pretty, as he says, as narrow as a shark’s back with a full fringe of Himalayan Balsam, and a couple of trees hanging down over the water.

Two islands below the weir, one in the middle of the river, one grassy banked.

I hauled myself discreetly onto a wall of water driven rocks, out of view of the fishermen who may tell me to clear off. There’s a good view of the weir which is making a white curtain of water across the rocks. The water is clear and clean here, which is welcome. I lean into a jungle of dried out plantlife to carve out a space that will at least take my sleeping mat and the footprint of my little tent. My tent is heroic: this must be the worst, most uneven pitch ever known but it holds. Because of uneven rocky ground I can’t put in a single peg but that shouldn’t matter. It’s held up by the skeletons of this summer’s plants.

Narrowly perched and surrounded by hemlock and dropwort.

Sitting on the rock wall, my feet dangling in the river, munching primula cheese on corn cakes. That’s quite risky here! The stands of dying plants are hemlock and water dropwort and their shiny black seeds ping through the air in a continual fusillade. Every part of both plants is poisonous, the latter is simply the most poisonous plant in Britain. You would know within twenty minutes if you ate any of it at all. Knowing wouldn’t do me much good with neither mobile signal nor mobile data.

Ethel dried out and then refloated with the tide. Photo by Pen

The fishermen stand up to their thighs in the pool below the pier. Their lines skim across the water. The fish don’t bite. They are hiding under Ethel’s creamy hull, a flock of river trout with their mouths in perfect round “ohs”. The oaks hang down in a curtain to the opposite bank. A kingfisher is having the best of luck. I see something bigger than trout rising in the deepest water of the pool. It could be salmon, though I think not; it could be otter though I am sure not, the shape of the back is too long and flat; it could be beaver. I’ve seen their toothy marks on trunks. Oh I do hope so!

Tamar Canoe Association. Photo by Pen

A little fleet of paddlers arrive from the Tamar Canoe Association. My island is hereafter named after Dave and Jenny who come along to chat. My second island, they tell me, is on the soft green bank where the fisherman are standing. Now that looks like a much comfier night for tomorrow. It’s an island, they tell me, because there’s a canal running around behind it. The weir was built by the Abbots of Tavistock in mediaeval times for the salmon fishing. The canal was built in 1800 to allow loads to bypass the weir. It’s called the Tamar Manure Navigation Canal but there’s no trace of that now, only the granite stone walls and hardly enough water for even Ethel to be towed along it.

Ethel enjoyed a bed of grass and flowers for the night. I enjoyed the ladder.

What luxury, soft flat green grass to pitch my tent on.

Paul and Sian live on the island in the old lock house. They welcomed me to camp on the grass that they keep so well mown. It was the comfiest island camp ever so far and I thank them for it. My first Tamar night couldn’t have been more uncomfortable and was laced with anxious dreams of toxic plants.

And so I have two more islands slept on: Dave and Jenny’s and Paul and Sian’s and two circumnavigated, Cap’n Ross Island and Dave and Jenny’s. If the county boundary goes down the middle of the Tamar then one was in Devon and one in Cornwall. I’ll be donating £22 to Aban and you’re welcome to do likewise - or simply share my post on social media, that’s a help too.