As part of the village’s festivities for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee weekend, a communal walk was organised along part of the parish boundary to ‘Beat the Bounds’. Despite it being the month of June, the weather was wet – typical weather for Dartmoor in June! – and some 20 villagers set out from the Village Hall on a wet and grey morning.
‘Beating the Bounds‘ is an old custom still observed in parts of England which traditionally involved swatting local landmarks with branches to maintain a shared mental map of parish boundaries, usually every seven years. It dates from former times when maps were rare and many of those who worked the land would have been illiterate. It was usual to make a formal perambulation of the parish boundaries on Ascension Day or during Rogation week.
Knowledge of the limits of each parish needed to be handed down so that such matters as liability to contribute to the repair of the church or the right to be buried within the churchyard were not disputed. The object of taking young boys along is supposed to ensure that witnesses to the boundaries should survive as long as possible. In the case of North Bovey Parish, it is a tradition that the children accompanying the walk are gently ‘bounced’ upon the boundary markers… which certainly helps them to remember where the markers are!
In England, the custom dates from Anglo-Saxon times, as it is mentioned in laws of Alfred the Great and Æthelstan. It is thought that it may have been derived from the Roman festival of Terminalia, celebrated on February 22nd in honour of Terminus, the god of landmarks, to whom cakes and wine were offered while sports and dancing took place at the boundaries.
We set off from the Village Hall at 09:00 in light rain… which became progressively more intense as we reached the first parish boundary marker at Dickford Bridge, about half a mile out of the village. Fortunately we were under tree cover, but the next 200 yards were followed by walking in the middle of the stream beneath the trees, so although we were sheltered from the rain anyone without good waterproof boots had wet feet for the rest of the day.
We emerged into open fields and the next few miles were spent walking along field edges and light woodland through the steady rain and mist. The parish boundary is not denoted by regular footpaths or Rights of Way – so aside from getting permission from landowners, one has to negotiate hedgerows, dense undergrowth in places, and other obstacles along with good map reading skills. Fortunately the best routes across hedgerows etc had already been scouted, proving exactly why in times past children were always brought along to help memorize the boundaries for future generations.
It is strange how land that you think you know well from one perspective is totally different when you actually walk it from a different direction… The mist was thick enough that whilst walking along a field boundary in plain sight of our home – admittedly a field that I have not walked in – despite it being only about 500 yards in front of my study window from where I am writing this, I was totally disorientated by the mist and being on the opposite side of a normally familiar hedgerow, and I had no clue where we were until I checked the route we had actually walked on my GPS in the evening!
The rain eased off late morning, and the rest of the walk was relatively dry, although the ground was soggy. For everyone the walk was a bit of a revelation as to what lay the other side of the hedgerows, and in the little hidden valleys that exist and cannot be seen from the lanes.
Fortunately the weather dried up during the afternoon and we reached Lettaford around 4:00 pm, to be met and driven back to the Village Hall, decorated in celebration of the Jubilee Weekend, where a free cream tea was provided by the North Bovey Belles, the ladies of the local Women’s Institute. And being Devon, you can rest assured that so long as you put the cream on first, followed by the jam, no-one will ever go hungry given the quantities of food that always seems to be prepared for a Devon cream tea! (And if you are worried about the cholesterol, you might as well die happy…)
* Important to note that the correct way of eating a scone in Devon is cream on first followed by jam, unless you are a heathen from across the Tamar in Cornwall, where the troglodytes put the jam on first followed by cream. They are still quite uncivilised over there and know no better. “There be dragons.”
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