Sourced by Colin Burbidge

The following beautifully composed extract describing the Upper Teign, is from Eden Phillpotts’ book “Children of the Mist”, set around a mill near Chagford, it was published in 1898 the first in an 18-book cycle based in and around Dartmoor.

Phillpotts was born in 1862 in India and died at Broadclyst in Devon in 1960. Phillpotts was for many years the President of the Dartmoor Preservation Association and cared passionately about the conservation of Dartmoor.

Chapter 4 “By the River”

“The wooded valley lay under a grey and breezy forenoon; swaying alders marked each intermittent gust with a silver ripple of upturned foliage, and still reaches of the river similarly answered the wind with hurrying flickers and furrows of dimpled light. Through its transparent flood, where the waters ran in shadow and escaped reflections, the river revealed a bed of ruddy brown and rich amber. This harmonious colouring proceeded from the pebbly bottom, where a medley of warm agate tones spread and shimmered, like some far-reaching mosaic beneath the crystal.

Above Teign’s shrunken current extended oak and ash, while her banks bore splendid concourse of the wild water-loving dwellers in that happy valley. meadowsweet nodded creamy crests; hemlock and fool’s parsley and seeding willowherb crowded together beneath far-scattered filigree of honeysuckles and brambles with berries, some ripe, some red; while the scarlet corals of briar and white bryony gemmed every riotous trailing thicket, dene, and dingle along the river’s brink; and in the grassy spaces between rose little chrysoprase steeples of wood sage all set in shining fern. Upon the boulders in midstream subaqueous mosses, now revealed and starved by the drought, died hard, and the seeds of grasses, figworts, and persicarias thrust up flower and foliage, flourishing in unwonted spots from which the next freshet would rudely tear them. 

Through these scenes the Teign rolled drowsily and with feeble pulses. Upon one bank rose the confines of Whiddon; on the other, abrupt, and interspersed with gulleys of shattered shale, ascended huge slopes whereon a whole summer of sunshine had scorched the heather to dry death. But fading purple still gleamed here and there in points and splashes, and the lesser furze, mingling therewith, scattered gold upon the tremendous acclivities even to the crown of fir-trees that towered remote and very blue upon the uplifted skyline. Swallows, with white breasts flashing, circled over the river, and while their elevation above the water appeared at times tremendous, the abrupt steepness of the gorge was such that the birds almost brushed the hillside with their wings. A sledge, laden with the timber of barked sapling oaks, creaked and jingled over the rough road beside the stream; a man called to his horses and a dog barked beside him; then they disappeared, and the spacious scene was again empty, save for its manifold wild life and music.”

 Reproduced by kind permission of The Royal Literary Fund