Photo of Horsebridge by Baz Richardson
While writing A Bag of Blood and Bone I realised, at quite a late stage, that a journey that Tom and Effra took was through a landscape that was unfamiliar to me.
The main routes into Cornwall from Devon these days are either along the A38, via Plymouth, or the A30, over the top of Dartmoor, via Okehampton. There’s also the A39 that snakes along the north coast. Between these arterial roads there’s a lot of land, of history and places to be discovered.
In my story A Bag of Blood and Bone, Tom and Effra enter Cornwall by crossing the River Tamar at Horsebridge. I visited the village, which is on the Devon side of the river. The bridge is an impressive structure that has been there since 1437. That’s nearly seven hundred years!
I followed the road westwards and came across three smaller bridges that all date back to at least the 15th Century. So, long before the A30 and the A38 were built there was a more meandering route out of Cornwall and it is still marked by these really old bridges.
The bridge at Stara stands beside an ancient wood. Ancient woodlands are defined as those that were present in the landscape since at the latest 1600. This arbitrary date is set because that’s when we start to have maps documenting the location of woods. If a wood was there in 1600, it is very likely it was part of the landscape going far back into the history of England.
Anyway, the bridge at Stara doesn’t have a specific date associated with it. The construction of it, though, is reminiscent of the clapper bridges over the streams in Dartmoor, being a ‘clapper’ structure of massive granite slabs held up by piers faced with large granite blocks. This is still the bridge that takes the road across the river, although nowadays most traffic flows over a younger bridge at nearby Rilla Mill.
At Treverbyn, there is a bridge that has better documentary evidence for its age. In 1412-1413 it was about to collapse and a plea to the Bishop of Exeter resulted in its repair. Most of the existing bridge dates from this time, though the western end of the bridge shows an even older style of stonework. In the 18th Century the approaches to the bridge were widened and in 1929 a new bridge was built to take the strain off the old one.
Pantersbridge is the third bridge I found on my route. This also dates from the 14th or 15th Century. It is described as dating from the early 15th Century, but with some material from an earlier bridge. Its style is very like Treverbyn Bridge, with slightly-pointed arches between the piers. The old bridge was closed to motor vehicles in 1968, when a new bridge was built next to it.
It’s great that we live beside these links to our past.
Sources: Britishlistedbuildings.co.uk, Wikipedia.org, Ancientmonuments.uk.