South Hams Layer Cake

I took some random photos of sights from my most recent walk in the local lanes around Sherford, near Kingsbridge. Putting them together for this post, I tried to tell some sort of story about what we see around here, if we walk, that is. Driving is probably another matter given the narrows and bends that you have to pay attention to. On foot though, you have time to stop and stare, and to see what our ancestors saw, as they travelled in the same way.

If you do stop and admire the view, you get a sense of the distinctive landscape of south Devon. Rolling hills, with steep narrow lanes dropping into even steeper holloways, that over the centuries have gouged their way through the earth and stone to form toboggan runs out of byways that predate tarmac. The hedgerows are high, and at this time of year, they are neatly pruned by topiarist farmers, into gently sloping green walls that are trying their best to make tunnels.

The trees and hedges occasionally succeed in creating green tubes you can fall down, into the slatey depths of the narrow valleys. The occasional twelfth or thirteenth century church tower punctuates the green icing of this layer cake like a candle marking an historic anniversary.

At the low points of the holloways, in these shale walled cellars of subterranean Devon you come face to rock face with an ancient geological past, older than people, older than mammals, older than dinosaurs even. Here, the sea beds under age old watery worlds from where the first fish emerged onto drier land and walked, reappear in daylight. You can stop your journey and touch the just revealed surfaces over which those fish swam in tropical seas 400 million years since.

That once flat, silty, ocean floor that was swallowed by the slow liquid of floating continents that dived down deep, to be compressed, folded and twisted for megennia like a primordial cake mix of future Devon layer cake, as it travelled north from the equator, to pause its journey here long enough for me to walk past and document its slalom patterns.

We are Devonian here, in both place and time, because this place is so significant that it lends its very name to the time of which we speak. It was nearly two hundred years ago that Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison chose the name for the marine layers they found in Devon. In 1839 they solved part of the Devonian puzzle by realising that other very different rocks in Britain had formed during different climates to those of Devon, but remarkably it was another seventy three years before Alfred Wegener proposed how that could have happened.

It was Wegener who realised that the solid ground under our feet was mere slow liquid moving around the globe, moving geological evidence with it, like lost jigsaw pieces, into confusing future combinations that ended up as a completed map of Britain. It was in 1835 that Darwin himself was to discover sea shells on top of the Andes in South America, quite a puzzle indeed.

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These are ancient trackways following ridge tops, where travel on foot was the only practical option. If you can follow a ridge for most of your journey, you can see approaching danger, you have a relatively flat, even way ahead, and you don't need to build bridges. A crossroads becomes a marker of distance and direction. The shadow line below is that of a sign post and the crossroads is itself the place of the sign as well as the place of the cross.

This shadow is the sign of a sign. There has always been a sign here, it is just the places it points too that have changed. Saxons walked this way before the Normans, and the Romans walked here before them and they conquered the Dumnones. Turn right here and keep going and you will reach their ancient tribal capital Isca Dumnoniorum which we call Exeter.

It is only when you have to move from one hill top to another that you have to risk that steep descent into damp and dark and danger. The water finds its way down there, as do the highwaymen, and springs trickle out from the hedgerows and a bridge may keep your feet dry.

The ferns have been the constant in this story too, as they are also "Devonian" creations of about 380 million years ago, albeit "Middle Devonian". Even on the opposite side of the planet in Australia, where the oldest fossilised ferns are found, they call them "Devonian".

As you climb back up into the light you reach the safety of another cross. A crossroads is not just a convenient junction where paths accidentally meet, it is also a symbolic place and has been, even before the cross of the Christians entered the culture and took solid form as the granite wayside crosses that once covered England at junctions like these.

As far as memory reaches back, the crossroads has had significance as a liminal space, somewhere that the physical and the supernatural met. Paths both diverge and meet here, making it a neutral space of no single direction, pointing everywhere at once and into infinity.

Crossroads were magical places and haunted places, where outcasts were buried and criminals executed. Don't presume that the corpse on the gibbet at the edge of the village was a warning, a deterrent to strangers, as the truth is stranger still. The folklore of the crossroads was a place of intersecting paths, confusion and bewilderment where troubled souls became trapped in a "thin place", that was a portal between the physical world and the underworld, that prevented them from finding their way home, where trouble or harm might be visited upon the innocent. It was an exorcism of sorts.

Lets play a game of imagination now. If this Devonian layer cake in the next photo were to represent the 400 million years since these stones were sea bed, then we humans have only existed for 0.075% of that time. All of us, and all of our human ancestors for ever, are a mere single fibre of one of those fine tree roots, right on the surface. Before then, our ancestors were different animals altogether.

The first animals out of the water and onto land were the inbetweeners in shells, that were only part timers. Then came the worms and millipedes who were our roughly one hundred and fifty million times great grandparents, and they would be the very lowest layer in this diagramatic layer cake. Mammals appeared at about the half way mark as roughly our seventy five million times great grandparents.

The dinosaurs appeared 140 million years ago, roughly where that line between soil and stone marks a change. They ruled the world for only the blink of an eye, but after that blink the mammals picked up the baton and kept running. It puts everything into perspective.