Okehampton welcomes revamp of service connecting Dartmoor town to Exeter and beyond
In 1972, the people of Okehampton turned out in force to wish a fond farewell to the Devon moorland town’s regular passenger rail service.
The mayor, Walter John Passmore, carried a funeral wreath and his wife, Daisy, waved the green flag to signal the final train’s departure, just about managing a sad smile for the cameras.
Continue reading...Campaigners in Devon celebrate return of passenger trains after 50 years, a first step to reversing the Beeching closures
On the rugged northern edge of Dartmoor, a small army of workers in high-vis vests is readying Okehampton station to welcome the first regular passenger train since 1972. The canopies and picket fences are being repainted in the original dark greens and warm yellows of the long-departed Southern Railway.
It’s a historic moment for local campaigners, who have been fighting for decades to reconnect the Devon town to the national network and open up this lesser-visited part of the national park. “It’s quite extraordinary – almost unbelievable,” says Tom Baxter, 68, the secretary of the Dartmoor Railway Association, watching the painting from a gleaming green bench on the platform. “I used to travel on the line when it was British Rail and I was here when it closed in the 1970s. Local railways were seen as a bit of a nuisance at the time – they wanted to get rid of them.”
Continue reading...As unprecedented numbers of people take their holidays in the UK because of the travel chaos caused by the Covid pandemic, David Hares has been photographing the English Riviera in Devon
Continue reading...The National Police Air Service south-west team has released footage of the moment a six-year-old girl was spotted by a police helicopter using an infrared camera after she had gone missing from her remote farmhouse home in north Devon. The child was found curled up asleep in the corner of a field. She had wandered more than half a mile from her home. She was checked over in hospital and reunited with her parents
Continue reading...Max Woosey, 11, hoped to secure £100 for a Devon hospice but his charity pitch became a marathon
Max Woosey has woken up in his tent in the depths of winter, teeth chattering, his sleeping bag and blankets coated with frost. The 11-year-old was almost tempted indoors one night when his tent blew down in a storm but he repitched and carried on.
This summer there have been some uncomfortably hot, sticky nights, especially after the family labradoodle, Digby, took to snuggling in with Max and licking his face at all hours.
Continue reading...It’s hoped a 12-year trial in Devon will persuade policymakers to back silvopasture to benefit the soil, livestock and climate
Andy Gray stands beside an enormous hill of bare red earth and smiles with a hint of mischief. This is his best field, its soils known as Crediton red land. The region was once known for producing swedes prized by Covent Garden market. Now, every six metres, planted in rows 14 metres apart, stands a tree guard shielding a young oak, aspen or alder.
“You can grow anything on it and I’m planting trees,” says Gray, a 16th-generation Devon farmer. “I’m seen as the fool on the hill. One neighbour said ‘you might as well concrete it over and build houses’. They could be right. Who knows?”
Continue reading...Much of Britain’s temperate rainforest has been destroyed – but it can sometimes regenerate. The race is on to map what survives and restore what we can
Few people realise that England has fragments of a globally rare habitat: temperate rainforest. I didn’t really believe it until I moved to Devon last year and started visiting some of these incredible habitats. Temperate rainforests are exuberant with life. One of their defining characteristics is the presence of epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants, often in such damp and rainy places. In woods around the edge of Dartmoor, in lost valleys and steep-sided gorges, I’ve spotted branches dripping with mosses, festooned with lichens, liverworts and polypody ferns.
You may have heard of England’s most famous fragment of temperate rainforest: Wistman’s Wood, in the middle of Dartmoor. With its gnarled and stunted oaks, its remote location marooned within a sheep-nibbled moorscape, and attendant tales of spectral hounds that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, it has an outsize reputation for somewhere so tiny in size: eight acres – about four football pitches.
Continue reading...Five twitchers travelled to Devon to photograph a northern mockingbird, last seen in the UK in the 1980s
Five birdwatchers have been fined for breaking Covid-19 restrictions after they travelled to Devon to try to see a rare specimen after a Twitter tipoff.
They were looking to catch sight of a northern mockingbird, normally found in North America, which had been spotted by Exmouth resident Chris Biddle.
Continue reading...No people or livestock are yet believed to have been harmed, but remote location has made tackling fire difficult
A large fire has broken out on Dartmoor near Tavy Cleave in Devon, a few miles north east of Tavistock.
Devon and Somerset fire and rescue service has deployed five pumps and other units to the area, but has struggled to tackle the fire because its location is difficult to access.
Continue reading...Many at the harbour in the Devon town are concerned that their industry has been sold short
Anton Bailey had just taken a delivery of a new set of fishing nets and was patiently sorting them on the harbour-side at Brixham in Devon. The skipper, who first boarded a fishing boat four decades ago when he was just three, was feeling a mixture of optimism and frustration.
He is optimistic that when he chugs out to fish for pollock with his fresh nets in the new year he will be lucky and return with a good catch, but frustrated that, to his mind, the Brexit fishing deal has sold the British industry short.
Continue reading...Suspicion in Devon town of face masks and 5G means take-up of vaccine may face resistance
Like many people living in or around Totnes in Devon, David, who is in his 70s, has his own theories about coronavirus and its origins. Sitting in the armchair of his house, he says the pandemic is a secret plot to impose a totalitarian world government and a nefarious effort to crush freedom. He scrolls through Facebook, which he recently signed up to, to show many with similar beliefs.
David came to many of these ideas recently. When the pandemic hit, he started looking for answers. “I’m friends with a few people who are active in researching what is going on. I quickly made contact with others putting posts on the internet.”
Continue reading...Storm Ellen’s strongest winds are expected across south-west England and west Wales
Emergency services have urged the public to be aware of the dangers posed by strong winds in the wake of Storm Ellen.
Gusts of up to 70mph could hit coastal areas on Friday, which when combined with high spring tides may trigger large waves and flooding.
Continue reading...Nine acres in Exmoor includes buildings, rivers and moorland linked to 19th-century tale
It is a place of wooded valleys, tumbling rivers and rugged moorland that was immortalised in the 19th-century novel Lorna Doone, a twisty tale of romance, murder and outlaws by RD Blackmore.
The National Trust announced on Tuesday it had bought nine acres of land in Doone country, including farmhouses and cottages, and is hoping to encourage more visitors to explore this tucked-away area of Exmoor.
Continue reading...Good to learn about Drake’s Island developments (Mysterious Drake’s Island opens to visitors after 30 years, 14 March), but a little correction is needed about the “bunch of schoolboys” invading in 1957. And some extras about Plymouth history.
We had recently formed Plymouth Young Socialists, upsetting the national Labour party, which had closed down the Labour League of Youth. Plymouth politics was starting to stir a bit. My father, Reg Scott, a local socialist politician and journalist, had just started a speakers’ corner on Saturday mornings at Frankfort Gate, the ordinary end of the splendid new city centre. Our “invasion” of Drake’s Island was to reclaim it from the military for the people of Plymouth. We set out in comrade John Duffin’s small, leaky boat, with its spluttering outboard motor, only to be intercepted by a fast naval launch out of the dockyard. We got halfway, were “arraigned”, lectured about dangerous currents, and then kindly taken to the island, awaiting our fate on the beach.
Continue reading...Fishing was a powerful factor in the case for leaving the EU. On the eve of crucial trade talks, the Observer finds optimism tempered by caution on the quays of Devon and Cornwall
Neil Watson was eight or nine when his dad took him out to sea for the first time. Soon he was earning his first pocket money by washing fish boxes on the quay at Brixham in south Devon. Three years after he started crewing, he got his skipper’s ticket and eventually he bought his own boat. For 30 years, he regularly spent seven days at sea followed by one night off, only stopping when his boat sank two years ago.
“I fished through good times and bad times. Fishing’s like riding a wave – one minute you’re up the top, and the next you’re down in the trough,” he said. Now Watson works at Brixham’s fish market, one of the largest in England, where £40m of fish was sold last year across the UK and Europe. A fisherman’s life is brutal, he said, but he badly misses the camaraderie.
Continue reading...Patrick McLarry, 71, of Devon, faces jail after taking more than £250,000 from scheme
The former head of a charity faces a substantial prison sentence after admitting to defrauding a pension scheme for workers with disabilities and using the money to buy houses in England and France.
Patrick McLarry, 71, took more than £250,000 from the pension scheme of Yateley Industries for the Disabled and used it to buy homes for himself and his wife and pay off a debt over a pub lease.
Continue reading...The 14 carvings will hang from the ceiling in arts venue The Box, due to open in the spring
A collection of 19th-century wooden figureheads from British naval warships has been lovingly restored from the ravages of years at sea and will form a striking display at a new heritage and arts complex in Plymouth.
The 14 figureheads, some of which were so badly water-damaged that their insides had turned into a soggy mulch, are to be suspended from the ceiling of The Box gallery and museum, which is due to open in the spring.
Continue reading...Lease extended on island off Devon – a haven for wildlife and seekers of the quiet life
The future of an island off the Devon coast that has been transformed from the haunt of pirates and chancers into a haven for wildlife and seekers of the quiet life has been secured for another half century.
A fresh 50-year agreement between the charities that own and run Lundy is being signed that will offer protection for the flora and fauna (and the hardy humans) who live on the weather-battered hunk of granite in the Bristol Channel.
Continue reading...Man found dead in car six miles from scene in Kingsteignton where 73-year-old was killed
Police investigating the “random” stabbing of a 73-year-old man on the doorstep of his home in Devon are trying to establish whether the suspected suicide of a driver six miles away is linked.
The stabbing victim died after he was found with multiple wounds in a cul-de-sac in Kingsteignton, a small town near Newton Abbot, on Sunday evening. On Monday morning, Devon and Cornwall police were told that another man had been found dead in a car at a coastal beauty spot a few minutes’ drive away.
Continue reading...Follow live updates on the disruption in the UK after the Met Office issues a warming for continuing snow
Wiltshire Health and Care, a partnership formed by the three NHS foundation trusts that serve Wiltshire to deliver adult community health services, is looking for volunteer 4x4 drivers to help nurses get to work.
We still urgently need 4x4 volunteer drivers in North #Wiltshire to help get nurses to and from work today. If you can help please call Sarah on 07514-323303. Please share. @wiltscouncil @Chippenhamtcl @MTCwilts @malmesburyteam @ChippenhamCEM
Welsh rugby fans trying to get to Paris for the opener of the Six Nations kept themselves entertained at Bristol airport after flights were cancelled.
Some of our amazing passengers choosing a singalong to keep upbeat during the snowy weather ❄️ pic.twitter.com/OoMigFLcJV
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