“The sun warmed us. We were going slower and close in to the shore. A heron ahead took wing. The cries of circling buzzards came overhead.
There were many rocky red scars where trees had fallen from the little red cliff. Many looked ready to fall. One lucky oak, set on a hard rock outcrop, had grown fatter and older than all the others.”
creeping downhill. There’s not many trees here get to even a hundred years old before they fall.’
A grey heron stood sentinel at the water edge. I glimpsed
a cormorant fl ying quick, black and close to the water away in mid-river heading upstream against wind and tide. The children watched the heron.
‘But the valley today was never always like this,’ the steersman said. ‘Right now we’re fl oating over the channel of the ancient river that cut this valley. The tide runs best here. When Dartmoor was fi rst thrust up by tectonic action, the overburden on top went as high as the Alps are today. Then it started to rain, and erosion gradually washed everything down, forming the roundy Devon hills that you see, while the softer material oxidised into the famous Devon red soil.’ The sun warmed us. We were going slower and close in
Ready to Go
to the shore. A heron ahead took wing. The cries of circling buzzards came overhead. There were many rocky red scars where trees had fallen from the little red cliff. Many looked ready to fall. One lucky oak, set on a hard rock outcrop, had grown fatter and older than all the others. I saw tree stumps on the beach.
‘Then came the Ice Ages, followed by a tropical time,’ said the steersman. The children were listening. His voice softened. ‘To picture it, imagine you have a state-of-the-art Photoshop in your head.’ He paused. ‘Take a sample of the trees and, in Photoshop, carry it across to the other side of the river and paste it to cover all of the fi elds, all the houses, everything on land, cover it with trees. And click Save.’ One or two young heads moved left and right. ‘Next, take a sample of the water, and with that, cover all the buoys and all the boats, so there’s just ourselves, drifting in the canoe entirely surrounded by water with a great green forest on every side.’ A pause. ‘Click Save.’ Another pause, then, ‘We have gone back in time roughly twelve thousand years.’ Everyone was silent. The canoe was lying almost at right angles to its direction of travel. We had slipped past the Pig Hole point, the river widened, at least a mile it seemed to me, and we carried out into the empty middle without paddling. In my mind we were in the canoe on the bright river entirely surrounded by forest – not the least gap anywhere.
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‘Now’s the tricky bit,’ said the steersman. ‘As the Ice Ages ended there came a tropical period but the water stayed frozen into Polar and Continental ice sheets so the sea was a hundred and forty something feet shallower than it is now. This river, the Dart, met up with the River Teign and the Exe and the Tamer about thirty-fi ve miles away to the East. So, the next Photoshop trick is, simply copy and delete all the water you can see.’ He paused again. ‘And now, we are fl oating in the air fi fty-sixty feet above a wide ice-melt river rushing down from high Dartmoor. It snakes across the valley, cutting the valley from the hills as it goes. The air is warm. Trees grow right down underneath us to the edge of the river’s fl ood plain. There’s hippopotamus in the quiet pools, there are buffalo and giant red deer. There’s golden eagles in the sky. There are wolves and bears in the forests. There is a small, hairy, straight tusked mammoth called stegadon grazing. And not far away, perhaps you can see it stalking, is a sabretooth cat.’
Teams Children
The smallest child snuggled tight against her parent, big eyes peeping. ‘We know about these animals from the bone cave in the limestone at Buckfastleigh on the edge of Dartmoor. The river eroded caves in the limestone, and one day the roof of such a cave collapsed and many animals fell in and died there. A chap called Pengelly discovered it. There’s a similar cave in Wales. A sabretooth could take a child for a snack between breakfast and lunch! Would anyone like to hear what happened to them?’ ‘I would!’ called a boy from the front. ‘OK,’ the steersman said, ‘But I have to bring in my Granny, because it was she who told me
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