Who's lost their marbles?

You might find them here!

Running by the upper reaches of the River Bovey proved to be quite an alternate experience to our previous week's gallop on Dartmoor. Skip and I had trotted from tor to tor admiring the views over the surrounding countryside. Today there was a thick clag covering the tops and we decided to take a lower level approach through ancient woodland along old stony track and paths. There was no shortage of interest and tracking along a deserted trail we came across this stone monument at the entrance to a grassy field - The Lost Marbles Dept - No Entry! We carried on no wiser as to what happens to people's marbles in this curious corner of Devon

No swans on this river!

My OS map showed that there was a clear crossing of the Rivey Bovey further up the valley and a fairly new footpath sign pointed straight across the boulders in the middle of the river here behind me. Skip didn't look very interested in climbing over these so we waded through the pools below and got our feet thoroughly wet. The path on the opposite side wasn't at all clear and we found ourselves following a faint trail back downstream on the other side which regularly seemed to fade from view appearing again after a few minutes of floundering through rocks and bracken. We were making painfully slow progress until after about 20 minutes we found a wide easy path which took us straight down to the Old Clam Bridge.

Nothing to worry about!

This has nothing to do with collecting clamshells or anything like that and the word clam refers to a particular style of bridge which at one time was a relatively common feature of the Dartmoor area. In this case an oak tree trunk has been felled across the river and a sturdy hand rail is attached to its upper side, it seems that there were at one time dozens of clam bridges crossing streams and rivers along the steep valleys that criss cross Dartmoor - this is one of the last survivors. For those travellers who prefer to take a less risky line there is a stouter wooden footbridge built more recently alongside this ancient relic.

 En route we called by at Posh and Beck's place!

If we'd made a slight detour we'd have found ourselves at Becky Falls which is a bit of a tourist attraction. For some reason the adjacent farmhouse is called Beckhams - we couldn't see any goalposts though!