A Vast Solitude

by Paul Harris - Glavind Strachan Photography

I had a conversation the other day where the person I was chatting with mentioned that people forget that Dartmoor (and other National Parks) are predominantly manufactured landscapes - this isn't the main thrust of this article, but it's worth noting considering the way the writer in this article from almost 140 years ago views the moor.

It appears that there is a moment, somewhere in the 1880s, when Dartmoor stops being a place people apologise for and starts to become a place they celebrate, or even boast about. You can watch it happen in this one cutting, a simple book review from the Morning Post in the summer of 1889.

The reviewer starts out, almost defensively, borrowing a line from Carrington (who wrote Dartmoor: A Descriptive Poem published in 1826), calling it "a spot almost unknown, untrod."

Sixty years on from the famous poem, he admits, little had changed: the tourist still "looks upon the moor as a weird, wild waste, to be gazed at and passed by," and even in Devonshire "it remains an unknown land." And then, quote by quote, the piece falls in love. I've reproduced it here, exactly as it was in the newspaper. Read it now or skip past and come back to it; both ways, works.

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The Morning Post

Monday, June 24, 1889

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Dartmoor.

A review of "An Exploration of Dartmoor and its Antiquities," by John Lloyd Warden Page.

It would be easy to contravene the dictum of Carrington that Dartmoor is "a spot almost unknown, untrod." Sixty years have, however, made this desolate wilderness but little more popular than it was when the poet sang his somewhat doleful lay. The tourist looks upon the moor as a weird, wild waste, to be gazed at and passed by. In its bleak, dreary expanse there is little to suggest comfort or hospitality, and it is not to be wondered at that even to many persons living in Devonshire it remains an unknown land. But beneath its rugged, uninviting exterior there are attractions for such as care to interest themselves in its historical associations. The rude stone monuments which still remain speak of the old Druidical times when the groves of the gods resounded to the songs and harps of the bards. Of late years enterprising farmers have treated with but little respect these antiquarian treasures. Excellent as agriculturists, they do not stop to gain a reputation as archaeologists, and the offending stones are ruthlessly removed to make way for the modern instruments of land reclamation and prosaic farming. Against the depradations of these peaceful marauders some action has, however, been recently taken by the establishment of a Dartmoor Preservation Society, whose primary object is the protection of these mysterious relics of remote antiquity. The railway has penetrated to the metropolis of Dartmoor, and the granite wilderness may be attacked from Okehampton, Tavistock, Plympton, South Brent, and Ashburton. A champion of the grand old moor has arisen in the person of Mr. Warden Page, who, in a volume prepared with evident care, relates much that will be new to the majority of readers with regard to its traditions, as well as to its form, extent, and present characteristics. In some measure Mr. Page's work is founded upon the Rev. S. Rowe's "Perambulation," which has been accepted as the standard book upon Dartmoor, an article written by Mr. Richard John King, and the Reports of the Transactions of the Devonshire Association and Plymouth Institution. But the chief value of the treatise is due to the author's personal acquaintance of many years with the moor. The Forest of Dartmoor, as it is still called, has an area of one hundred and thirty thousand acres situated in the heart of Devonshire. Trunks and leaves of trees dug out of its morasses show that at a remote period it has been to some extent wooded. It must be remembered that the term "forest" referred more directly to a hunting ground than to a dense growth of trees such as the word generally suggests. Certain it is that there is no such forest at Dartmoor now. Possibly the tinners who formerly worked there exhausted the supply of wood, as they were allowed to supply themselves with fuel necessary for fusing the ore. Of the present aspect of the place Mr. Page thus writes:—

It is a vast solitude. Save the convict settlement of Princetown and a few scattered cottages abutting on the roads which cross the central district, scarce a human habitation greets the eye. In the northern quarter, where the great morass about mysterious Cranmere lies, a dark blot on the surface of the landscape, nothing but an occasional cart-track, faint and broken, hints at the presence of man, and the traveller may walk from the outskirts of Princetown to Okehampton — a good fifteen miles — without meeting a soul. Long ridges rise in dusky sweep against the sky — line beyond line, like the waves of ocean, to which, indeed, they have been not inaptly compared — and from these waves — to carry out the simile — rock-strewn crests start forth capped with grotesque piles of granite. These are the 'tors,' a word whose etymology is discussed elsewhere; and it is to these rugged peaks that Dartmoor in a great measure owes its fascination. Lions couchant, sphinxes, and other strange monsters are the order of created (and uncreated) being more commonly assumed by the disintegrated granite; but not unfrequently man himself is represented, carved by the slow but sure hand of time from the grim rock. Down the slopes are scattered in wild confusion huge blocks of splintered granite, locally known as 'clatters' or 'clitters.' Some of these blocks must weigh scores of tons, and the eye is bewildered by their picturesque disorder and varied forms. Frequently the loveliest ferns fill the interstices, and lichens, grey, white, and orange, contrast with the almost black patches of moss which, watered plenteously by the mists, cling to their rugged sides.

An idea is widely held that Dartmoor is a kind of Salisbury Plain, but the tors in which it abounds give it a totally different aspect. Their average height is said to be 1,400ft., but this altitude is largely exceeded in the northern quarter of the moor. High Willhays and Yes Tor measure respectively 2,059 and 2,029ft. Standing upon one of the loftier hills, mile after mile of heathey expanse may be seen, and the distant heights display an ever-changing variety of hues as the clouds drift over them. The charm of scene is enhanced by the dashes of colour in the green bog, the purple heather, the red and brown rushes, and cotton grass. In the valleys clear streams ripple in their rapid race to the far-off fertile country. That which must strike the visitor more forcibly than all else is the almost painful silence that reigns supreme on the hills:—

A light murmur, says Mr. Page, may float up from the torrent hundreds of feet below, a faint rustling as the breeze sighs through the heather may strike upon the ear; but all else is not. And if the time be evening, the sense of weirdness is intensified, for against the setting sun looms up the shapeless ruin of some ancient keep, or the form of a great stone monster who has kept watch and ward over this solemn land since the Deluge.

Many rivers find their source in the central morass, but of lakes Dartmoor can boast nothing more ambitious than Classenwell, a pool no larger than a Westmoreland tarn. Mr. Page warns his readers against attaching too much credence to the many stories of hairbreadth escapes from Dartmoor bogs. The element of danger doubtless exists, but if the pedestrian avoids the treacherous bright green patches he need fear no harm. These bits of "seething and quaking bog" consist of a thin layer of sodden moss over a substratum of black slime and water. A slight thrust with a pole causes the mass to emit a seething or hissing sound, and the surface will then commence to quiver in most unmistakable manner. The late Bishop Hannington had an unpleasant experience in a Dartmoor bog, and readers of Miss Edna Lyall's "Donovan" will remember how the hero nearly lost his life in Fox Tor Mire; but Mr. Page assures us that such danger is very much more imaginary than real. He walked hundreds of miles upon the moor, and, like the driver of the Wild Irishman, is "a living man yet." Of the cromlechs and stone avenues, which constitute an important part of the ancient treasures of Dartmoor, the author has much to say. He describes them in words and illustrates them in map and picture. He does not accept the rough-and-ready theory that they are all Druidical relics. The origin of these curious monuments of ancient times is so surrounded by doubt and difficulty that he does not pretend to give a certain solution of the problem. There are many near Merivale Bridge, where the Staple Tors and the great Mis Tors are separated by the Walkham, of which he gives the following graphic account:—

These interesting antiquities will be found close to, and for the most part on, the south side of the road which passes through what appears to have been part of an aboriginal village. Close to these hut-dwellings are two avenues, running nearly due east and west, the one 780ft. in length, the other 590ft. The stones are about 2ft. apart, and of most irregular height, though seldom exceeding 3ft. They vary much, too, in shape; evidently no tool has been used upon them, so that some are thin and pointed, others thick and truncated. A circle, with a diameter of 11ft. 8in., and which appears to have contained a kistvaen, stands about the centre of the larger avenue. Proceeding down this avenue from the east end, we shall, after traversing some 250ft., find at a distance of less than 100ft. to the south the remains of a cromlech. The cover-stone, of which the centre part has evidently been removed by some granite robber, is 6ft. 7in. by 5ft. 1in., and 15in. in thickness. Towards the west end, at a distance of 36ft. and 72ft. respectively, are the ruins of two cairns. We now steer for the tall menhir, still further to the south. On the way we pass an almost perfect sacred circle, consisting of ten low stones, the largest being about 1ft. 10in. high by 2ft. wide. Its diameter is 54ft. From this the menhir is distant 105ft. It is a remarkably fine specimen, and the tallest on the moor, having a height of about 13ft. Surrounding it is an imperfect circle of small, round stones about 6in. high. The hut-circles and supposed pound to the north of the avenues call for no especial mention.

Among the various theories that have been advanced in respect to these parallelitha, that of Mr. R. J. King tends to regard them as relics of ancient British serpent worship, and compares them with similar remains at Stanton Drew in Somersetshire, and at Karnac in Brittany. Legends still linger that the Dartmoor Tors were haunted by flying serpents. Mr. Fergusson holds that the avenues were erected in memory of some great battle, and represent the lines of opposing forces, an opinion in harmony with that of M. Galles, the French archaeologist, who writes:—"Celles qui forment un ordre long et droit .... ce sont les combats de guerriers. Voila les alignements de Carnac d'Erdeven." The grave of a chief would be the front circle, another place of sepulture would be marked by the menhir, and the cromlech and circles would indicate the resting place of others of the fallen. Some writers have considered the space between the avenues as a racecourse for British charioteers or a processional path for the Druids. Mr. Page is an admirable guide. He takes his readers up hill and down dale, leaving no corner of Dartmoor unexplored. An enthusiastic lover of its rough beauties, he infuses his book and friends with something of his spirited energy. It is impossible to read his work without experiencing a desire to enjoy the exhilarating breezes and the indescribable charm of the rugged moor. Whether a ramble among its bleak hills and wild plains will exercise upon every one the strange and powerful fascination such as Mr. Page experiences is open to doubt. But his instructive book cannot fail to raise Dartmoor in the estimation of all lovers of Nature and of solitude, where unchanging monuments of bygone ages remain as mystic and silent witnesses of the flight of time.

* "An Exploration of Dartmoor and its Antiquities." With Maps and Illustrations. By John Lloyd Warden Page. London: Seeley and Co.

What was surprising was that a 1889 book review becomes a story about conservation. The reviewer notes, with some obvious anger, that "enterprising farmers have treated with but little respect these antiquarian treasures," the stones "ruthlessly removed to make way for the modern instruments of land reclamation." The remedy, newly on the scene, is "the establishment of a Dartmoor Preservation Society, whose primary object is the protection of these mysterious relics of remote antiquity." The society that still fights the moor's corner today is right there in the cutting, brand new and already needed. The argument we are still having, about who the moor is for and what may be cleared off it, was already in the newspaper in 1889.

And then here is the part that turns a nice old newspaper cutting into a walk you can still take on Saturday morning. When Page reaches "these interesting antiquities... near Merivale Bridge," he's describing stones that are still there. This is Merrivale Stone Rows (the paper spells it Merivale), the brilliant (and easily accessible) ceremonial complex beside the B3357 between Princetown and Tavistock. The "two avenues, running nearly due east and west, the one 780ft. in length, the other 590ft.". The "tall menhir... the tallest on the moor, having a height of about 13ft." is the Merrivale standing stone, still about thirteen feet, still exactly 105ft from the little sacred circle just as Page paced it. You can stand on that spot today, this transcript in your hand, and check his measurements against the granite. I'm fairly sure nothing in the passage has changed in the hundred and thirty-six years since he wrote it, which is the reviewer's closing phrase made physical: they really are "unchanging monuments of bygone ages."

There is even a whisper of the Dartmoor that Conan Doyle would make famous a decade later. The reviewer soothes the danger of the bogs by reaching for fiction: the late Bishop Hannington had "an unpleasant experience in a Dartmoor bog," and "readers of Miss Edna Lyall's Donovan will remember how the hero nearly lost his life in Fox Tor Mire." Fox Tor Mire. Grimpen was not invented from nothing.

What I really like about this snippet is that it is not really just a book review at all. It's the sound of a whole culture deciding, on the page, that the vast empty quarter of Devon is not an embarrassment but a treasure. The tourist is still being told to gaze and pass by. Warden Page, and his reviewer, are among the first to say: stop, and take a closer look.

As I said at the start, the landscape may have been shaped by humans, it may not be everyones 'cup of tea' but it is always interesting and being outside is never wasted time.

Will the real Mary Maria Colling please stand up?

(A Dartmoor Story about a lowly Tavistock resident in the Nineteenth Century)

by Paul Harris - Glavind Strachan Photography

Did Anna Eliza Bray edit Mary Colling's poems?

Recently I've been using AI more and more to aid me in my research around the many interesting stories to be uncovered about Dartmoor (both the famous ones, and the almost forgotten ones). Often it leads me down some very interesting rabbit holes, and sometimes some very dead ends 😁

As a side note, I would say that in my limited experience, AI is great at collating research, it is wonderful at cross referencing, keeping track of notes and ideas, but it still comes up short on occasion (and in fact several times, different iterations have outright lied to me).

Consequently, whatever it might tell me I will still (as much as I can) rigorously check sources and will always attempt to find corroborating evidence wherever I can.

It’s not going away, so as somebody who really enjoys learning new things, I’m embracing it’s usefulness.

Using it to replace truly creative pursuits I frown upon greatly.

Back to the question in hand.

Whilst reading some of the work of the famous Mrs Anna Eliza Bray, I came across (not for the first time) “Fables and Other Pieces in Verse”, published in 1831 by Mrs Bray.

Interestingly (and one of the reasons for this article) on one of the opening pages the work is attributed to and "published for the sole Benefit of Mary Maria Colling."

When I searched back through the cobwebbed, dusty corners of my memory I vaguely remembered reading about Mary several years ago and making one of those many mental notes to look into her life when I had time. Like most of my brilliant plans, it’s sat on a shelf (gathering dust) for way longer than was good for it.

In my attempts to remain curious about Dartmoor (but not in a way that merely feeds the algorithms) I’ve decided to pursue things that interest me. Creativity is about being curious, not about writing the very same thing again in a slightly different way, so your SEO is better 🤣

I have to be honest before continuing with this analysis of Mary’s poetry.

Miss Dart (our English teacher who specialised in poetry) would be unimpressed.

I don’t really get on with poetry.

I’m sure if I was born in 1867 I’d be a much more fervent fan, however in this technological age, it’s not my “go to” art form.

Still, to ignore this interesting discovery would be (at least) amiss and it might give somebody who knows what they’re talking about a jumping off point for more research.

Like most adolescent boys who grew up in the late 70’s and early 80’s I tried my hand at writing poetry (I was a big Jim Morrison fan; and yes; my stuff was terrible).

Do young people still write poetry or are they all wannabe rappers now? A question for another time, I’m sure.

Here’s my favourite “proper” poem of all time: (so you might garner at least a little of my limited appreciation)

Whilst pondering this question further; and having distractedly left the attic hatch of my memory open; I began to reminisce my ‘A’ Level English Literature lessons, that I had rather enjoyed Tennyson’s “Morte d'Arthur” and Pope’s “The Rape of The Lock” and (although my relationship with the bard is somewhat complicated) I do love me a bit of Shakespeare now and again.

One of the tenets I like to live my life by (and this investigation into a working class housekeeper from rural Devon fits nicely into that way of thinking) is that you should have no boundaries to what you consider interesting, what is thought of as worthy, what is “art”.

I love a good shouty punk song as much as I enjoy a beautifully crafted ballad. I’ll listen to Run The Jewels and then some Grieg. Human beings spend too much time cultivating reasons why their view of something is best, why

The attitudes of the Victorian critics to Mary’s work, whether supportive or scathing, is always indicative of the time and the whole “God given position”. We should judge on results. Results are subjective.

You and I can disagree, but we should always remain open minded.

… Then (out of the blue) The Millers Tale popped into my very odd head :

I absolutely loved that our English teacher, Mr Burrows, let us study The Millers Tale. Written by the 'father of English literature' it uses words like “pisse” and “fart” and “ers” (and even the Middle English equivalent to the “c” word).

The father of English Literature swore!

He wrote bawdy and funny stories.

He tells us more about the time he lived in than any history book ever could.

This is why I find Mary interesting.

So, Who was Mary Maria Colling?

Mary Maria Colling was born in Tavistock on 20 August 1804 (though it appears her date of birth is sometimes mis-quoted by Bray and others as 1805) and was baptised there on 2 September.

Her father, Edmund Colling, was a husbandman and assistant to the surveyor of the highways. Her mother, Anne (née Domville - the spelling is disputed), and there is some thought that this might be a derivation of an old French name.

At the age of ten, Mary was sent to a dame school to be taught needlework, and learned to read and write. At thirteen she taught her own father to read, as "it grieved her that his Bible could not speak to him."

At fourteen she entered domestic service as a lady's maid, eventually becoming housekeeper to Colonel Hughes and his wife. Her master gave her a strip of garden, which she liked so much that before long the whole garden ended up in her care and its beauty was widely commented upon.

Somewhere along the way she started writing poetry.

How Mary Colling came to be in print

By all later accounts she was something of a local curiosity in Tavistock once it was discovered that a "low-born" girl could produce unusually heartfelt verse.

The turning point comes in March 1831, when Mary posted a small parcel of her poems to the Vicarage and asked Mrs Anna Eliza Bray; the rather well known (at least locally) novelist and wife of the Vicar of Tavistock; to give her opinion on them. Bray's response was elaborate.

She took down two of Mary's fables, sent them to Robert Southey (the then Poet Laureate), and arranged the publication of Fables and Other Pieces in Verse with Longman in 1831, by subscription. This meant that the patrons and their network effectively pre-paid for the book (more on this later).

The network Anna set up was substantial to say the least.

Mrs Bray travelled to London (to find a publisher) and, while there, was introduced to Letitia Elizabeth Landon ("L.E.L."), one of the most prominent literary women of the moment. Landon subscribed, and …

Personally, I believe this kind of “knowing the right people” is still an important part of the reason we don’t see greater variety in not only the arts, but also in business, industry, politics …

There’s a great deal of “marketing” going on here. There was already a history of promoting “uneducated poets”. We’re unused to seeing the over commodification of things by stuffy Victorians, however it’s merely a macro of what is happening with the monetisation of the internet.

Southey himself rounded up subscribers including William Wordsworth, Thomas Crofton Croker (best known for his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland), and Chauncy Hare Townshend (English poet, clergyman, mesmerist and collector - basically a posh rich bloke with some hobbies). Southey went on to write a very favourable review of his own in the Quarterly Review.

I’m actively avoiding the whole “elitist” and “classist” way nearly all of these so-called “educated” people refer to Mary (it’s not irrelevant, but it isn’t directly a part of the argument I’m making here). Time changes attitudes, that doesn’t mean we should ignore them - I’ll address and expand these in later articles (perhaps).

Dennis Low in his book The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets, has written possibly the most useful modern account of the publication, characterising the combined efforts of Mary’s patrons, thus :

(Jerdan was the editor of The Literary Gazette and I’ve been unable to ascertain if it was him or Letitia Elizabeth Landon [as Mrs Bray suggests] that wrote the review).

Not everyone in Bray's own circle was convinced. Her nephew John Kempe (who eventually edited her autobiography after she died), wrote from Clare College Cambridge in March 1832 (quoted in Dennis Low’s 2006 book) …

That was the verdict of Bray's own family.

The book itself is roughly half Mary's poems and roughly half Bray's letters to Southey about Mary. Three of those letters open the volume, detailing Mary's "familial background and unblemished character."

The patron basically qualifying the moral acceptability of the working-class poet, in writing, at the beginning of her own book.

The question that emerged about M. Colling’s Poetry

Reading around the subject of Mary, I came across more than one writer who'd questioned the “validity” of Mary’s work as well as whether or not the poems in Fables were really hers. Did the Brays "help" with the construction?

The fullest modern reading of the volume is Erica Obey's 2010 essay in the Keats-Shelley Journal, “‘The Poor Girl's Talent’: Romantic Mentorship and Mary Colling's Fables”.

Obey reads Fables not as condescending patronage but as something much more clever and way more sympathetic, a covert critique of the masculine myth of Romantic genius scribbling away in splendid isolation.

She has assembled out of the very multi-voicedness, the heteroglossia, that a patronised labouring-class volume creates by its nature, with Southey, Wordsworth, Bray and Colling all talking through and past one another on the page.

It is a persuasive reading on its own terms; but the intelligence it credits is Anna Bray's.

In Obey's account the editorial mediation is not a problem to be cleared away but the method itself, and Mary's self-effacement, the fables stripped of their morals, the meaning handed to a rose or an owl to speak, becomes a deliberate, even radical, gesture of Mary's own.

My investigation runs underneath that argument rather than against it. Obey worked from the same Bray papers and independently dates one of the notebook poems to 1820, the West Sussex Record Office brackets the book at 1820–25, several years before Bray "found" her, but she reads it for what it tells us about Bray's arrangement, not for what it preserves of Mary's text.

Setting that manuscript line by line against the printed page, I find that a good deal of the self-effacement Obey reads as Mary's choice was in fact the editor's hand: stanzas cut and added, theology softened, and in at least one instance a correction Mary made to her own verse simply overruled.

The poem Obey treats as the wellspring of Mary's authentic voice, "The Storm," is among the most heavily reworked of all.

None of this refutes her; it answers the narrower, more literal question she sets aside - how much of the book is actually Mary's?

Low's work (his 2003 thesis and 2006 book on Southey's female protégées) gives a nod to the Bray/Colling case, however by his own admission on page six of his rather splendid book, he leaves Bray herself as "one glaringly obvious omission".

In short, there is no comprehensive account of Anna Eliza Bray's editorial relationship to Mary Colling.

I’d be the first to admit I’m no academic and I’m hardly in a position to claim any authority in this area, I’m just somebody with an inquisitive mind. Curiosity might have killed the cat, but it also made the cat a way more interesting companion.

If I’m completely honest, the thing that drove this whole deep dive into a long forgotten nobody from Tavistock, it was the very tiny thought that Large Language Models thrive on analysing text, and here we had some text worthy of analysing.

So I set about asking Claude to “read” what was available online of Mary's published verse and Bray's published prose, look for stylistic patterns, and then (more usefully as it turned out) to help me work through a few examples of Mary’s manuscripts themselves I found by searching the West Sussex Record Office.

I had absolutely no expectations and no preference as to what the results might yield. Driven purely by curiosity I was happy to realise that I might have found a useful task for AI.

The short answer from Claude is … yes, Mary wrote the poems.

However, (and this is where my rabbit hole was dug way deeper and exponentially wider) it would appear that the published versions in “Fables and Other Pieces in Verse” are measurably edited reworkings of what Mary actually wrote in her hand written notebooks.

I should possibly restate now that I am neither an expert in linguistics or poetry, nor am I even a particularly good writer, I didn’t do the difficult legwork for this research, the AI did and I’m happy to be told it’s workings are dubious; or even wrong; whatever the reason, the published works are substantially different from Mary’s handwritten work.

Substantial enough to materially alter her voice, the structure, and in some places the theology of the words (it can be easily established that Mary was rather religious).

I can see for myself that the hand written poems I asked to be sent from the West Sussex Record Office Home are different from those published in 1831.

It would be pointless to discount that Mary herself may have reworked her words (possibly numerous times over many years) I’m just proposing a hypothesis and remaining curious.

Let us first look at the idea that Mary and her poetry were (for want of a better phrase “well packaged”.

Mary was literate, and demonstrably wrote things down.

I think this is a very important fact, and it cuts through a great deal of the romance and the clever marketing. Mary could read and write (her spelling might not have been spot on) but she wrote her poems down in a notebook signed in her own hand and dated 1825. It’s held at the West Sussex Record Office.

The date matters here.

It places this notebook several years before Bray's "discovery" of Mary in 1831, the West Sussex Record Office brackets it at 1820-25.

The poems in it; including "On the Creation," the poem the standard account says was inspired by Edward Atkyns Bray's sermon and was supposedly Mary’s first attempt at poetry is written out in Mary's own handwriting, long before any documented editorial relationship existed.

A girl who teaches her own father to read at thirteen, and who keeps a dated notebook of her own poems at twenty, is definitely not composing in the manner of an illiterate folk bard.

The "she didn't write them down" framing is older than Mary.

The “simple working class country girl”, composed-in-her-head story, which I believe is partly responsible for some of the critical backlash which Mary endured, comes directly from Bray's letters to Southey.

It’s then merely recycled in the “Spectator's” puff piece of January 1832:

The "she didn't commit them to paper" line is, in the end, a clever packaging device.

It fits into a very established Victorian literary market: the brilliant “natural genius” from the working classes, untutored, uneducated, composing by inspiration.

Stephen Duck (the “threshing” poet, taken up by Queen Caroline in the 1730s); John Clare, whose publisher John Taylor apparently heavily edited him; Mary Collier, the Petersfield washerwoman who answered Duck in 1739; John Jones the Butler.

All of them came with similar framing. Composing-in-the-head had become a trope of the genre, not a Colling speciality. It’s almost unthinkable that so called “real poets” wrote absolutely everything down.

It’s also very likely the writer in The Spectator knew this perfectly well. They note, with a fairly dry sideways glance, that Southey seems to be considered “the general father of the illegitimate muse”.

They’re not taking the “natural genius” packaging entirely at its face value.

I’m at pains here to point out that just because something isn’t true, doesn’t mean that automatically negates any value it might hold (this is a very important distinction I hope to investigate in future articles).

Southey's verdict, and what it licensed (The Poet Laureate and The Romantic Novelist)

In the letters between Bray and Southey:

It’s worth paying particular attention to that sentence. It’s the patronage of “lowly poets” perfectly distilled. Mary has raw talent but the “art” is wanting.

Which means, conveniently, that the patron “class” can supply what's missing. The Poet Laureate of England, the most authoritative literary voice of his moment, has diagnosed a deficiency that justifies the intervention. The patron diagnoses the gap. The patron then fills it.

While researching this I discovered a less than pleasant review of Mary’s work in the Monthly Review from 1st December 1831 which very pointedly makes note that Southey had not (at this juncture) made any comment on Mary’s work: ‍

A year later, when Southey came to write his own Quarterly Review article on the volume, he was open about who had filled it. He refers, more than once, to Anna Eliza Bray as "the benevolent editor of this volume." The word he uses is “editor”.

Not patron, not friend, not introducer. Editor.

Even in The Spectator article:

Southey, The Poet Laureate of England, in the principal Tory literary periodical of the day, acknowledged in print that Bray was Mary's editor, even as the volume's title page kept the relationship deliberately ambiguous.

What Southey was actually responding to when he wrote his initial assessment to Bray we don't know exactly. He probably didn't see the manuscripts in front of me. He had seen what Bray had shown him.

That's important, because what Bray was preparing to print is, as it turns out, substantially different from what Mary had written in her leather bound books.

Going back to Mary Colling’s Handwritten Manuscripts

As I mentioned previously, after an inordinate amount of digging around, served up with a very large side portion of Internet Trawling, I have in my possession scans of two poems in Mary's own hand: "The Storm" and "On the Creation." (Thanks to the lovely archivist at West Sussex Record Office)

Both can be set alongside the printed text of Fables and Other Pieces in Verse (1831), and against the Spectator's January 1832 reprint of "The Storm."

The book and the Spectator have basically the same text, the same stanzas, the same wording. Logic tells us that the editorial work was done at the book stage, by whoever edited it for the publishers, Longman.

That whoever is, by every available indication, probably the Brays. The result of the comparison is a more substantial reworking than the standard account allows.

"The Storm"

Mary's manuscript "Storm" has fourteen stanzas.

The published version has eleven.

Four of Mary's stanzas were cut, one new stanza was added that doesn't appear in the manuscript at all, two stanzas were swapped in order, and individual lines throughout were significantly rewritten.

Here’s a side by side (unless you are on a phone, where one is below the other) comparison of the manuscript and printed versions, before we analyse the differences. I’ve left in Mary’s spelling mistakes and not (at this point) added in her corrections or hand written edits.

Behold the sky is over cast 
with A Terriffic Gloom 
The Raging storm increaseth fast 
And Threats Impending doom

The Atmospheres in Tumults Hurl'd 
And From the Frowning North 
The Storm upon the watery World 
In Fury Marches forth

Behold the Shivering Vessel Rocks 
Upon th' Ambitious wave 
The Seamans Art and Skill it Mocks 
And threats A Watery Grave

Still Still with Unrestrained force 
The Raging Billow lifts 
Its Waves and over flows its Course 
And Sweeps the Lofty Cliffs
  
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The Lightening Darts with Awfull Glare 
Fast Flie(s) the Vivid Flakes 
The Thunder Roars and Rends the Air 
The Vault of Heaven it shakes

While Toss'd upon that deep Abyss 
The Hapless Seamen Give 
The Mournfull Signal of distress 
But None Can them Relieve

No Tracks of Safety can they Trace 
How dreadfull is the Gloom 
And Each with Horror in his face 
Anticipates his Doom

They Cannot there for Shelter hide 
Nor Shun the Ruthless foe 
Danger looks big on every Side 
And fears Increase the Woe

Now Each his fruitless Art doth drop 
Nor doth the Storm impair 
They take farewell of Every Hope 
And plunge in deep despair

O Righteous Heaven in Mercy Deign 
Their hapless State to view 
Thou Canst the Raging winds Restrain 
And Calm the Ocean too

Now in this Most Distressing time 
They Earthly help have None 
Bereft of Every help(aid) but Thine 
Of Thine O Lord Alone
      
Danger Her direfull Yell Repeats 
Thy pity Now they Crave 
O Let them know the power that [threats] 
Is Still as strong to save

Let them be Led to see that thou 
O'er all things bears Command 
That with Submission they May bow 
Beneath thy Mighty Hand

Thou Givest the Stormy winds decree
Thy judgments to fulfill 
These Heralds of thy Majesty 
Obey thy Sovereign Will

Behold, the sky is overcast,
With a terrific gloom ; 
The doleful night is hastening fast,
And brings impending doom.
   
The atmosphere's in tumults hurl'd. 
And from the frowning north,
The storm upon the watery world. 
In fury marches forth. 
    
The bosom of the mighty deep.
Is swell'd, and day departs ;
As bursting from a silent sleep. 
Gigantic horror starts.
    
Its darkening waves with fearful force,
The angry ocean lifts ; 
The billows overflow their course,
And sweep the lofty clifts
    
On high the shivering vessel rocks,
Upon the ambitious wave ;
The seaman's art and skill it mocks,
And threats a watery grave.  
    
The lightenings dart : with awful glare
Fast fly the vivid flakes ;
The thunder rends the boundless air,
And Heaven's high vault it shakes.
   
While toss'd upon the deep abyss,
The hapless seamen give
The mournful signal of distress.
But none can them relieve. 

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They can no where for shelter hide,
To shun the ruthless foe ;
Danger looks big on every side.
They fear increase of woe.

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All gracious Heaven, in mercy deign,
Their hapless state to view !
Thou can'st the raging winds restrain,
And calm the ocean too.
      
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Danger her direful yell repeats,
Thy pity now they crave : 
Oh ! let them know the power that threats
Is still as strong to save.

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To stormy winds, thou giv'st decree,
Thy judgments to fulfil : 
As heralds of thy majesty,
They all obey thy will.

A handful of examples will give the flavour.

Mary's opening stanza:

And in the printed book:

The first two lines come through.

Lines three and four are completely rewritten.

Mary's raging storm becomes the editor's doleful night.

The image is no longer of a storm intensifying but of darkness approaching ,a very different picture altogether.

Later in the poem, a single word goes from plain to archaic.

Mary's manuscript:

Its Waves and over flows its Course And Sweeps the Lofty Cliffs

Published:

The billows overflow their course, And sweep the lofty clifts.

“Clifts” with a “t” - this is a venerable old poetic word, used by Spenser, Milton, and the King James Bible (as in "the clift of the rock").

The editor reached back into Renaissance and Augustan diction to make Mary's plain cliffs sound more literary. They didn't tidy her plain English; they replaced it with antique English.

Before I push the "they archaised her" line too hard, I have to be fair to the evidence, because it cuts both ways.

Mary's manuscript is not plain, modern, vernacular English.

It is already reaching for a literary register. In "The Storm" alone she writes "the Raging storm increaseth fast," with the old -eth ending; she shortens the into "th' Ambitious wave" the way eighteenth-century poets did to keep a line scanning; she inverts her syntax for effect.

"The Storm upon the watery World / In Fury Marches forth."

In "On the Creation" she reaches again and again for the archaic second person:

"Thou speak'st the Word," "Thou mad'st the Earth," "Thou Brought'st in Man." These are Mary's own words, in Mary's own hand, six years before any Bray took a pencil to them.

So the picture isn't the tidy one of a plain-spoken country girl whose honest vernacular was gentrified by her betters. Mary “wanted” to sound more like she believed a poet should, and the poets she had to hand, the ones she'd have heard from the Vicarage pulpit and met in whatever books reached her, were the poets of the previous century.

The olde worlde writing was, in part, hers.

What the editors did was not invent that register but finish it. Where Mary wrote does, they wrote doth.

Where she wrote cliffs, they wrote clifts.

Where she reached for an eighteenth-century effect and didn't quite land it, they landed it for her.

Mary writes the archaic "increaseth" in her manuscript, and the editors cut that whole line in the printed text (your opening stanza becomes "The doleful night is hastening fast"). So one of Mary's genuine archaisms was discarded while new archaism (does → doth, cliffs → clifts) was imported elsewhere, which tells me the “editors” weren't preserving Mary's old-fashioned flavour, they were substituting their own.

Which, awkwardly, lands us right back on Alford: "Her language is not that of her own home, but of her friendly patrons." He meant the printed verse.

But the manuscript suggests it was true even of the words Mary wrote herself, she had absorbed the patrons' register before they edited a single line. The voice was being borrowed at both ends. And that makes the authorship question more tangled, not less: even where the hand is unmistakably Mary's, the ear behind it may already have been the Brays'.

The theological alterations are subtler but, I think, more telling.

Mary's stanza begins:

O Righteous Heaven in Mercy Deign

In print this becomes:

All gracious Heaven, in mercy deign

Mary's God in "The Storm" is “righteous”, judging, sovereign, awesome. The editor's God is “gracious”, merciful, kindly, consoling.

That's not a smoothing change. That's the kind of revision someone makes when they have a definite view about what English religious verse ought to sound like in 1831. And then, three stanzas later, the closing couplet:

These Heralds of thy Majesty

Obey thy Sovereign Will

becomes:

As heralds of thy majesty,

They all obey thy will.

“Sovereign”; possibly the strongest word in Mary's couplet; describing the divine authority her shipwreck poem is finally addressing, is gone. Mary's basic narrative survives. Her core imagery survives. But the published "Storm" is, in many ways, a more conventionally devotional, theologically gentler, and stylistically older sounding (Romantic) poem than the one she actually wrote.

"On The Creation" - Mary Maria Colling in her own hand

If "The Storm" is suggestive, "On the Creation" is direct. Mary's manuscript version, dated 1825, has five stanzas.

The published 1831 version has seven.

Two stanzas were added, the manuscript shows no sign of.

One of those added stanzas opens:

Obey observes that the first line is almost certainly an echo of Joseph Addison's hymn "The Spacious Firmament on High" (1712), one of the most famous English religious poems of the period.

Bray, in her preface, attributes Mary's knowledge of the phrase to Mary hearing it quoted by Edward Atkyns Bray.

Obey though, clearly states :

Obey even acknowledges that “Anna Bray's papers contain Colling's original copy book of poems.” though doesn’t seem to consider that maybe Colling wasn’t the author of those lines at all.

Eternal self-existent God 
Nature thy Goodness does display 
Thy Wonders are dispers'd Abroad
Creation owns thy Sovereign Sway

These Products of Creating Skill 
To Speak thy Praise they all combine 
They are Subservient to thy will 
And all proclaim thine Hand Divine

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Thou speak'st the Word and they obey'd
If Angels did with Praise employ 
Ten Thousand Forms at once were made 
The Morning Stars they Sang for Joy

These Wonders of thy mighty Hand 
Show us thy Wisdom is immense 
And There display'd thro' every land 
Memorials of Omnipotence

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Thou mad'st the Earth with Charms [Replete] 
And Blessings fill'd this lovely Frame 
And When thy System was Complete 
Thou Brought'st in Man to praise thy Name

Eternal, self-existent God!
Nature thy goodness doth display; 
Thy wonders are dispersed abroad;
Creation owns thy sovereign sway.
   
These products of creating skill.
To speak thy glorious praise combine;
They are subservient to thy will, 
And all proclaim thine hand divine. 
    
The spacious firmament was rear'd,— 
Soon as the dread command was given;
Unnumbered worlds at once appear'd. 
And gemm'd the azure arch of heaven.
    
Nature thy sovereign voice obeyed;
Angelic songs it did employ; 
Ten thousand forms at once were made;
The morning stars they sang for joy.
    
The wonders of thy mighty hand 
Show us thy wisdom is immense;
For there 's display'd through every land 
Memorials of Omnipotence.
    
From heaven, thine own eternal seat, 
Thine eye surveyed this lovely frame,
And when the system was complete,
Man was brought in to praise thy name.
   
The new-born day rose at thy word;
'Twas usher'd in with seraphs' lays;
They tuned their harps, and forth was pour'd
A universal tide of praise. 

The entire stanza containing the phrase isn't in Mary's 1825 manuscript at all. Possibly Mary added it to a later draft, or possibly the stanza was supplied editorially and the attribution to Mary's "hearing the phrase" is part of the extended fallacy of the “uneducated poet”.

“Azure arch of heaven, gemm'd” seems to me, to belong to the Addison hymn tradition, not to a labourer's daughter in Tavistock. If anything they are in the tradition of the Vicarage.

Within the stanzas Mary did write (we can see them in her own hand), the same kind of intervention recurs.

Her line "Thou speak'st the Word and they obey'd" is a plain biblical echo of Genesis and the Gospel of John — becomes the editor's "Nature thy sovereign voice obeyed."

The Word is gone; in its place an abstracted Voice. The biblical resonance has been quietly turned down. And then there is the single piece of evidence that, on its own, settles the question of what the editorial relationship actually was in practice.

In stanza five of Mary's manuscript, she has written: Thou mad'st the Earth with Charms And Blessings fill'd this lovely Frame And When thy System was Complete Thou Brought'st in Man to praise thy Name

As written, the rhyme doesn't work (at least to my mind) - Charms and Complete don't rhyme.

Mary noticed. She wrote the word “Replete” in the upper margin of the page, indicating the correction: the line should read "Thou mad'st the Earth with Charms Replete."

That gives a clean ABAB rhyme: Replete / Frame / Complete / Name.

It is Mary's correction to her own poem, in her own hand, on her own manuscript.

The published version did not use her correction. Instead, the editor rewrote the first two lines entirely:

From heaven, thine own eternal seat,

Thine eye survey'd this lovely frame,

Mary's image of God making the earth with charms, blessings filling its frame, is replaced with God's eye surveying creation from his eternal seat in heaven. Conventional. Devotional. Eighteenth-century-hymn. Whoever edited this saw Mary's correction in the margin of her own manuscript, and overruled it. That, I think, is the patron-mediation relationship caught in the act on a single page.

Which Bray held the pen?

There's a quiet assumption running through almost every account of Mary’s work, including my own, until now. It kind of goes without saying that when we say "Bray" edited Mary's poems, we mean Anna Eliza Bray.

What if she didn’t?

Anna Eliza Bray was a novelist. A very prolific and pretty successful one but a writer of prose. As far as I can see, in a career spanning sixty odd years she never published a single poem of her own.

The one book of verse her name is attached to is “Poetical Remains” (1859), and that is her late husband's poetry, selected and edited by her after his death. Anna's whole relationship to poetry was editorial. She arranged other people's verse; she didn't write it.

Her husband did.

Rev. Edward Atkyns Bray (1778–1857), Vicar of Tavistock and perpetual curate of Brent Tor, had been writing poetry since boyhood, he circulated two small collections of his verse amongst his friends before he was twenty-three. He was schooled almost entirely at home, came to the Church by way of the bar, and belonged, very much by birth and habit, to the eighteenth century.

His poetic models were the models of the previous age. When Alford's witnesses spoke of "Mr. and Mrs. Bray" correcting and polishing Mary's verse, they named him first, and I don't think that's an accident.

Because every editorial fingerprint in "The Storm" and "On the Creation" points the same way.

“Cliffs” reaches back to “clifts”; plain biblical English is lifted into Augustan hymn diction; a whole stanza arrives echoing Addison's "The Spacious Firmament on High" (1712).

That is not the instinct of a Regency novelist. It is the instinct of an eighteenth-century clergyman-poet, a man who'd have known the Addison hymn off by heart, and for whom "the azure arch of heaven, gemm'd" was not an affectation but his first language.

A smoking gun?

The standard account says "On the Creation" was inspired by a sermon of Edward Atkyns Bray's, on "the power of God manifested in the creation of the world."

So the one poem we can watch being expanded with borrowed hymn-diction is the very poem the vicar himself set going. The sermon was his. The theology of the additions is his. The eighteenth-century diction is his.

Obviously I can't prove Edward held the pen, it’s all speculation and short of a marginal note in his hand surfacing somewhere, it will only ever remain speculation.

But "the editor" has all this time been quietly assumed to be the famous Mrs Bray, when the evidence, the diction, the theology, the sermon, the order in which Alford's witnesses named the names, points at least as firmly at the less famous Mr Bray beside her.

At the least it was a joint operation. At most, the woman whose name carries the story did the discovering, the letter-writing and the marketing, while her husband did the versifying.

A small correction, but the kind that matters: maybe we've been crediting the wrong Bray?

What was actually happening between Southey, The Brays, Mary Colling ?

None of this softens the two hardest pieces of evidence, though. A whole stanza of Addison-flavoured hymn diction that appears nowhere in the manuscript is an addition, not an amplification, I feel like you can't absorb your way into a stanza you never wrote.

And Mary's own corrected rhyme, overruled in favour of the editor's line, is a plain overruling whatever register she was writing in.

If you take the two manuscript poems together, one cut and rewritten, the other expanded and rewritten, what emerges is not a "finishing polish" (the phrase used by Rev. D. P. Alford, a later Vicar of Tavistock who saw a different set of Mary's manuscripts in the 1890s and concluded the published verse essentially matched).

What emerges is something larger and more interesting: a consistent editorial process that took Mary's raw text and remade it to fit the literary register of her patrons.

Alford's observation holds up perfectly against the manuscript evidence: Her language is not that of her own home, but of her friendly patrons.

Anna Bray herself says:

Note the use of the word “edit”.

Anna is already regretting the choices she has made.

Obey's reading of Fables as a heteroglossic feminist text is largely compatible with what the manuscripts show, and where she goes way beyond what I've done here; for instance, in her sharp reading of the frontispiece portrait, where the housemaid's bonnet overpowers Mary's face, or in her account of how the Mary Philp grandmother narrative deviates from the standard "annals of the poor" Southey had asked for.

But on the specific question of how much Mary's voice survived intact into print, the manuscripts tell a more pointed story than the published volume alone can. The "heteroglossia" in which Mary supposedly participated turns out, at the level of individual stanzas, to be more often Bray's voice than Mary's. The Replete moment in particular is the kind of evidence Obey's framework can't fully accommodate. Colling is making her correction; the editor is overruling it; the relationship is one-directional in this specific instance, whatever it may have been in the abstract.

Who is to say Mrs Bray suggested edits and Mary’s position merely made it easier to agree.

The critics in the room - Mary Maria Colling analysed

The patronage circle was not blind to what they were doing, and they were not the only ones watching. Read across the five major periodical reviews of Fables from 1831 and 1832, the same concern surfaces in different voices, from different political and aesthetic positions, and with very different degrees of sympathy for Mary herself.

The Athenaeum in 1831 (the review almost certainly by the Lake Poet protégée Maria Jane Jewsbury) admired the volume but warned that bringing Mary "forward as a poet, drawing public attention to her as an intellectual marvel, another of the race of prodigies, is not too perilous a price for a temporary benefit." Already, the reviewer noted, Mary "appears to have suffered from the envy and ill-will of her equals in life, but inferiors in mind." The writer offers the sharpest single diagnosis of Mary's situation in 1831:

The Gentleman's Magazine in December 1831 framed the volume as a courtroom case in which Mary was "arraigned at the bar charged with trespassing on Parnassus" and acquitted only after Mrs Bray testified on her behalf.

Even the favourable verdict reads Mary's writing as inherent trespass. The reviewer's own warning was theological rather than social: if the literary attention should "lead her from the path of duty, she will have eaten of the tree of knowledge but to the increase of her own responsibility."

The Fall narrative, applied to working-class education.

The Spectator in January 1832 was knowingly arch about the whole patronage tradition, sliding in its sideways remark about Southey as "the general father of the illegitimate muse."

And Southey himself, in the Quarterly Review of 1832, opened his twenty-three-page article on Mary by explicitly pairing her with Lucretia Davidson (an American girl-poet who had died young after being overstimulated by literary attention) and who Southey himself had eulogised in his own 1829 essay as a cautionary tale.

Six months earlier, in a private letter to Bray dated 14 July 1831, Southey had warned that Mary's "nervous disposition" required careful handling, citing exactly this Davidson parallel: "That sweet American girl Lucretia Davidson was beyond all doubt killed by excitement of this kind."

Then he goes ahead and writes a twenty-three page puff piece that basically puts Mary in the same frame.

The warning was in the room. He printed the warning. And he proceeds with the marketing plan anyway.

Sharpest of all was the Monthly Review in December 1831, whose anonymous reviewer was openly hostile to Mary, to Bray, and to the whole genre of patron-mediated working-class verse.

The contempt for Mary herself is undisguised ; her fables are "trash," her satirical pieces evidence of "natural malignity and bad temper," her best fate would be to "sell fruits and flowers from her own garden" rather than write.

The class snobbery is unmistakable. But underneath the snobbery, this reviewer named the structural mechanism more clearly than any of the others.

The article opens with a thought experiment: that they could, if they chose, take up the hymns of "a very worthy man"; a gardener of their acquaintance; "polish them up" for the religious public, collect subscriptions, obtain "a most grateful dedication," gather "various particulars of his life," and "gain a little fame for ourselves, but very little money for the poor man; and end in giving him so much disgust for his present honest and industrious mode of living, as to render it necessary for him, in a short time, to solicit... the assistance of his parish."

That is the patronage operation laid bare, in print, in 1831 along with a prediction of the harm done to Mary.

The reviewer goes on to identify "the vanity of the patron, or the patroness" as the engine of the whole genre, and to call Bray, like Southey before her, the editor of the volume — "the poetry is worthy of both parties, the inditer and the editor."

And the review closes by saying Bray "alone must stand accountable to this poor girl, for the disappointment of hopes that ought never to have been encouraged, and most probably for rendering her discontented with the humble station in life, in which it was the will of Providence to place her." A hostile critic, in print, in 1831; and, as we'll see; fourteen years ahead of Mary's own circle reaching the same conclusion.

There is one further irony worth flagging across the five reviews. Both the Athenaeum and Southey's Quarterly Review article identified the same flaw in Mary's verse: the archaic verb constructions, she uses too many doths, dids, the Stuart-era expletive verb.

The Athenaeum noted them as "few inelegancies of rhythm." Southey ascribed them to the "colloquial language of humble life."

Both reviewers were criticising Mary for the archaisms in her published text. But the manuscript shows that not all those archaisms are Mary's. Cliffs in the manuscript becomes clifts in print.

Plain biblical English becomes Augustan hymn diction. The Stuart-era flavour the reviewers identified as Mary's labouring-class voice is, by direct manuscript comparison, the editors' importation.

The most authoritative literary critics in England, in 1831 and 1832, were criticising a working-class poet for sounding too archaic, when at least one of the archaisms had been introduced by the patron class for exactly that effect.

The five contemporary periodicals I’ve found; Athenaeum, Gentleman's Magazine, Spectator, Quarterly Review, Monthly Review; span the whole political range of 1830s, from Tory establishment to Whig opposition to liberal independent.

Their reviews of Mary's poetry range from cautious praise to open contempt. On the question of whether this “patron-and-protégée” operation was good for Mary herself, the five voices converge. The sympathetic reviewers worried about it. The hostile reviewer predicted catastrophe. The system was visible to its contemporaries, from every angle, and described by them in their own words.

The Rev D.P Alford (himself vicar at Tavistock) wrote about Mary, thus:

A note on Mary's later life

Mary's mental decline came at the very end of her life, in the 1840s and early 1850s; two decades after the poems were written and more than a decade after the book was published.

On Rev. Alford's account her symptoms were restlessness and compulsive swearing, "a sad picture of one naturally so gentle." Friends sent her to Bude for a change of air; it did no good. She spent a short time in an asylum, recovered, and came home "quite well in mind, though feeble in body." She died of dropsy on 6 August 1853, aged forty-eight, at her married sister Mrs Nicholls's house in Bannawell Street.

Her mother had died at seventy-eight, the previous August. Her father would follow her, eighteen months later, at eighty-five.

The illness has nothing to do with the authorship question. Or does it?

She wrote the poems twenty years before her mind began to slip. By the time she could no longer hold a thought together, the book had been on Longman's list for a decade. But the illness is interesting for another reason. The proximate trigger Low identifies in his book is that Mary's employer Colonel Hughes died, and his heirs declined to keep Mary on, despite her having spent her working life in their father's service. Within months of that dismissal she was unwell.

There are suggestions of alcoholism (which I've found no evidence of) and of Tourette's Syndrome (on account of the swearing). The Tourette's idea seems very unlikely: it's essentially a childhood-onset disorder, and verbal tics that surface in adulthood would almost always have shown up in childhood first. Coprolalia; the involuntary swearing; is in any case rare, and tends to get fixed on precisely because it's the most noticeable and memorable feature of the condition rather than the most common. Far more likely is that the sudden cessation of what had become her life (and one she obviously enjoyed) left her adrift, and that the neglect of her own physical health which followed dragged her mental health down with it.

*I’ve also recently come across the article by Tim Burke which states:

Again, I can only presume this is mentioned in the letters between Mrs Southey and Mrs Bray (see next section).

And it was at this point, some fourteen years after the publication of “Fables”, that Caroline Bowles, by then Robert Southey's widow and a poet in her own right, wrote to Anna Eliza Bray to express her sympathy:

That is the inner Southey circle, admitting in writing that the literary patronage may have done Mary more harm than good. Bowles's reference to Thomas Gray’s poem “Ode on the death of a favourite Cat” by quoting "a favourite has no friend" is actually more telling than Low (who transcribed the letter in his book “The Literary Protegees of the Lake Poets”) might have realised.

Low has written “Grey” it should be “Gray”, however, more telling is the poem is a mock-elegy on Walpole's cat, drowned in a goldfish bowl with no one watching. Bowles has turned a line about a petted creature that dies the moment its protector looks away as an observation on Mary and Anna. It’s quite vicious.

Set against the Athenaeum and Gentleman's Magazine reviews of 1831, the Bowles letter of 1845 is not a piece of belated insight. It is confirmation of a worry that was visible in print from the start. The patrons were warned, in public, by their peers. They proceeded anyway.

From The Quarterly Review 1837 -

We cannot be sure Anna Bray edited the word “friend” from her autobiography (or whether it was her nephew, who edited the autobiography).

Where this leaves us concerning Mary Maria Colling

So, what is the conclusion of my meandering research into Mary Maria Colling?

Mary wrote the poems - in a notebook in her own hand, dated between 1820 and at least 1825, several years before Anna Eliza Bray published her "discovery" of the young housekeeper.

The Brays didn’t ghost write for her; the manuscripts are unmistakably Mary's, complete with her own corrections (and spelling mistakes). The published “Fables and Other Pieces in Verse”; the version Southey praised, the version that major periodicals reviewed, the version every subsequent account of Mary Colling has been built on, is, in real and demonstrable ways, a Bray mediated artefact.

Stanzas have been cut and added.

Lines have been rewritten.

The theological register has been softened. Much of the diction has been archaised.

And, in at least one case, Mary's own correction has been overruled in favour of the editor's preferred line. The "art" that Southey said was "wanting" had, by the time he was assessing it, already been substantially supplied.

He was praising the version that Bray was preparing for print, not the version Mary kept in her notebook. Mary would not have been published without Anna Eliza Bray. That much is clear. Bray took down the fables, sent them to Southey, arranged the volume with Longman, framed Mary for the literary public in the long letters that make up the first half of the book.

Without that effort, Mary Maria Colling would have lived and died as one more clever housekeeper in Tavistock, and the poems would have stayed in a notebook that ended up in an archive, or on the fire.

What reached the reading public was no longer entirely her work. It was more of a collaboration whose full terms were never disclosed on the title page, one that many contemporary critics worried about at the time, and that the patrons themselves were privately uncertain about by 1845.

And one more thought, by way of ending

The reason I think this all matters, and it's a thread I'll keep pulling at in future articles, is that Mary is, in the end, one of the lucky ones.

She had an Anna Eliza Bray.

She had a Vicarage within walking distance, a Poet Laureate willing to write a polite letter, a Longman publisher willing to take the risk an employer who was willing to pay for the printing (though not a reprint - reading between the lines, he liked having a “smart” servant, just not that much!)

We have two hundred pages of her, a portrait, a burial date, an asylum stay we wouldn't otherwise know about.

We even have a notebook dated 1825 which lets us measure, line by line, how much of her own voice survived the journey into print.

For nearly all working-class voices of this time, nothing survives. It’s a cliché, but history is written by the winners.

Just how many other housekeepers, farm labourers, miners, dairy maids, coopers, wheelwrights in how many other Tavistocks wrote poetry, or songs, or stories, or letters, or histories of the places they lived, that no one will ever know about?

The question of how we come to “know” a place, or a time, or a person is nearly always a question of who got to do the telling, and on whose terms.

One of the most telling details in Southey's “Quarterly Review” article is worth returning to.

When Mary received her share of the royalties from Fables and was advised to put the money into the Savings' Bank, she replied that the first thing she intended to do with any part of it was to place a stone on the grave of her grandmother, "she had carefully attended to the grave for many years, and did not like that it should lie without anything to mark it."

The woman who wanted to mark her grandmother's grave was buried, twenty-two years later, in an unmarked grave.

For now I'll just leave Mary somewhere on Dolvin Road, and say: she was here.

She wrote the poems, in her own hand.

She corrected her own rhymes.

The version that reached the world had her name on the inside page and perhaps somebody else's diction on every fourth line.

Just a few more thoughts

It seems to me that Mrs Bray was perhaps hoping to emulate her mentor Southey (Even ignoring the possible influence of Mr Bray). Although she’s a woman of a superior social position, in the male dominated Victorian era, it would be almost impossible for her to mentor a man (even a common man) so she seeks out a woman to mentor.

The last mention of Mary Colling in Anna Bray’s autobiography is from the entry for 24th of December, 1836. The date that the Poet Laureate visited. It’s clear that Mary was part of the visit for however long it lasted (they even made a visit to the Colonels house in the snow) however, Mary lived another seventeen years and Anna another forty-seven years (some of which she covers in her autobiography) yet no more mentions of Mary?

Also Anna is still using Mary’s words as late as 1837 (quarterly Review) - she is acknowledging Mary, but is she being paid for her writings?

It appears that The West Sussex - have 3 letters from Mrs Southey to Mrs Bray dated 1845 regarding Mary’s illness I’ll save up to see what they say. I’m presuming that nothing was done to help Mary in her time of need.

Obey states:

It's apparent Mary didn't die in the asylum, she recovered enough (at least mentally) to live with her sister and died in Tavistock. Obey's "to Bray's credit, she continued to try to aid Colling to the end" is generous; the letters I've not yet been able to afford copies of may bear it out, but the rest of the evidence I've gathered points the other way. (On the Tourette's suggestion Obey raises, it doesn't really hold up.)

Is Mary's poetry good or bad? I’ve no idea, I’ve come to enjoy it (through researching this article).

I’m very much aware that academically this has zero currency, however, what I’ve discovered as I walk Dartmoor and try and capture the magic that I feel there is that when I come across ancient structures there’s something akin to the way I enjoy Mary’s work.

When I visit a stone circle or a stone row on Dartmoor, I find them interesting (even stimulating). In the same way I find a church interesting. When I stumble upon a hut circle or an ancient settlement because they represent “ordinary” people; people like me; I am fascinated.

I’m sure that I’m not alone in my interest in the mundane, the everyday, the ordinary. Stood in the remains of an ancient hut circle, looking through the stone door jambs, realising that thousands of years ago our ancestors decided to make their entranceway face the rising sun, that they saw this amazing view as they rose for a new day.

I think that’s what I like about Mary.

I can identify.

I’m reminded of a time when studying feminism in movies that our lecturer (whilst discussing the ladder scene in “Coma”) read the shedding of high heel shoes and pantihose’s identified all the usual aspects. I could see the point in all of the theorising, but ultimately I also saw a human being trying their best and making a few mistakes (very much like I would have). I think we’re all more like Dr Wheeler than Rambo.

The internet equivalent ….

Further Reading on Mary Maria Colling

Primary sources

• Bray, Anna Eliza, ed.Fables and Other Pieces in Verse, by Mary Maria Colling. With some Account of the Author, in Letters to Robert Southey, Esq., Poet Laureate, &c. London: Longman, 1831. Available on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=xUleeaTAGzwC
• The Athenaeum, no. 211 (12 November 1831), p. 762. Review of Colling's Fables, almost certainly by Maria Jane Jewsbury. https://books.google.com/books?id=XdmrNMZ3luIC&pg=PA762
• The Gentleman's Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, December 1831, p. 534. Review of Colling's Fables. https://books.google.com/books?id=V6VJAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA534
• The Spectator, 14 January 1832, p. 18. "Mary Colling's Poetry." https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/14th-january-1832/18/mary-collings-poetry
• Southey, Robert. "Poetry by Mary Colling." Quarterly Review, vol. 47 (1832), pp. 80–103. Published anonymously. https://books.google.com/books?id=RTi1inKch_0C&pg=PA80
• Dowden, Edward, ed.The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, and Co., 1881. Available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/correspondencewi00soutuoft
• National Archives. Will of Mary Maria Colling, Spinster of Tavistock, Devon. Proved 13 September 1853, Prerogative Court of Canterbury. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D13713
• The New Bray Archive, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester. The 1825 fair-copy manuscript notebook of Mary Maria Colling. Catalogue reference per Obey 2010: Box 3, Bundle 13. https://www.westsussex.gov.uk/leisure-recreation-and-community/history-and-heritage/west-sussex-record-office/

Secondary sources

• Alford, D. P. Letter on Mary Maria Colling, in W. H. Kearley Wright, ed., West-Country Poets: Their Lives and Works (London: Elliot Stock, 1896). The most extensive 19th-century biographical source. Available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/westcountrypoets00wrigrich
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "Colling, Mary Maria (1804–1853), poet and domestic servant." Online edition, Oxford University Press, 2004. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access, or UK public library membership required.) https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-61556
• Obey, Erica. "'The Poor Girl's Talent': Romantic Mentorship and Mary Colling's Fables." Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 59 (2010), pp. 65–77. The most substantial modern scholarly treatment. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41409531
• Low, Dennis.The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Chapter 1, pp. 21–23, on Colling. Now published by Routledge: https://www.routledge.com/The-Literary-Protegees-of-the-Lake-Poets/Low/p/book/9780367882457
• Low, Dennis.Four Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets. PhD thesis, University of Hull, 2003. The earlier version of the above. https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:5708
• Orlando Project. Entry on Mary Maria Colling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://orlando.cambridge.org/people/1602e35e-d158-4021-9a4f-ed09808c7828 (subscription required for full entry)
• Sampson, Julie. "Talking about Tavistock: Mary Maria Colling; A C19 Maid-Servant Poet." Women Writing on the Devon Land blog, 9 April 2019. Useful local-historical context. https://newdevonbookfindsaway.blogspot.com/2019/04/talking-about-tavistock-mary-maria.html
• Pulsford, Ann. "A Literary Christmas 1836 at Tavistock Vicarage." Formerly on dartmoorlinks.co.uk; the original page is now offline but accessible through WayBack Machine. Cited in Sampson 2019 above for the claim that Mary Colling's headstone now stands in the churchyard in front of St Eustachius Church, Tavistock, but does not mark her original grave. This is an incorrect attribution. The Pulsford article says Mary’s grandmother’s headstone is now at St Eustachius Church. I have been unable to locate either a plot location or headstone for Mary.
• Tavistock Local History Society. Thanks to the lovely people at Tavistock Local History Society, 2021. TLHS, Tavistock Cemetery Transcriptions at https://www.tavistockhistory.co.uk/

Related works on labouring-class poets in the period

• Fulford, Tim, ed. Robert Southey: Lives of Labouring-Class Poets. London: Routledge, 2024. https://www.routledge.com/Robert-Southey-Lives-of-Labouring-Class-Poets/Fulford/p/book/9781032450872
• Christmas, William J.The Lab'ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–1830. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001.
• Goodridge, John, et al.A Database of British and Irish Labouring-Class Poets and Poetry, 1700–1900. https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/projects/labouringclasswriters/

For Clarity - A Footnote

I have no experience in analysing poetry, nor even researching local history.

I will not defend my claims, they are just claims, idle thoughts that occurred to me and rather than let them dissipate into the ether, I decided to write them down - my sincere hope is they ignite an interest in maybe one other person or at least my methods (mad as they be) can be expanded upon by people who actually know what they are doing.

If anything I have said upsets you, I am truly sorry and I meant no harm, I’m just curious.

My references are incomplete as in the construction of this piece the task became rather unwieldy and I lost my focus for a while (I shall attempt to update as many as I can).

That being said, I have saved as much of my source material (even if it’s a url and nothing else) to a folder on my backup hard drive and am happy to share these with anybody with a similar inquisitive mind 🤣

This way originally published on my Photography website “Glavind Strachan Photography”

Bowerman’s Nose: Legends are like memes in slow motion

by Paul Harris - Glavind Strachan Photography

Search anywhere for "Bowerman's Nose" today and almost every result will tell you basically the same story. A cocksure hunter and his faithful hounds are turned to stone by witches whose ritual they disturb.

The Dartmoor National Park website tells it. Atlas Obscura tells it. Nearly every local holiday cottage blog repeats it almost verbatim. ChatGPT, of course, will happily retell it with some extra bells and whistles.

The Legend of Bowerman’s Nose

Here is the basic outline: (in case you either don’t know, or can’t be bothered to read any of the online sources) - there are embellishments and slight deviations from this, however those are expected (and indeed, actively encouraged when you are constructing a legend).

Bowerman is a hunter (loved by all in the local area for his wonderful generosity and all round loveliness, because; as we all know; throughout time, every member of the landed gentry has been absolute saints).

An unfortunate Bowerman (and his hounds) accidently (or maliciously, depending on the version) upset a witches ritual, and they without hesitation decide that this mild inconvenience is worth petrifying somebody and in the process; making themselves an easy target for some not unwarranted local antagonism. Standard legend fair.

Now, I’m the first to say that I love a good myth, legend or random snippet of local folklore, however here's the really interesting bit about Bowerman’s Nose. The story, in the “complete” form that everyone knows, appears to have been reintroduced to the world in the early 80’s by two cheap visitor booklets sold in Devon gift shops.

Before that, you have to go back to a rather (to my mind) tongue-in-cheek book from 1939 to find anything resembling it. In the very same story, the author also manages to shoehorn in an appearance by Sir Francis Drake and blaming the witches for inventing the Welsh national dress 🤣

Before that, the rock had a profusion of disparate stories attached to it.

Let me try and explain why “Legends are like memes in slow motion” (or, I suppose “Memes are like Legends on Fast Forward” - whichever takes your fancy).

Preamble: I should probably explain that this piece started, as a lot of my better tangents do, with a recon mission.

I'd been asked to photograph a coven of witches (yes, they still exist, and yes, that's a different blog post) and my Hill & Moorland Leader brain decided Hound Tor was the right venue, accessible enough for a group with varied physical ability, and dramatic enough to make the slight incline worthwhile.

Whilst I was in the area checking the lay of the land, I wandered over to Bowerman's Nose because it was close enough and it had been a while since I’d last visited.

Whilst lying amongst fern and sheep poop, it occurred to me that I'd never taken the time to properly look into the legend behind the rocks.

So I did just that.

I also ended up using an abridged version of what you are about to read as the “presentation” you have to make for your Hill & Moorland Leader Assessment. Basically, you have to talk for ten minutes on the moor about something that interests you about Dartmoor. I presented my talk on the edge of Hartland Tor (it was pretty well received, if I say so myself).

What follows is the story of that story.

A "Rock Idol" - Carrington and the Druids (1826)

As with most myths and legends there seems to be very little logic or even the pretence of coherence between the various lines of thought.

The earliest serious literary reference I can find to Bowerman's Nose is in Noel Thomas Carrington's 1826 poem “Dartmoor”. Carrington describes the “structure” as a "Rock Idol"; not in the Jimi Hendrix sense; and many commentators ran enthusiastically with the idea that Druids had carved the stones to this shape for ritual purposes.

This was very much the fashionable nineteenth-century reading. Antiquarians of the period were keen to find pre-Christian religious infrastructure absolutely everywhere on Dartmoor, and a thirty foot column of weathered granite that vaguely resembles a man was an obvious candidate.

There are zero witches in this version. There are absolutely no hounds and certainly no hare. There's just a bunch of rocks that kind of resemble a fellow in a flat cap, if you’re squinting, or have partaken of way too much strong Westcountry cider.

Carrington himself, writing in the notes to his poem says;

He goes on to expound the idea that those who think druids didn't have anything to do with Dartmoor are obviously deluded.

The Conqueror's man and the great stone - 1870-1900

By 1870 we get a different angle. A reference from the rather ramblingly named guidebook “The South of Devon and Dartmoor : Torquay, Teignmouth, Dartmouth, Dawlish, Totnes, Ashburton, Newton, Moreton, Kingsbridge, Tavistock, [etc.] with a Sketch of the natural history of the district” gives us another reading.

Suddenly the rock isn't a druid idol; it's a memorial to a real Norman local with a very large nose. Fifty years on from Carrington and still no witches, no hounds, no hare.

In 1898, Hilderic Friend's “Bygone Devonshire” throws all of this out. Friend can find no historical landowner named Bowerman, so he turns to his Celtic wordlist and proposes that the name is really maur + man - corrupted Celtic for "great stone."

This sounds very satisfying and is almost certainly totally incorrect. Various writers have noted that Celtic word order would put the noun first, giving us maen vawr, which would corrupt into something like "Minevower", not "Bowerman." Even with a broad Westcountry accent, they’re very different words.

The Dartmoor scholar R. Hansford Worth made this objection:

The much simpler explanation, as Eric Hemery later noted

The surname apparently turns up in Dean Prior records of 1772. It's a local family name. The rock memorialises a man, somehow, in some way, just as the 1870 source said.

In 1900, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould weighs in via “A Book of Dartmoor” and scolds anyone ridiculous enough to believe Druids had anything to do with the moor at all.

Being of good Christian stock, it's hardly surprising he's keen to distance himself from the idea of druids (just pointing out, not judging). Baring-Gould is a renowned author and his debunking of ridiculous pagan theories is a recurring motif of his.

So, here’s the state of play at the beginning of the twentieth century: a possibly-Norman, possibly-Celtic, possibly-just-a-rock with a man's surname attached. Still no witches. Still no hounds. Still no hare.

God did it - Lisle and Clinton-Baddeley (The Nineteen Twenties)

In 1920, Clifton Lisle in his book “Hobnails and Heather” (the story of a hike through England and France made by the boy scouts of Troop 1) informs us that Bowerman was turned to stone by God:

Not by witches.

This also echoes the story of the Nine Maidens stone circle near Belstone, who are traditionally said to have been petrified for dancing on the Sabbath. Lisle was another devout Christian, and a Sabbath breaking explanation evidently appealing more than some pagan idol worship.

In 1925, V.C. Clinton-Baddeley seems to almost be poking fun at the diverse retelling of the tale:

This pattern (no matter how irritating to the researcher) matters.

I’ve mentioned eight different writers and each offers various different explanations for what Bowerman's Nose is. Not one of them mentions witches. Not one of them mentions a hare.

Skinner's 1939 fever-dream - where the witches eventually arrive

And then, in 1939, A.G. Skinner publishes a slim book called “Tales of the Tors”, and everything changes.

An aside:

Back in October 2025 (when this idea was first forming) I went to see the wonderful Emma Cunis (Dartmoor's Daughter), at The Museum of Dartmoor Life in Okehampton where she was talking about her brilliant book “Dartmoor: Myths & Legends”. I’d already messaged Emma and told her of a “gap” in my research and she brought along her own copy of “Tales of The Tors” for me to take a look at.

Without her, this piece would be missing its keystone.

Skinner's version is the first one I've been able to find that has the recognisably modern structure. There's Bowerman the much loved hunter, his pack of hounds, the disturbed witches, the witch-turned-into-a-hare, the chase, the petrification. The skeleton of the story we now all love and repeat, are all set in place.

However, Skinner's version also has things the modern story has quietly dropped. A farmer's wife cuts the heads off Bowerman's hounds. Sir Francis Drake gets crowbarred into the narrative (for reasons I discuss later). And, one of the disgruntled witches is, apparently, the source of the Welsh national dress 😜

Purely for transparency (and the fact that a digital copy of Skinner’s retelling doesn’t seem to exist anywhere, here is the tale in full. I shall scan the whole book when I have time and upload it to archive.org.

For those of you not willing to spend the time reading this brilliantly inventive piece, here’s me reading it for you …

I would never (heaven forbid) consider suggesting that this book was published purely to excite and titillate. But I will note that it was very obviously written (with tongue very much in cheek) to excite and titillate 🤣

A small note on the author of “Tales of the Tors”.

A.G. Skinner is Aileen Georgina Skinner. For ninety years she has been cited as A.G. Skinner (though rarely cited at all, if my recent research is correct). When I started my dive into this deep rabbit hole, I assumed that the author was a man, because almost everyone writing about Dartmoor in 1939 was.

On re-reading the story (and some of the others in the book) it occurred to me that the style of storytelling was extraordinary if not unique for the time (I’m possibly manifesting here, whatever … it yields results) .

Searching for “Tales of the Tors” on the British Library website told me our author was called Aileen and an even deeper dive using a free month’s subscription on Ancestry revealed the “Georgina”.

Disclaimer: I do not have the resources to 100% guarantee this A.G. Skinner is that A.G. Skinner 😁However she is the only A.G. Skinner in the 1939 Register, and everything else appears to fit!

That being said, let’s reveal the author of our modern day take on a famous legend: Aileen Georgina Skinner was born in Kensington in October 1882, daughter of Colonel Monier Williams Skinner of the Royal Engineers, himself born in Ceylon, into a family with longstanding roots in British colonial service.

By 1911 she was living in Budleigh Salterton. She served in Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps during the First World War and was awarded a campaign medal (I have a copy of her medal card).

She authored three books across two decades, “Mushroom Land, etc.” (1920), “Flower Legends” (1932), and “Tales of the Tors” (1939).

All of these, on the evidence of the first two titles and the publishers who published them are children's books. I’ve no way of proving this (though I have contacted the British Library) and it seems Aileen remained single all her life, though with six brothers and sisters, she would have had plenty of nephews and nieces to write stories for.

She was 57 when “Tales of the Tors” appeared with the Methodist Epworth Press, three weeks after Britain declared war on Germany.

This gives the line …

… added resonance.

She lived another 27 years, dying in 1966 at the age of 84, and is buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Bathwick, in Bath.

Aileen Georgina Skinner has been more or less invisible in everything written about Bowerman's Nose.

The book that started the modern witch story is hers; her name belongs in front of it.

I’m putting together a longer piece about her separately, because she has earned more than a paragraph. In the meantime; here; at least, she gets her name back.

Back to the matter in hand!

Aileen is writing a tall tale, not carefully transcribing an oral tradition, she’s taken aspects of older stories and put a new twist on them. The Francis Drake and Welsh national dress flourishes are the giveaway.

It would appear, to me at least, that the first appearance of the witches and the transmogrification into a hare story in print is an embellishment for comic effect, for entertainment. It isn’t, and doesn’t seem to present itself as, the serious cataloguing of an ancient traditional story.

The Folklorists' Silence

My research for this time period (incomplete as it is) has turned up at least three serious works dedicated to Devon and Dartmoor folklore by writers who took the subject genuinely seriously. As well as a handful of other guides about the area.

One would assume that if the Bowerman's Nose witches story were authentically traditional; that is, passed down through generations of moor folk through oral tradition; these three would have recorded it. They didn't.

In fact, whilst re-reading my own copy of "The Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor" (1971) by renowned local journalist and author from Sticklepath; Ruth E. St. Leger-Gordon; I was surprised to notice this observation from a Dartmoor resident famed for collecting stories about witches and local folklore;

I initially got excited by the mention of “apart from one mythical murmer “ ... yet on reconsideration, this is obviously a reference to the "nose" bit.

Published in 1972, this can only mean that part of the "Legend" must have been "discovered" (or “rediscovered”) sometime between 1973 and when it appears in any sort of written form (more on this later).

My own copy of "The Folklore of Devon" published in 1977 by Ralph Whitlock does not mention Bowerman's Nose at all. Seems like a terrible omission.

In 1981, F.H. "Harry" Starkey, another renowned Dartmoor expert with multiple books to his name, also has nothing to say about witches or hares.

Worth mentioning here that (amongst many other things) F. H. or ‘Harry’ Starkey discovered the old Manga Clapper bridge and when it was restored is now fondly known as Starkeys Bridge. There is also a memorial stone nearby.

Starkey was also a committee member of the Dartmoor Preservation Association and the Devonshire Association and belonged to both the Devon Archaeological Society and the Ramblers Association.

Even some of the popular gift shop titles, still fail to mention witches;

Several writers, producing work over a decade or so, all of whom (you would presume) would have at least mentioned this aspect of the story if it had been circulating in oral tradition (even if they believed them to be untrue).

Silence is the evidence.

“When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” - hang on, totally different line of thought there!

How a gift-shop pamphlet completed a legend

Finally (and this is where it all starts to come together), in 1983, a small independent publisher called John Pegg puts out two cheap booklets: “A Visitor's Guide To Dartmoor - The Land, Its Legends and History” and “After Dark on Dartmoor”.

I stumbled across these as they were referenced on a few websites and I managed to find a copy of each on eBay 😁

They're the kind of thing you pick up on a day trip as a memento, slim, cheerful, true gift-shop fodder.

They both contain the witches and hare story, discovered, (I’m making an assumption here) presumably from Skinner’s story of 1939 with the more obviously outlandish bits omitted🤣

This is, as far as I can tell, the moment the modern legend enters mainstream circulation.

After 1983, the references abound.

The story then propagates through numerous guidebooks, websites, Dartmoor National Park's own educational materials. Each new retelling treating the previous one as a primary source, none of them noticing that the trail goes cold, hard, in 1939 with a comic confabulation, and before that doesn't exist at all.

I should make it plain here. I'm not saying Pegg invented the story; he didn't, Skinner did, or at least he playfully combined a series of interesting ideas he’d read about.

I'm not even saying Pegg knew what he was doing, these were small commercial publications, and the most likely explanation is that he came across Skinner's book, thought "the tourists will love this one," and trimmed off the bits that were a bit too much.

In retrospect, the actual effect of the two publications was to take a piece of well meaning, jovial 1939 entertainment and inject it into the gift-shop economy as authentic local folklore. From there, it just grew legs and travelled far and wide.

It doesn’t take long for the myth to spread.

It’s not at all surprising that our friend Mr Pegg (only two years since rediscovering the “witches”) has them once again, making an appearance in another publication.

So, because this is the way my mind works, I now had to have a dig around to find out why Aileen Skinner’s addition of witches and hares just makes sense.

Where the hare actually came from

The witch “transforming into a hare” element didn't just appear as if by magic. I did some reading and by 1939, Dartmoor already had a fairly well documented witch/hare legend and long before anyone attached it to Bowerman's Nose, the story was in active oral circulation in Devon. I’ve managed to track down two independent printed pieces.

The first mention of a witch turning herself into a hare on Dartmoor that I can find turns up in the “catchily entitled” - “Traditions, legends, superstitions, and sketches of Devonshire on the borders of the Tamar and the Tavy illustrative of its manners, customs, history, antiquities, scenery, and natural history, in a series of letters to Robert Southey, esq” by Mrs Anna Eliza Bray in 1838. I transcribe it here in full, as it seems to only appear in one of the copies held on archive.org :

The book this passage came from formed one of the foundational Victorian collections of Devon folklore, recorded by Mrs Bray directly from oral sources on Dartmoor.

My personal favourite is the “The Witch Hare of Tavistock” which comes from the much less well known “English Forests and Forest-Trees: Historical, Legendary, and Descriptive (London: Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853)”.

Chapter IX is dedicated to Dartmoor Forest, and there is a section explicitly titled "Witches and Witchcraft" (p. 179). The compiler — working fifteen years after Bray, for a different publisher, in a different city, in service of a completely different project (a national survey of English woodlands rather than a regional folklore collection) — records a witch-hare story for Dartmoor that echoes Bray's so closely that they cannot be coincidence.

A witch and her grandson run a small scam where the boy tips off the local huntsman that he's spotted a huge hare in a local field, the huntsman pays him sixpence, and then the hounds chase the witch (in hare form) for hours and hours without ever quite catching her (not surprising as she has wit beyond that of your average hare).

The huntsman eventually grows suspicious, engages the help of local squires and the clergy, has the cottage watched, and eventually catches the two red-handed. The witch is arrested and burnt at the stake.

These aren't just isolated Dartmoor oddities. The witch as a wounded hare story is a well documented international folk-tale type, with various versions of the story collected in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, and even rural America.

What Skinner appears to have done in 1939 wasn't really invention. It was grafting. She took a pre-existing, demonstrably traditional folk-tale archetype; witch becomes hare, hunter and hounds chase her, witch is eventually unmasked or wounded; and attached it to Bowerman's Nose, a rock that had previously been a druid idol, a Norman noble, a Celtic etymological mishap, and a Sabbath-breaking morality tale, but had never, before 1939, been part of the hare tradition.

Then she changed the ending. Instead of the witch being unmasked, or shot with silver, or burnt at the stake, she tacked on another idea from the legends past, the hunter is petrified.

The component parts were genuinely old. The specific combination was new in 1939. And one of the things that makes legends feel ancient is the recognisability of their parts: Skinner's readers had grown up hearing variants of the witch and hare story, so when she attached one to Bowerman's Nose, the new graft felt like something they already half remembered.

That's how a legend is welded onto a landmark.

Which brings us to the witch's name.

Levera - the witch who turns into a hare

In every modern retelling of the Bowerman's Nose legend I can find, if there is a witch and the witch has a name, that name is “Levera”.

Aileen Skinner doesn’t name her witch in 1939 (even the one who moves to Wales).

The name doesn't appear in either of Pegg's 1983 booklets. It doesn't appear in Tim Sandles's Legendary Dartmoor retelling. Nor does it appear in any printed source I’ve been able to lay my hands on.

Where it does appear, with a unique and very identifiable phraseology is the Dartmoor National Park's very own "Legend of Bowerman's Nose" page. The place I first learnt it.

"Levera by name"

It’s probably a good time to mention that whoever wrote that page has also read “Tales of the Tors” …

Once you notice this fingerprint, you start finding it everywhere (at least digitally).

The trail of "Levera by name" is the trail of one piece of late-twentieth or early-twenty-first century web copy, propagating outwards through the search results until it has become the canonical version of the story.

The Wayback Machine has it’s first crawl of the page as 16th January 2018 - I couldn’t discover if there was a previous version before this.

I can't prove the National Park were the originators (and, as I explain later, I’m not trying to point fingers here, I’m merely satisfying my own curiosity).

It is, of course, possible that they heard the name somewhere on their Dartmoor travels, sat by a fire in a pub, pint in hand, storyteller as a companion. The most likely answer though (as Sherlock would point out) is that an education officer at the NPA was composing a child friendly version of the Skinner story, and; deciding the witch needed a name; reached for one.

And here’s the tiny philological joke that makes my day.

When I first read that the witch who turned Bowerman to stone had a name (and it was because I was researching this piece) there was something about “Levera” that kept ringing a very faint, far off bell in the back of my mind.

Days later, it popped back into my head, all at once, possibly something I learnt whilst enjoying English Lit classes with the fantastic Mr Burrows - Lovingly known as “Henry”, even though his name was Trevor.

A “leveret”, from the Old French “levrat”, is the word for a young hare.

It's the term hunters of old and today, more so naturalists and biologists use to refer to a hare in its first year of life. Whoever it was that composed the modern Bowerman's Nose retelling either half-remembered "leveret" (like I did) or knew the word perfectly well and reached for it as a reasonably unusual sounding witch's name.

Shift a few letters around and give it a feminine suffix and you have Levera.

The witch who turned herself into a hare is called “Hare” (well, close enough).

How many people have copy and pasted what Jake the poacher from “Withnail and I” told us all along : “Here hare here” 🤣

My brain finds this oddly amusing.

Folklore has always known that names carry secrets. Rumpelstiltskin is a story about exactly this — a goblin whose power dissolves the moment somebody recognises his name. Levera, the Bowerman's Nose witch, has spent years hiding in plain sight. She was always her own clue.

It also tells you everything you need to know about how legends propagate in the era of search engines and the need to create content. A mutation only needs to happen once. After that, every downstream retelling accepts and repeats the addition without question.

The word "Levera" is now embedded in the Bowerman legend that I’d not be at all surprised if it far outlasts most of the people reading this article 😂

Legends are memes in slow motion

Here's the thing that struck me when I sat down to write this all up.

The "6/7" meme, has gone from an almost incidental lyric in Skrilla's "Doot Doot" to a totally incomprehensible moral panic in primary schools in just over a year. It mutated, propagated, and embedded itself in the language and culture of the young at viral speed. Hashtags accelerated it. TikTok intensified it. Children loved it. Teachers and parents, not so much!

Bowerman's Nose did the same thing. It just took 150 years.

Carrington's “rock idol” begat Friend's "great stone" begat Baring-Gould's debunking target begat Lisle's Sabbath desecrator begat Skinner's witch-cursed hunter which begat Pegg's gift-shop legend that begat the Dartmoor National Park's official version. All culminating in ChatGPT's cocky, confidently asserted fact.

Each generation lifted from the previous and added its own elaborations.

Myths and legends are the OG memes.

Stories that, like stoned snails, went viral very, very, very slowly.

Instead of TikTok, people had hunting trips and pub fires; instead of hashtags, they had heroes and spooky ghostly ladies. The Devil dropping by Widecombe, the Hairy Hands grabbing your steering wheel on the B3212, Bowerman frozen mid-chase on the slopes of Hayne Down - these are the 6/7 memes of their day, propagating slower and mutating with every retelling.

Just like the meme, each new writer adds their own twist. Before long, chaos reigns. The Wisht Hounds chase you through the ancient gnarled woodlands; the piskies lead you astray; humans, as ever, have always loved a good remix.

For shits and giggles I asked ChatGPT to make me a meme about Bowerman's Nose using one of my own photographs, so I could use it on my Hill & Moorland Leader presentation.

I hate to admit it, but it's pretty good.

A note on Storytelling before we close

I want to be absolutely clear about one thing.

Nothing in this article is intended as a complaint about the existence of the witches story, or about the writers and tellers who have helped it spread.

I’m just interested in learning and I absolutely love a good mystery. My brain just works like that.

Aileen Skinner did what storytellers have always done. So did John Pegg. So did whoever first wrote "Levera by name" on the Dartmoor National Park's website.

Stories grow in the telling. They accumulate specifics, drop details, attach themselves to different landmarks, swap endings, change protagonists, they discover new homes in new generations and transform to fit the era. That is not a flaw in storytelling. It is what storytelling is.

The Bowerman's Nose witch story has been pretended into existence over the course of nearly a century, told and retold through a series of books, booklets, websites, podcasts, and now the AI chatbots that ingest all of these and spew it out (and still, somehow, mange to give you the wrong answer).

None of that is malicious. It is a quiet demonstration of the reasons why people tell stories at all, and what happens when the pretending becomes so good that nobody really remembers it all started as pretence.

It would be awry of me if I didn’t mention a few of things that have entered the arena in the last forty years or so that the older storytellers couldn't have anticipated or could have even dreamt of.

The first is tourism. Dartmoor's modern visitor economy has a real commercial interest in the moor being ancient, mysterious, and full of legend, and a tourist board with a website is a very different propagation engine than a 1939 children's book.

I’m positive the Victorian tourist market was profitable for Devonians, but the scale of the machine today is one hundred fold. Stories that earn their keep get retained, amplified, retold; stories that don't, fade. That isn't spiteful; it's commerce, it’s capitalism. It does, however, shape which version of the legend you encounter when you stand at the foot of Hayne Down with your phone out (if you can get reception).

It goes without saying that Aileen Skinner, even living until 1966 could not imagine the Internet. Information, good and bad, at your fingertips. Rather than months for a new idea to even permeate the populous and years to take hold, it can take minutes.

Then there is artificial intelligence, which is, at this very moment of you reading, busily storing these thoughts of mine and will no doubt regurgitate them to somebody somewhere who has typed “Bowerman’s Nose” into a search engine.

The trick is to not believe everything you read (and definitely not to thoughtlessly use AI).

Legends transmogrify to fit the social and economic circumstances of their own time. That’s always been known and always the truth. The difference is that today, that cycle has gone from generations to weeks, and the loudest source (or the one with the biggest marketing budget) becomes the “truth” for everyone downstream. This doesn’t just go for Dartmoor Legends.

This article started out as a curious look into a story I thought I knew. It progressed into some research for a talk on a hillside near Postbridge and helped me achieve my Hill & Moorland Leader qualification. It’s become something of a metaphorical hill I just needed to climb. The article has existed in two different versions for some time and it’s taken hours to merge the two into what I hope is a coherent look at several different aspects

This article isn't a debunking of ideas.

My hope is that it’s a small piece of accurate attribution.

The witch in the modern story is named after the hare.

The hare and the witch come from a Devon folk tradition which in turn (it would appear) is repeated all over the world. The hunter, the chase, and the petrification were deftly assembled into their current form in 1939 by a London born, Devon raised writer named Aileen Georgina Skinner, who was 57 at the time, had been active during World War I and was now watching the country prepare for war once again.

The story is hers. It belongs to Aileen, to John Pegg, to whichever education officer added the witch's name to the story and to everyone who has ever heard the tale and repeated it with a little flourish of their own.

I couldn’t resist - when I was editing this article (and it’s been a behemoth of a task) I’m not sure I want to take on anything this size again … I dropped my ChatGPT created “meme” back to it’s creator and asked it to "zhuzh it up a bit" …

Further Reading:

Primary sources (chronological)

Carrington, N.T., Dartmoor: A Descriptive Poem (1826)

Bray, A.E., Traditions, Legends, Superstitions, and Sketches of Devonshire on the Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy (1838)

English Forests and Forest-Trees: Historical, Legendary, and Descriptive (Ingram, Cooke, and Co., 1853)

Friend, H., Bygone Devonshire (1898)

Baring-Gould, S., A Book of Dartmoor (1900)

Lisle, C., Hobnails and Heather (1920)

Clinton-Baddeley, V.C., Devon (1925)

Skinner, A.G. [Aileen Georgina Skinner], Tales of the Tors (Epworth Press, 1939)

Worth, R.H., Dartmoor (1953)

St Leger-Gordon, R.E., The Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor (1972)

Whitlock, R., The Folklore of Devon (1977)

Lauder, R.A. & Williams, M., Strange Stories from Devon (1982)

Pegg, J., A Visitor's Guide to Dartmoor and After Dark on Dartmoor (1983)

Pegg, J., The Face of Dartmoor (1985)

Carter, B., Walking in the Wild (1988)

Hemery, E., Walking Dartmoor's Ancient Tracks (1997)

Modern retellings

Cunis, E., Dartmoor: Myths & Legends

Sandles, T., Legendary Dartmoor

Dartmoor National Park's "Legend of Bowerman's Nose"

Online archives used

archive.org

The Wayback Machine

The British Library catalogue

Ancestry.co.uk (for the Aileen Skinner research)

Witch as a Wounded Hare : Further Reading

The Witch as Hare or the Witch's Hare: Legends & Beliefs in Nordic Traditions

Old Woman As Hare: Approaches to Narrative Folklore Analysis

A Witch Hare

Story about a witch who transforms herself into a hare

Confessions of Issabell Gowdie Black 1662

Exercise Baskerville

by Clive Darke

In April that year there was still snow on High Willhays.

Junior Private Barry Jones died of exposure, aged just fifteen years, during a map reading expedition on the north moor.

He was in a group of eight Junior Privates, inadequate clothing was deemed a contributory factor.

Local GP and councillor Dr. Charles Jones prompted Okehampton Borough Council to buy 250 copies of the British Mountaineering Council leaflet “Exposure” (BMC 380).

It was distributed to youth organisations, hotels, guesthouses and notice boards around the borough. In May, the Ten Tors expedition, organised by the Army, had icy rain and dense mist.

Over one hundred participants were still on the moor on Monday morning, it was supposed to finish on Sunday afternoon.

The weather for Ten Tors 1987 is still regarded as one of the worse to date.

The British Army had used Dartmoor for training since Napoleonic times; Okehampton camp was built at the end of the 19th century. In the Second World War almost the whole moor was used for training, this continued to include training for the Suez crisis in 1956 through to the present day.

Both Mons (Aldershot) and Eaton Hall (Chester) Officer Cadet Training Units set up battle schools at Okehampton Camp. The BMC pamphlet “Exposure” was issued throughout the Army during the summer of 1967 but the copies sent to Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot were not received.

Exercise Baskerville was a British Army navigation exercise from Ripon Tor to Okehampton Camp. It was held regularly and, until 1967, trained 2,171 cadets without serious injury or incident.

On exercise in November 1967 were fifty-seven officer cadets from the Mons Officer Cadet School, seventeen of them from Commonwealth countries. They were in patrols of three or four students, each with a different route of about twenty miles.

Equipment included maps, compasses, binoculars, flare guns (Verey pistols), torches and field dressings. For foul-weather each student was equipped with a cape or “poncho” only intended to be showerproof. They also carried A41 radios and rifles.

On the evening of 1st November 1967 Dartmoor gave its normal weather for that time of year – cold, driving, rain. These were not raw recruits. Officer Cadet Ugba, 28, from Nigeria, was a sergeant with ten years service, including active service in the Congo. Officer Cadet Kalani (aged between 20 and 24), from Kenya, had completed an Outward Bound course and expeditions to Mount Kilimanjaro. Both died.

Officer Cadet Gabriel Ugba

Officer Cadet Gabriel Ugba probably collapsed at or near Great Kneeset. The nearest rough track accessible by Landrover would have been at Dinger Tor, where there was an observation post (now removed).

It must have taken quite an effort to carry the casualty that distance. Once there he was transported to Okehampton War Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Officer Cadet Harrison Kalani

It appears that Officer Cadet Harrison Kalani was first in trouble on the banks of Ladybrook on the side of Cosdon Hill. His group’s radio had broken and, with only one torch for the whole group, a heroic effort was made by Cadet Pyemont to raise the alarm. It took a civilian, Frank Woodward of Belstone, to guide the rescue party to the casualty, but they had no stretcher.

One finally arrived but Harrison Kalani succumbed five hours after the first alarm was raised.

At the inquest on 20th November the Coroner said the cause of death was “Cold and exhaustion” with a verdict of “Misadventure”.

An MOD publication, “Survival Against The Elements”, was finally produced over six years later in 1975.

By then the Dartmoor Rescue Group had been setup and was equipped and functional, partly because of these incidents, spurred on by the indomitable Dr. Jones.

In the Footsteps of Francis Drake

by David J. Hawkings

As a boy growing up in Plymouth, I often found myself looking to the north-east, where the hills of Dartmoor rose, sometimes purple in the sunshine or wreathed in cloud, grey, mysterious and beckoning.

Needless to say, as soon as I could, I headed for those hills and discovered what William Crossing so aptly described as “the land of streams”.

At school, a friend and I established the Rambling Club and most weekends we took the No. 83 Western National bus to Yelverton or the Plymouth Corporation service No. 46 to Meavy.

If Sam was the conductor, he often “forgot” to take our fares! In those days, we seventeen year-olds didn’t need a risk assessment to take a gang of unruly third formers into the “wild and wondrous region”!

For me, it was not only the streams but the leats of Dartmoor which fascinated me … from Francis Drake’s Plymouth Leat of 1591 to the many smaller watercourses supplying farms and powering mines and mills, and the thirty miles of leats flowing down to Devonport, they exerted a fascination which has never left me.

So it was inevitable that I felt the need to get it down on paper. It was nearly thirty years later that “Water From The Moor” appeared, telling the story of how my home city was able to quench its thirst with water from those distant hills.

The Fishing Feast

One curious tradition I referred to in the book was The Fishing Feast, when once a year the civic dignitaries of Plymouth met at the headweir of Plymouth Leat to celebrate Drake’s achievement and to raise glasses of pure Dartmoor water with the toast:

After this, trout were caught in the leat and served later at a grand supper. The headweir on the River Meavy is no more, drowned beneath the waters of Burrator Reservoir.

Not so long ago, I came across an extraordinary photograph of the event in 1896, just two years before the site was lost beneath the water.

Nearly a hundred men are grouped around the spillway of the leat, unsmiling behind their beards, severe beneath their toppers and bowler hats, held firm by their waistcoats and watch-chains.

Just three women and three children have somehow penetrated this male preserve.

David J. Hawkings

David is the author of “Water from the Moor: Illustrated History of the Plymouth, Stonehouse and Devonport Leats”. He also went to the same school I did 😁 a few years before me. Along with his son, Simon, he hosts a podcast called “Myths of the Moor”.

The Loneliest Place

by George Wall

A solitary hawthorn twists improbably out of the earth.

The silhouette of a distant tor sits aloof above a trail of lifeless scree.

A meadow pipit squeaks anxiously.

Dartmoor is the loneliest place I know… And I love it.

Filming my podcasts which aren’t podcasts means spending a lot of time on the moors alone. And traversing this landscape without company is, I feel, the best way to experience it.

I’m no misanthrope, but no matter how good a friend you go walking with, there’s always some pressure – even if it’s only imagined – to keep up conversation, set an appropriate pace, have a schedule of some kind.

On your own, though, you can change your plans in a second, improvise a route, climb a hill on a whim, jump in a river. Whatever.

It’s an unrivalled feeling of freedom.

Oh, and you might die, which is also quite exciting.

Most importantly, though, when you explore the landscape alone, you are actually exploring yourself. Where are your limits? What thrills you? Where does your mind go when it’s free of distractions?

When you wander, you wonder. The emptiness of the moor is perfect for this. Hiking through those barren, silent hills you have time to ruminate and reformulate, make lateral connections, or just daydream.

It’s so difficult, nowadays, to find a space like this. More than ever, we need Dartmoor – a place where our imagination can grow as wide as the sky, as slow as the peat, and as deep as the granite.

The Dartmoor Podcast

George is the creator, writer, researcher and presenter of “The Dartmoor Podcast” (not a podcast), an absolutely tremendous (and rather amusing) video blog of his adventures and experiences on Dartmoor.

I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting him in person … a thoroughly wonderful gentleman!