‘ Taw simply meant water’ wrote Hughes in his poem ‘1984 on ‘The Tarka Trail’’. ‘There in the fen five rivers began’, wrote Williamson in his 1927 classic Tarka the Otter, noting that these were the Taw, Torridge, Teign, Tavy and Dart. The moorland where the rivers have their sources was also a sacred place for Henry Williamson, a Devon author whose nature-writing Hughes read and re-read during his boyhood. He loved this landscape: Devon was his ‘land of totems’, as he called it in Birthday Letters. Hughes settled in Devon for nearly forty years, farming, fishing and writing. This region of high moorland where many of Devon’s major watercourses begin has fascinated several of the county’s writers. The granite slab that bears Hughes’s name was placed in the area where Dartmoor’s rivers rise: the Taw, Dart, East Okement and Teign. The exact locality of the stone was kept secret when it was placed there in 2001, until press reports of 2003 revealed its whereabouts. I set off on the military track near Okehampton towards the source of the Taw, where something unexpected lies hiding in thick tussocks: a memorial stone to Ted Hughes. A rainy spring – a babble of larksong in Dartmoor’s long brown grass. The stone it describes is on the cover of my book about Ted Hughes.Įaster. This article was originally published in The Clearing magazine.

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