Three Hares in Devon churches: a map

get a copy of this map here

(edit, added June 2020: I have updated my map, and you can see the newer version here)

The image of three hares sharing three ears can be found all the way from here to China, where the earliest examples are found. But Devon, and especially Dartmoor, is particularly rich in them.

I've been visiting the churches where the hares can be found; the search has taken me to some beautiful places. Deborah Harvey has written a poem about them, which you can read here. Some of her poem features on the map...

Here are places where you can find the hares in the churches, but do take a torch!

Ashreigney
Bradford
Broadclyst
Chagford
Cheriton Bishop
Iddesleigh
Ilsington
Kelly
Newton St Cyres
North Bovey
Paignton
Sampford Courtenay
South Tawton
Spreyton
Tavistock
Throwleigh
Widecombe

Here is photographer Chris Chapman's Three Hares Project, with lots of excellent pictures.

The map is available as an A5 print, over on my Etsy shop.

a hunting of the hares

 small patch of sunlight

hares over the Devon hills

hounded by rainclouds

I was down in Devon the other week, staying in the Thrushell valley near Lifton as a guest of Richard and Ute at Barbaryball; a lovely spot, and highly recommended. The rain was at times positively elemental, so that the smaller roads became rather more like rivers. It was good fun, and made the occasional sunny interlude all the more welcome.

dawn over the Thrushell

I sat in the car park at Brent Tor for a while, listening to the rain hammering on the car roof, then gave up my intention to scramble up. There were sunny intervals in Devon on that particular day, but they and I were never in the same place at the same time.

Still, it was good weather for wandering around churches, and I was particularly pleased that Kelly was very close to where I was staying, as it is one of the seventeen places around Dartmoor where you can find three hares.

Nice as it is to find the three hares where they should be, it is perhaps even nicer to find something new and unexpected, both in the fabric of the place and in the encounters, like the brindled lurcher in the church at Throwleigh who came to say hello while the owners attended to something; though that encounter was a part of the fabric of the place too, of course. Some of those things I'll keep to myself; some of them are in the picture below. I especially liked the owl, because I didn't know it was there. And the green man at Drewsteignton was a treat, too; peering up through the gloom, I saw what I was sure was a face peering back at me, and so I took the picture, and hoped. And there he was, when I uploaded the pics to the computer; looking like a friendly hippy, or the sort of chap who has his own pewter tankard behind the bar at the pub. But without the folk songs. Result.

1. South Tawton hares
2. Cheriton Bishop hares
3. Throwleigh hares
4. Kelly hares
5. Tavistock hares
6. South Tawton owl
7. South Tawton green man
8. South Tawton green man
9. Drewsteignton green man

the door claps to, the pane is blind with showers

Huddled over the heater, swathed in blankets and listening to the rain rattle on the roof. Were we really swimming in a Dartmoor river only ten days ago? 


Well, yes. We were. 

 Carpe diem, as they say. Which translates as, eat some fish every day.

mapping

Dart map, originally uploaded by Dru Marland.

Here's a map of Dartmoor in the 14th century, at the time of the Black Death. It's for Deborah Harvey's novel Dart, due to be published this year. It was fun to draw, once I'd worked out how to go about it- something vaguely in the style of a mediaeval map, and those brightly coloured postcard maps that you used to get in the 60s.

A useful tool for getting the perspective right was Google Earth, and a fun by-product of using Google Earth is goofing around on the flight simulator that's available in the tools options. Flying under the Saltash Bridge in an F16 is great fun, and one unattended by the risk of a knock at the door from the CAA. Very unmediaeval!

Dart

I've just finished this picture, for the cover of Deborah Harvey's new novel, Dart. That's Hound Tor, on Dartmoor, in the background.

I quite like this picture. It would have been nice to have done it all on one piece of paper, but that would have been impossible, applying washes over the rather intricate foliage of the border, given the limitations of masking fluid. Still, Paint Shop Pro (which is what I use for digital manipulation) is as much a part of my toolbox as the paintbrushes, dip pens and assorted paraphernalia of a more traditional kind.

Here are the two components of the picture, before I layered them up on screen...