Exploring Devon's Ancient Woodlands and Legends

By Collecting Folk Songs in the West Country
Comments 35
19 Sep 2026

Exploring Devon's Ancient Woodlands and Legends

Reading the Wood Before You Walk It

Devon's ancient woods sit quietly behind the county's better-known landmarks. What makes a wood "ancient" is continuity, not the age of any single tree: land wooded since at least 1600 is classed as ancient woodland, and the evidence is largely botanical. In spring, look for bluebell and wood anemone; in summer, dog's mercury and sanicle. In the canopy, sessile oak dominates acidic slopes, while wild service tree and small-leaved lime suggest long, undisturbed ground.

Look at the shape of the trees too. Many Devon woods were worked as coppice, cut on rotation for poles, charcoal and bark, leaving multi-stemmed stools with wide, gnarled bases far older than the trunks above them.

Holloways, Boundary Banks and the Smugglers' Trade

Some of the loveliest paths in Devon are holloways: lanes sunk two or three metres below the fields by centuries of feet, hooves and rainwater. Cool and mossy, they are effectively archaeological layers, with the deepest sections preserving the oldest routes.

Watch also for low earth banks running beside paths and woods. These hedgebanks — an earth bank, sometimes stone-faced, topped with beech, hazel or oak — mark parish, manor and farm boundaries, some following lines fixed long before the present hedge was planted. Where a bank has a ditch, the ditch is usually on the landowner's side, which helps when you want to be certain you are still on the right of way.

Smugglers knew these lanes well. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, brandy, tea and silk came ashore in small coves and moved inland at night along holloways and drovers' tracks to cellars and barns. Names such as Smugglers' Lane and Brandy Path still appear on maps, and the trade was never as romantic as the stories suggest — threats and harsh penalties were part of it.

Place Names That Remember Older Beliefs

Place names are the cheapest archaeology there is, and Devon's are unusually rich.

Piskie, pixy, pisky — small, mischievous spirits of lane and moor; a pixy field was somewhere to leave alone after dark.
Hob, hobgoblin, Grubb — hearth spirits, helpful if treated well and tiresome if not.
Lady, Our Lady, White Lady — traces of medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary, often attached to a well or a boundary oak.
Holy, Chapel, Cross — early Christian sites; a holy well may have been a spring long before a saint's name reached it.
Well, Head, Spring — water sources, many once credited with cures and visited on particular saints' days.
Yeth, Wisht, Hound — the Wisht Hounds of Dartmoor; "wisht" in Devon dialect means eerie or uncanny.

Treat them with care. Some are genuine survivals, others Victorian invention or folk etymology; names hint, they do not prove.

Rogationtide, Wells and Hymn Heritage

Rogationtide — the days before Ascension — once saw congregations walk the parish bounds, beating hedges with willow wands, singing psalms and reading the Gospel at a marked tree. Some Gospel oaks and boundary crosses survive, and the custom kept both boundary and memory alive.

Many springs near woods carry saints' names — Nectan, Brannock, Petroc — visited on their feast days, with pins dropped into the water or rags tied to a thorn.

Devon's hymn heritage runs alongside. Augustus Toplady, vicar of Broadhembury from 1762, wrote Rock of Ages; Sabine Baring-Gould, born in Exeter in 1834, wrote Onward, Christian Soldiers and collected West Country songs, saving many from loss. Harvest hymns such as We plough the fields and scatter still suit the small, timbered churches that stand at the edge of oakwoods.

Walking Well: Wildlife, Walls and Rights of Way

These woods are fragile, and many are private land or reserves with rules of their own.

Keep to public rights of way and permissive paths; open-looking woodland is not open access.
Do not climb banks or push through hedges — boundary banks are historic features and wildlife corridors.
Keep dogs under close control, and on a lead near livestock and between March and July, when ground-nesting birds are vulnerable.
Never light fires, and leave deadwood alone; it is habitat for beetles, fungi and bats.
Take litter home, and leave flowers, seeds and stones where you found them.
Check for ticks after walking in bracken or long grass.
Leave gates as you find them, and step aside for horses and farm vehicles.

A Few Devon Woods Worth the Walk

For a first visit, choose a wood with waymarked trails and somewhere proper to park. Wistman's Wood above the West Dart is the famous one — a stunted, moss-hung oakwood so delicate that visitors are asked to stay on the path. Black-a-Tor Copse nearby is a quieter version of the same. Yarner Wood near Bovey Tracey, Dunsford on the Teign and Ashclyst Forest in the east offer easier going, while the Bovey Valley woods give oak, bluebells and a chance of pied flycatcher in spring.

Go early, go quietly, and take the map. A holloway, a boundary bank and a name on the page are three kinds of story, and in Devon they often run within a few yards of one another.

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5 Comments

Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply
- John Abraham says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
  
  I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
  Reply
  - Robert Sonnysays Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
    
    I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
    Reply
Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply

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