The Ancient Cross at St. Olaves Murchington

by Colin Burbidge

For a good many years in the grounds of St. Olaves Murchington stood an old Cross. It was still marked there on the 1886 and 1890 Ordnance Survey map.

 John Chudleigh’s book “Devonshire Antiquities” published in 1893 has an illustration of this cross as it stood against a wall at Murchington, showing a square tenon at the lower end of the shaft.

It was also mentioned in this extract from a small book “The Ancient Stone Crosses of Dartmoor”.

“A few years ago, in the garden of St. Olave's, a pleasantly situated residence,

then belonging to the Rev. W. T. A. Radford, rector of Down St. Mary,

was a fine old cross. It was not a Dartmoor cross, having been brought

from the parish of Bow, which is many miles distant. This was done,

I have been informed, by the Rev. J. Ingle, a former owner of the property.

About three years ago Mr. Radford sold St. Olave's to the Rev. A. G. Barker

 and shortly afterwards, the rector of Down St. Mary, saying that Mr. Radford

had authorized him to remove the cross, took it away, to his own parish

and placed it in the churchyard there, where it now is.

There seems, however, to have been a misunderstanding somewhere,

as Mr. Barker afterwards ascertained that no permission to remove it had been given”.

This account is not entirely accurate. In 1896 the Rev. W.T.A. Radford died and was succeeded as Rector of Down St. Mary by the former missionary Bishop of Madagascar, Robert Kestell-Cornish.

In his Will Rev. Radford left his estate (gross value £15,000) and any property to his remaining son, who was also named William Tucker Arundel Radford.

Ancient Cross at Down St. Mary

In late August 1897 Rev. Kestell-Cornish officiated at the marriage of young Mr. William Radford to Mary Baker, daughter of Commander Robert Baker R.N.

By this time William Radford and his bride were living at St. Olaves Murchington. The Rev. Kestell-Cornish would have been familiar with St. Olaves and the ancient cross that was there. Rev. Kestell-Cornish had asked permission from William Radford (the younger) if he could acquire the ancient cross. To clarify the matter following the first inaccurate account Rev. Kestell- Cornish wrote to the periodical “Devon Notes & Queries”, with reference to the dubious circumstances connected with the removal of this cross from St. Olave's to the churchyard of Down St. Mary.

THE BOW - DOWN ST. MARY CROSS (Ancient Stone Crosses of Dartmoor, etc., D. N. & Q., p. 134.) where Bishop Kestell-Cornish is the Rector, the Bishop writes us:

 “I see in the July number of Devon Notes and Queries an account of the removal of an old cross from St. Olave's, Murchington, to the churchyard of Down St. Mary.

This account is not quite accurate and implies that on a quasi-authority from Mr. Radford I removed the cross from St. Olave's and placed it in Down St. Mary Churchyard without any reference to Mr. Barker. But this is precisely what I did not do. I had been informed by a mutual friend that Mr. Radford would allow me to have the cross, but that I must remove it before a certain date, because on that day the property would pass out of his hands, and I felt that it would not be fitting or courteous to take any steps without consulting the prospective owner

This led to my sending a letter to Mr. Barker, who answered me most kindly, and at his invitation I drove over to St. Olave's for luncheon, and it was then and there agreed that I should send for the cross, which I should receive from Mr. Barker. This was done, and after some delay, owing to the remissness of the man employed to make the base, it was placed where it now stands. You will see, therefore, that I was most careful not to act upon Mr. Radford's kind offer of the cross without the full concurrence of the Rev. A. G. Barker.

 The Cross can still be seen in Down St. Mary churchyard.

Murchington

Hand-tinted postcard of Murchington’s main street, c. 1910 showing Woodland Farm and the Anglican Chapel

The hamlet of Murchington lies just outside the parish of Chagford, which is bounded on its northern edge by the course of the River Teign. But though it lies within the parish of Throwleigh, the pull of the larger, and much nearer settlement of Chagford must always have ruled here. Even before Chagford Bridge was first built at the bottom of Walland Hill (probably in the early thirteenth century), the Teign was no real barrier as it could be forded at various points hereabouts.

1884 OS 6-inch map showing Murchington and the course of the River Teign

For much of the nineteenth century, Murchington was also significantly more populous than the village of Throwleigh, thanks in part to its proximity to the small town of Chagford with its textile factories and growing tourist business. In 1841 there were 158 people living in Murchington, compared with just sixty in Throwleigh. Those passing through Murchington on their way to Gidleigh might be surprised (then and now) that the handful of homes on each side of the road could house so many people. Much of Murchington is slightly hidden from the incurious traveller who sticks to the road. Besides the main farm there have long been a cluster of dwellings at Higher Murchington, to the north of the main Gidleigh road, and the narrow lane that disappears beyond the post box in the centre of the hamlet leads to a further group of cottages: St Olaves―a hamlet within a hamlet. Until the late 1860s there were even more cottages here.

The front of St Olaves in c.1910 - the extension to the left was finished in 1906.

In addition, we can see from census records that households were much bigger in the mid-nineteenth century than they are today. In 1841 farm labourer George Dicker, 55, headed a household of nine. This included his wife and their son and three daughters aged between 15 and 20, an older couple (another farm labourer and his wife) and a 5 year old child with a different surname (possibly a grandchild born out of wedlock). Next door, local farmer John Dicker aged 40 (possibly a relation) headed a household of seven including his wife Johanna, their three children and two farm hands. John Dicker’s three-year-old son William lived and farmed in Murchington for the rest of his life. He went on to have four daughters by two wives and in 1909 was buried in Throwleigh Churchyard next to his first wife Susan Litton Nichols, who had died in 1869.

Page from the 1841 Census showing part of the return for Murchington including the two Dicker households

The local economy, like that of much of West Devon, was overwhelmingly agricultural, but the hamlet also boasted a pub, a blacksmiths and for a while a working quarry.  There was talk of Murchington being more unruly and irreligious than most Devon settlements, presumably because it lacked the powerful controlling influence of a big landowner or resident parson. But things began to change from the late 1860s with the arrival of a succession of wealthy, non-resident landowners attracted by the hamlet’s remote beauty and the sporting possibilities of its upland river and dense woodland.

First on the scene was the Reverend John Ingle, an Exeter-based Anglican priest associated with the High Church (opponents said ‘papist’) Oxford Movement. Ingle was the vicar of St Olave’s Church, a Saxon foundation in the medieval heart of Exeter, when, in 1868, he bought fifty acres of Murchington farmland, including farm buildings and three rows of labourers’ cottages. He renamed his new estate St Olave’s in honour of his parish church (this hamlet within a hamlet survives, but as ‘St Olaves’ having mysteriously lost the apostrophe).

A photograph believed to be of Rev John Ingle in the early 1860s

Ingle demolished many of the properties he acquired, presumably evicting the poor tenants, and renovated the finest cottages to provide a spacious country retreat (although according to the Chagford Parish Magazine of June 1868, his original plan had been to build ‘an elegant Elizabethan mansion … on a lovely site overlooking the vale of Holy Street’). The 1840 Throwleigh Tithe map records a range of properties called ‘Waste Houses Court’ on precisely this site―their swift demolition by Ingle may have been intended to facilitate his grand building plans. Ingle quarried stone from the site and used this to help build the enormous granite retaining walls that can still clearly be seen from the top of Nattadon or Meldon Hill. He also began planting specimen trees imported from around the world, starting the collection that now includes the stands of Giant and Coast Redwoods, Grand Firs and Douglas Firs that are equally visible from afar. Part of this collection of specimen trees can also still be seen in the adjacent Milfordleigh plantation, then part of the estate but now owned by the National Trust (see 1884 OS map above).

A section from the 1840 Tithe map of Throwleigh parish (Waste Houses Court is plot 207)

Ingle sold up within a decade, never realising his ambition to build a fine mansion. He was succeeded by a series of other rich clergymen who further developed the estate as a gentleman’s country retreat. They used their wealth and influence to strengthen the Church of England’s presence in the hamlet, including supporting the construction of Murchington’s small Anglican Chapel, finished in 1890. The Sutton family, who owned St Olaves from 1907 to 1960, were also strong supporters of Anglicanism―indeed Edmund Sutton bought the right to appoint Throwleigh’s clergy at the same time as he acquired his Murchington estate.

However, the family’s influence in the district waned considerably after Edmund’s son Ralph suffered a stroke in the early 1950s.  Between 1954 and 1971, the estate was gradually broken up, returning more or less to its original constituent parts. Milfordleigh plantation was sold off, Murchington Farm lost its land-holdings, the farm’s outbuildings became separate dwellings, and the various cottages and outbuildings that had formed the Suttons’ private residence were reconstructed as four separate properties.

A plan of the proposed Anglican Chapel for Murchington

Murchington Chapel also experienced a re-incarnation with the passing of the Suttons. In 1975 it was finally decommissioned as a place of worship and sold for redevelopment. Sympathetically restored, it is now a private residence and the only holiday let in the hamlet.

But if Murchington has not succumbed to the curse of second homes, it has nonetheless changed drastically in recent years. In the nineteenth century there were at least five separate farms in Murchington, mostly small-scale mixed farms of between twenty and seventy acres run by local families with deep roots in the area. There was also a pub and a small shop. Today there is only one working farm, and a small-holding – the other farms, along with the old pub, have become private residences for people drawn to the area by its beauty and relative tranquillity; just as Ingle, Radford and the Barkers had been in the nineteenth century.

Jon Lawrence

(drawing on research by Colin Burbidge and Judy Moss)