A third walk along the walls (May 2023)

This time we’re doing a circular walk looking at the neighbourhood walls, around the grounds of four former villas from past centuries.  The walk proper starts at the junction of Wonford Road and St Leonard’s Road, just a short way from the village shops.  St Leonard’s Road was once an approach to Mount Radford House and the cedar tree is a reminder of the trees that lined the mansion’s drive. 

 

Walking towards Topsham Road from the junction, there are Victorian houses on both sides, with the Woodhayes Care Home formed from three of them.  The abandoned bus shelter is a relic from the 20^th century.  After the fourth house on the left there is a footpath leading to West and East Grove Roads.  The path marks the boundary of The Grove whose estate was developed for the terraced houses round about 1900.  The Grove had a lodge (where house 39 stands) and an entrance drive (houses 41 and 43 are built over it).  The wall on the left is typical of the many Heavitree stone (Breccia) walls with added stones from other quarries --- until you find something quite different.  The builders incorporated some large hard stones that have been polished in river or sea.  Why and where from?  

 

Back on the main road, the Victorian houses continue on the right-hand side of the road.  As in the road nearer the village, some of the walls have granite toppings and the remains of railings.  One property has the stumps of very thick railings --- the salvage crew in WW2 chose not to cut through them.   

The bricks here include many with a white glaze, adding visually to both sides of the road.  There’s plenty of Breccia to be seen here, including on the boundary wall of the houses in St Leonard’s Place.  There’s volcanic trap there; did someone salvage that from Exeter’s city walls?   

And don’t miss the street sign, with its “pointing finger”.   

St Leonard’s Lawn straight ahead was part of the front lawn of Mount Radford House (Barnardo Road is on the site of the house).  The road always curved around the lawn, though one old map shows a public footpath across it.

Psychologists tell us that it is hard to notice when something is not to be seen; so what is missing?  From here on, Dartmoor granite is little used.  The approach to Claremont (the second of the villas on this walk) has a gatehouse and walls of stone from beyond the city; grandeur on the cheap, costing less than granite, but definitely more upper-crust than brick or Breccia. 

The school is built on the site of Parkers Well House, whose grounds stretched from here to Matford Lane.  Some of its estate walls are intact, others have been replaced over the years.  The walls were built before the widespread availability of granite in the city.  After the school gates there is a cob wall on a foundation of Breccia; stand here on a sunny afternoon in the early summer and you are likely to see masonry bees entering nests in the cob --- and at any time you can find the small holes they use.  An old saying is that a cob wall has “its hat dry and its feet wet”; the hat is made of tiles, the feet are on porous stone – however the wall lacks protection from the weather and is slowly eroding.  (But school budgets do not include a heading for “repair of cob walls”!)

 

Round the corner is a gateway for Parkers Well House, now a little overgrown; the family sought to impress passers-by with this brick entrance; pause to look at the fancy brickwork on the curved wings of the gateway.   

Because of the slope of Topsham Road, the next section of boundary wall is much higher, and the brick walls are on a base of stone.  Hidden at the top are iron railings; they possibly survived the war, but may be an addition to protect schoolchildren.  The foundation wall here has a few pieces of water-washed stone; they are generally much smaller than the blocks seen earlier and have been used to fill in cracks where the quarried pieces were uneven.  (In other parts of St Leonard’s, clay roof tiles have the same purpose.)  

 

Turn up Matford Lane (averting your gaze from the modern development opposite); opposite you are the impressive granite gateposts of Coaver.  Just reflect on the effort to shape them, transport them and erect them with few mechanical aids!  The walls around Parker’s Well are stone, and the well itself has a pleasant stone arch.   

On the left are the sandstone walls of Parkers Well House, now playing fields for the school.  Several years ago, part of the wall collapsed, blocking the road.  The repaired wall can be recognised with its modern mortar.  Further up, a microclimate on the wall means it is partly covered by a large patch of moss.

 

It's worth a diversion to the right, into the grounds of County Hall, and a short way along, on the left is a high stone wall; this was the boundary wall of the grounds of Coaver, and there are small signs in the structure that this was once the wall of a glasshouse, facing south to take advantage of the sun.  (Edward Parfitt, who was Coaver’s gardener in the 1850s, was a nationally known botanist, familiar with the flora of tropical Africa, which may have led to the construction of a building for delicate plants.) 

Back on Matford Lane, Wayland Avenue has a dog-leg route around the terrace of army officers’ houses.  The small side wall is stone topped with brick; just round the corner is a cob wall, with a rough stone base, exposed to the elements to keep it damp, and a tiled top.  The limestone wall on Matford Lane belongs to the former rectory of the parish church, and then just round the corner is a small reminder of the fourth villa, the lodge of Fontmell.

We are back in Wonford Road, and refreshments await us in the village, a quarter of a mile away. 

 

Have you ever noticed white patches on the walls of St Leonard's?

No, it isn’t the work of a careless painter, nor the result of someone disposing of their chewing gum, it’s natural.  And not just white patches, but yellow, green, red and brown; it’s lichen, moss and some kinds of algae. 

One of the must-have DVDs of Christmas 2016 was the newly released film of Swallows and Amazons.  Before the film-makers decided to introduce a hint of espionage, there was a sub-plot in Arthur Ransome’s book about Captain Flint’s book of his travels, “Mixed Moss” by “A Rolling Stone”.  Ransome was referring to the proverb, “a rolling stone gathers no moss”, a reminder that moss grows slowly and likes steady conditions.  Moss can be found in damp, shady parts of the neighbourhood, a nuisance to those whose lawns are “grass mixed with moss”, but a way of softening the hard, harsh surfaces of pavements and walls.  Biologists will tell us that there are over 10,000 species of moss, flowerless plants which spread by spores, not seeds.  Gardeners rely on moss as a constituent of peat – suffering from over-use these days – and florists use moss for decoration and to retain water (many mosses can hold over 10 times their weight of water).  In the First World War, moss was collected and used as a dressing for wounds – a memorial at Widecombe is a reminder of the amount collected on Dartmoor.  Moss was superior to cotton as a dressing for wounds, being mildly antiseptic.  There is speculation that some birds choose to use moss in their nests for the health of their chicks.  So, if the moss on your patio or roof is being pecked by birds, it may be for the insects living there, or to help raise the next generation.

Lichens also generally prefer damp conditions; their biology is more complex than that of mosses, and even now there are some aspects of how lichens live that are not fully understood.  The professional society that studies them explains that “A lichen is not a single organism; it is a stable symbiotic association between a fungus and algae and/or cyanobacteria.”  And I am not going to attempt to explain that here!  

Around the neighbourhood, there are countless patches of what is called a crustose lichen (crustose simply means that it has a crust) which can be mistaken for chewing gum on pavements.  (Not many lichens have common English names, and I will leave Latin in the Neighbourhood News to the editor’s fluency.)  The commonest species here are very tolerant to urban pollution; generally, though, lichens prefer an unpolluted environment, and so you find more different lichens where the air is cleaner.  (My brother points out that he finds many more lichens when he visits Exeter than in his workplace of Sussex.)  Next time you are walking in the neighbourhood, stop to look at the crusty lichens on the walls.  Walls with a lot of lichens are providing the right kind of conditions; acidity, moisture, quality of air, chemicals in the stone.  So glazed bricks don’t grow many lichens; older bricks often do.  Lichens are scarce on local granite features, even though the tors of Dartmoor are home to many.  It is all to do with moisture and pollution.  Lichens colonise some pavements more than others; it may be the type of surface, or simply the amount of foot traffic from passers-by.  Have a look under a roadside bench to see how they spread where they are undisturbed.  Different crustose lichens can be found on the bark of trees, usually on the north side of the trunk or branch, because that is moister.  But you may notice that some species of tree have no lichen, while a neighbouring tree has plenty.  Trees differ in the acidity and nutrient content of their bark, and lichens grow where the conditions are just right.

Older garden trees may have fruity or fibrous lichens, and again, the number and type of lichen depends on the species of the tree.  Generally, the tree will not suffer from the presence of lichen, so if you have some, rejoice – your garden has pure air.  

What’s the use of lichens?  Of course, you can feed your pet reindeer on lichen; they enjoy it.  Humans sometimes eat lichen, but it is not for everyday diets – unless you are desperate, and even then, take care.  But from prehistoric times, lichens have been used to make dyes for wool, and some weavers and spinners still do this.  Brown, gold, orange, green, purple, blue and red colours are all possible, depending on the species of lichen used and the type of extraction process.  And if your favourite perfume contains oakmoss, you are scented with an extract from that lichen – despite the name!  

The poet John Clare wrote about the natural world.  It is perhaps appropriate that his gravestone in Helpston churchyard in Northamptonshire is covered with lichen.  The lichen has spread into the inscription so that his epitaph now reads “A POET IS BORN NOT MAD”, hiding the final “E”.

(Published in Neighbourhood News, Jan-Feb 2017) 

 

Keywords: St Leonards, Exeter, history, geography, beauty  lichen