Belladonna at Belstone

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The village of Belstone sits high on the moors overlooking the deep valley that separates it from Cosdon, the massive hill that is visible from almost anywhere in northern Devon. I have known the area for years, for my brother and I visit it each New Year’s Day, and walk with wives and families down south to the moors.

It was this year, 1999, that we went to walk down towards the stream, and while strolling among a heavy clitter, I mused it was much like so many spots where monks and nuns chose to site their convents, an idle thought that eventually gave rise to this story. I invented St Mary’s.

Nowadays we think of abbeys and priories being set in delightful places, almost invariably among trees, with lush vegetation and parkland all around. That’s because since the Dissolution, many have been converted into houses and gardens, their lands cultivated over centuries. Beforehand they were often wild, remote, cold and bleak. It’s true that in sunshine they are beautifully romantic ruins, but that is because we visit them on holidays when the summer sun warms us and the ancient nature of the wrecks can give us a comfortable sense of the passing of the years. Yet for all the delights of the larger ecclesiastical holdings at Rievaulx, Westminster, York, Fountains and Whitby, many others sprang up and disappeared, unable to support their communities with their poor and scrubby land. The two years of famine (1315-17) speeded the end of some of these, as did the two murrains or plagues, first of sheep (1313-17) and then of cattle (1319-21), which devastated the English economy. Smaller, less financially viable convents were swallowed up by wealthier ones.

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