The Tinner's Corpse

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The early spring evening was well advanced when the men downed tools and set off homewards. They were working on the eastern edge of Dartmoor, so could walk back to their dwellings around Chagford within the hour, rather than camp out in the primitive huts dotted all over the high moor. Only eleven of their gang of a dozen tinners trudged down the little valley towards their wives and a good meal. As usual the overman had stayed behind to scrape the last of the precious shode from the wooden troughs, then add it to the pile of ore. Tomorrow it would be taken down to the blowing-house for the first smelting.

The others marched away down the stony gully, following the stream that gurgled between moss-covered boulders under twisted, stunted trees that crouched down from the winds that whistled across the miles of open moorland. Tough as they were, the tinners were weary after the long day’s work and had little inclination to gossip on the way home. Although their calf-length boots of raw ox-hide were thickly greased, they were not watertight and the men’s feet were cold and wet from working in the stream all day. Most had managed a gruff farewell to the foreman they left behind, but in a few moments they were out of sight around the curve of the small ravine down which the South Teign brook sped on its way to join its northern partner at Leigh Bridge. After a few twists, as the ground dropped away from Thornworthy Down, the valley opened up to give a distant vista of fields and woods, with the little town of Chagford nestling in the centre.

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