Interpretation Work for National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst Banner-stand Exhibitions Portable roll-up displays, designed to travel between the National Park's visitor venues.

Paddlesteamers, Postcards & Holidays Past The History of Tourism on Exmoor

Triptych banner-stands, total area approx 6m² Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

In the Footsteps of the Romantic Poets

Celebrating the extension of the Coleridge Way long-distance footpath and the stunning scenery that inspired a whole new chapter in the history of English literature.

Triptych banner-stands, total area approx 6m²

Accompanied by an albatross (wingspan 1m), hand-crafted in gold- flecked organza, and a new anthology of everything written by Coleridge, Wordsworth and their literary friends during their time on Exmoor. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

Exmoor's Woodlands

2500 hectares of Exmoor's windswept uplands are cloaked in rare ancient semi-natural woodland, and it has been designated an “Ancient Woodland Priority Area”.

Single giant banner-stand, total area 3m²

Accompanied by an exhibition of woodland photos by ENPA photographer Jon Coole. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst Self-Sufficiency in the Twin Villages

Before the railway arrived in 1898, overland travel to and was difficult, and the two villages had to be self-sufficient. Villagers gathered, herded, grew, made and repaired just about everything they needed for daily life.

Single standard banner-stand, total area 2m²

A slightly different version was produced simultaneously for the Lynton & Exmoor Museum, with a series of bespoke signs and labels to display alongside museum artefacts. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst Pteridomania!

Early in the nineteenth century, a thirst for collecting botanical specimens was matched by an upturn in the quality of travel. Many species of fern flourished in and Exmoor, and new bylaws were needed to protect the countryside from unscrupulous dealers.

Single narrow banner-stand, total area approx 1.5m²

Accompanied by an arrangement of giant ferns (1m each), hand-crafted in felt and beads. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

iPad Stories

History in a nutshell! Pithy tales told in pictures (10-12 per story) with the briefest of captions.

THE LYNTON & LYNMOUTH CLIFF RAILWAY Lynton & Lynmouth cliff railway was opened on Easter Monday, 1890, as part of an ambitious scheme to open up Exmoor to the newly-booming tourist industry. Without missing a day's service in 126 years, it is the world's only carbon-neutral cliff railway.

CULBONE CHURCH Said to be 's smallest church still in use, Church was used to film Lorna Doone's wedding. The teenage Jesus allegedly paused here on his way through from Looe to with his great uncle, tin trader Joseph of Arimathea.

WIND HILL, COUNTISBURY, AD 878 “In the winter of this year, Hubba the Dane landed in Wessex, in Devonshire, with three and twenty ships, and there was he slain, and eight hundred men with him, and forty of the army. There was also taken the war-flag, which they called The Raven.”

LYNTON & RAILWAY Until the railway arrived in 1898, Lynton's best connection with the outer world was by boat. The railway's narrow gauge, enabling it to follow tight curves around the hills, meant that the coach height was just 2.5m, and it was dubbed "The Toy Railway". Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

WEST MINERAL RAILWAY The Mineral Railway was built in 1857-1864 to carry ore from the Hills iron mines to the harbour in . From here it was taken by ship to Ebbw Vale for smelting. Business boomed on Exmoor – for less than two decades.

WE'LL HAVE TO LAUNCH HER OVERLAND! At 8 pm on a wild winter's night in 1899, Lynmouth's lifeboat received an SOS from : A ship was helplessly adrift in the . With gale-force winds and a very high tide, there was no way they were going to be able to launch the Louisa.

SAVING PORLOCK FROM THE SEA When Porlock's shingle bank was breached by a massive storm in 1996, experts suspected that several decades of efforts to prevent flooding had actually weakened Porlock's natural sea defences. A whole new way of looking at the problem was needed.

WHO BURNT THE HOUSE DOWN? Hollerday Hill shelters Lynton from Atlantic gales rolling up the Bristol Channel. Villagers once had allotments here, with pigs and chickens in their orchards. Today its steep slopes are clad in woodland, with a hidden mystery lurking among them...

LORNA DOONE – FACT OR FICTION? RD Blackmore's 1869 novel "Lorna Doone" became a legend itself, and truth and fiction were soon hopelessly tangled together. He insisted that he had been very liberal with the truth, but eagle-eyed readers were quick to point out the many similarities.

THE HOUSE AT ASHLEY COMBE Byron's daughter, Lady Ada Lovelace, liked to pace Ashley Combe's exotic terraced gardens with computer inventor Charles Babbage. A bit of a geek herself, she translated maths papers from the Italian and is credited with devising the world's first software. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

WILDWOOD OR WORKING WOODLANDS? At the end of the last Ice Age, woodland spread across the frozen landscape - hardy species that still flourish today on Exmoor's exposed uplands. Then the first farmers started clearing the wildwood to grow crops, using the trees for firewood and timber.

POWERED BY WATER The Domesday Book listed 10 watermills on Exmoor. Later there were no fewer than 13 mills on the River Avill alone. Exmoor's high rainfall and steep hillsides meant that there was plenty of water streaming at high-speed through the valleys to power the mills.

THE ROMANTIC AGE OF STEAM When war closed the continent to visitors, Exmoor became a tourist hotspot. "On account of the pleasantness of the situation and salubrity of the air," said a 1790 pamphlet, "a number of persons of fashion have been induced to visit it as a bathing place.”

RECLAIMING EXMOOR Britain's population boomed after the Napoleonic Wars, and it was widely believed that land reclamation was needed to support the new industrialised society. The Knight family embarked upon a scheme meant to upgrade Exmoor into a profitable “bread basket”.

PTERIDOMANIA! Early in the nineteenth century, a new thirst for collecting botanical specimens was matched by an upturn in the quality of travel. Many fern species flourished in Devon and Exmoor, and bylaws were needed to protect the area from unscrupulous dealers.

ACROSS THE BRISTOL CHANNEL Medieval Exmoor enjoyed a brisk trade with Wales. Welsh wool was exchanged for local fish, cheese, beans, wheat, oatmeal, malt, coal, sheep and oxen. Later Welsh limestone and coal were burnt together here to make lime, and timber was sent back for pit props. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

EXMOOR'S COASTAL TRAVERSE Exmoor's Coastal Traverse follows the base of England's highest marine cliffs from Combe Martin to Foreland Point, featuring crumbling outcrops on steep north-facing cliffs. Only one team has ever completed the traverse in a single outing, in 1978.

A ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE Spectacular scenery such as the Valley of Rocks led Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth to move to the area in 1796/7. Their joint anthology “Lyrical Ballads”, written here, marked a major turning point in the history of English literature.

TALES OF EXMOOR'S COAST From smugglers to broken-hearted heroines to WWII bomber crash- landings, Exmoor's rugged coastline lends itself to romantic tales. Most imaginative is the Aetherius Society's claim to Holdstone Down as a holy mountain for their interplanetary parliament.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY IN THE TWIN VILLAGES Until the railway arrived in 1898, had to be self-sufficient. Local timber and stone were used for building, moorland peat for fuel, homegrown crops, fruit and veg for food. Lynton had its own smokehouse, slaughterhouse and brewery.

BRANDY FOR THE PARSON In the 17th century heavy taxes were imposed on imported goods to help fund a war with France. Everyday goods such as tea, soap and salt became prohibitively expensive, and whole communities were involved in smuggling these in to avoid the crippling taxes.

BOURNE FREE Writer and artist Hope Bourne spent almost 40 years roaming free on Exmoor, keeping a journal and sketching the landscape. She grew her own vegetables, kept bantams and shot rabbits and deer for the pot. Her novel, Jael, was published posthumously in 2011. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst Teaching Resources The History of Tourism on Exmoor

The "Paddlesteamers, Postcards and Holidays Past" teaching resources explore the history of Exmoor's ninetenth-century tourist boom. The project is designed for students in Keystages 2 and 3, with suggested tasks that cover the full curricular range. As well as plenty of background information, there are itineraries for class visits to seven key sites in the history of Exmoor's tourism. Four of them are based around Lynton and Lynmouth and could be included in a single day's whistle-stop excursion, with the other three being representative of historical tourist destinations away from the twin villages.

Each location has information and tasks for students to work through with their teacher, before and after the visit as well as during the tour. These documents complement one another and should all be used in the classwork, even if it is not possible to visit each site. There are also teacher's notes to accompany these documents, giving further information and including suggested extension tasks and links to other relevant web-based resources.

There are many other tourist honeypots across the moor, of course, and students are encouraged to find these for themselves in the classroom, through a close inspection of the 1:25000 Ordnance Survey map, following their work on the project's main theme: “What makes a beautiful landscape, and how does it provide inspiration?” Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

Documents and Resources included

Background Reading Site Visits - Core Sites: 1 Lynton 2 Lynmouth 3 The Valley of Rocks 4 Watersmeet - Other Sites: 5 6 Doone Valley 7 Heddon's Mouth Teachers' Notes Curriculum Links Subjects Covered Overview of Site Visits - Core Sites - Other Sites Schemes of Work - English - Other Subjects Online Resources: - History and Art in Local Postcards - Lorna Doone – Fact or Fiction? - Early Tourism in the Press - Poems, Journals and a Short Story Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst Introduction to the Project

When the Napoleonic Wars put an end to the Grand Tour of Europe, taken by the wealthy sons and daughters of Britain's ruling classes to broaden their horizons, they needed to look closer to home for their inspirational holidays. By this time, their elders had got into the habit of partying on the continent, and they, too, were seeking out their own country's scenic hotspots in order to continue taking extended holidays with their sketchbooks and their servants.

It couldn't have happened at a better time for Exmoor. The Industrial Revolution had mechanised farming and the spinning and weaving cottage industries that underpinned their rural economy, putting the area's labourers and homeworkers out of work. To make matters worse, suddenly the seas were empty of the shoals of herring that for centuries had provided a livelihood for the rest of the population. At the end of the eighteenth century, all they had left to exploit for a living was the scenery.

Fortunately, scenery was just what nineteenth-century tourists were after. Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth spearheaded a cultural revolution that sought inspiration in dramatic landscapes, and word soon spread that their seminal anthology "Lyrical Ballads" arose from the breathtaking scenery they were exploring around Exmoor and the Quantocks.

Some of the influential holidaymakers inspired by their poetry to visit Exmoor fell in love with the area and moved in, along with their fortunes, their dynamism and their city contacts, and they set about working with local businessmen to improve the area's transport links and infrastructure. The result was a booming tourist economy. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

The key to Exmoor's continuing success as a tourist destination is the inspiration that visitors find in the landscape and the lifestyle; and the main purpose of these teaching resources is to enable students to find this inspiration for themselves.

A teacher's role is to provide students with information, interpretation and inspiration. The National Curriculum prescribes the information element of this formula in its very comprehensive schemes of work; but they fall into the category of plans that make excellent servants but very poor masters. It is very easy for over- loaded teachers to get bogged down in the detail and forget that the best way to help students understand a subject is to inspire them to want to know more! Full information specific to the project is of course included here; and links are provided to some of the many relevant websites covering related topics.

The interpretation factor is provided by every teacher as part of their delivery of a subject, and there has been no attempt to talk down to students in the project. Words, phrases and concepts that will inevitably be outside most students' experience are included in the knowledge that teachers will be able to explain them simply within the context of the subject. Resources and links are given where these might be helpful. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

Inspiration

While the background reading and site visits together provide extensive information, their purpose is to get students' brains spinning creatively, right across the curriculum. Numerous questions, not all of them completely relevant to the task in hand, are included to get students thinking about the subject for themselves. They are required to keep journals and sketchbooks, as Exmoor's earliest tourists did, and explore the ambience and atmosphere of each location, as well as the factual data. The routes taken by Coleridge and Wordsworth and their cronies on their tours of the landscape are examined, as well as work produced by these nineteenth-century luminaries while they were here.

Links to the literature, art, music and architecture of the Romantic period are included to provide contextual inspiration, and in each discipline students are encouraged to produce creative work of their own in the same style.

Lorna Doone, Gothic novels, “penny dreadfuls” and Neo-Gothic architecture help students to understand the appeal of wild places in the days of Exmoor's early tourism, and the legend of young ladies being turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday gives rise to a “Chinese whispers” storytelling task. Using modern techniques to produce facsimiles of the earliest magazines provides plenty of practice in computerised and manual design. Timetabling stagecoaches and their links with trains, as part of this, introduces the need to sort through information and make it accessible to “Victorian tourists”, both on paper and online.

Although another important theme of the project is the universal need for people to express themselves in some way, its application is not confined to the expressive arts. The topic of Exmoor's tourism lends itself to providing inspiration in the other subjects too. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

Students of Design and Technology are introduced to the evolving technology of transport during the nineteenth century; because this was critical in linking an isolated area to the fashionable world wanting to explore it. Considering the relative merits of paddles and screwthreads in powering Victorian steamships gives an opportunity for further work, according to the students' needs. Exmoor's steep gradients and its rugged terrain – both of which contribute so much to its scenic beauty and therefore its popularity with visitors of all eras – provided interesting challenges for early engineers to overcome.

Southey writes of Countisbury Hill: “From this place the descent to Lynmouth begins. It runs along the edge of a tremendous precipice and the sea at the base! A bank of from two to three feet is the only barrier.” Countisbury Hill was nationally notorious among early drivers and still gets an occasional mention in road reports today.

 As this old postcard shows, the gradient is 1 in 4. What does this mean? Can you draw it accurately?  Sometimes road signs give a gradient as a percentage figure. What would the percentage gradient be for Countisbury Hill?  Find out the gradients for Lynmouth Hill and Porlock Hill. Which of the three hills is the steepest?

Lynmouth's cliff railway is an inspiration in itself, being the world's only carbon-neutral railway today, and the Victorian hydroelectric power station above Watersmeet was a world-first enterprise, in the way that it used off- peak electricity to pump the water back up to the reservoir on Summerhouse Hill, ready to generate the next day's power. All these engineering topics also give opportunities for students of maths and physics to work on gradients and energy. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

Darwin produced his “Origin of Species” as our tourist boom was gathering pace, and a suggested task in a couple of the locations is to catalogue and identify their wildlife from scratch, as a Victorian explorer of Exmoor would have had to do. Ferns were the big attraction to naturalists heading here at the time, as we find out at Watersmeet, but goats and Exmoor ponies add colour, and the whitebeam endemic to Exmoor introduces the topic of rare and endangered species – a subject approached from a different angle in considering the tropical plants that borough and estate gardeners introduced, and the problems that they are giving landowners today.

The Victorian fashion for sea-bathing and “taking the waters” raises a number of topics for scientific debate and investigation, including the origin and nature of the water that fed Glen Lyn's “mineral factory”. RD Blackmore's witch “Mother Melldrum” adds further interest in the consideration of witches, herbalism and alternative medicines.

Mary Anning was busy finding fossils on the Dorset coastline at this time, too, and many amateur naturalists and antiquarians were running around the countryside, trying to map its story. The project touches on the importance of Hollow Brook, near Heddon's Mouth, as a key location for geologists, because of its fossils and the information they gave about rocks formed during the Devonian period. This leads on to EA Newell Arber's surveys of Exmoor's coastal geomorphology, and the attempts of twentieth-century mountaineers to overturn his declaration that it was not possible to explore these cliffs without a boat. Students of cookery and nutrition are challenged in our own project to plan the food that these expeditioners might have taken for their five-day traverse of the coastline. (There are other ideas for food and nutrition elsewhere in the project, too, and their role in the success of Exmoor's tourism). Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

Warnings about the dangers of climbing are of course included, alongside details of professional adventure companies for those students who are inspired by the descriptions of Exmoor as a climbing destination. The steamship excursion that ran in 1910 to view Scott's “Terra Nova”, before she set off for the Antarctic, provides the excuse to give weblinks to companies mounting modern-day expeditions for young people inspired to do some serious exploring themselves.

In the meantime, they are all exploring the Exmoor landscape first-hand, equipped with OS map, compass and full instructions on staying safe. It is suggested that visits to Heddon's Mouth and Doone Valley include navigation practice, as required by the National Curriculum, and there is so much practice in using OS maps in the classroom that they will be experts in the skill by the time they have finished! Mapping in general is a major part of the project, from international mapping of the European capitals included in the Grand Tour, through national work based on the destinations of tourists' postcards, steamships and rail journeys and distances walked by eighteenth-century visitors on walking tours, to finding the grid reference of the memorial stone to RD Blackmore in Doone Valley.

There is also a lot of other geography work, based on the shape of the landscape and how it has been changed, by both natural processes and the people living and working here, and the effect these have had on its scenery and therefore its appeal as a tourist destination.

History is, of course, the other main component of the project, which could be used as a local study in itself. Much of Exmoor's earliest development as a tourist destination took place during – and because of – the Age of Enlightenment, and there is plenty of historical detail throughout the project. The inclusion of the dubious Doune brothers in real life is intended to make students think about the concept of verifying information, from whatever source, especially material found online. Interpretation Work for Exmoor National Park 2014-16 Ruth Luckhurst

There is a passing reference to KS3 Citizenship studies in the story of Victorian capital projects relating to tourism – railways etc – and the role of both citizens and Parliament in their funding and implementation. Shareholders, profits, budgets and keeping accounts are given some thought, as is the role of local governments in bylaws protecting the countryside from the ravages of fern collectors. There are numerous topics for debate at both Keystages, some controversial, and a great many open-ended lines of enquiry, catering for all interests and abilities, right across the range of subjects.

As well as a selection of online resources to be used as part of tasks within the project, there is a section devoted to curriculum links. This gives a breakdown of subjects covered, by subject and by site visit, matched against National Curriculum Schemes of Work.

© Ruth Luckhurst & Exmoor National Park, 2016