Two new tales with endings to leave you with mixed emotions

As you read this, my Week of Ghost Walks around selected Dartmoor towns and villages is almost upon us. Right now, I am busy distributing posters putting the finishing touches to my intended routes and polishing up the tales I’m telling.

Spaces on the walks are filling up nicely, with Bovey Tracey having already filled its original date and the second, Wednesday June 5, is well on its way.

The other week, I shared with you some of the stories I picked up unexpectedly during a visit to Okehampton.

Last week I tried out my popular Bovey Tracey route, using members of my family as guinea pigs and I think they were suitably entertained. We had a very pleasant meal at The Cromwell Arms before heading down to the gathering point outside of the tourist information centre in the large car park.

I was particularly keen to get their opinions on two new stories that I’ve just added to my repertoire, which involves taking in a circuit around the bottom end of the town. Fortunately, they found them both worthy of inclusion, so I thought I would use them as the basis for this article to whet your appetites in case you fancy joining me and hearing them told in their natural habitats...

For the first tale, which is quite sweet really, we need to take a walk past St John’s Church, to the entrance of a new housing development known as Indio Fields. Ignore the modern advertising hoardings and imagine an older, winding driveway leading to an impressive building that might once have been a priory.

For the purposes of our story it was a nunnery, as suggested by the fact that ghostly nuns have been sighted in the area over the years. Whoever resided there, the name Indio, in Latin, means house of God, so some sort of religious order occupied it up until Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.

This particular order of nuns were very much involved in their community, running a school for local children, some fee paying, others charity cases. They tried to be self-sufficient by growing their own vegetables and selling off any surplus, but they only owned ten acres of land, so this didn’t give them much to work with.

Instead, another source of income was the fine needlework that the students were encouraged to produce to then sell at the local markets.

One of their best pupils was a young orphan girl whose handiwork became quite famous far and wide, thus making her quite indispensable to the upkeep of the institution.

The girl was also very beautiful and soon caught the eye of one of the boys at the school who happened to be the son of the Lord of the Manor.

He was quite smitten with her. When his father died, he inherited his title and his land. It was only then that he asked the girl to marry him. Shocked by his proposal, she agreed but far from being overjoyed at marrying into such a wealthy family, she became quite distraught as she realised how reliant the nuns were on the income she brought them.

Seeing her tears, the lad asked why she was so sad at the prospect of their marriage, so she explained that her happiness came at a price for the nuns who had taken care of her since she was a child. Realising it was in his power to make his bride-to-be happy, he commanded that the land belonging to the nunnery should be increased ten times, giving them 110 acres to farm and grow crops in more than enough to compensate them for the loss of their famous stitcher!

This extension was bounded by a series of hedges, making it a permanent fixture of the Indio estate, even providing a more convenient pathway, allowing the nuns access to the town and church should they wish to visit, part of which is still accessible today. This kindness by her beloved, allowed the orphan girl to have her happy ever after...

The second story is more tragic and holds a fascination for an investigator like myself. It concerns an intriguing monument, back down the road from Indio in the churchyard of St John’s.

The memorial consists of three angelic figures standing under Christ on the cross and is dedicated to the three Gurney sisters, Emily, Rosamund and Mary, who tragically drowned when their boat capsized on the River Nile in 1875 during a storm.

A family member, the Reverend Frederick Gurney, had recently taken over the parish of Bovey Tracey at that time and even though the women weren’t local to the area, their parents already being deceased, he wanted a lasting reminder of his kin that had been taken so untimely so he commissioned their memorial to be erected in his churchyard where it remains to this day.

However, our tale doesn’t end there for their brother, Edmund, survived the tragedy and seems to have suffered survivors' guilt for the rest of his life as a result. Trying to find some meaning to their deaths, he devoted himself to psychological research, joining various societies and consulting with clairvoyants and mediums to try and make contact with his deceased sisters.

Unfortunately for Edmund, several of his associates, that he was working closely with, were eventually revealed as frauds, severely undermining his reputation in his chosen field. He took this set back quite badly and, sadly, died not long afterwards from an overdose of chloroform that he had been prescribed for neuralgia. Some said his death was accidental, others that it was suicide as he was that desperate to have contact with his sisters. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is said that after his death, Edmund himself came through to certain mediums, thus proving to some the veracity of his life’s endeavours...

If you like these sorts of local stories and want to hear more, not just from Bovey Tracey, but from Chagford, Princetown and Okehampton as well, then please get in touch via my email address (davidtiptrips@gmail.com) and book your place on a walk. Don’t forget the next available Bovey one is June 5...and who knows, I might be seeing you soon!