Lydford
Lydford is located within West Devon local authority area. Historically it formed part of Lifton Hundred. It falls within Tavistock Deanery for ecclesiastical purposes. The Deaneries are used to arrange the typescript Church Notes of B.F.Cresswell which are held in the Westcountry Studies Library. The population was 422 in 1801 2812 in 1901 . Figures for other years are available on the local studies website. In the valuation of 1334 it was assessed at £01/03/04. The lay subsidy of 1524 valued the community at £01/07/05. In 1641/2 39 adult males signed the Protestation returns. It is recorded as a borough from 975?. It had parliamentary representation from 14 cent.. A market is recorded from 14 cent..
A parish history file is held in Tavistock, Okehampton. & Princetown Library. You can look for other material on the community by using the place search on the main local studies database. Further historical information is also available on the Genuki website.
Maps: The image below is of the Lydford area on Donn's one inch to the mile survey of 1765.
On the County Series Ordnance Survey mapping the area is to be found on 1:2,500 sheet 88/13 Six inch (1:10560) sheet 88/SW
The National Grid reference for the centre of the area is SX511849. On the post 1945 National Grid Ordnance Survey mapping the sheets are: 1:10,000 (six inch to a mile: sheet SX58SW, 1:25,000 mapping: sheet Explorer 112, Landranger (1:50,000) mapping: sheet 191. Geological sheet 338 also covers the area.
Illustrations: The image below is of Lydford as included in the Library's illustrations collection. Other images can be searched for on the local studies catalogue.
A fair is known from: 14 cent.. An extract from The glove is up! Devon's historic fairs, by Tricia Gerrish, is included by kind permission of the author.
LYDFORD FAIR LOCATION: A386. Western fringes of Dartmoor
ORIGINAL CHARTER 1267 Granted to Richard, Duke of Cornwall and King of Almain by Henry III. 3 day fair at Feast of St Petroc (4th June). Sometimes recorded as St Patrick.
Richard, Duke of Cornwall and King of Almain, received King Henry III's charter for a three day fair in 1267. Many sources claim it was for the Feast of St Petroc, the saint to whom the parish church at Lydford, or Lidford, is dedicated. The Lysons claim it was for the feast of St Patrick, and some later writers have followed their view. Mrs Whitcombe, writing in 1874, also claims that the principal fair was dedicated to St Patrick and held on a Sunday afternoon, with trading formerly taking place in the church. However, press reports early in the 20th century bear out that the fair continued at the feast of St Petroc, in June. In 1300, tolls and fees from this fair were worth five shillings to Richard. Market dues continued to be paid to the Duchy of Cornwall, as landlords in later centuries, as late as the mid 1800s, but the fair almost certainly lapsed before then. William Browne, c.1644 writes that Lydford had neither market nor fair to comfort it.
In 1822 a fair took place at nearby Two Bridges on the 1st Wednesday following 16th August, at which horses, sheep and cattle were traded. White's Directory for 1860 also records cattle fairs for Tuesday following 20th July, Thursday following 2nd August (at Two Bridges) and on 23nd August, at Princetown. According to Tavistock Gazette, 1924’s Lydford Fair at the Feast of St Petroc had continued 'to modern times.' There are no further reports following the Second World War.
Extract from Devon by W.G.Hoskins (1954), included by kind permission of the copyright holder:
LYDFORD is a small village and a long-decayed borough on the NW. foothills of Dartmoor (plate 11), with a parish that takes in an enormous tract of the Moor and is reckoned at some 50,000 acres. The village stands on a narrow tongue of land above the Lyd, which enters a remarkable wooded gorge immediately below. There is no doubt that the site of Lydford was chosen for military reasons. It was one of the four burhs of Devon, set up by Alfred for defence against the Danes, and was one of the four Domesday boroughs two hundred years later. It was never a walled town, but was defended by a massive earthen rampart and stockade. This rampart, drawn across the neck of the promontory, is still clearly visible on either side of the road at the NE. end of the village.
At the SW. tip of the promontory a castle was probably thrown up between 1066 and 1086, as Domesday Book records of the royal borough of Lydford that "40 houses have been laid waste since King William has had England." It seems likely that the mount and ditch about 100 yds. SW. of the present stone keep represents the site of this 11th century castle. In 1195 this was superseded by the great square stone keep, of lanes that cross the present street at which the gutted shell still stands, built expressly for the custody of offenders against the forest and stannary laws. By the early 12th century the military importance of Lydford had passed away to Launceston Castle, the key to the whole Cornwall, and to Okehampton Castle. Lydford was one of the four Saxon mints of Devon. Its coins are known from the reign of Ethelred 11(979-1016) to that of Edward the Confessor (1042- 66).(D.A. 65 (1933), 140.) But just as its military importance passed away at an early date to Launceston and Okehampton, so its commercial life decayed also with the rise of Tavistock and of Okehampton. One can still trace the lines of the early medieval streets, in the grass-grown lanes medieval glass brought from elsewhere. In the churchyard is an ingenious epitaph to George Routleigh, a local watchmaker. Lydford Gorge, a remarkable place, is now National Trust property.
Princetown is in the parish of Lydford, a grim little town some 1,400 ft. above sea level, with an abominable climate of fog, snow, wind, and more than 80 in. of cold rain over 100. It stands on a cot between the two Hessary Tors, exposed to the bitter N. and E. winds, the least suitable place that could ever have been chosen for a town. But the site was dictated by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt so as to be near his granite quarries.
As early as 1780 a farm, named Prince Hall, was reclaimed on the site of an ancient tenement near Two Bridges, and in 1785 Mr. Tyrwhitt (later Sir Thomas), who had been appointed Lord Warden of the Stannaries, set about improving the moor at a place which he named Tor Royal, about 1.5 m. SE. of Princetown. Here he made a productive estate and built a house in 1798. (Rowe, Perambulation of Dartmoor, 255) He was later instrumental in building the road from Tavistock to Princetown, and the other good roads that now cross the Moor and make it (or some of it) accessible to the motorist.
It was Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt who proposed that a prison be built on the Moor to house the thousands of captives of the Napoleonic Wars, who had become too numerous to lodge in the prisons and prison-ships at Plymouth. The site was given by the Prince of Wales, who held the lands of the Duchy of Cornwall to which all the Moor belonged: hence the name Princetown. The prison was built in 1806 (architect, Daniel Alexander) at a cost of £130,000 and at one time between seven and nine thousand prisoners were crammed into it.
A small town grew up near the prison. Two large inns were built during the war; one of them is the present Duchy Hotel. Many of the prisoners had prize-money to come from their own country; many others made their own in their hammocks at night, even forging Bank of England and local bank notes, which they passed off in the great daily market held in the prison. With the closing of the prison in 1816 the town almost collapsed, but the completion of the Dartmoor Railway in 1823 brought back many people to the granite quarries. The prison remained derelict until 1850, when it was reopened for prisoners serving long sentences. It has since been considerably extended.
The prehistoric antiquities of Dartmoor are too numerous to mention. Some are referred to in Part 1, and all the more important are marked on the special map (Fig. 5). Reference should also be made to the other semi-moor- land parishes, principally North Bovey, Chagford, Cornwood, Manaton, Walkhampton and Widecombe-in-the-Moor.
