Clatworthy Reservoir - Most Peaceful Stretch of Water in the South West

The 450-year-old Rock Inn - as mentioned in the neighbouring article - stands just a few feet from the young River Tone. Travel a few miles upstream, higher and deeper into the hills, and you will come to Clatworthy Reservoir, which is not only one of the oldest drinking water lakes in the region, but one of the prettiest. Two facts which perhaps go hand-in-hand. The building of a giant reservoir causes a major disruption to the ecology and environment, and it takes many years for the scars to heal.

Nowadays, Clatworthy has a far more natural look than it did when I was a lad, visiting with my journalist father. The reservoir, with its capacity of 5,364,000 cubic metres of drinking water, today supplies some 200,000 homes, but when I was a toddler back in 1960 it was just beginning to fill up as the headwaters of the Tone came up against the newly built dam. 

Last week I drove up there after lunch at The Rock and, on a hot August day, was surprised to find myself the only person at the Wessex Water visitor car park and picnic site. So I took a very peaceful stroll across the dam and through the oak woods that line the northern fringes of the lake. 

Nothing moved, save for a single fisherman out on the water in his rowing boat. The thought struck me that this must be the most unvisited and tranquil stretches of water to be found anywhere in the region bang in the middle of the holiday season. 

It was all very different back in the days before the valley was flooded. My father wrote about how the lonely and highly fertile valleys tucked deep into the eastern limb of the Brendon Hills were doomed. I found this rather moving account jotted in one of his notebooks. 

“May blossom hanging in the hedges reminded me of an evening along time ago when I called at a farmhouse tucked away in a deep valley and was welcomed at the door by a little girl and a boy carrying an oil lamp.

“‘Is this Cindercombe Farm?’ I had asked. ‘Oh yes!’ they had replied, as if that were a fact the whole world ought to know and rejoice in.”

Top of the dam, Clatworthy Reservoir

A few years later he took the children’s mother back to the valley as it was being flooded - it was the first time she’d been back since she’d left her old home. 

“We walked down the well remembered lane - surrounded by high banks, green and pretty with pennyworts and new moss - towards the house,” wrote my father. “Suddenly we rounded the last bend and, instead of the familiar buildings, a sheet of water lay at our feet. We could see the submerged portion of the road continuing on into the depths.

“‘It’s unbelievable! All this water!’ gasped the children’s mother. She pointed to a little bank, half submerged. ‘The children had a bit of garden here… and over there in a little field, I drove a horse and cart in the days before anybody had all these machines’…”

I can never go to Clatworthy without remembering my father’s stories of the valley pre-reservoir, which I first heard as a small boy standing on its shores. And last week was no different. As I walked in the afternoon sunshine, it was rather lovely to be haunted by thoughts of the old-fashioned lives that had once existed beneath those cool waters, rippling in the western light.  

CLATWORTHY RESERVOIR ANNIVERSARY ARTICLE

(FROM A PIECE I WROTE FOR THE WESTERN MORNING NEWS AND WESTERN DAILY PRESS IN 2019)

The waters were rising. Slowly, but not imperceptibly, creeping up the valley sides in an irreversible and devastating tide. The homesteads were abandoned, the families and their pets and farm animals, had gone. 

It happened 60 years ago in the heart of what must have been one of the most peaceful, hitherto undisturbed, valleys in the West Country. This year marks the flooding of the Cindercombe and other small Brendon Hill ravines which had been selected for the building of what was then one of the region’s largest reservoirs. 

Clatworthy Reservoir, with its capacity of 5,364,000 cubic metres of drinking water - now run by Wessex Water - today supplies some 200,000 homes, but back in 1959 it was just beginning to fill up as the head waters of the River Tone came up against the newly built dam. 

It wouldn’t be opened and operational until 1960, but the lonely and highly fertile valleys tucked deep into the eastern limb of the Brendon Hills were doomed. Work was steadily advancing on the dam, much of which had been built the year before - as we shall hear. 

Today, peace has long since returned to this little visited corner of the region. There are some excellent walks around the 52-hectare reservoir which it is a favourite haunt of fishermen. 

Beneath its deep dark waters are several farms and cottages as well as a mill compete with an overshot well and millstones. 

View downstream from top of the Clatworthy dam

Look on the internet and you will find surprisingly little information about Clatworthy Reservoir - the anniversary of its flooding only caught my eye because of a little handwritten booklet sent to me by regular reader Colin Pady of East Devon. I would, by the way, not recommend sending me precious documents which have a personal importance - I fear that either my dogs will chew them or I will lose them.

Anyway, this one remains safe and sound waiting for retired farmer Colin and his wife Val to collect - but this is what he wrote in an enclosing letter…

“I enclose the booklet of my first-lass hike which I mad with my practice buddy in October 1958 as a 15-year-old scout from Taunton School.”

Colin then outlines the route the boys took in two days of hiking, which took them over the huge eastern shoulder of the Brendons (not far from my home, which is why Colin was kind enough to send the document.

“The content of the hike may be of interest because it records the building of Clatworthy dam and the fact that we were probably the last hikers to walk down that valley before it was flooded,” he writes.

And so reading through his excellent little handwritten booklet I came to the following passage…

“There was water running down either side of the track but we could walk on the raised centre of the road. We noticed that the wooded slope to our left was partly felled. The track followed a tributary over which there was no bridge, so we had to jump over it.

“As we continued we saw some cables stretched across the valley in front of us. Then a derrick on the right side of the valley and finally, as we rounded a corner, we saw the dam. We had approached it from behind coming over land that was doomed to be flooded.

“The track was blocked by the dam and so we had to find another way out. After staying half-an-hour wandering around the structure, we finally decided to get over the lowest part of the dam which was just scaffolding. We had to cross a plank over the river and then jumped over the scaffolding. The men at work there with the pumps waved to us and we carried on crossing over the river once more by means of a bridge made of sleepers.

“We rejoined the road and, passing the offices of the firm building the dam, we proceeded down the well metalled road until we came to a cottage and a farm to the right. Then we came to two notices - one telling the name of the firm and the other telling us that trespassers would be prosecuted and that no and authorised person was allowed onto the site of the dam!”

So Colin is probably correct to assume that he and his school pal were the last hikers to walk down the valley. Today the health-and-safety police would have sent them marching, or worse…

Anyway, Colin’s account caused me to remember that my own father, Peter Hesp, had visited the site many times in his role as a local journalist for the Somerset County Gazette newspaper. So I dug out his notes, and among many articles he wrote about Clatworthy and its new reservoir I found this rather moving account jotted in a notebook. 

It concerns a visit he made to one of the families who had been told they’d have to abandon their farm. The Cowlings had managed to move into a nearby farmstead by April 1960, which is when my dad persuaded Mrs Cowling to take a walk down to the watery shores which had swallowed her home. 

This is what Peter wrote…

“If I were looking for an example of the typical hill farmer’s wife, I would pick on Mrs Ralph Cowling. She is straight-backed and breezy, in the prime of middle-life, with a courtesy and cheery good humour which comes of having raised seven children and worked hard, indoors and out, every day of her life on the good upland acres where she was born. She is of that excellent kind who would rather have a sing-song around a piano than sit watching ready-made entertainment on the television - and, when I intercepted her busy way this week, she was just off to help “cut up” for a niece’s wedding on a neighbouring farm.

“Mrs Cowling will think ill of me for writing all this about her, but it is nevertheless true, and I stated it in order to explain why it is that few people ever guess the sorrow that is in her life. It is a gentle sadness, never obtruding to be seen by other people, never clouding her busy day. In the evenings, when she and her husband and, perhaps, a few of the children, chat awhile beside the fire at Tripp Farm, near Raleigh’s Cross, their sorrow is remembered.

“Now, I don't want to exaggerate this in any way because when the plans were drawn up for the big Clatworthy reservoir, the Cowlings knew they would have to go. They accepted the fact, as reasonable people would. The experts came bumping down the steep lane to Cindercombe Farm, where the couple had been since they were married 23 years ago, and assessed their land is being some of the finest in the locality. They were liberally compensated and, it so happens, that they were able to buy neighbouring Tripp Farm, where Ralph was born and where his father, old Mr Tom Cowling, still kept the land in good heart.

“But Cindercombe, for the couple and their five sons and two daughters, was home as no other place will ever be.

“Just a year ago the Cowlings moved out, the bulldozers pushed down the ancient walls, and the waters of the reservoir began to rise up the Cindercombe Valley, where once the Romans smelted iron from the hill.

“This week Mrs Cowling went back with me, for the first time since the waters covered her home.

“‘I was eight years old when my parents came to live at Cindercombe. It's heartbreaking to think of it down there under the water just opposite that little quarry,’ she told me. For once her habitual cheerfulness was laid aside as we stood among primroses and violets looking down on the broad blue stretch of water.

“There was a steep field where, years ago, she had driven a team of three horses dragging a chain-harrow, and there was the pastureland, now rich and green, which had once been nothing but bracken and waste deep in furze. And there, beneath the waters, lay nearly 100 more of their rich and lovely acres and the homestead.

“We walked down the well remembered, sheltered lane to the house, the reservoir hidden by high banks, green and pretty with pennyworts and new moss. Suddenly we rounded the last bend and, instead of the familiar buildings, a sheet of water lay at our feet. We could see the submerged portion of the road continuing on into the depths.

“‘It's unbelievable! All this water!’” said Mrs Cowling. She pointed to a little bank, half submerged. ‘The children had a bit of garden here… and over there in a little field I drove a horse and cart in the days before anybody had all these machines…’

“She was laughing again now.

“‘My husband was working on the back of it and wondered why I wasn't driving straight across…’

We were both laughing and looking over the water.

“‘I had fallen fast asleep as I drove!’

"At the head of the reservoir we could see Westcott Farm, its windows empty and buildings deserted. We looked in at Roes Farm where the workmen are still building the strong boundary fence to keep stock and any other trespasser from wandering on the marginal land, once so familiar but now forbidden ground.

“‘I suppose we’re trespassing here,’ said Mrs Cowling, and we walked back up the steep lane, gossiping cheerfully about a thing that is sad, look at it how you will.

Stan and Freddie, two of the Cowling boys home from school, appeared briefly on bicycles.

“‘Didn't know you'd come this far! Going off and help with the poultry now, there's good boys!’ said their mother. Then, to me: ‘They can't keep away. They all come back. But this is the first time I've been back since the water rose. Still, I never seem to have the time for this sort of thing; it's been quite an afternoon out for me and I thoroughly enjoyed it.’

“Calling goodbye, Mrs Cowling climbed into her car and went tearing off with the confidence of a driver who knows every bump in the road.

“The May blossom hanging in the hedges reminded me - I don't know why - of an evening along time ago when I called at a farmhouse tucked away in a deep valley and was welcomed at the door by a little girl and a boy carrying an oil lamp.

“‘Is this Cindercombe Farm?’ I had asked.

“‘Oh yes!’ they had replied, as if that were a fact the whole world ought to know and rejoice in.”

My father was a bit of a genius when it came to the mellifluous nature of melancholy - and I can never go back to Clatworthy now without remembering this tale of Mrs Cowling, which I first heard as a small boy standing on the shores of the reservoir, excited by such a big sheet of water that could hide so many invisible tales.