Hoar Oak Cottage is in a remote upland part of West Exmoor. This is sheep farming country. Once home to generations of shepherds, the cottage was depopulated and gutted by the Exmoor National Park Authority in the mid-20th century. In 1999, the Exmoor Society was proposing that the Park Authority should demolish the cottage. Two descendants of one of the Hoar Oak shepherd families set up The Friends of Hoar Oak Cottage heritage charity and began the work to save the cottage as protected heritage as well as to research, save and share the history of the place; the people and their lives. The Park Authority agreed the building should be preserved and took responsibility for the work to ‘conserve’ it as a heritage ruin. The Friends took responsibility for the research, preservation and sharing of the history of the place; the people and their lives. That work was funded by a Heritage Lottery Grant awarded to The Friends and it took as its theme, the reality of remoteness. The Friends continue to protect the cottage and share the information they have researched. It can be found on the Friends of Hoar Oak Cottage website, the social media sites Facebook, Instagram and X Twitter. The Friends do annual exhibitions, talks and walks and talks to the cottage. The information and artefacts now held by The Friends have been archived and catalogued and can be found on the National Archive Discovery on this link Hoar Oak Cottage Collections.
Exmoor stretches across the counties of Somerset and Devon and has a scattering of villages and small towns. The geology is almost exclusively sedimentary rocks from the Devonian and early Carboniferous periods.[i] The geography of Exmoor comprises high coastal heaths; high wooded coast; combes and cleaves; low farmed coast and march; farmed and settled vale; enclosed farmed hills with commons, incised wooded valleys; plantation; wooded and farmed hills with combes.[ii] Hoar Oak Cottage is situated at the intersection of the ‘farmed hills’ and the ‘commons and plantation with heathland’. It is on the western bank of the Hoar Oak Water which runs north from near the head of the River Exe to join the Severn Estuary at Lynmouth. The nearest farm is at Furzehill near Barbrook and the cottage is located at OS Grid Reference E2742000 N143550 on OS Map 0L9.
The ‘population’ of the cottage has ranged, over the years, from a single shepherd to a family of 15 – a shepherd, his wife and their 13 children. In two instances there were multiple occupancy –a shepherd and his wife with their daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren and in another instance a shepherd and his wife with their children and her mother and father. The nearest neighbours are at least an hours walk away over rough, open moorland and comprises 3 small farmsteads at Fursehill. The nearest village is Simonsbath. The nearest town is Lynton and Lynmouth.
Hoar Oak Cottage started life as a one roomed shepherd’s cott sometime in the medieval period.[iii] Farmers and landowners bordering the Royal Forest of Exmoor had commoners’ rights to take sheep onto Exmoor for summer pasturage. It is likely that the original Hoar Oak cott was built by the Vellacotts of Fursehill who held these commoners’ rights and they would need a small cott to accommodate their summer shepherd. By the early 1800s, the Crown planned to sell the Royal Forest of Exmoor and a survey was undertaken to accurately establish the Forest boundary in order to compensate local farmers for their loss of commoner’s rights. A ‘buffer zone’ was identified, straddling the boundary of the Royal Forest and the privately owned farms, over which local landowners were given the right, for up to 3 generations, to use the moor as they always had done. After this time, they had the right to keep or dispose of the land as they wished. The Vellacotts of Fursehill were ‘awarded’ the Hoar Oak Allotment which included the shepherd’s cott. By the time the Royal Forest was sold the Vellacotts had extended the original one room cott into a one up one down cottage and moved one of their sons, with his wife, into Hoar Oak Cottage. The first child was born in the cottage in 1814.
The cottage was extended further over the next 150 years until its final ‘big’ extension in 1902/3 to house the 13 strong family of Shepherd Johnstone. This extension work included the addition of more rooms, outbuildings, a lean-to for a pig and a kitchen/dairy. The photo below shows the cottage in 1903.
In the 1950s, moves were afoot to create the Exmoor National Park and in due course the cottage and 25 acres around it were purchased for inclusion in the Park. By the 1960s, the Park Authority had decided they no longer wanted people living in this remote part of Exmoor and the last shepherd family was removed. The cottage was gutted, let for agricultural purposes and fell into increasing ruin over the next few decades. Around 2010, the Exmoor Society[iv] proposed that the Park Authority should demolish the cottage completely. Two of the descendants of Shepherd Johnstone set up The Friends of Hoar Oak Cottage charity and worked with the Park Authority and Exmoor Society to prevent the total destruction of the cottage. The building was saved as a ‘heritage ruin’ and the Friends set up a project to collect, preserve and share the history and heritage of the place, the people who lived there and their life. That work continues to the present day.
The cottage has always been associated with moorland uphill sheepfarming which has a very long and important history in the economy of Exmoor.[v] [vi] There was a short ‘blip’ in this history in the 19th century when John Knight, wealthy ironmaster and MP for Worcester, purchased the Royal Forest of Exmoor from the Crown and instigated a programme of enclosure and reclamation. John Knight’s son carried on from his father and introduced what has sometimes been called a ‘sheep farming experiment’ which saw the importation of Scottish sheep and shepherds to run remote sheep herdings on Exmoor. Although the Knights built several new farms and cottages, they rented Hoar Oak Cottage to use as the home for the Scottish shepherd (and his family) they employed to run the Chains/Hoar Oak herding with flocks of Scottish Black Face and Cheviot sheep. The success of the Knight’s activities has been written about by Orwin and Sellick, and McDermot[vii] but these histories have recently been re-evaluated by the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth in a paper entitled ‘Revolution and Continuity? Reassessing Nineteenth-Century Moorland Reclamation Through Palaeoecological and Archival Research’.[viii] In this paper Baker et al suggest that the earlier reporting may have been rather rosier than reality and a new book is due for publication in 2024. Despite the activities of the Knight family around inclosure and reclamation, the long-term continuity of the socio-agricultural-economy of Exmoor has been largely dictated by the landscape and maintained by those who understand how to farm that landscape. The contemporary economy is characterised as combining agriculture with tourism and Hoar Oak Cottage has a role in the local economy as a heritage site within the broader historic context and as part of the rural enterprise community.
The reader is directed to sections within the website which are devoted to explaining about The Life at Hoar Oak Cottage The Life – hoaroak (hoaroakcottage.org) and here will be found web pages devoted to:
A publication on The Womens Life: An untold history is available through this link Books4Sale – hoaroak (hoaroakcottage.org)
The cottage is located in rough, open moorland with no roads or tracks. In and around the immediate vicinity travel and transport across the moor was by Exmoor Pony or by Shank’s Pony. Children were taken to school on the pony where they would stay for the week with a relative to attend school before being picked up by pony on Friday to return home. Women took the pony to market and the pony, along with a sheepdog, were the shepherds main tools of the trade. The pony was a real part of their lives and part of the family. Once off the moor and onto a nearby lane or track transport was enhanced by a cart stored in a farmer neighbour’s barn. The pony would be hitched up to the cart to go on to a nearby village. By the late 19th century buses, cars and trucks would be pressed into service and the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway, opened in 1898, would have opened transport horizons to Barnstaple and further afield. Sadly, by 1935 that railway closed putting an end to access to that useful form of travel. The Scottish shepherds arrived from the Borders by boat or by train or, in some instances, by foot having driven sheep down from the Scottish Borders following the old Drove Roads.
The families who once lived at Hoar Oak Cottage tend to be people of simple backgrounds who leave little formal record other than in Church records or, after 1837, in the BMD Registers. They are also occasionally found in newspapers, military records or, in one particularly sad instance, the Paupers Records for the Exeter Asylum. Nonetheless, their stories are important and the author Alexander McColl Smith kindly gave The Friends permission to use a line from his famous 44 Scotland Street books, namely, that “The simple life, the humble life, is as wonderful, in its way, as any grand life of achievement and public recognition.”.[x] Indeed, it could be said the Hoar Oak peoples’ legacy is a living legacy – that the descendants of children born in the cottage still live in and around Exmoor. And if they don’t, still keep contact from across the globe.
The reader is directed to People – hoaroak (hoaroakcottage.org) to read all about the families who once lived and worked at Hoar Oak Cottage as well as some of the other people associated with it and whose stories are relevant to the wider story. A list of those names is included here for rapid reference:
A Roll of Honour is included on the website of the Hoar Oak Cottage military history.
A section on The Scottish Shepherds who migrated to live and work on Exmoor is also included on the website.
A section dedicated to Robert Tait Little, Head Shepherd on Exmoor explains the story of this notable individual and his invaluable diary keeping.
[i] filex_05.pdf (exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk)
[ii]Preece E J (2007) Exmoor Landscape Character Assessment
[iii] Humphreys and Preece (2010) SWArchaeology Report No. 101105
[iv] https://www.exmoorsociety.com
[v] Exmoor Horn Sheep Breeder’s Society (exmoorhornbreeders.co.uk)
[vi] Exmoor National Park – Home of Exmoor Horn Sheep (exmoorhornwool.co.uk)
[vii] Orwin & Sellick (1929) The Reclamation of Exmoor Forest and McDermot 1911 A History of the Forest of Exmoor (revised 1939 and 1973)
[viii] Baker, L. Rowney, F. French, H. Fyfe, R (2023) Revolution and Continuity? Reassessing Nineteenth-Century Moorland Reclamation Through Palaeoecological and Archival Research available through Open Access on https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01426397.2023.2244904
[ix] GENUKI: Anglican Parishes and Chapels of Ease in Northumberland, Northumberland
[x] Smith, Alexander McCall (2004) 44 Scotland Street
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