Bucks mills fishing

The 's and 30's were particularly stressful years for Rudston, with a great deal of hard work and many undeserved disappointments, and it is not really surprising that his North Devon holidays became very important to him. On the face of it, Bucks Mills was never a soft option as a holiday venue. Bathing was difficult on the rocky shore, and the only way out of the village was up.

Communications were non-existent and the accommodation was basic. But I believe that these shortcomings explain why Buck Mills appealed to Rudston so much. What it had to offer him was so very different from the life he led in London, where he worked in an atmosphere of political manipulation and even animosity, on projects that were at the cutting edge of 's technology.

Woolfardisworthy history

Bucks Mills insulated him from all that. The village was built from natural materials; granite hewed from the cliff sides, Welsh slate or thatched roofs from local reed beds, timber from local forests. Technology was replaced by timelessness. But it was typical of the man, with his boundless energy and permanent need to be doing something useful, that one of the first task he set himself was the complete restoration of a cottage.

Bucks Mills is a strange and wildly beautiful village, in a deep valley that faces almost due north across Bideford Bay, not into one of our coastal seas but into the mighty Atlantic itself. When Rudston and Mollie first discovered it, it was almost cut off from land, being reached by a macadam track that wound for nearly two miles down the steep, lush sides of the valley with a gradient of 1 in 7 in places.

The village is built along the foot of the valley, on either side of the mill leat that is channelled the length of the village between granite walls and tunnels, and forms the dividing line between two great estates. The houses to the east of the stream belonged until quite recently to the Pinecoffin estate and some have never been sold, though the family house, some three miles away on the cliff top, is now a hotel.

The other estate, Walland Carey, was long ago broken up, and the cottages to the west of the stream have been in private hands for very many years. The village appears not to predate , and the native villagers showed a different lineage from the short, square-built, fair-skinned Devonians who are of Saxon origin. Bucks Mills men and women, the Braunds of Bucks, were tall, swarthy, dark-eyed and handsome.