This week’s column is provided by Bideford and District Archive. The area covered by the community archive is geographically large and some of the outer edges still hold shimmering echoes of their Celtic past.  For those of us who like our history ancient, this is the place for us. On 21^st June at 4pm there will be a service at St Nectan’s Church in Stoke celebrating the saint who gives his name to the church and whose festival falls on 17 June. 

Richard Pearse Chope (1862-1938), lover of Hartland and St Nectan’s Church in Stoke, wrote about the isolated community in his ‘Book of Hartland’ and reviewed the ancient sources for the life of St Nectan. Some more recent research has been published by Stephen Hobbs.

Legend tells us that this Celtic saint moved into the Hartland area and on 17 June he challenged ruffians, possibly in connection with cattle stealing, and was beheaded. A spring emerged where his head fell. St Nectan’s well is in the centre of Stoke and it is said that his blood still stains its stones. Foxgloves are said to have sprung up where his blood fell, so St Nectan is symbolised by the foxglove and the church will be decorated with them in June.

The valley from Hartland Abbey to the sea was the site of the foundation of the first abbey at Hartland. It was founded in 1050 by Gytha, the mother of Harold Godwinson, who famously lost the battle of Hastings in 1066. Gytha’s abbey was founded with 12 canons, according to the Domesday Book, not monks but clergymen living in a community.

After the battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror took the land, as he did all that of the defeated Saxon nobility. Subsequently the Norman French family Dynham (Dinan) benefitted from the land and refounded the abbey in the 12^thcentury. The modern, much altered buildings may retain some medieval foundations. 

The abbey survived until the Reformation and Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries overseen by Thomes Cromwell. It was closed in 1539, and the site was sold by Henry VIII to William Abbot, his sergeant of the wine cellar, who turned it into a private house – a destiny shared by most abbeys and monasteries closed by Henry VIII. In modern times the Abbey and evocative surrounding Hartland coastline and Quay have been used for many filming projects.