WOODBURY SALTERTON NEWS

Holy Trinity Church

Children’s Film Night

Another of the popular film nights for children was held at the end of January. Children came into church with excitement, wearing their pyjamas or onesies and clutching duvets and pillows, and settled down to watch Madagascar. Debbie Jung and Jill Dupain sold popcorn, soft drinks, sweets and hot chocolate. £140 was raised for church funds.

March Coffee Morning

It is encouraging that more people than usual attended the February coffee morning. The March event is on the 4th, as always the first Saturday in the month, in church from 09.30 until 10.30. Bacon butties will be served with the coffee.

Monthly Craft Afternoons

These take place in the village hall on the last Wednesday of each month, from 13.00 until 16.00. These are proving a popular social event when anyone can bring their craft work and sit and chat to friends and enjoy tea, coffee and cake. If you would just like the company but don’t do a craft you are still welcome to join us for a chat. The March event will be on Wednesday 29th.

VILLAGE LUNCHES AT THE DIGGER’S REST

With the reopening of The Digger’s under new managers Simon and Nikki, we have been able to resume our monthly village lunches. The date is always the second Wednesday in the month and we meet at 12.00. The March meal will be on the 8th a chance to meet up with friends in the village and have a good chat. Anyone interested in joining us please contact Nikki at The Digger’s to book a place. All are welcome.

Katharine Wheeler

Hospiscare

COFFEE AND CAKE MORNINGS

FIRST TUESDAY OF EVERY MONTH

WOODBURY CHURCH ROOMS

10.00 - 12.00. All very welcome.

Woodbury Garden Club

TUESDAY 14 MARCH, 19.15 for 19.30

Woodbury Village Hall

Speaker, Rob Hutch, of Hutch House Plants, Exeter, will be talking about keeping house plants and also bringing a large selection for sale. Visitors welcome - £3.

MARCH SERVICES FOR ST ANDREW’S CHURCH, EXTON

Sunday 6 March - Evening Prayer, Revd Roz Harrison, 18.00.

12 March - Holy Communion, Revd Bill Lemmey, 09.30.

19 March - Lay-led service, 09.30.

Preparing For Easter In Exton

Good Friday (7 April)

The annual Easter Egg Hunt will be held in the Goosefield, from 10.30 until 12.00. Coffee and hot cross buns will be served and everyone, no matter how young or old, is very welcome. Keep your fingers crossed for the same glorious weather we enjoyed last time!

The week before Easter

Let’s keep the tradition going of decorating gates, drives, windowsills, trees, doors, etc. with Spring/Easter themed displays. Easter gardens, flowers, eggs, rabbits – all are welcome! (There were even Easter dinosaurs last year). Whilst a visit from the Exton Easter Bunny, delivering chocolate eggs to each participating household cannot always be guaranteed, this lovely tradition makes people smile, cheers up a potentially lonely dog-walker, and helps unleash some of that latent creativity in Exton residents. If you’ve not tried before, why not make 2023 your Easter Decoration Year? Liz Williams

Exton Garden Club

The speaker at our February meeting was Ben Candlin from Exmouth who gave us an interesting talk on Adventurous Plants. This covered unusual perennials and tropical plants which it is possible for us to include in our gardens. Ben is also a working gardener and had some excellent photos, showing how it is possible to have a good display. Many of these plants are evergreen with few flowers, but there is plenty of colour and interesting shapes which give a sculptural effect. One of the gardens had a lovely backdrop of these plants with some hardy flowering perennials in the front to provide colour. There are of course the ones we already have in our gardens, such as the cannas and banana plants, which have good colour and impressive leaves. Ben suggested introducing one or two of these or a castor oil plant (Fatsia Japonica) and Arisaema from bulbs to give a bit of extra interest and shape. He had several books on growing tropical plants, the earliest by William Robertson published in the 1800s. Ben brought a selection of plants, some of which I’m sure will be seen in Exton gardens. The next meeting will be the AGM on 3 March and the following meeting is brought forward to 31 March due to the April date being on Good Friday. Ben Carlson will be talking about pelargoniums.

Eileen Pratt

Woodbury Parish Celebrations For King Charles Iii Coronation

SATURDAY 6 AND SUNDAY 7 MAY

Plans to celebrate the coronation of King Charles III across the parish are well underway and we are now able to share more detail of the weekend celebrations. Further details will follow, so please look out for updates in Woodbury News and on posters and Facebook.

Saturday 6 May Afternoon Woodbury 15.00 to 17.00

Woodbury village green - Afternoon tea in the marquee. Afternoon tea £6 and optional glass of fizz £1 to toast our new King.

Saturday 6 May Evening Woodbury from 19.00 onwards

Woodbury village green – An evening of music (performed by All Jazzed Up), dancing & firework finale. Maltsters bar available in the marquee. BBQ £5 (vegetarian and coeliac options available). Hog Roast £6.50.

Sunday 7 May Morning Woodbury 10.30

Woodbury village green marquee - Combined Church Service White Cross Community and Christ Church. All welcome.

Sunday 7 May Afternoon Exton from 13.00

Goosefield arrival from 13.00.

14.00 to 15.00 - Professor Bumble to entertain. Children’s fancy dress with prizes.

15.30 – Children’s afternoon tea party – food and drink provided for children.

17.00 onwards - Jazz trio and welcome drink provided. BBQ run by the Puffing Billy, and bar run by the Goosefield Committee.

Woodbury 7 May from 15.00

Village Green Street Party from 15.00 onwards. BYO food. Squash provided, tea/coffee for sale. Royal theme fancy dress (optional). Some tables/chairs available but bring picnic blanket just in case. The Maltsters and White Hart open for beverages and toilets. If weather bad, this will be held in the marquee.

Woodbury Salterton

Details of Saturday and Sunday celebrations to follow.

Roundandabout Death

Maureen Wright (16 June 1940 - 28 January 2023.

We are sorry to report the death of Maureen Wright on 28 January. We send commiserations to Alan and their family. Maureen’s funeral is due to take place as we go to press; a full obituary will be included next month.

Welcome

Welcome to Natalie Bell-Moyse of Willow Hair and Wellbeing, formerly Salon No. 8. We wish her every success.

Mx5 Owners Club

The photo below taken on 5 February on a lovely sunny Sunday morning shows some cars of members of the MX5 owners club from Torbay to Taunton. We would just like to say a big thankyou to Lee and Luke at the White Hart for providing us with a fab breakfast, before we set off for an open-topped drive around East Devon. The guys made us feel very welcome and are keen to provide a service to our community. Judging by their willingness to open especially for us, I would like to encourage you all to use their facilities. Please give them a try; you will not be disappointed.

Nita Goffron

WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO NOW?

The idea for this article comes from a most thought-provoking piece on Thought For The Day, broadcast on Tuesday 7 February at 07.50 on Radio 4. If it’s still available, do listen to it. However, I am going to summarise it now for those who can’t. It was given by Rabbi Laura Naomi JannerKlausner only a couple of days after the terrible news of the earthquakes in both Turkey and Syria. She said: ‘[following the] earthquakes the death toll is still rising (then about 4,000 dead). It has happened to lands still traumatised, one of them still shaking from years of war … [Our] world leaders have rightly pledged to send support. As I watched the news from the safety of my home, I alternated between imagining how horrendous it is, and turning away to retreat. As I did I was reminded of a client of mine who is a coach working with those affected by natural disaster, who told me that humans can live with the facts of natural and other disasters because generally we just don’t believe they will happen to us.’

‘This can lead to two responses,’ she said: ‘On the one hand it can be a good thing to build a retreat like this – a coping mechanism to distance ourselves from natural disaster. On the other hand, it can allow us to be excused from sustaining a vital empathy to respond to distant disasters or catastrophes such as these earthquakes.’

She then referred to the Hebrew Bible: ‘Elijah also retreats when he feels under threat (by hiding in a cave). God’s response is to say “Why are you there? Ge[t] out!” (spoken in a cockney accent). So Elijah stands outside the cave and experiences the extremes of climate: earthquakes, avalanches, tornadoes and fire - cataclysmic sights and sounds.’

Significantly the Rabbi says: ‘In the aftermath of an earthquake, every so often rescuers stand in complete silence - just listening. They are trying to hear any sound of life obscured by noise of moving rubble. Elijah also experienced silence after the earthquake and after having felt the presence of God. But that wasn’t enough. Most important is what happened next: Elijah was commanded to act! Not just to listen or hide in a cave!

So the quiet voice of God asked him: “So, Elijah, what are you going to do now?” The story of Elijah is helpful when we are forced to deal with so much noise and pressure in our own life. Like Elijah, we need to move out of the safety of our own caves. Rabbi Janner-Klausner asked us to imagine ourselves along with the earthquake rescuers listening intently. Can we allow ourselves to hear even the slightest still small voice? She concluded by asking ‘So, what are we going to do now?’

In the Christian tradition, we can reply “Amen”. But this means (probably) “So be it”. So be “what”? In response, I repeat her final question: ‘What are we going to do now?’

Rev Bill Lemmey (with a lot of Rabbinical help!)

From Peter Payne

Can I say how much I enjoyed reading Gill Selley's article in the last edition of Woodbury News entitled Globe Hill. Like all of Gill’s articles, it was well researched, relevant and very entertaining. Gill has been a regular contributor to Woodbury News for a number of years now and I congratulate and thank her.

From Chris Quantick

We've been catching the 09.30 'T' bus into Exeter since it came into service late last year. The same bus does a circular route and leaves again at 11.00 and 13.00. It’s a Dartline bus that is very prompt. So far the driver has been the same charming young man called Ross, who is very considerate and a very good driver. It goes via Topsham and sometimes, for a change, we alight there. It gets into town at around 10.10 and the return 'T' buses leave from outside NEXT at 10.20; 12.20 and 13.50. If you wish to stay in town longer there are buses, going via Greendale, leaving the bus station until the last one at 17.35.

You could in fact, if the times suit you better, catch the 'T' bus to Topsham, alight there and catch another to Exmouth and do the same in reverse or catch the '58' bus back but would need to make sure you get the correct connection times.

I really cannot fault this service (except I’d like it to have later times back) and recommend everyone to try it. It really is a case of use it or lose it.

From David Whitton

I share Ken Perry's frustration with the slow progress of the Neighbourhood Plan.

On its website, the Government says "Neighbourhood Planning is a new way for communities to have a say in the future of the places where they live and work. It gives you the power to produce a plan with real legal weight that directs development in your local area."

I invite those responsible for producing the Plan to let the community know:

 The governance arrangements for the production of the Neighbourhood Plan

 An update on the status of the Plan

 The programme with key milestone dates for completing and publishing the Plan

 Steps that are being taken to ensure programme compliance and the earliest possible Plan publication date.

DEVON CPRE’S ANNUAL BEST CHURCHYARD COMPETITION

The Devon branch of the countryside charity, Campaign to Protect Rural England, is once again on the lookout for award-worthy churchyards across the county. Since Devon CPRE launched its Best Churchyard Competition six years ago, the charity has come across inspiring stories of communities pulling together to make the most of the green spaces around their churches and chapels.

Is the green space around your local church a welcoming sanctuary for people and wildlife? What has your community done to make your churchyard a place for people of all ages, regardless of their faith or mobility? Have you taken steps to increase biodiversity in your churchyard? What innovations have you used to encourage people to use and enjoy the churchyard, or to help people to find graves in pursuit of historical or family research? Whatever your community has done to help your churchyard thrive, Devon CPRE wants to hear from you. The deadline for entries is 31 March 2023. The winning churchyard receives a cheque for £200 and a sustainable oak plaque to display with pride. The results will be announced in September. To enter, visit: www.cpredevon. org.uk/competitions/devons-best-churchyard-competition/

Woodbury Twinning Association

Wine Tasting Evening

Join us for a fun quiz testing your knowledge of wines! Try a variety of different wines with accompanying nibbles. 25 MARCH IN THE CHURCH ROOMS

STARTING AT 19.30

Members: £15 Guests: £18.

Tim Bourne, our President, and members of Exeter Southernhay & Topsham

Rotary Club invite you to join us for

Our Popular Quiz Night

AT WOODBURY VILLAGE HALL EX5 1LX

FRIDAY 31 MARCH, 18.30 FOR 19.00

Entry still only £10 per person to include pasty (vegetarian option available) and salad, and dessert

Cash bar and raffle

Proceeds to Devon Wildlife Trust and Hospiscare

For further information and a booking sheet, please email suebury@aol.com

CENTENARY OF THE TEA BUNGALOW (information sourced from the Dupain family)

In 1913 James Marley went to Canada with his wife, Cecil Mary. Their daughter, Constance, was born in 1915 on Cortes Island, off Vancouver Island. The family returned to England after WWI and bought a plot of land from Sunnyhaye Fruit Farm in Sanctuary Lane, near the junction with the B3180 across Woodbury Common. The area was open fields on which they built a Boulton and Paul wooden bungalow in 1920. They ran a chicken farm there but in 1923 visiting friends remarked on the quality of the cream tea and inspired Cecil Marley to start selling teas.

The standard tea initially included two scones and a selection of sponge cakes, which were served on a two-tier cake-stand with doilies. Strawberries from the Fruit Farm and local Devonshire clotted cream were essential elements; jam was initially home-made blackberry jelly but later changed to strawberry and the butter pats were handmade. Leaf tea was always used; in later years young waitresses had to be taught to use a tea strainer. The only fuels were solid fuel for the Aga, bottled gas and paraffin until the late 50s. Cooking had to be fresh every day and if there was unexpected demand, extra scones had to be hastily baked. Orders were not written down but delivered to the kitchen from memory; the aim was a personal service, even though over 200 people might be served in an afternoon at peak times. The first tearoom was in the spare bedroom of the bungalow, seating 15 people.

A full cream tea cost one shilling (5p). To accommodate more visitors, a wing was soon built at right angles to the bungalow for 30 customers. A further extension increased the capacity to 70 with a further 30 able to sit in the garden. In the early days there was a separate room at the back for chauffeurs, reached by a back path, but most customers still arrived by pony and trap, bicycle or on foot. The tea rooms were coloured yellow and brown, as was the china. The knives were bone handled and all the washing up was by hand, of course. Staff were brought from Woodbury in Stamp’s taxi. The Union Flag was flown when the tea garden was open. Fears that WWII would stop customers coming because of petrol and food rationing proved wrong. Scotch pancakes were served as a substitute for scones and proved so popular that they remained on the menu thereafter. When supplies were low, the basic offer was a boiled egg tea, using eggs from Sunnyhaye Farm. The WWII air raid shelter came in useful for keeping perishable items cool and is still visited occasionally by school groups. Polish airmen based at Exeter airport were frequent customers during WWII and dipped the wings of their fighter aeroplanes when flying over. Douglas Bader was one famous visitor amongst the many service personnel. The ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn was another, brought by her grandparents who lived in Exmouth. Some regular visitors donated trees and shrubs for the garden and seats in memory of loved ones.

Constance Dupain took over the business when her mother died in 1955 and her family moved into the Tea Bungalow but of course she had long been involved in helping, joining officially when she left Exmouth Grammar School. Constance was a keen hockey player and represented Devon. Just after WWII, Constance married John Dupain and their home was a wooden bungalow next door to the Tea Bungalow. Their sons, Nigel and Simon, were born there.

In 1985 Constance retired and closed the Tea Bungalow business. Cream was then £1.40 per pound, in contrast to one shilling and six pence (7½p) when she started serving teas. In the final year, a cream tea cost £1.40 and a plain tea was £1.00. Constance continued to live in the bungalow until she went into care, a year before she died in 2001. A tribute to her stressed the high standards and politeness that were hallmarks of the business. In 2011 the courtesy, attention and good value that she offered to all visitors were recalled in an article entitled Bring back proper Devon cream teas. The Tea Bungalow is now the home of Hannah Dupain and her family.

Carolyn Keep

Rspb Aylesbeare Common

The heavy rains before Christmas have been pleasingly absent in the last couple of months, giving way to dry and sometimes frosty weather. And snow – we spent a Wednesday morning in January working while it was snowing all over us, using chainsaws and hand tools. They were character-building conditions, and we were joined by brand new volunteers who returned the following week undeterred.

The drier conditions make our winter scrub work a little easier all round: less muddy clothing to dry out at the end of the day, easier underfoot without the need for wellies, easier to drive around the reserves. In wet weather we’d soon ruin many of our tracks so we avoid those that are saturated, muddy or steep. Excess rain and mechanical disturbance (as well as footfall and mountain bikes) all contribute to erosion. Also a prolonged dry spell provides us with a window to do some swaling. This intervention is only possible in winter, outside the breeding season, and when the vegetation is dry enough to burn. Some years we’ll have no such window of dry weather, with the right sort of wind, or perhaps our work schedule or resources don’t accommodate it.

Swaling is the controlled burning of standing heathland vegetation. Sometimes, we have bonfires to dispose of our cut scrub, but swaling involves setting light to the ground vegetation instead. In lowland heathland management, we burn small areas at a time, perhaps 20m by 20m.

If done correctly, in ideal conditions, it may look dramatic but the moving line of fire is slow. We begin the fire downwind so that it burns slowly and well, against the wind, and we mow fire breaks around the area. When the wind is too gusty or fast it may be too risky, so we can’t do it. But if there’s no breeze at all, it can be hard to get it going. The idea is that the vegetation above ground is burned out and we create the equivalent of a scrape, with less soil disturbance. Often we’ll choose areas where tractor or bulldozer work would be tricky, because swaling is a great solution there. In the spring, the area recovers with green shoots from the gorse and heather, as well as creating space for seedlings to germinate. It’s an immediately destructive intervention, as many of our management tools are, but in the following five to ten years, it provides valuable pioneer habitat within the landscape. We can use swaling to open up areas and regenerate them in ways we wouldn’t otherwise be able to. Sometimes our grazing animals can do this, but if it’s too dense they simply don’t bother going in.

As with all our winter scrub work on the heaths, we dot about; we don’t just hit one big area. We are always aiming to create that useful buzzword in conservation land management – a mosaic. Within a lowland heathland site, that habitat mosaic looks like a mix of different age structures, with a percentage of bare ground, ideally relatively small in scale because many of our specialist species (eg the silver studded blue butterfly, adders, invertebrates of all sorts) will not easily roam and colonise new areas far apart.

At the beginning of the year we began a new Countryside Stewardship agreement, and we have started work for this, including some scrub clearance in the less-visited St Mary in the Willows and also Manor Common. We have undertaken an agreement with the land owner to manage Manor Common and one of the first stages of this will involve fencing it so that we can start to increase the grazing with native breeds of cows and ponies (Dartmoors and Exmoors). Grazing is probably the single most valuable intervention we have in managing heathland for wildlife. We can only throw so much petrol and diesel at it, with our chainsaws and tractors. We’ve talked about it before, but heathland is a landscape of the pastoral economy, which itself is now defunct on much common land like ours. So we must strive to emulate its workings because within southern England especially, it has come to be relied upon almost exclusively by so many specialist species such as Dartford warbler and nightjar.

Fiona Daggett, Warden

Editor’s Note : In order to maximise submitted copy and photographs into Woodbury News, it may be necessary to reduce the size of some items. The Editorial team will attempt to do this as carefully as possible.

THE WOODLAND TRUST - YONDER OAK WOOD

Local a cappella singers are lifting their voices with reworked folk songs – ‘tree shanties’ - to celebrate the creation of a new wood in East Devon. The Woodland Trust hosted the first mass planting at its new Yonder Oak Wood near the Exe Estuary to the sound of music as hundreds of people came together to plant 13,000 trees.

The tree planting is the first step in the charity’s mission to create a new haven for wildlife, and they invited local people to join this mammoth task at free planting events in February.

The SongFishers, a group of troubadours from Lympstone, have been inspired to adapt traditional folk songs to include the new wood and serenaded tree planters during the plantings.

The new wood, which was named last year in a public vote, sits in a hidden valley just two miles south of Woodbury. It features fragments of woodland that the Trust have already cleared of invasive laurel; and stately veteran oak trees, once part of hedgerows, dot the landscape like living legends. The Trust’s vision for the site includes new woods, open glades and wood pasture, all of which will create a rich mosaic of habitats.

Woodland Trust site manager Paul Allen, said: ‘Creating a new wooded landscape that will host wildlife way beyond our lifetimes and be resilient to the changing climate is no mean feat. The mass tree planting is the first step in what will be a decades-long journey to bring wildlife back to this site.

Trees are a great natural solution to the climate crisis, soaking up CO2 and delivering oxygen, and it’s great to see so many people wanting to step up and join this effort.’

Over 400 students from local primary schools in Exmouth, Lympstone, Woodbury and Exeter have been getting really involved in the project. Lessons in school to gear them up for tree planting kicked off in December, and now these budding tree activists have headed to Yonder Oak Wood.

The Trust’s engagement and communications officer, Rachel Harries, has been cleaning her stock of spades in preparation, and said:

‘Planting 13,000 trees is an epic task but we’re finding that so many people are wanting to get involved in this project right from the very beginning –there’s a real sense of community coming together about it. With nature in crisis and climate change affecting cont’d./...