Poachers

On the 9th October 1888, the pioneer Dartmoor photographer Robert Burnard, sometime secretary of the Dartmoor Preservation Association, travelled to Dartmeet to take a picture of Daniel Learnan, agricultural worker and renowned peat cutter. The caption in Burnard's photographic album reads that Learnan was "a great fisherman; not innocent, so it is said, of occasional poaching". The portrait is of a white bearded man in battered clothes, with a large fishing rod in one hand and a gaff hook in the other, a mischievous smile upon his face.

It is said that there wasn't a rock or pool on the Dart and its many tributaries that Learnan didn't know and could readily find in the dark. Even as a legitimate fly fisherman, Daniel was renowned. William Crossing tells us that Learnan and his kind were "born and reared in that land of streams, they know the most likely spots to afford sport, and being keen observers of the state of the weather and the water, can tell the most killing fly to use on all occasions. Men like Daniel Leaman and Will Mann could always depend upon filling their baskets with trout, and if there were salmon in the Dart, knew where to find them".

Forty years ago, old folk on the Moor told me that Daniel Leaman and Will Mann (a fellow labourer and peat cutter who hailed from Hexworthy) might, if they were particularly in need of a meal, gaff out a salmon or two, and could tickle or guddle endless numbers of trout, but favoured - as natural sportsmen - the more legitimate approach of rod and line. They looked askance at the idea that any riparian owner might or should claim ownership of the fish in the river, William Crossing remarks, "their flies they made themselves, and that was the only part of their tackle that they took any trouble about. A pliant rod or a silk and hair line was a matter of no moment to them. They could make a cast with a rod as stiff

Dartmoor Poachers
By John Bainbridge

as a hop pole as well as most fishermen with an expensive Copham. and as for their line - well, it cost them threepence 'in to Ashburton'."

It isn't recorded whether Leaman and Mann poached other game apart from fish, though it is likely that pheasants, rabbits and hares fell victim to their country skills. Many woodlands around the borders of Dartmoor were strictly preserved for at least some periods during the years 1700 to 1900.1 recall the late Mr Jack Simpson, Lord of the Manor of Spitchwick, showing me a man trap up at the manor house in the 1980s. I was minded of the description of such a trap in Richard Jefferies book The Gamekeeper at Home, written at a time when Leaman and Mann were active: the trap is almost precisely similar to the common rat trap or gin still used to destroy vermin, but greatly exaggerated in size, so that if stood on end it reaches to the waist, or above. The jaws of this iron wolf are horrible to contemplate - rows of serrated projections, which fit into each other when closed, alternating with spikes a couple of inches long, like tusks. To set the trap you have to stand on the spring - the weight of a man is about sufficient to press it down; and, to avoid danger to the person preparing this little surprise, a band of iron can be pushed forward to hold the spring while the catch is put into position, and the machine itself is hidden among the bushes or covered with dead leaves. Now touch the pan with a stout walking stick - the jaws cut it in two in the twinkling of an eye. They seem to snap together with a vicious energy, powerful enough to break the bone of the leg; and assuredly no man ever got free whose foot was once caught by those terrible teeth.

In the earlier years of the nineteenth

century, every walk in the countryside must have been fraught with danger from such well-placed man traps and spring guns. The most likely victim of these 'terrible engines' was not the skilled local poacher, who would be wary and knowledgeable when entering the wooded coverts, but the naturalist on the lookout for specimens, the literary gentleman or artist seeking inspiration, the early rambler and, most likely of all, the local labourer and his family desperate for firewood, nuts and mushrooms. The Victorian writer and social commentator Sydney Smith declared, in the pages of The Edinburgh Review, that 'there is a sort of horror in thinking of a whole land filled with lurking engines of death...'

This is not to suggest that Dartmoor was as well preserved as other woodland up country. Tradition suggests that there was some toleration of local poachers, and the open moorland was more or less un-policeable. In recent decades there were times when gangs from the cities made outrageous raids on Dartmoor rivers; carrying out a massive slaughter of fish. But these mercenary individuals had little in common with the local poacher out for "something for the pot".

Many years ago I knew an elderly poacher of the old school who I yarned with on many occasions. He had the reputation of being the village 'ne'er do well' but he had a kindly heart, and many a struggling neighbour would find a brace of pheasants or a basket of trout on their doorstep when they got up in the morning.

Fred, as I shall call him, had been poaching the Dartmoor rivers and woodland estates for some fifty years back in the Seventies. He was very much in the tradition of Daniel Leaman and Will Mann, knew the Dartmoor countryside intimately and had a number of poaching adventures.

Fred simply did not believe that any one person could claim ownership of the running waters of a Dartmoor river nor of the fish therein. He would often use a fish spear, made for him by the local blacksmith, as he prowled the dark pools in search of salmon. He knew where the fish would rest up and it is said that he could get a catch with almost every thrust. He would take pheasants without a gun, creeping up on the birds at dusk or early morn and finishing them instantly with a blow from his stick.

When I knew Fred he was elderly and could walk but a short distance, his poaching days long over, but he had many a tale of Dartmoor to tell and could remember hearing the poaching adventures of Daniel Leaman and Will Mann. Despite declining fish stocks there are still such traditional poachers on the Moor, but they are a dying breed.