ANNA BRAY AND THE TAVISTOCK VICARAGE GARDEN

Anna Eliza Bray (1790–1883) was a writer who lived in Tavistock between 1822 and 1857. She had married the antiquarian Charles Alfred Stothard in February 1818, when she was twenty-eight, but was widowed three years later. In May 1821, while he was drawing the stained glass windows of St Andrew's Church, Bere Ferrers, her husband fell from a ladder and was killed. Anna gave birth to their daughter, Blanche, in the following month but the baby died in February 1822. At the end of that year Anna married the vicar of Tavistock, Edward Atkyns Bray, the son of the Duke’s steward, also an Edward Bray. They lived in the vicarage, which had been newly built in 1818, until her husband died in 1857, when Anna moved back to London.

While she was in Tavistock Anna corresponded with the then Poet Laureate Robert Southey, who visited her in the vicarage once at Christmas 1836. Their correspondence was published in 1836 as The Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy. In her letters to Southey Anna described her delight in the vicarage garden, which occupies the former abbey precinct. It was planned and planted by her husband in an informal design to show off the architectural remains of the medieval abbey, which include Betsy Grimbal’s Tower at the front and the Still House in the south-east corner. In one of her letters Anna complained that the ivy grew too quickly over these architectural features.

To provide interest throughout the year Bray had planted the garden with evergreens, which included standard and variegated laurel, bay, cedar, cypress, holly and juniper. These plants grow well in the acid soil of Tavistock, which, on the windward edge of Dartmoor, receives its fair share of rain.

There was also a Tea Tree, Melaleuca alternifolia, which Bray had replanted from the adjacent Abbey House garden where he had previously lived. He trained the branches over a framework so that when the tips rooted they formed a bower. In the centre, as a seat, he had placed an ancient stone, which probably came from the Abbey church. Anna also described enthusiastically a majestic Cedar of Lebanon, Cedrus libani. However, the Tavistock canal feeder channel which ran through the garden, she referred to unfavourably as a ditch.

At the time the vicarage had a veranda, which Bray had designed, in front of the drawing room windows. Climbing plants trained up the trelliswork, included clematis, honeysuckle, climbing hydrangea and a flowering quince. The veranda later rotted away, so no traces remain. There was also a thatched building in the garden, against the boundary wall to the west of the house. This was used by the Brays either as a walking shed for taking outdoor exercise when it was raining, or as a summer house.

Anna recorded that there were two inscribed granite standing stones in the garden (in 1868 a third was added). They had Latin inscriptions and had been placed in the garden by her husband.

One of these had been part of a pavement in West Street, but from 1780 was used as a foot bridge over the mill leat. Bray took it to Abbey House in 1804, and when he moved into the vicarage in 1818 placed it in the south west corner of the garden, near the drawing room, planting ivy around it.

The second stone had been noticed in September 1804 at Buckland Monachorum. In 1831 Bray found that it was still there but lying in a roadway. The lord of the manor of Maristow, Sir Ralph Lopes, offered to give it to him if he organised transport for it to Tavistock. It was then taken by wagon and horses to the vicarage garden where it was erected in the south-east corner and became known as the Buckland Stone.

A third inscribed stone had also been known since 1804, being used as a gatepost to a field on Roborough Down, but the farmer was then unwilling to part with it. After the Brays' time at the vicarage, in 1868, Mr Hastings Russell, who became the 9th Duke of Bedford in 1872, exchanged it for a new gatepost and brought it to Tavistock, siting it in the vicarage garden near the footbridge over the canal. It became known as the Roborough Down Stone.

It is assumed that the Latin inscriptions on all three stones indicate that they were pre-Christian, dating from the second to third centuries AD and that they originally marked graves. The Buckland Monachorum Stone bears the inscription Sabinus son of Maccodechet; the West Street Stone commemorates Nepranus son of Conbevus; and the Roborough Down Stone is for Dubunnus the smith son of Enabarrus. In 1873 an inscription in Ogham characters (an early medieval alphabet) was discovered on the edge of this stone.