David Venner
ROUTES TO THE PAST
David Venner at the start of the Parrett Trail in Somerset, taken by his wife, Sue, who accompanied him A beautiful misty morning on the River Parrett Trail, where David and Sue embarked on their unusual ancestral journey
TIP
Find a freely available digitis ed copy of The Visitation of the County of D evon in the Year 1620 (1872) on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/visitationcount02camdgoog
Walking through our ancestors’ ‘home country’, rather than driving to each farm, village or town where they lived, is an ideal way of seeing the country as they would have seen it, of actually experiencing the half-hour walk to school or the five-mile walk to the nearest market town. Naturally, many features of life have changed – the growth of settlements, fast travel and ROUTES TO THE PAST instant communication to name just three – but the lie of the land is much the same and often old buildings survive to take us straight back to the times of our earliest known ancestors.
I had always wanted to walk alongside the River Parrett from source to mouth. Or at least, as an adult I had longed to do this. I grew up near the river’s mouth, at the small Somerset village of Combwich (pronounced to rhyme with Wurzel Gummidge!). Back then, the idea of walking very far along the riverbank didn’t enter my head. As a child, my horizons were limited to the family dairy farm just outside the village, the hilltop primary school overlooking the Parrett, and the riverside common where we congregated (‘hung out’ in today’s parlance) and played cricket and football.
Continuing my education in Bridgwater (once a significant port and the Parrett’s lowest bridging point) kept me firmly within reach of the river. Much later, when genealogy became a passion, I discovered that the Venners were originally Fenners, and came from the South Somerset town of Crewkerne, not far from the river’s source just over the county border in Dorset. So it was here that my journey started, on a drizzly autumnal morning.