RUMBLING BRIDGE
To walk the path to the Rumbling Bridge on a spring afternoon is to leave the sunlit world behind. You descend into a holloway, a cleft in the land carved not by footfall but by the ceaseless industry of water. The air cools, grows damp. The scent is of wet stone, of moss, of the deep, iron-rich breath of the earth itself. Above, the sky is a filigree of new-leafed birch and oak, the light dappled and uncertain. You are entering a gorge, an underland, where the normal rules of landscape feel suspended.
The bridge, when you reach it, is a thing of two minds: a modern road laid over a much older arch, a suture of dressed stone and tarmac across the wound of the gorge. But it is the sound, not the sight, that commands the place. It is a sound that precedes you and follows you, a low-frequency thrum that vibrates up through the soles of your boots and into the bone. This is the rumbling. It is the voice of the River Devon, amplified and echoed by the rock chamber it has spent millennia carving. The water, peat-brown and swollen with spring melt, chafes and scours the sandstone walls, its power made audible, tangible. The bridge is less a crossing than a listening post, a place to feel the deep grammar of the gorge being spoken.
Further down, the path narrows, clinging to the rockface. The rumbling sharpens into a percussive, grinding roar. This is the Devil’s Mill. The name is an old one, a piece of folk-geology seeking to explain the terrifying power on display. Here, the river crashes into a series of cauldron-like pools, its energy turned back on itself. It is not a smooth pouring but a violent churning, a hydraulic chaos that has drilled and blasted the rock into monstrous shapes. You can see why it was imagined as a mill; the water is a grinding agent, endlessly breaking down the solid world. The air is thick with atomised water, with negative ions that prickle the skin. It is a place of elemental fury, where the water is not merely flowing but is actively, violently, at work.
Yet all around this tumult, the delicate work of spring continues. Cushions of moss, impossibly green, swell with moisture. Ferns unfurl their croziers from the dark leaf-litter. A wren, its song a sudden, sharp reel against the water’s bass drone, flits between ivy strands. There is a profound contrast here, between the slow, patient violence of the geology and the quick, insistent pulse of the season. The water smashes and the moss grows. The rock erodes and the bird sings. It is a reminder that the land is never static; it is a process, a series of nested rhythms, from the geological deep-time of the gorge’s creation to the fleeting moment of a single, sun-struck afternoon.
Leaving the gorge, climbing back into the light and the quiet hum of the upper world, the sound of the Devil’s Mill lingers in the mind’s ear. It is the sound of time itself being ground away, of a landscape caught in a perpetual act of self-creation and self-destruction. The river’s work is never done. It is a place that gets under your skin, a memory that is as much a feeling - a vibration in the bones - as it is a sight. The mill grinds on, with or without witness, its dark, wet, thunderous work continuing long after you have gone.