Brent's hair shirt

In the course of our second visit to Buckfast Abbey last week, we came across an important relic, indeed a genuine relic, the hair shirt once worn by St. Thomas More, the wearing of such a shirt being 'freely undertaken as an act of devotion'.

The shirt

The shirt, having passed through various hands over the centuries since the owner's execution by Henry VIII, arrived in Buckfast Abbey in 2011, where it is now housed in one of the chapels on the south side of the nave. The small black square just below the crucifix - with the small size being something of a puzzle, but perhaps hair shirts fold down smaller than the sort of shirts that I wear.

St. Bridget

One of the hands was Syon Abbey, then housed in Marley House in South Brent. Coincidentally, Syon Abbey and the Bridgettine Order of nuns which staffed it, started out under the auspices of Sheen Palace, with East Sheen being the place in west London where BH spent the first half of her childhood.

A listed flat

Curious, we asked Bing about Marley House, a grade II listed building, to find that it has been sold off for flats. I think the small number of surviving nuns were relocated to Plymouth.

Poirot

Marley House being near the small town called South Brent, I then started to wonder how this last came by the name, there being no North Brent in the vicinity. The relatively recently invented London Borough of Brent is named for a river there. While the Brent oil field was named for a 'B' water bird by Shell, being the second such field in the North Sea. But South Brent is on the River Avon which makes its way to the sea at Burgh Island, made famous by the episode of Poirot made there, 'Evil Under the Sun'. There is a modest hill to the north of South Brent called Brent Hill, but if South Brent was named for Brent Hill to the north, that just moves the problem to the hill.

The proper map

Then BH remembers that there is a place called Brent Tor, on the top of which is perched a small church. A tor somewhere to the north of Tavistock, nowhere near South Brent, a tor which she claims I have driven past on at least one occasion. So we get out all our various maps of Dartmoor to see what we can find.

North Brentor all present and correct, north west of a place called Mary Tavy, twinned with a place called Peter Tavy, just the other side of the river of that name. On some of our maps there was a place called South Brentor, no more than a cluster of houses. But Brent Tor proper was nowhere to be found, outside of a book about the churches of Devon. Back home, we go online with Ordnance Survey and it turns out that Brent Tor is in a south western protuberance of Dartmoor, lopped off many Dartmoor maps to save a bit of space on the page. A place which clearly needs to be visited next time we are in the area; compensation for not having got to the bottom of South Brent.

PS 1: I am reminded that Dartmoor is named for the River Dart, above which we were staying, in the same way as Exmoor is named for the rather bigger River Exe. While Bodmin Moor is both spelt as two words and named for the town. Also home to the famous Jamaica Inn.

OED

PS 2: not much help from OED, beyond telling us that calling a hill a brent is about as uninformative as calling a river an avon. And nicely illustrating the distortions brought into view by the fish eye lens of my Microsoft telephone. Why can't all the tricky software in such cameras correct for such things?

Reference 1: https://syonabbeysociety.wordpress.com/. Seemingly dormant since 2017.