My friends the Goldsmiths, of Canberra, Australia, sent me a Christmas letter as they have for many years. This time they had special news of their moving to Tasmania, where they will be near their daughter and husband, who live on a 68 acre property in the middle north of the island near the township of Deloraine. John Goldsmith is a retired city engineer of Canberra; whilst his wife's home was on Tasmania. She is a descendant of the MacCarthy's of West Down House, her grandfather having been born there. They preceded the Bosanquet family and came there from Florence. According to a small catalogue of their sale when they left Bradworthy they possessed some beautiful works of fine art from the Italian city. The ancestral home of the MacCarthy's was Yaglier castle, County Cork. The late Miss Mary Vanstone remembered them as a child and friends of her parents when her family lived at Ryal farm. MacCarthy descendants today live in America and Australia, One member of the family, Dermod, died in infancy and is buried in our Churchyard. I thought the island of Tasmania was a good place to live, I stayed at Launceston, named after the Cornish town. The River Tamar flowed nearby.
Looking over some old copies of the Hartland Chronicle recently I came across a report of a “badger dig”. It amazed me how the writer described with enthusiasm, glorifying, as it were, the “badger hunting party,” organised by Mr. Bassett (of Holsworthy) “a mighty hunter whose fame had spread far and wide.” One would think he was hunting the big creatures of the jungle instead of one small English wild animal. The report stated that the party arrived with bill-hooks, crowbars, pickaxes, mattocks and two pairs of rough coated terriers. They soon found a badger holt at Etson and dug out and bagged “an unwieldy brute with a cruel looking snout.” Several people sat around to “watch the sport”. Then they all tucked in to Mrs. Bassett's “ample lunch.” As a boy in the Bradworthy north area I remember going up the Torridge valley from Atworthy to Horton Brake, where there were several badger holts, hoping to see one of the pretty animals peep out. No luck! This was before it was thought that badgers carried TB.