Bryony Tilsley: Stargazing in Dartmoor

Bryony Tilsley and her husband are planning a local astronomy event when their family undergoes a big change.

Bryony Tilsley, along with her husband Rob, is a founder of Dartmoor Skies, a U.K. charity that shares the beauty of astronomy with anyone who wants to experience it. She studied writing and choreography at Dartington College of Arts so she loves to bring art and science together. She finds stargazing therapeutic and would like to build an observatory on Dartmoor. She has lots of books, two cats and a dog.

This story originally aired on April 28, 2017.

Story Transcript

Hello! Hi! All right. Okay, so I’m going to talk a little bit about, um our journey setting up our organization. We are a small organization. We are in our early stages, but it’s something that feels like it’s growing and it’s going in a very exciting direction.

The reason why we started this is because basically my husband’s a nerd. He claims that he isn’t a nerd, but I’d just like to point out that he’s the chap over there with “Pi” on his T-shirt. That’s the number not the food group, so there [laughs]. He’s definitely a nerd. And it’s a lot about he’s kinda dragged me into that, slightly reluctantly.

One of his big loves is astronomy. So, a few years ago, myself and his family decided to come together and buy him a telescope. And my very first outing with him onto Dartmoor with this telescope was in a dark, cold carpark. I don’t know if anybody here knows Dartmoor. There’s a reservoir called Venford Reservoir; you drive past that, you go over a bridge, first carpark on the right-hand side.

There we were, him fiddling around, trying to get his telescope set up. Me, wrapped up in a pink, thick coat, going, “Oh my God, what have I done? What have I unleashed?”

And he gets the telescope set up and we look at a couple of things, and then he gets Jupiter in the viewfinder. And I’m having a look through this eyepiece, and there’s this planet, and it’s stripey, and I can see specks of light around it, which are the moons. And I can see it moving out of view of this telescope, and I just have this sensation of being on a planet that’s revolving. You don’t get that, you don’t feel the Earth spinning. You know that it is, but you don’t feel it. And that’s the first time in my life I’ve ever had the sensation of being on a planet that’s actually revolving and feeling that you’re part of something that’s so much bigger.

So this kind of nerdy journey starts to unfold, and eventually we decide that the thing to do is to go up to Kielder, where there’s an observatory. It’s beautiful. It’s in a dark-sky park. It’s really different – I mean we were really lucky on Dartmoor, but in Kielder, it’s -- you can see so much more in the sky. And this observatory is wonderful. They’ve got this amazing facility, and their energy and their generosity with it is fantastic and we book them for later events. The thing I really like about this is that – and we stayed in a converted church, I kinda felt like there was this nice little parallel between being in a church and doing nerdy science stuff in the evening.

And it’s a long drive back from Kielder down to Devon. It’s a ten-hour journey. And on the way back on that journey I’m sort of talking to him. “Why don’t you go to stuff like this in Devon? There’s nowhere on Dartmoor that does astronomy, which seems mad. It’s this amazing dark sky. Why isn’t anyone getting to enjoy it?”

And we kind of realize that actually what we’ve been doing with this telescope that we’ve got in our garage, on a very small scale what Kielder has been doing. We’ve got this telescope, we take it to friends and family, we set it up in their garden, we show them things in the sky, and they love it. We start to think, Well, why don’t we do something for the public?

So, in this ten-hour journey we start to plan what we’re going to do. We decide we’re going to do an event about Saturn. And we start kinda thinking about the things that we need to do, so we get home and we start picking a venue, and we start building a website, and we kinda do our social media thing and we start telling people what we’re gonna do, and the response is really amazing – people are really interested, they want to go. We start selling tickets, and it kinda feels like this thing’s starting to unfold.

And it’s kinda weird because both Rob and I come from an arts background and actually it’s quite tricky getting into the arts. It constantly feels like you’re having to fight against things, whereas this is just, like, people love it. They just want to be there.

So, we’ve been organizing things for a few weeks. We’re actually back with our family, visiting them in West Sussex. And I’ve got this glass of wine in my hand, and this little thought pops into my head. It’s like “Bryony, when was your last period?” And I’m like, “Oh, God, when was my last period?” And I kinda put this glass down, like, “Oh.”

So later on in the evening, Rob and I are like in his dad’s office on the sofa bed, and we’re like, “Ooh, my God!” and it’s really exciting and also very, very scary. We get home, I take a pregnancy test. It’s positive, and we’re like, “Oh, my God, what’re we going to do? Are we going to be parents? This is terrifying, why should we be responsible for a child? Umm, this can’t end well.”

So we carry on, organizing our event, and the only real difference is now I’m napping like a pro and really watching what I’m eating. I’m doing lots of research on the internet at the same time, going, “Right, don’t eat too much tuna, and don’t do this and don’t do that.” We’re taking it very seriously.

It gets to two days before our event, and this pain crosses across my belly and I’m like, “Mmm, this isn’t good.” I go to the hospital, I have a scan, they confirm, baby has not survived. It’s like this big, and the first time I’m meeting it I’m saying good-bye to it. ‘Cos it was tiny -- and then there’s lots these decisions you have to make and you don’t have any control over this decision, really, because it’s a decision, the decision you want to make is not an option. It’s not on the table. You just want to say, “Please give me back my baby.” 

And the other decision that we have to make is whether we carry on with the event that we planned. And Rob says to me, “Well, it’s down to you. If you want to do it, we’ll go ahead.” And I don’t know, maybe it’s this stubborn streak in me, but I’m like, “No, we’re gonna do this.” I think partly because I need something to distract me, but also because… I don’t like letting people down. It just seemed really daft that we planned this thing and suddenly we just wouldn’t do it. And we had friends coming down, so we’re like, “No, we’re gonna go ahead, we’re gonna do this.”

It’s not easy. I’m munching down painkillers and we’re both feeling really heartbroken, and actually what we really want to do is just kinda get into bed and fling a duvet over our heads and go, “No, actually, we don’t want to do that.”

But we do it, we do the event and on this day, I’m baking cakes and welcoming friends. And we get there and we set everything up, and it goes really well! People love it. You know, we show them Saturn, we show them Jupiter, we show them amazing nebulae and galaxies, and they love it and we have this amazing warm response to it.

And then right at the very end, the telescope is -- the very first one that we bought Rob is up – and I have a look through it. It’s actually set on Jupiter, and there it is – being beautiful and amazing, as Jupiter is -- and I just see it move out of view, and I just have this sensation that I’m anchored and it’s fine. I have physical scientific evidence that the world is still spinning, and if the world is still spinning, then I can definitely carry on and that’s totally fine, too.

One of the things that I find really interesting about astronomy is that I feel like it has a real therapeutic quality, and I think that’s something that personally I’ve experienced and I know that Rob’s experienced, too. If you’ve had a stressful day, and you’re feeling really like “ERRR,” and you look through the telescope and look at something that’s millions of miles away, it kind of puts everything into perspective in this really beautiful way. And I think that’s what happened to me on that day when I looked through that telescope and I saw Jupiter and I saw it moving out of view. I was like, “Okay, that’s fine.”

The other thing that I’ve learned from astronomy is actually really amazing things can come out of total chaos. Our solar system came out of total chaos and it’s amazing. It’s beautiful. And we had a moment of chaos – something collapsed. This huge kinda cloud of chaos came into our lives. Sometimes you don’t have much control over what you build out of it, but you can build something else and it can be amazing. What we’ve been building over the last year isn’t necessarily what we were expecting to build, but we’re still really proud of it, and we feel like there’s a long way to go.

It’s kind of this idea of legacy. We’ve got these really amazing options. We want to turn Dartmoor into a dark-sky park, we want an observatory in Dartmoor. Whether we would be here if we had had our baby, I don’t know. I think we’d be on a very different path, but nonetheless, this is the path that we’re walking. This is the world that we’re building, and we have to enjoy it and appreciate it, even if it wasn’t quite what we were expecting.