by Mike Parker
It’s a really tough climb: relentless and demanding, saving the worst for last. That scramble up the cone, sliding over ball-bearing scree slopes to the summit, is as tough climbing as you’ll get almost anywhere, for there is nothing to grip on to and the gradient is sheer. Again, smiles and words of encouragement lifted my knackered legs. Clouds hung obstinately over the summit, so there was no chance of getting the dazzling view of Clew Bay, but that didn’t matter. The sense of achievement and fulfilment as the grotty little hilltop chapel hoved into view through the mist sent me soaring; the view on top of that might have been a bit too much. It means also that I’ll have to come back and do it again: the next time in the hours up to sunrise. I could see why so many people did this time after time, treading the same path with new hope. It was inspiring, moving and amazing fun. Mrs Doyle would be very disappointed.
While many fine paths play up to our sense of the spiritual, there are a whole load of others whose existence is more explicitly religious, created to oil the wheels of the established Church, in all its pomp and frequent inhumanity. Perhaps the most prominent in this category, and certainly the most notorious and gruesome, are the corpse paths, or death roads.
These were routes for funeral processions, particularly in the early medieval countryside, when larger minsters and churches would insist – mainly for reasons of finance and power – on conducting every burial within a huge area. Radiating out from the mother church was a spider’s web of paths used to carry the dead to their final appointment, sometimes the general paths that people used for normal church attendance, but often little used for any other purpose and increasingly imbued with an other-worldly reputation. As the outlying satellite churches grew in size and status, this procedure was gradually abandoned, although it continued into the nineteenth century in some more sparsely populated outposts.
A vast store of legend and superstition hovers around corpse roads. They were where you might see various harbingers of death, such as spectres and wraiths, black dogs, corpse candles and phantom funeral cortèges; numerous accounts survive of such sightings. Less ethereally, one of the most persistent beliefs is that once a coffin has been taken down a path, it automatically becomes a public right of way. Such thinking still surfaces even today in official enquiries held to confirm or extinguish public paths. Public Rights of Way consultant Sue Rumfitt told me of a case she’d attended as a young RoW officer in Bedfordshire in the late 1980s, when a number of elderly witnesses all independently attested to the belief that the path in question was public, because they had heard that ‘a coffin went down it’. Interestingly, none of them had witnessed such an event themselves; the information had been handed down as anecdotal local tradition.
The idea has surfaced since, in RoW enquiries in Norfolk, Suffolk and elsewhere, and it remains one of the most persistent myths in our canon of beliefs about our footpath network. It was enough to scare many landowners from allowing funeral processions across their land, although once a path has been established, it was generally treated with the utmost respect, even dread. Corpse paths went unploughed, and were left to become hard and dry, as they would have to be for the task of ferrying a dead body across sometimes punishing terrain. For the coffin bearers, there were numerous customs to which they must cling in the execution of their grisly task. Many believed that the corpse must be carried feet forward. Oftentimes, corpse roads deliberately crossed streams, stiles and crossroads, for these were thought to be liminal places that held the spirits and prevented them wreaking havoc back in this world. It was the terror of allowing the spirit to escape, and then return to haunt old friends and neighbours, that underpinned the most important custom on corpse roads, that the funeral procession must not, under any circumstances, deviate one inch from the prescribed route. Calamity would await those who failed. Is this perhaps one root of the terror that so many people still feel these days about deviating from the official path?
Many of our corpse roads have been ploughed up or built on, but many have not, and their ghosts can be found not just in the misty fringes of our islands, but also in some unexpectedly prosaic corners. Paul Devereux, in his book Fairy Paths & Spirit Roads, locates examples at Saintbury in Gloucestershire, Thurmaston on the outskirts of Leicester, across Otmoor in Oxfordshire, near Abertillery in the south Wales valleys and at Brailes on the edge of the Cotswolds in Warwickshire. A fine example can be found at the southern edge of the spreading hinterland of Redditch new town in Worcestershire: starting as Burial Lane in Ham Green and continuing along a bridleway and ancient holloway to the church at Feckenham.
Self-evidently, it is in the less urbanised parts of the land that old corpse paths can most easily be found. The South West is riddled with them, none more famous than the Lich Way across Dartmoor. Lich, or lych, is an old English word for ‘corpse’, and is more commonly associated with the thousands of lichgates to be found in churchyards everywhere. Such gates originated as the dedicated entrance to the churchyard for funeral processions: their roof would give mourners shelter and a few examples survive of integral wooden or stone slab shelves on which the coffin (or, rather more frequently, the corpse in a shroud) would have rested. The funeral service would begin at the gate, with the priest intoning, ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ before leading the party to the freshly dug graveside.
The Dartmoor corpse road sounded fascinating, and I was eager to try it. Its celebrity is due to its considerable length, around 12 miles, the only path crossing this part of the moor from one side to the other. Lydford, on the north-western flank of the moor, was for centuries the largest parish in England, its jurisdiction covering almost the entire moor. This meant that anyone dying in or around the villages on the eastern and southern edges of Dartmoor – such as Bellever, Princetown, Postbridge and Hexworthy – was obliged to be carted to Lydford. The corpse road across the middle of the moor was by far the most direct route, but it was difficult, long and crossed almost featureless terrain.
On a website about the Dartmoor Lich Way, there was some mention about walking it at dusk on a summer’s evening. The idea squatted in my imagination, and refused to move. I decided to set off from the west side a couple of hours before sunset on the night of the June full moon, mentally crossing the moor under a fading pink glow and then through silvery beams. In my head, it looked lovely. I checked the calendar and saw that the June full moon fell on a Saturday. Perfect: the Lich Way crosses an extensive military firing range, but the guns are silent on summer weekends. When I mentioned the idea to friends, nearly everyone pulled a vinegary face and said something along the lines of, ‘Hmm, rather you than me.’ It didn’t sound scary to me – well, only a bit. Perhaps it should have done. Mainly, the prospect seemed thrilling, a challenge of wit and spirit, a pilgrimage and a celebration of those who had gone before.
Time and place sorted, and it was immediately obvious too as to the company I wanted. I first met my friend Woody at the annual Queer Pagan Camp (QPC), back in 1999. He’s a shaman, a witch, a priest, an artist and a star, and had moved from London to Devon at much the same time that I’d left Birmingham for mid-Wales. As two single urban gay boys launching themselves into the rural outback, it had been good to have each other to lean on over the years, compare notes and shriek with shared laughter at some of our less edifying moments, especially in the early days. After we’d been in our respective idylls for a few years, we almost simultaneously fell in love and settled down with local blokes, people that neither of us would ever have met had we stayed in the urban jungle. I remembered the many nay-sayers when I was preparing to move: a single gay Englishman thinking of upping sticks to Llannowhere! How mad was I? At worst, I’d be lynched, and at best, I was condemning myself to a life of aching loneliness. Even at the time, and without really knowing why, I knew that was rubbish. And one supportive conversation with Woody was worth a thousand hours of clucking from the chorus of doubters.
I outlined my Lich Way plan to him, and he agreed to join me
. He was a little freaked out by it, all the same, and warned me to think very carefully about what I wanted and expected from it. One of the most important parts of his spirituality is regular communion with the folk of the land, for to him, they are as real and as present as the milkman or the curtain-twitcher at number 76. At QPC, it would usually be him monitoring – policing even – things like where people pitched their tent, so as not to block the spirit and fairy paths across the land. If you were on gate duty at camp, it was your job to explain this to new arrivals, along with more mundane issues like toilets and meal times. One day, I was on gate duty and a lesbian couple arrived for their first time at the camp. They’d driven from London to our field in west Dorset, and were in a pretty fractious state. One of them could hardly wait to join in, but the other looked like the proverbial bulldog licking piss off a nettle. I brewed up a cup of tea for them on the gate fire and then went through the few rules and regs of the set-up. When I reached the bit about not camping on the fairy paths, the edgy-looking one shot to her feet. ‘See, I told you!’ she shouted at her girlfriend. ‘I told you they’d be fucking nutters! Fucking fairy paths! Hippy wankers!’ Within five minutes, she’d roared off back down the lane to London, while her partner stayed the week and had a lovely time. Mind you, a week away from that girlfriend would have been fun if she’d spent it in a cardboard box in an underpass.
The day of the full-moon walk grew hot and sticky. Storms were threatening according to the forecast, and Woody was certain that if they were going to break anywhere, it would be over Dartmoor, and probably at dusk. After all, the moor was famous for its gloomy micro-climate, where fogs can descend suddenly out of a clear sky. His spirituality deals often in the dark of life; mine tends towards a blithe ‘Oh, it’ll be all right’ certainty that, despite the many occasions on which it had been proved wrong, still somehow endured. I gave him Paul Devereux’s book, so as to read the quite lengthy description of the route we were to take that night. It didn’t help. Ignoring the blood-stirring passages about the Wild Hunt, phantom funerals and the splendours of Coffin Wood, he instead seized on phrases like ‘a gruelling journey’, ‘difficult to navigate owing to marshy conditions’, ‘continues in an increasingly ill-defined way’ and ‘poorly defined or, at best, a stranded route in open moorland’. Honestly, some people. Always seeing the negative.
He ramped up our mood of chain-smoking nervousness by telling me a little about his experiences of the folk of Dartmoor. One time, he’d visited Wistman’s (or Wiseman’s) Wood, a grove of ancient oaks near the beginning of the route and – as its name implies – a place of celebrated magic. There he was greeted by a pack of aggressive folk, warning him away with spears and sticks. After much negotiation, he persuaded them that he came in peace, and they changed instantly into garrulous hosts, escorting him around the wood and showing him all their favourite places. As for the famous pixies (or piskies), he said, they’re not the cheery little imps that you’ll find leering off the shelves in the local gift shops, but blueish creatures that are ‘very spirited’, and not always terribly friendly. He’d warned me before that they were particularly fond of cake, so I’d baked a bara brith at home and brought it with me as an offering, worrying only slightly that it was culturally inappropriate to give Welsh delicacies to Devonian piskies. Should I try and rustle up a clotted cream tea for them instead? Woody told me to stop taking the piss.
We drove both cars the hour’s journey down to Lydford, leaving mine in a small army car park on the moor’s western edge. The drive to Powdermills, our starting point, seemed an awful long way. To the left, the moor looked gaunt and grim, even in the evening sunshine, but nothing compared with the shock of HMP Dartmoor, the most notorious prison in Britain, suddenly looming large and brutal on the horizon. At last, we coasted into Powdermills, parked and set off, giggling a little too shrilly at our crap jokes.
Even though the Lich Way is closed more often than not by army manoeuvres, the path is a fully fledged right of way. And despite countless times when I’ve learned how untrue it can be in reality, I still found myself looking at the map, tracing the green dashed line and believing in it. Paul Devereux’s words of warning about its lack of definition and all-round difficulty were easily drowned out in my mind by the authoritative voice of Ordnance Survey, my much-flawed god. Will I never learn? On the map, the path looked plaintively lonely, edging out over tussocky contours and with only the odd stream and rocky tor to break the monotony, or indeed to navigate by.
At the first tor after Powdermills, Longaford Tor according to the map, we stopped to attune ourselves and make our offerings to the folk. Woody said that he’d already clocked a few interested heads poking up to check us out as we passed by, and when we made the offering, they clustered around. My bara brith was deemed acceptable, apparently, and we gave them a drizzle of tea from our flask to wash it down. They prefer booze, I was told, but sweet tea was a reasonable alternative. The tors, those glorious piles of granite that look as if they have been placed with artistic precision by Andy Goldsworthy or Nils Udo, rippled across the landscape ahead of us, like wave crests atop a swollen green sea. Suddenly I realised that this route was as dangerous, and unpredictable, as the ocean itself.
As the sun slid down in a sultry haze, the temperature barely dropped at all. I was sweltering, the sweat dripping off my nose as we pushed on down into a valley and back up again to the next tor. This was the pattern for miles: you never reach any momentous height, but the constant up and down, through wiry grass and sudden pools of rusty water, was absolutely knackering. The day’s over-consumption of fags was also weighing heavy on us both.
My God, but it was impressive. We sat on one tor, having a bit of food and drink, as the sun sank towards the north-west. Ten minutes before it disappeared, I looked around to the opposite horizon, and there was the freshly risen full moon, briefly the sun’s identical twin. Both were pink and hazy, squashed at the extremities, one leaving, one arriving, and sharing just the most fleeting moment of perfect synchronicity. We sighed, smiled and felt very blessed, enough even to stop feeling scared for a few minutes.
Paul Devereux wasn’t wrong, though. The path was a sod to follow, especially in dwindling light. Even the moon wasn’t playing ball. Having risen so spectacularly, it failed to climb high and bright, preferring instead to limp along just above the horizon, the colour of ripe cheese. At times, there was no evidence of a route at all, and all we could do was work out from the map what we were vaguely aiming for and to head as best as possible in that direction. I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t even brought a compass. Though I had remembered my little wind-up torch, and was feeling pretty pleased with myself for that. All the same, we were breaking the cardinal rule of not straying from the corpse road, and I couldn’t imagine that it had ever been any different for anyone else.
Occasionally, we would stumble across the Lich Way again, whether as a gravel or grass path, a rough stone cobble, or as a sudden and unexpected little holloway through the featureless sump. It was as clear as day when we were back on the path, you could just feel it. As I found on the Tóchar Phádraig, there was an echoing, bony quality to it, the sound of centuries of human and animal feet booming deep and resonant beneath us. It swam in and out of focus like a distant radio signal, but when it was on, it was very on. And when it was off, we floundered hopelessly. The folk, I was told, were largely leaving us alone. They had long ago surrendered authority on this ribbon of humanity across their moor, for this, Woody felt, had been a human ceremonial way long before the Church muscled in.
He did confess an encounter later on, though, one that I’m very glad he didn’t divulge at the time. At one of the bleakest bits in the middle of the moor, when we’d lost the route again and were inching like snails across the squelchy savannah, Woody tells me that the spirit of a dead man, big and hairy, wearing hessian, with mad eyes and a matted beard, suddenly appeared at our side. He wasn’t in a good mood either, forever denied the sanctuar
y of church on account of being a murderer and condemned to spend eternity on the Lich Way. ‘You can take me out with you,’ he told Woody, who pointed out that he couldn’t, as he was protected. ‘He’s not, though,’ said the hirsute murderer, pointing at me, at which point Woody silently threw some protection my way.
Something got through, however, because as we became increasingly lost, and the moon continued to glimmer dimly only just above the horizon, I began to feel really ill. I’d massively overheated earlier, and that nearly always brings on a migraine. And so it was again. It felt as if the jolt of every step were bruising my eyeballs from the inside, and I could barely focus. The map under torchlight swam uselessly in my gaze, all identifying landscape features invisible in the black. I had to stop; the pain was excruciating.
Often, a physical purge helps release the pressure a little, and I was soon retching into the black. My head still pounded, and all I could think of to do was to place it, forehead-first, on the cool grass, and hope that it would absorb some of the heat and pain. Woody later told me that this moment, as I sank to the ground with a moan, was his low-point of the night (amongst some pretty stiff competition), as he wasn’t too sure that I’d ever get up again. He put his hands on my head and declared that there was a flint from the folk lodged in my forehead; I’d been attacked. He helped dispel it, and I felt a little better, just about able to continue on our hopeless way.
A long drawn-out hour or two later, the remains of the headache vanished in an instant, at the precise moment when we scrambled over a dry stone wall into a farmer’s field. Even if we were miles out of our way (and we were), we had reached the other side of the moor. Relief flooded my body, and the pain just evaporated. I have never had such a strong, and instant, physical recovery from so far down. The dry stone wall, and even the barbed wire that topped it, were the first workings of the hand of man that we’d seen in hours, and they looked just wonderful.