by Tom Cox
MINOR ALPS
(2011–19)
I’m not scared of people in positions of power or authority, I no longer especially fear death, but what does trouble me is this: over the course of the remainder of my life, I will suffer more head injuries. You can try to be more careful, work on yourself all you like, live in houses with loftier architraves, rise more cautiously after squatting under open windows, but there’s no way of getting around the bare facts: the future is coming, and it contains head pain. When you’re taller than average, from a long genetic line of head-knockers, and dopey by nature, the odds are more steeply stacked against you. I’m trying not to get complacent, but I’ve been doing pretty well since my last head injury, which was a nasty one and could have been significantly worse – could even, in fact, have been my final head injury of all. When I suffered this head injury I’d not long moved to a cabin on the edge of Dartmoor and was about to set off to find my local trig point, which is something I like to do when I’m making friends with a new neighbourhood. I’d spotted a couple of horseshoes on the bench outside the cabin and, remembering a horseshoe I’d hung outside a previous house but which had somehow been lost in one of my other moves, I scouted around for a place to hang them. I thought it a bit premature to be banging a nail into the wooden exterior of my new rented accommodation, so instead I found a perfect ledge for the horseshoes to sit, side by side, directly above the front door. Ten minutes later, excitedly clutching my OS map, I set off, slamming the door firmly behind me. Then, after I had picked myself up from the ground, staggered a little, and regained my balance, I set off again.
I had been lucky: although the horseshoe that hit me had gained velocity over the course of four or five feet before making contact with my head, the part of my skull it hit was the toughest part, so the noise of the impact was far more alarming than the moderate amount of pain accompanying it. The shoe that struck me was the older and rustier of the two, and had a couple of bent, jagged nails sticking out of one side, but the side without the nails had been the side that hit me. What I had experienced was the horseshoe equivalent of dropping a slice of toast butter side up. Nonetheless, twenty minutes later, as I began to climb Ugborough Beacon, the 1,240-foot-high mound behind my house, I reached a hand up to wipe what I thought was some sweat out of my eyes, brought it back down in front of my face and discovered it was covered in watery red liquid. The Beacon was in a benign mood and, from its upper slopes, as I blinked the rest of the blood out of my eyes and looked south, I could pick out the Blackdown Rings earthworks and the Avon Valley, a secret, currently primrose-lined corridor where my tree-surgeon neighbour and his friends liked to fly their hot-air balloons down to the coast. Dartmoor began more abruptly here than it did farther east, where I had been more accustomed to entering it over the last four years. Once you reached the summit of the Beacon, it was just acid soil, gorse, tussocks, feldspar, bracken and ponies stretching for miles.
The cabin wasn’t on the moor, but was close and high enough to get its weather: rain and wind and mud, and even a little snow, hurtling down from the hilltop and hammering at the back walls of the bedroom and bathroom, asking to be let in. My neighbour once told me he’d built the cabin – the second house I’d lived in under the moor’s shadow – from giant redwood, but he’d been drinking gin and taking hits from his bong for at least a couple of hours when he said this. It was true he had built the cabin himself from trees, though: his very own, sliced and diced in his woodyard, eighty yards away. Now, the cabin sat in the middle of more of his trees, like a squat robot tree impostor, maturing but not growing. The trees sussed out its phoniness and jostled and mocked it, blocking out its light, with the result that a tenant only felt the benefit of the cabin’s large windows in winter or right now, in early spring, just as the canopy was on the cusp of exploding. It was a nice building to be inside, but draughty and damp, though no doubt not nearly as draughty and damp as the smaller cabin that had preceded it on the same spot.
My neighbour had hosted parties at the old, smaller cabin in the 1970s, pulling his Triumph Stag up close to the building’s door and playing the same rock and reggae compilation on the car’s cassette player, over and over again, as people drank and smoked and danced and snogged. The trees around the cabin were just saplings back then. At one party a girl whom my neighbour had been trying to impress said she had a friend, a poet from a Mediterranean town, who was looking for somewhere to live and write. ‘Tell him he can live here!’ said my neighbour. By the time an Italian man, equipped with a single suitcase, arrived at my neighbour’s front door a couple of weeks later, my neighbour had totally forgotten he’d ever extended the invitation. But the Italian poet went on to live in the cabin for over a year. My neighbour’s family also owned a swimming lake a quarter of a mile down the valley. One day, in a search for inspiration, the poet spent an entire day by the lake, thinking, jotting down notes, observing his surroundings in great detail, thinking some more, jotting down more notes, before proudly presenting my neighbour with the fruits of his labour. ‘This is for you,’ he said, handing my neighbour a sheet of paper. The paper contained just two lines of verse:
The lake
It is beautiful
My neighbour had told me the story about the poet a couple of days before I was hit by the falling horseshoe. It had been early evening, with the sun descending through the canopy, inspiring leaf shadows to get up and dance on the cabin walls, and my neighbour had wandered over to my house, carrying a couple of bottles of beer. ‘Here,’ he’d said, handing one of the bottles to me, having casually twisted the metal top off the bottle using one of the horseshoes. After I’d returned the horseshoes to their original, safer spot on the bench outside the house, I sometimes looked at the older horseshoe and, when not haunted by the image of its rusty nails embedded in my skull, imagined the kind of horse that had once worn it. I liked to think it was a horse from centuries ago, maybe one that had done an important job on the moor, a transporting task connected with a tin mine, perhaps, but horseshoes acquire the look of age very quickly when they’re out in the elements and no longer part of a horse, and the truth was that the horseshoe had probably been worn by one of my neighbour’s horses, back in the seventies or eighties, or even as recently as the nineties. My neighbour liked to take his horses to the beach or the moor to ride in the evenings. He spoke frequently of Willow. ‘We’re taking Willow down to Bigbury’ he would say, or ‘Willow is outside’ or ‘Katie is bringing Willow back later’. It took me many weeks to realise that Willow was his daughter, and not one of his horses. In my defence, one of his horses did look an extraordinary amount like the kind of horse who might be called Willow.
My original horseshoe – the one I’d lost in one of my house moves – had been one I’d found on a walk a few miles north of here, on the way up to Piles Copse, which is one of Dartmoor’s three ancient woodlands, along with Wistman’s Wood and Black-a-Tor Copse. Piles has the lightest atmosphere of the three, although it’s also the one that’s most tricky to navigate to and where the prospect of being carried off to the lair of a tree sprite and drugged seems most likely. The first time I entered the copse I immediately saw the biggest southern migrant hawker dragonfly of my life then dangled my toes in the river and watched a huge unidentified fish swim beneath them, so afterwards when I found the horseshoe on the ridge above the copse it was easy to believe that it might belong to some giant spectral moor-horse, rather than just, say, a more everyday horse of around the same size as my neighbour’s horse who wasn’t called Willow.
The most huge and spectral horse I have seen on Dartmoor was also spotted just above one of the ancient woodlands, on the hill opposite Black-a-Tor, in January 2012. Night was drawing in, with an accompanying steaming drink of fog, and although my girlfriend and I could not see the horse’s eyes we knew it was staring directly at us and were momentarily frozen in the awesome power of its gaze. We had just enough time to get back to the car before the daylight totally v
anished but only if we took the correct one of three parallel paths, and I suggested that we followed the path the horse stood closest too. My girlfriend, who was generally fearless and used to delight in frightening me by balancing precar-iously on walls above Dartmoor’s steep dams and other formidable West Country chasms, expressed serious worry that the horse meant us harm, but we took the horse path, and it turned out to be the right one. We kept the horse in our sights the whole time and did not at any point see it wander away, and yet by the time we reached the place where it had stood, it was gone.
I wasn’t living in Devon that time, but I was driving over regularly, from Norfolk, to spend time with my girlfriend. While I waited for her to complete her shifts in a shop in Plymouth, I explored the moor. I followed a broken clay pipe along a ledge above the River Plym, where the Devil once handed a farmer a sack containing the farmer’s dead infant son. In rain that probably could not have been scientifically wetter, rain that I embraced more than I’d ever embraced rain before, I introduced myself to the rivers: the long busy row of them, running down from the moor to the torn edge of the country. I listened to their dramatic rush and it sounded like the new thrilling state of my insides. Each walk mussed me up a little more, pulled my stuffing out. Some neatened parts of me began a gradual, elated process of vanishing.
A year later, just after I moved to within fifteen minutes of the moor, on the south east side, my dad was talking to his uncle Ken, who reminded him that my dad’s grandma – Ken’s mum – had lived on Dartmoor until her early teens, when her family relocated to Nottingham. To me, this was hugely exciting, unexpected news, which I was more than happy to allow to underpin the deep sense of belonging I felt when I was out on the moor. I strived to recall the face of my great-grandma, when I’d last seen it in person at the age of five. I didn’t get much further than a big grin and some glasses. A look through some photographs from the 1970s brought the grin and glasses into sharper focus. They remained the dominating features of the face. It was a wild face, not neat, not a face you could imagine ever rebuking you for living in your own free and particular way. Kathleen: that was her name. Mother of Ted, my grandfather and the most renowned head-bumper of all the many head-bumpers of the head-bumping side of my family. Had Kathleen been a head-bumper too? It was likely. I couldn’t help but fantasise about this new unsuspected strand of my lineage: all my ancestors before Kathleen, generations of Dartmoor people with un-neat faces, going right back to prehistoric times and the time of my most un-neat ancestors of all, who went around grinning and looking unkempt and bumping their heads on the low-hanging boughs of ancient oak trees and delighting in letting the rain wash over them and standing on enormous rocks and trying and not always succeeding in not banging their heads on the enormous rocks and ritualistically worshipping an old god with the face of a knowing sun and waving their sickles around. ‘HER FAMILY WERE TENANT FARMWORKERS WHO MADE FOOD FOR DARTMOOR PRISON,’ my dad told me, reeling me back in a few feet closer to earth. But pride still rushed through me. I’d walked and driven past that prison on several occasions. Conan Doyle had written about it, or a fictionalised version of it, in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Frank Mitchell, an associate of the infamous British gangsters the Krays, who had the strength to casually lift grand pianos high into the air without assistance, escaped from it in 1966. Napoleonic soldiers were detained there in the early 1800s. A baby owl once made the local news headlines after being rescued from the space between its inner and outer walls. It was a very charismatic and historically important prison.
I parked fairly close to the prison, just outside Princetown, and walked to Wistman’s Wood, the best known of the moor’s ancient oak woodlands, thinking myself into Kathleen’s shoes. The exact position she and her parents and four brothers had lived on the moor was now lost to time, but it was logical to assume that their rented farmhouse might not have been far from here. I pictured hers as a life of cramped living quarters and great outdoor freedom. Weekend mornings began before dawn and were taken up by farm chores but after that she would wander, with a couple of other local children, far from home. Nobody minded, so long as they were home before dark. Their games were based on the legends they’d heard about the moor. The phantom pigs of nearby Merripit Hill, who set out to find a dead pony then, realising it is just some bones, dissolve into the mist, again and again, for all of eternity. The Wisht Hounds who ride here at nightfall, worked into a blood-eyed frenzy by their master, Old Crockern, the Spirit of the Moor, with his lichen hair, peat eyes and granite skin. It was easy to imagine Kathleen and her friends in the wood, scaring one another by leaping out from behind the dwarf oaks and mossy boulders. In Wistman’s Wood, the lichen hangs heavy, like special tinsel for people who enjoy folk music. If you visit in May, caterpillars will divebomb you from it and, if your hair is at all nest-like, as mine is, you might find yourself still gently picking them out of it up to an hour later, as you negotiate your way back along the opposite bank of the River Dart. If you listen closely to the river, it is said you can hear it call ‘Jan Coo’, the name of an innocent cowhand the water once lured to his death, farther downstream at Rowbrook. I once fell in the river here, but only a leg got wet, and as far as I know the leg has not now coalesced with the water’s spirit and joined its haunted chorus. When I walk on it, it feels just the same as it ever did.
Over the ridge, towards Crockern Tor, you will find the road to Postbridge, where the Hairy Hands used to cause their mischief. Having left Dartmoor for Nottinghamshire in 1913, Kathleen might not have been aware of the Hands, the most modern of Dartmoor’s well-known ghosts, whose notoriety blossomed in the years directly following the First World War, as motorised travel grew more popular and the Hands began to pull more and more cars and motorcycles off the road, all in exactly the same spot. Horses mysterious bolted. A doctor from Princetown was killed when the engine of his motorcycle inexplicably detached itself. A young army officer told of how the hands closed over his much smaller ones on the handlebars of his bike, hurling him and his machine into a stone wall. The Daily Mail arrived, amidst growing hysteria, to report on and attempt to find the Hands. Logic prevailed and it was decided that the camber on the road was dangerous and needed to be levelled, but, when it had been, the Hands sporadically continued their work, simply moving a little farther down the road. In 1924 a woman in a caravan saw the Hands creeping their hirsute way along the window above her sleeping husband, but hers was an isolated example of the hairiness of the hands being visually witnessed. Usually people just experienced the hands as invisible but very pointedly hairy and huge. In the Forestry Commission land around here, there are red warning signs, in which a large hand struck through with a bold red line forbids walkers to follow paths where dangerous tree work is happening, but which I am unable to resist thinking of as signs telling me to beware of Hands.
A couple of miles north is the Warren House Inn, whose fire is said to have never gone out, although my friend Pete once met a man at the bar who refuted this, assuring Pete that, while drunk one Saturday night, he had ‘pissed it out’. The pub is the highest in southern England, gets its electricity from its own generator and stands totally alone on the road between Postbridge and Moretonhampstead, with no other building in sight. The nearest village to it is one that hasn’t been occupied since the Middle Bronze Age, Grimspound: a low stone wall enclosing twenty-four hut circles, where it’s possible to stand in a palpable former living room and dream up your Stone Age self, untarnished by tourist signs or information kiosks. Grimspound is a lonely spot and when you walk the ridge above it, back towards Hameldown Beacon and Widecombe, in winter fog, with frost on the ground, blurry standing shapes materialise in front of you and you wait a few moments to find out if they are alive. Some turn out to be sheep. Others are ponies. Very occasionally, one turns out to be another walker. Some of the shapes are the long posts that were hammered into the ground by the Home Guard during the Second World War to make the process of landing more treac
herous for German parachutists. Some of the shapes never reveal what they are and vanish by the time you draw level with them. One traveller, negotiating weather not dissimilar to this during the nineteenth century, was relieved to reach the Warren House Inn and find a room for the night, but the relief only lasted until he opened a trunk in his room, where he discovered a corpse. ‘That’s feythur,’ he was told by the Inn’s owners. ‘Us salted un down against when us can get along to Lydford.’ The tale is retold in different ways in several old Devon folklore books: sometimes the Inn’s owners are waiting to bury the body very nearby, when the frost abates, sometimes they are waiting for more clement weather so they can take him to the churchyard in Lydford, via the ancient Lychway running across the moor, which passes above Wistman’s Wood, under Crockern’s gaze. In it there is a pre-echo of the story of the artist Robert Lenkiewicz and Edwin McKenzie, the diminutive homeless man Lenkiewicz found living in a barrel on a rubbish tip, who went on to lodge with Lenkiewicz in his studio a few miles off the moor’s edge in Plymouth, first as a living man renamed Diogenes, and then – according to McKenzie’s own wishes – as an embalmed corpse, in a large drawer, where he remains to this day.
In the wide spaces of Dartmoor’s heartlands, I believe unequivocally in the ongoing existence of the dead. If that ever scares me, it is usually in an oddly comforting, non-claustrophobic way. The one time I was genuinely terrified on the moor was at the hot and tangled end of a summer many years before I first moved to Devon, when I was staying in a friend’s cottage where heavy locked doors crashed unaccountably open in the night and the air seemed thick with rising glitter and the sough of the stream under the building was like the lament of a wraith. It’s easy to associate the moor with the cold stone gloom of its winters, but it does some of its eeriest work on hot days, when everything goes still and slow. It was on a day like this during the 1930s that a friend’s great-grandparents became pixie-led in a field on the moor, lost in sparkly mist for an entire day in one small rectangle, walking and walking but arriving again and again at the same padlocked gate. The trick, it is said, is to turn your pockets out, then the pixies leave you alone. I have never been sure if this means leaving what was in your pockets for the pixies, or just showing it to them. Do the pixies need to take your bank card, or merely note down its three-digit security code and expiry date?