by Tom Cox
On another summer day when there was similar glitter and hot weight to the air, in 2015, I drove to the village of North Bovey and, looking up from lacing my walking boots in the footwell of my car, almost passed out from fright upon seeing the faces of three children pressed against the driver-side window. Nervously, I pressed a button and reduced the glass by not more than a couple of inches. ‘Hello sir!’ said the tallest child, who appeared to be the leader. ‘Would you like to purchase any refreshments?’ On a table behind her, in the small, otherwise empty car park, sat a jug of orange cordial and a couple of packets of digestive biscuits. I don’t drink orange cordial and had only just eaten but spent the next hour walking bridleways and woodland paths in a state of profound regret caused by my decision to decline their offer and not encourage their entrepreneurship. Later in the afternoon my route took me to the grave of Kitty Jay, an eighteenth-century workhouse girl who committed suicide after being treated poorly by her Dartmoor farmhand lover. Because Jay’s death was self-administered, she could not be buried in consecrated ground and was instead interred here at the lonely entrance to a bridleway, beside a lane running in the direction of Buckland-in-the-Moor. On top of the grave today there was a rusty dog-themed necklace, various coins and a jam jar containing forget-me-nots and honeysuckle. The legend is that fresh flowers appear on the grave every day, but nobody knows who puts them there. The truth is that this myth was generated by the romantic novelist Beatrice Chase, who began to place votive offerings on the grave after her move to Dartmoor in 1901. Pleasingly, walkers and locals have upheld the tradition since Chase’s death in 1955 – the one exception being during the foot and mouth epidemic at the beginning of this century, when the area was sealed off. I have left various offerings on the grave myself, including coins, a golf tee peg, a charity supermarket tiddlywink and – when I could find nothing else of use – my Caffè Nero loyalty card, which at the time was still seven stamps away from a free coffee.
Standing beside the grave on this particular day, in the thick air, I could not help but think of Kirsty, another acquaintance who had once got lost on the moor in the mist, while trying to locate a house party, stopped to consult a map with a friend, and in her rear-view mirror seen a figure in a white robe, levitating six feet above the tarmac. Only later did Kirsty and her companion discover that, by chance, they had stopped the car precisely opposite the grave. I walked back to North Bovey through deep woodland whose sunburst gaps gave it the quality of a hall of mirrors where every shape was being reflected apart from my own. A brief wrong turn took me to a farmyard where animal skulls were piled on a large ball of barbed wire. When I reached my car I noticed that its right front tyre was ripped and deflated. It had been a long time ago, four hours or so, which is even longer in Dartmoor Time, but I now recalled my swerve into a hedged bank on my way to the village to avoid an oncoming car that was travelling too fast and too far over my side of the road. I remembered the sharp thud the tyre had made, as it had hit a piece of hidden granite in the bank: an impact I had felt in my own shins. I also remembered that my roadside cover had expired and I no longer had a spare tyre in the boot. Over in the dense woodland opposite, deep in the moss, Crockern shrugged. I looked at my phone, saw I was without any hint of reception, and wandered over to the Ring of Bells, the village’s thirteenth-century pub, which at that point was still six months away from burning down. In the mid-1800s, North Bovey had a reputation for fostering some of Dartmoor’s most ferocious women, several of whom were frequently known to fight in the home of the village’s rector, the Reverend W. H. Thornton, pulling one another’s hair and throwing crockery and stones as Thornton attempted to settle their quarrels. Bovey men were reputed to be heavy drinkers, and in 1868 one sold his wife for a quart of beer. But the atmosphere in the Ring of Bells was sober and calm, and an extremely accommodating barwoman let me use the phone and recommended a garage in Moretonhampstead, whose head mechanic came out and attended to my problem within the hour.
‘Good luck!’ Dartmoor residents will often say as a sign-off, I have noticed, after giving directions to their house. The 34,000 people who live on the moor tend not to drive new or expensive cars, and those they do drive always have much smarter paintwork on their right side than their left. My granddad Ted drove an old Wolseley on some of these lanes while down from Nottinghamshire on holidays in the 1960s: holidays which I now realise probably doubled as pilgrimages to Kathleen’s birthplace. On the narrower lanes, when he met a vehicle coming in the other direction, he would have to stop, get out and sprint up to the driver of the other car and politely ask them to reverse to the nearest passing point, owing to the fact that the Wolseley did not have a functioning reverse gear. Being content to spend a large part of your day reversing down tight green corridors is a big part of living in rural Devon, and I have always been OK with that. It’s on the slightly wider lanes where the problems tend to emerge. Three times now my front left tyre has exploded as a result of slamming into a hidden chunk of rock in a bank to avoid a collision with a large and plush car, aggressively driven by somebody travelling in the opposite direction who almost certainly wasn’t a resident of the moor. The penultimate time my front left tyre exploded near the moor, it was necessary for safety purposes to drive for a couple of miles on the unprotected wheel then abandon my car for the evening. It was dark but fortunately the point where I abandoned the car was barely more than a mile from my cabin. I walked through the rain and the dark directly to my neighbour’s house, where ghost stories were being told in front of crackling logs. The father of my neighbour’s Personal Assistant talked about the time he stayed in The Smugglers Haunt hotel in Brixham, a fishing town seventeen miles away, and woke up in the night to watch his luggage being thrown about by two small girls, who had somehow broken into his room. Later, not knowing about the incident, his wife had found out that the hotel’s famous ghost, Aggie, is a small girl who fell to her death from one of the windows in the 1920s, and now likes to disturb the bedclothes and luggage of the hotel’s guests. As we took this in, the PA’s pet husky – when it came right down to it, just a wolf with a good stylist – stretched out in front of the woodburner and eyed us balefully, with an apparent abundance of recondite knowledge. The evening was very south Devon – woodsy, affluent, laid-back, superstitious, and lightly salted – and I enjoyed being within it while also very much on the periphery of it.
Dartmoor is what divides north and south Devon, and is a big part of what makes them tangibly separate places. North Devon is cheaper, less trimmed, a region where the coombes and hollows growl at you with a less refined vocabulary, where there are fewer opportunities to shelter from nature’s unforgiving side at a farmers’ market or a Bikram yoga class or an open-air sound system set up by a dreadlocked man whose parents have just moved down from Brighton and own a paddock. There is something particularly, unapologetically country and pagan about the area where the north moor melts into the villages of mid-Devon. Dartmoor was granted National Park status in 1951 but Old Crockern had no personal say in that. The A30 and A38 dual carriageways are not boundaries he recognises, and sometimes his influence seems even more present in the villages above the moor on the north side than it does in those on the moor itself. In St Michael’s Church in Spreyton, I stumbled across the most chilling Green Man carving of all the many Green Man carvings in the churches of Devon’s heartlands: less a Green Man than a king blinded and suffocated by the thick stalks of foliage. The message was unequivocal: the only true monarch is nature, and those who build themselves up into spurious positions of power and lord it over the land would be wise not to forget that. More unnerving still was the death’s head on All Saints Church in Winkleigh, a lichen-splattered stone skull in the sky which must surely count as Britain’s most frightening and durable Halloween pumpkin. The timing of my walk was apposite, with Samhain just two nights away. I’d just read Earth to Earth, John Cornwell’s unique and disturbing book about the double murder-suicide of the Luxtons, a Wi
nkleigh farming family who cut themselves off from the rest of their community during the 1970s, and worked and lived in the manner of people in the 1870s, to the extent that, in preference to going out and buying paint, they made their own. As I walked in search of the Luxton farmhouse there were few cars and motorbikes on roads at the edge of the village but each one that did pass me appeared thoroughly intent on mowing me down. A dazzling late afternoon sun shone on hedgerows bursting with the ripeness that can only directly presage decay. The moor was visible on the horizon but it had its back turned, as if preferring not to be counted as a witness.
To my mind, Dartmoor always faces in a southerly direction, training its severe gaze down upon the towns and villages of the rolling pre-sea lands of the South Hams. The sprites of the moor tend to remain in the uplands but something of their essence is carried downstream into the towns and villages of the southern sub-Dartmoor area. This pixie and faerie run-off is most potent in Totnes, where it mixes with tidal river water, patchouli oil and raw carrot juice to create the stock that the town stews in from day to day. In summer 2014 I walked into an occult art and stationery shop on the high street to find some moving leaves talking about cheese: an incident that surprised me less than it probably might, had I not been getting to know the town for several months by this point. Only a couple of minutes previously, I had walked past a white van with the words ‘Unicorn Ambulance’ stencilled on it.
‘Never have incense burning while you’re eating cheese,’ announced the leaves, which were dry and white. ‘It’s always a disaster.’
Remembering the block of cheddar in my bag, I wondered if the leaves had somehow gained a clairvoyant knowledge of my plans for the weekend, until a man stepped out from behind a rack of cards and replied to the leaves. He told the leaves that Camembert was the worst because it ‘really absorbs the vapours’. At this point the leaves shook more animatedly and revealed themselves to be Ralph, the shop’s proprietor, who’d been fiddling with something under the counter under the protection of the leaves, which he told me were white sage and had strong cleansing properties, especially when it came to fixing negative houses. I decided not to purchase any leaves, as my house at the time was quite positive, although briefly considered some for my garden shed, which was prone to intermittent bouts of negativity. Ralph lived on the moor and on my first visit to the shop had told me about a witch’s dolly that resided in a pub up there, the Tavistock Inn at Poundsgate. It wasn’t quite as if I said, ‘Hello! I’m Tom. I’ve newly moved to the area’ and Ralph replied ‘Did you know about the one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old witch’s dolly they keep up at the Tavistock Inn?’ – but we still got to this point in what might have seemed remarkably quick time to someone not quite so interested in obscure folklore artefacts of the late Victorian era. The next day I’d driven up to see the dolly and would have closely inspected it, but it was on a shelf behind a table where a family were eating scampi and chips and I had been leery of awkwardly resting an elbow in their tartar sauce.
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In my early days of exploring the moor, this tended to be my route: the steep climb up New Bridge Hill, where I once found a rare Octopus Stinkhorn fungus, past Poundsgate and its dolly, towards Dartmeet, where the east and west branches of the Dart crash into each other and become one. On the north side of the valley was the former site of Snail House, where two old women allegedly lived in the early 1800s and ate nothing but snails. Beyond that is the ledge from which a cow once fell onto the car of my friend Mike, who works for the National Park. The cow succeeded in writing the car off but emerged unscathed and sauntered off into a field on the opposite side of the road as if comprehensively unmoved by the whole episode. Deep in the recesses of the hillside opposite was the spot where, in 2015, I assisted with the rescue of a wild pony which had rolled onto its back to enjoy the sun and become trapped in the narrow space between two rocks. For this, I can thank my Dartmoor OS map, which enabled me to give the pony’s co-ordinates to Karla McKechnie, Dartmoor’s Livestock Protection Officer, who arranged for a farmer to come out and un-wedge it. As I waited with the upturned pony, careful not to get too close to its kicking legs, other ponies mooched around it, chewing on heather, as if in the mindset of, ‘Oh, there’s Greg again, with his drama and pratfalls. I’m just going to try to get on, and not rise to it.’ Greg turned out to be unhurt and, within an hour, had been carefully nudged out from between the rocks and flipped the correct way up, and was once again chewing on heather himself.
When Frank Mitchell was sprung from Dartmoor Prison by the Krays, the escape plot was a simple one: while in a work party of prisoners out on the moor, Mitchell asked permission to feed some ponies, then, having had it granted by a guard, walked to a lane where a getaway car was waiting for him. This seems surprisingly laissez-faire of the prison authorities, but perhaps might be viewed as less so upon consideration of their decision four years earlier to grant Mitchell permission to take a taxi up to Okehampton, more than twenty miles away, to buy himself a budgerigar. Nonetheless, you might have thought a prison guard would be more aware of an important rule of the moor, which is that the ponies shouldn’t be fed by members of the general public, since it makes the ponies more likely to both stray into traffic and develop an attitude problem. I learned this in 2015, shortly after I’d helped to rescue Greg, when I was invited by Charlotte Faulkner to assist with the pony drift at Haytor Rocks. Charlotte, who is founder of the Dartmoor Hill Pony Association, said that by feeding the ponies tourists increase the risk of them being hit by a car, and make them harder to drift. What a lot of people don’t know is that every pony on Dartmoor belongs to a specific farmer. The purpose of a drift is to round the ponies up so their health can be checked, the foals among them can be weaned, and those who’ve strayed can be returned to their correct area. Some of them are also subsequently sold in order to keep the number of ponies on each common in accordance with the rules set by the executive public body Natural England.
The Haytor drift is one of the simpler drifts, in the sense that it takes place over a relatively small area of ground, but one of the most difficult, in the sense that Haytor also has an unusually large amount of tourist traffic and is home to, in Charlotte’s words, ‘the most arsey ponies on the moor’. The people doing the hardest work rode a mixture of horses and quad bikes. Less significant members of the team such as me, meanwhile, served as peripheral foot soldiers, my main job being to stand halfway up Saddle Tor, about a quarter-mile south-west of the start point, and wave my arms and shout at the ponies if they hurtled past. An hour and a half into the drift four of them did just that, in spectacular fashion. This was probably the nearest I would ever come to living in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1864. ‘I’m getting quite emotional watching it,’ Kerry, a watching hiker, told me. She gestured at the traffic and tourists below. ‘Isn’t it a disaster waiting to happen?’
Charlotte belted about from tor to tor with infectious energy, shouting instructions into her walkie-talkie, racing alongside the ponies in her Land Rover with me in the passenger seat, but by the end of the day less than half of the eighty targeted ponies had made it to the pen. The stretch of craggy, marshy ground between Haytor and Saddle Tor was a graveyard of half-sunk and abandoned quad bikes. With the danger of being returned to society gone, the loose ponies swaggered about and resumed their business. One who was queuing for ice cream in the car park gave me a little nip on the ribs when I had the temerity to come between him and a 99 Flake. I’d always wondered who was crazy enough to buy ice cream from the vans on the moor in winter and now I had the answer. It was ponies.
Every popular and busy part of Dartmoor is close to a quiet part of Dartmoor that can feel totally your own. If you follow the stone rails of the old quarry north from the back of Haytor, everything gets peaceful and boggy very quickly. In the 1800s, granite was transported from here, all over Britain, and was used in the building of several famous London structures. If you have walked across London Bridge, o
r through the British Museum, you have walked on some of Dartmoor. The tor itself also has its empty times. Early in the autumn of 2017, I got into the habit of climbing its rocks on a succession of cloudless, lilac weekday evenings. Only a smattering of people were around, the waning moon was thin and clear and I felt loose and as connected to all the geology beneath me as I ever had, comfortable with the idea that I was just another layer of it, to eventually be broken down and absorbed. Nightfall in this spot brought less, not more, isolation, as you looked south and saw the electricity of Bovey Tracey, Newton Abbot and Torbay begin to lick at the bottom of the hill. I remember first noticing this the previous winter, as I failed to watch the Orionid meteor shower on a much cloudier night up here under a blanket. There was a stronger, more ominous, sense of civilisation than you got in daytime, and when you looked at all the lights you realised how many people there were for each of them, and that this was just the tiniest fraction of the UK, and that the UK was just the tiniest fraction of the planet, and that every one of those people had problems and worries which they often made bigger than they really were, and then you started to think about the shooting stars and globular clusters taking part in the celestial event above, hidden by the cloud cover, who were all those light years away, and the people in other centuries, now dead, with all their problems and worries which they often made bigger than they really were, and then all you could do was pull the blanket more tightly around you and accept the tea your friend Roy was offering you from his flask and try not to get a headache.