Ring the Hill

by Tom Cox

  A couple of years ago a friend’s friend’s dog fell off the back of Haytor. The dog broke its leg but survived. A vet in Bovey Tracey told the dog’s owner that it was not an unusual event: they got about twenty dogs a year in the surgery who had been injured or killed as a result of falling off the tor. People I speak to who know Dartmoor only by reputation often think that I am putting myself at risk with all the walking I do up there: that I will slip off a tor, fall down an old mine shaft, sink into a peat bog without trace or get bitten by an adder. I have yet to fall down a mine shaft or off a tor on the moor but I have stepped into two large, concealed holes: a slightly jarring experience in both instances, but not resulting in any injuries worth mentioning. I have only encountered two adders on the moor, in all my hundreds of miles of walking up there, and it was very obvious that neither one of them wanted any trouble.

  On the whole I feel that Dartmoor is far more likely to be responsible for the improvement of my health than the decline of it. In the days directly before my fortieth birthday, I was feeling a little run down, and a large sore spot appeared on the end of my nose. I had hired a room for a sizeable party and although I felt sure that nobody I had invited to the party would like me any less because I had an enormous red nose, I would, given the choice, have preferred it not to be a dominating feature of the night. In the preceding days I dowsed the nose in all manner of tea tree oils and antiseptics, to no avail. Two days after the party, with the spot – which, if I was looking myself properly in the face and being frank, could perhaps be labelled more officially a boil – still raging, I walked on Dartmoor, from Postbridge to Fernworthy Forest, through rain, wind and unseasonable breath-sapping hail. A cuckoo sang through the deluge, undaunted. When I returned to the car, the spot was gone, leaving not the smallest blemish in its place. I should have known: the moor cure was the way to go. Dartmoor had successfully, emphatically exfoliated me. Had the spot been one or more warts, the moor could have helped out too, if old lore was to believe: all I’d have had to do was put some stones in a bag and leave them by the side of the road to be picked up by another traveller, who would subsequently inherit my warts. Had I made a small detour to the north-east on my walk, I could also have passed through the Tolmen Stone – a large rock overhanging the North Teign river, with a smooth hole in its centre, alleged to possess magic healing properties – and guarded myself against the future possibility of rickets or infertility. Having already been through the Tolmen twice in the last six months, however, I figured I was insured in both departments. At one point, the village of Chagford was well-known for its population of faithless wives who, having cheated on their spouses, were sent to the Tolmen for purification. When you arrive in Chagford from the direction of Waye Barton in summer, the foliage obscures the ‘C’ in the sign, and I have always wondered if the decision not to prune around it is intentional.

  Dartmoor has a strong tradition of women failing to be well behaved at times in history when good behaviour was expected of them. Climb the hills above Belstone, and you can visit the Nine Maidens, where a group of female villagers were turned to stone for the crime of dancing naked on the sabbath. Even in death, they continue to rebel, since they in fact total seventeen, not nine. At night, they are said to still have a little dance around, and sometimes swap positions. Great-Grandma Kathleen liked to drink and she liked to go to the bookies. When Kathleen and her family moved from Dartmoor to Nottinghamshire, her mum, Ellen, caused a stir by being the first woman in the local village who had the temerity to visit the pub on her own. Apparently this was standard practice for the progressive women of Dartmoor, while still frowned upon in much of the rest of the country. The moor always feels a little outside the rules, outside of Britain, even. It has not been the scene of any major historical battle, nor closely associated with any king or queen. It is its own small, squelchy, non-conformist country. I am sometimes surprised by how much knowledge I have gained of this small country in little more than half a decade, but I am more frequently overwhelmed by how much there is to know of it, and all that I will never know of it, no matter how many walks I take or books I read or people I meet or questions I ask.

  My main soundtrack for the recent trips I have taken to Dartmoor has been the late, non-conformist country singer Townes Van Zandt – particularly his album Our Mother the Mountain, and an anthology that came out a few years ago. There’s a very shocking moment on the anthology when it jumps from the songs Townes wrote in the early seventies, directly into ‘Marie’, a ballad he sang with Willie Nelson in 1990. The first time you hear it, you wonder when Townes will start singing, and then you realise he is singing. That deep burnt sound, like ash cleared out from a grate and compacted into song, is him. I cannot think of another musician whose voice changed more dramatically in the space of less than two decades. He sounds as old as a tree in Wistman’s Wood, as old as some moss-coated clitter in a ravine below the shadow of a tor. He is, in fact, at this point, close to his forty-sixth birthday – just seven years from his tragically early death. I will be the same age in three years, but when I walk on Dartmoor, I often feel considerably more youthful. It’s something about the intoxicating quality of the air up there. It’s air that creates lichen and makes wooden footpath signs and boulders look old but makes people feel young. I don’t know that it actually makes people look any younger. Probably, if I spent enough time up there, my face would end up covered in lichen too, just like a wooden footpath sign or a boulder. I find that I do not fear this. I would enjoy stroking the lichen on my face, while deep in thought. I feel so young and bouncy on the moor, it makes me wonder what it would be like to be immediately transported into my seven-year-old self, when I was possibly at my most bouncy. How shocking would it feel? How amazing would it be to find out how far, how gradually, you’d leaked away from who you once were? I suspect that if the forty-six-year-old, ash-voiced Townes Van Zandt was translocated into his seven-year-old self, it would be even more shocking, were it not for the fact that Townes Van Zandt appears to have been a very unshockable kind of person.

  The fact of Townes’ Texan heritage does not stop his music being perfect for Dartmoor in winter: it has just the right level of devilry, just the right amount of mountain and hill obsession, just the right whiff of eternity. One Townes song I listen to a lot is ‘Waiting Around to Die’, in which the narrator, embodied by Townes, has trouble with his violent father, a duplicitous woman, trains, wine and prison, before finally finding a friend he can trust, in the form of codeine. My mum, who also likes the song, thought it had a much happier ending, not having realised that Townes was saying ‘codeine’ and thinking he was just talking about a man with an American name who was quite nice. The other Townes songs I listen to most regularly are ‘Lungs’, ‘Snake Mountain Blues’, ‘Our Mother the Mountain’ and ‘Kathleen’, which is about the imminent prospect of being reunited with someone called Kathleen, who is almost certainly dead.

  People who trace their ancestry are always telling you they’re related to someone historically significant. From what I can work out by tracing a little of mine, most of my Devon ancestry were historically significant too, since agricultural work and serving the needs of the aristocracy are very historically significant professions. The line clusters around the Moretonhampstead and North Bovey area at least as far back as the mid-1700s. Where did my people roam, I wonder, as I walk the moor. Which bogs and basins and earthworks have their feet and mine both trodden? Were our womenfolk some of those who fought in the North Bovey rectory and damaged the beleaguered clergyman’s crockery? As she reached the cusp of adolescence and explored the moor, did Kathleen ever tramp and stumble north from Fernworthy Forest to the bubble in the earth where the Dart originates, as I did in summer 2017? Did she ride there, maybe? Was her love of gambling on horses in later life a result of growing up in such an equine place? Did she ever ride or walk anywhere near the cabin and the stable of the horse who wasn’t Willow?

  Back then, both buildings
would have been just a field, probably: the trees wouldn’t even have been planted, the smaller proto-cabin perhaps not yet even built. My neighbour’s parents would still be four decades away from purchasing the accompanying farm buildings and lake. But Dartmoor’s weather would still have been hurtling down the south side of the Beacon and landing on everything. The winter before I arrived, in the biggest storm of the year, all but the largest of my neighbour’s chickens blew away, never to be seen again. Now the lone survivor pecked around the wild ground next to the cabin, hoovering up the wildflower seeds I’d thrown down. The loss of the seeds to the hen’s appetite would turn out to be moot, since one day in May, when the wildflowers were reaching their apex, one of my neighbour’s Boys would strim them down to nothing while I was out. ‘My Boys’ was what my neighbour called the younger men he paid to fell and mend trees, drive his tractors and maintain his land. The cabin’s heating and cooker ran off bright red LPG bottles. The bottles were heavy but the gas in them lasted no time at all and when it was gone it was my job to let my neighbour know and pay him for a new bottle, which he would ask one of his Boys to wheel over from the shed and install. ‘I’ll get one of my Boys onto it dreckly,’ he would say. ‘Dreckly’, I had gathered, was a word used by Devonian and Cornish folks which meant ‘in a period of time that will take precisely as long as it takes’. But that was OK. I didn’t do much cooking while I was living at the cabin and the weather soon warmed up.

  Outside on the dirt and wood shavings, the lone hen, who now had a new hen friend, pecked about. Behind the hens, my neighbour’s three-legged terrier powered around the communal lawn with great determination, driving forwards with her one unusually muscular front leg, and behind her my neighbour’s son, the sister of Willow who wasn’t a horse, powered around on a motorised go-kart. My neighbour’s PA’s husky, which had killed one of the chickens last year, depriving the chicken of the chance to blow away, stood guard over the whole scene from the doorstep of the PA’s quarters, narrowing its eyes in my direction as if permanently at work on the equation of how easily and effectively it could take me down. The go-kart buzzed along the track leading behind the pen of my neighbour’s two pigs, whom my neighbour would soon put on the enormous outdoor grill beside his lake, cook and eat. The pigs oinked excitedly when I came out of the cabin, having learned to see me as a daily bearer of culinary gifts. I tried, and failed, not to love the pigs. I fantasised about kidnapping them and taking them to my next home and permitting them to just be pigs.

  During periods of forgetting to make the cabin work in various ways, my neighbour, whose love of giving and receiving gifts was as large as his more general love of pleasure and luxury, kindly brought me glasses of gin and the occasional record. ‘Do you have The Doors? Put The Doors on!’ he asked, arriving at the cabin door one night, with gin. I put The Doors on and my neighbour danced around my living room to The Doors. When I clinked glasses with my neighbour but failed to look him directly in the eye, he told me off, and made me do it again. I became increasingly aware of my disappointing inability to be one of my neighbour’s Boys; an inability that made itself most apparent by the fact that I did not drink enough gin, plus the fact that I was not technically anywhere close to being an actual boy. ‘You’re forty-two?’ my neighbour said, sounding shocked and saddened, after asking my age a few weeks into my tenancy. He had not read the part of my contract where my date of birth was listed. He took a literal step back as he said it and lost three or four inches of balance and his look was so profoundly forlorn that I almost put an arm on his shoulder to comfort him. He would not tell me his own age and if this was a ploy to encourage me to think of him as a person who didn’t have one, it was wholly successful.

  One day I emerged from the cabin and a man – older and in possession of more gravitas than my neighbour’s Boys – was wandering through the trees, running his hand along a branch here and there. The canopy was in full leaf now and formed a tight dark ring around my impostor-tree home. The man introduced himself as a business associate of my neighbour, and said he was an arboreal consultant. He told me about the ways trees communicate with one another underground, via their roots, and alerted me to a couple of personal crises that these trees were going through. He said trees can teach humans a lot about the best way to deal with problems: that the answer is not running away to places where our problems will ultimately only follow us, but is to remain rooted solidly in one spot and face up to our problems honestly. I absolutely saw what he was saying, and concurred with a lot of it, but my six months at the cabin were coming to an end and I was already excited about where life might take me next. After he had posited his theory, the arboreal consultant examined the trunk of a eucalyptus and, apparently finding it to his liking, unzipped his trousers and blessed it with a torrent of steaming urine.

  When I moved from the cabin, I saw no reason for any major emotional farewell to the moor, since I knew I would be back regularly and would not be moving any huge distance from it. But on the day prior to my departure I felt moved to retrace, and slightly rework, one of my favourite Dartmoor walks, along the River Erme, on the high bit of the moor directly above the cabin. It was a much cooler, overcast day after weeks of uninterrupted heat, but as I squeezed through gorse and bracken on a barely defined path and reached the riverbank, the sun started to push through. By the time I drew level with one of my favourite swimming spots, the clouds had totally given way, and I felt overdressed, over-hot and niggled by undergrowth. From somewhere deep within the sweaty tangle of my hair, a flying insect, possibly feeling even more hot and bothered than I did, protested angrily and I shook it free. At this point of the Erme, the water slowed and the banks widened, forming a natural twenty-metre-long pool with a deep central shelf. I hadn’t brought my trunks but I was totally alone and the lucid, coppery temptation of the water was too strong. I stripped naked, leaving my clothes scattered along the bank, and swam twenty glorious lengths. I had never skinny-dipped on the moor before so this was effectively the first time that there had been no barrier between the two of us. I was Dartmoor and Dartmoor was me. ‘What on earth are you thinking, leaving here?’ said a voice in my head. ‘I can’t wait to be somewhere new!’ said another voice in my head. The voices were equal in strength and volume. As I pulled my trousers back on, I regretted getting out of the water, and could easily have stayed in for the rest of the day, were it not for the packing I still had left to do. A party of eight female walkers, all in their fifties and sixties, but collectively sounding much younger than that, passed by on the footpath above me, the vantage point of which, had they arrived at it two minutes earlier, would have given them the clearest possible view of my naked form against the coppery surface. Struggling to get a sock back onto a damp foot, I shouted a hello, then watched them fade into the grass, the cheerful mess of their noise lingering long after they had vanished.

  OLD FAT BUM

  (2015–19)

  As I drive the roads, I watch the hills. I always notice the interesting ones, and none of them aren’t interesting, so I notice them all. I notice them like some other people notice types of car or dog they are enthusiastic about. If there’s a hill that particularly catches my attention, I’ll look it up on the map when I get home, find out if there’s public access up it and, if there is, feel the excitement rising in my chest, and make my plans: loose plans, usually, that I have no need to trouble anyone else with. Society isn’t ever going to buy you a drink for climbing a hill. A hill is not a mountain. You climb it for you, then you put it quietly inside you, in a cupboard marked ‘Quite A Lot Of Hills’ where it makes its infinitesimal mark on who you are. One I’d had my eye on for a long time was Brent Knoll, beside the M5, a little north of Burnham-on-Sea. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but every time I drove past it, on my way somewhere else, I would ogle it and make a mental note: ‘Climb the big hill near the motorway that looks like a fat squashed onion with the stem sliced off.’ But then I’d f
orget. It was always freshest in my mind when I was on my way elsewhere with no time to spare. Before I experienced its various moods intimately, I got to know them from a distance: the Easters when it had a wooden cross on its summit, the days when, in the very localised mists you got in this part of the Mendips, it appeared to have its own halo. Then I did the unforgivable: before we’d even properly met, I went on a date with its rival.

  In my defence, when I climbed Crook Peak, on the opposite side of the M5, I did not know the fraught history between it and Brent Knoll. In the time of King Arthur, giants lived on top of each hill and would throw large stones at one another across the valley. If you stand on the summit of either hill, a rivalry remains apparent. In Severn Coast terms, they’re the two tallest kids in class. As they vie for supremacy, Crook Peak comes across as the more pouty and petulant of the two, and is the highest, by a larger margin than is obvious from the road. From its trig point you can gaze down at the six-lane carriageway snaking between the Quantocks and the Blackdowns in the south and briefly appreciate the beauty of motorways, until you realise it’s not the beauty of motorways you’re appreciating but the beauty of what a 274-metre outcrop of Carboniferous limestone and the setting sun of a sharp, bright winter’s day has briefly bestowed upon a motorway. Motorways are still motorways: functional scars in the land, which I am not quite allowed to hate since they permit me to more easily reach walking routes in the places they haven’t yet destroyed.