There is such a thing as a Dartmoor moment. It’s when you realise you’ve gone wild, walked away from fires and towels and teacups. When, in an instant, soft southern England summons its dark side. When you look at the map, fraying in the gale, and notice you’re far from the chocolate-box villages on the moor’s edge – Lustleigh, Lydford, Chagford. You see the ghosts of forests long gone, land bare and scant, land left by life. “Lost” doesn’t quite cover it. You feel yourself in harsh country. It can daunt the unwary. But come out here with the right kit and character and that Dartmoor moment can be a thrill.
It’s the second evening of our 34-mile trek from Okehampton to Ivybridge, north to south across the expanse. We’re about halfway through the journey, with the hardest yards done. Hangingstone Hill has been summited, mires avoided, sundry black streams vaulted. We reach an old tin working a few hours south of Princetown and take in our surrounds.
The horizon now rolls in slow, fat hills. Underneath the tussocks, Dartmoor is a dome of granite. It bubbled up about 300m years ago and, perhaps predicting a local aversion to ostentation, settled on a landscape of subtlety. In dull weather, it can disappoint those lacking patience. But when the light is like this – bright but low, somehow gooey – it oozes into cracks, eases into furrows, animates all it touches. The “clitter” (rock debris) at the tops of the tors shines. The ground, once flat, becomes mosaic: peat and straw and yellow flowering gorse. On a dry stone wall, a pink chunk of granite twinkles. Another proudly wears a necklace of platinum lichen. They are adornments in a place with few of them.
As the sun sets behind us, we head south-east to Fox Tor, the outcrop we hope to shelter under for the evening. But after 10 minutes, the path collapses into a bog. We stop and look back to see clouds have crept up on us. We’re alone, with dark falling, rain approaching, and no way of making a town by night. I hear my breath, the wind, the trill of skylarks. Our eyes search the hills for a way up. All we can see are the runnels snaking down the other way. Local priest and writer Sabine Baring-Gould claimed to have seen Dartmoor horses stand still and sweat with fear. Perhaps they were in this predicament.
This is it, then – the Dartmoor moment. Spend long enough up here and you will have one….
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