Aaawooooohhhh. "Hear that sir?" mutters our carriage driver as we clatter deeper into the gloaming. "That'll be the hound." The howl, booming across this remote Dartmoor gully, sends the bristles of my hastily grown moustache all a-quiver.
We trot into the yard at Lafter Hall, guided by the butler's flickering lamplight. A glass of champagne and warm hearth await within, as does roué Algie Smythe-Masseuse, the Vicar of Fernworthy and assorted other shady characters.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have been invited here tonight to re-live - or more accurately, take part in a hammed-up reinterpretation of - Arthur Conan Doyle's famous murder mystery, the Hound of the Baskervilles.
The year is 1900 and Lady Frankland has summoned Sherlock Holmes to solve the peculiar case of what might just be a slavering beast of horse-like proportions roaming the moor. The detective has brought along his housekeeper Mrs Hudson, so we're in for a spiffing dinner too.
It's a cunning scheme by Sylvia Agnew (aka Lady F) who felt that her home's location - amid 368 square miles of wind-swept heather and close to actual Hound of the Baskervilles spots such as the grim Dartmoor Prison - would make the ideal setting for mystery dinners mixing actors and guests.
The idea is to arrive in character: you pick one of the book's personae or go off piste with your own. It's clearly down to us whether the evening sings like a canary or dies on its derriere.
Fortunately, we've gone the full Victorian monty: you can't move for tweed and daft aristo accents. My character, the Rt Hon Charles Appledore, sports a particularly offensive frilly shirt with matching right-wing views.
Introductions and canapés over, we sit down to dinner. It's a cracking period affair: candles on the table, gleaming runs of cutlery and an enormous fruit-laden epergne. Service is an efficient farce: Tilly the maid moves with the grace of a geriatric duck and is all Babs Windsor innuendo ("he's going to do me later!") but proves a dab hand with the serving tongs.
Lady F steers the conversation around the evening's plot, encouraging diners to extemporise at will. "My sister? She's feeling a little bogged down" hints Jack Stapleton darkly. Inspector Lastrade, working undercover in tweed plus-fours and red football socks, keeps nipping out for a cheroot ("it's this bally gout") while an 85-year-old Lord Fitzgerald spooks us with his psychic powers: "I've been out of my body twice you know".
The five-courser is based on authentic Victorian recipes: we slurp Prince of Wales soup before digging into soft pigeon breast, parmesan-soused plaice and then guinea fowl in a Madeira sauce. An Earl Grey tea sorbet slices through the heaviness while Sherlock dips into local guide mode, keeping the table agog with tales of murderous phantasmagorical hairy hands and treacherous mires.
And then things get awfully exciting. Although sworn to secrecy, I can reveal that it involves quite a kerfuffle, a spot of running about and an attempt by Holmes to play the violin — enough to induce a murder of our very own. And throughout Perkins the butler keeps pouring the wine, a steady hand amid the madness.
And to accompany the frenzied denouement? A citrus posset known as "Lemonentary" my dear Watson. A curious, riotous night out.
• The Baskerville Dining Experience (+44 (0)1822 880386, baskerville-experience.co.uk/dining) costs £85 per head, which includes a carriage ride, dinner and drinks. Stay at the nearby Beechwood B&B (+44 (0)1822 880332, beechwood-dartmoor.co.uk), which can usually transport you to and from Lafter Hall.
