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. This is a land where humans are never entirely in control, a land of mist and myth, of the songs of Seth Lakeman, of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The elements deny dominion, ruin plans, foil progress. One simply ends up in places.
But there is recourse. Because on most of Dartmoor, unlike almost everywhere else in England, one can camp wild. Follow the basic principles – pitch late, leave early, leave no trace – and no one will complain. It’s neatly consistent. A place that defies human settlement, refuses human convention. And we’re grateful. We turn back, and resolve to tackle Fox Tor tomorrow. When we find softish, flattish ground we pitch our tents, shake off our boots and crawl into our sleeping bags. We may be crumpled with fatigue but, as we listen to the wind and rain hammer the canvas, we feel a buzz. We have met our moment and not shied.
I don’t intend to glorify the act of camping itself. In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Laurie Lee describes being woken by birdsong as a soothing passage over the borders of consciousness. He made camping sound spiritual. It wasn’t like that on our first night on Dartmoor, under East Mill Tor. The air was icy, bearable inside a sleeping bag only with all my clothes on. On sloping ground, I slid off my mat regularly; the earth was cold as a tomb. Then there was the wind and rain. On one side of my tent, a peg was yanked from the ground, collapsing the fly on to the inner layer, and letting water in by my feet. The borders of my consciousness were savage. When I managed to sleep, I dreamed of sheep with wings and fangs.
No, for me the joy of camping on Dartmoor is not the camping. It’s simply the best way of walking through the land, and knowing it. Of taking on the elements, adapting, moving on. Of entering a place and accepting its good bits and bad. Of experiencing day and night stitched together with silver silk. Of having a Dartmoor moment, ending up somewhere, and smiling.
Committing to camp is also a way of happening on wonder. At the East Dart Inn in Postbridge, halfway through the second day, we stopped for lunch. Part of me wanted to stop for good; a pint of Dartmoor Ale begged to become plural. But we had a stubbornness and a plan and carried on, across the granite bridge, over Bellever Tor, to the junction of Rivers Swincombe and West Dart. There we entered a shallow valley where the air stilled. Oaks, rowan and ash, hundreds of years old, fringed the river. They were unlike any I had seen before. Many dangled branches into the water, as if searching for trout. All had moss, lichen and ferns on their bark and branches. Everything was covered in something else.
I couldn’t stop staring; these were wild gardens in the sky, tiny jungles, carnivals of green. This stunning sight, where plants grow on plants, is one of the hallmarks of a temperate rainforest, as documented in Guy Shrubsole’s book The Lost Rainforests of Britain. I had wanted to visit one for a long time; somehow we’d stumbled into a fragment without trying.
It’s at risk, all this. Our camping spot for the second night bordered the Blachford Estate, bought by Alexander Darwall in 2013. Since then, he has tried to use the legal system to keep campers off his turf. In January, his lawyers won the right to take the case to the Supreme Court.
No one we met on the moors wished Darwall success. But if he wins, and inspires other Dartmoor landowners, much will be lost. At stake is the essence of a place rare in England: one that exchanges ownership and exclusion for liberty and awe. These are gifts to pass on, not rights to revoke.
Five or so miles before the end, we found the Two Moors Way on the black peat crest of Harford Moor. Finally on a metalled path, we descended swiftly into Ivybridge to devour a gravy-running roast at the Trehill Arms. Our state (or perhaps smell) provoked questions from one of the waiting staff. Where have you been, she asked. Up there, we said, pointing. Doing what? Walking across. Staying where? Just tents. Might have to try it some time. Yes – and you should go soon.
