I like to climb Yarner Beacon on a clear day, gaze several miles into the distance towards the sea and try to pick out the location of the footpaths I’ve walked, which, after three years of living here, is almost all of them. I once made the mistake of moving to an exciting new part of the British countryside and not immediately investigating every bit of it forensically on foot and I don’t intend to make the same error again. From up here I’m always amazed at the way all the threads connect, their shimmies and jinks and thrusts being disguised when you’re beneath hilltop level, in the thick of it. It could be compared to the moment when, having only previously travelled through London by Tube, a person explores the city at ground level on foot and realises the unexpected interconnectivity of the stations, their surprising proximity to one another. So many of the paths here in south-west Devon are of a hidden nature: sunken lanes that were already old in Saxon times, created by landowners digging ditches on the boundaries of their properties and piling earth into continuous banks on their own sides. These holloways feel impossibly solid when, as a walker, you’re bracketed by their banks below the bulk of the land, in an eerily quiet semi-subterranean shale, fern, mud and moss world.
In winter this countryside is a totally different colour to Norfolk’s: reddy brown and green, as opposed to grainy brown and muddy grey. Rich rain-sodden earth and leaf mulch provide the reddy brown; plentiful moss, resilient fern and lichen add back-up greens on the borders of fields and meadows that stay more emerald luminous in the cold months than any other fields and meadows I’ve known. There is a strong argument in favour of every season here: autumn for its crunchy lysergic coppers and golds, its sunlit spider’s webs and sudden forgotten woodsmoke rush; summer because summer here is just dizzying with all the possible ways it offers to fill your time. But in winter as the land strips itself back it shows you new secrets and you feel like you’re getting a glimpse into something special behind everything else: intangible, ghoulish, a necessary dark pigment on the edge of the land of the living.
Restless from driving, I arrive home and go straight out again on foot, wringing the daylight out of the day. On a steep rocky holloway leading down from the hamlet of Aish the leaf veil has fallen back to reveal a ruined barn I never knew was there. One of its broken woodworm-riddled doors creaks in the wind as I pass, which is odd, as I hadn’t realised there was any wind. At the bottom of the hill, beside a water lane, on a fence in a stark garden belonging to an isolated cottage a well-known death figure has been made using thick black polythene draped over two crossed sticks. Hooded and faceless, he holds a lantern in one unseen hand and a scythe in the other. I step gingerly over to photograph him, and a man of baby boomer age wearing a fisherman’s jumper emerges from the front door of the cottage. ‘Ooh, he loikes the reaper,’ he says to me in a strong West Country accent that leaves me unsure if it is genuine or being put on for hillbilly Straw Dogs effect. Something ominous hangs in the air for twenty seconds until a younger man – possibly his son – emerges from the house, chuckling. I ask the younger man if he made the reaper himself and he confirms that he did, with the help of friends, and that it was the centrepiece of a recent New Year’s Eve party. There is no such levity to explain away another haunting site I see six and a half miles upriver, near Staverton: a fence post, recently denuded of nettles and bracken and draped with a blue shawl, matching floppy felt hat and off-beige scarf to form what looks chillingly like a small, stooped woman, turned away from the footpath, crying over some crippling recent tragedy. Of these two ominous home-made figures this is undoubtedly the greater piece of art, constructed using nothing but a banal pre-existing boundary marker and three dirty pieces of clothing, yet conveying absolutely no sense that, were you to touch her and ask her if she was OK, she would not turn round with glowing crimson eyes and gnashing teeth, crunch your skull into fragments and suck fresh blood from your neck hole.
I hike these paths more often in winter, when daylight is scarce and I am reluctant to waste what there is of it on car journeys to further-flung walking destinations. South Devon is by far the most touristy place I’ve ever lived, but in January, February and March you can take a route across the hidden places and get a genuine sense that no other human feet have preceded yours for weeks. One of my favourite walks is a thirteen-mile loop to the village of Tuckenhay. I love the way the village looks from
