Widecombe-in-the-Moor is even more famous for the folk song ‘Widecombe Fair’, which is also equine-themed: a tale of a horse theft in the area, along with a list of people going to the fair in question. An argument could be made against the necessity of the list’s length. The early-music-influenced psychedelic folk band Renaissance and trippy displaced garage rockers the Nashville Teens both made the song their own in phantasmagorical ways in the early seventies, but the lyrics remain a bit like an old-time folk version of one of those tedious conversations you overhear on a train in which a cocksure young man is speaking into his mobile phone to another cocksure young man and listing all the people he has secured to join them for a night out (‘Tom Cobley’s confirmed now, and his grey mare – it’s going to be sick!’). Behind me where I sat and ate a plate of chips smeared with melted cheese in Widecombe’s extremely welcoming Rugglestone Inn were some original 1800s illustrations detailing events at the fair. These were enchanting, although conveyed a strong ambience of ‘several people taking advantage of the hubbub elsewhere by sneaking off to have sex with people they shouldn’t’.
While I ate my chips I read more about Widecombe in Sabine Baring-Gould’s collection of Dartmoor essays A Book About Dartmoor. It could be argued that the title of this is similarly overlong. A simple Dartmoor would have got the same point across adequately. Nonetheless, I decided to let that go at the time of purchase, as my local branch of Scope had been only asking £2.50 for it. Baring-Gould describes Widecombe as a village ‘walled off from the world’, but when I climbed one of these steep green walls twenty minutes later all I could see was that hole in the sky and beneath it heather, dead bracken, tussocky grass and large prehistoric boulders: a debatable definition of ‘world’ but one I was very comfortable with. There was room to imagine so much into existence here. Ascending Buckland Beacon beside a dog apparently made entirely out of knitting material, with that glowing crack in the clouds above and not another human in sight, it was not hard to look back and picture woolly rhino and mammoths trudging across the valley below.
I like to imagine that there was a time when all animals were woolly, not just rhinos and mammoths.
‘That snake over there looks exceptionally warm.’
‘Yes. That’s because it’s a woolly snake.’
The colour of the dusk as the walk ended reminded me of the dusk in An American Werewolf in London when David and Jack come down off the moor to visit the Slaughtered Lamb pub in East Proctor: smudgy granular purple-green. As a fourteen-year-old, I recorded some evening golf highlights on BBC2 and let the VHS tape run on so it also recorded the first thirty-five minutes of the film when Alex Cox showed it on the Moviedrome series. Over the next year I watched those thirty-five minutes more than a dozen times. When I finally saw the rest of the film, as an adult, I enjoyed it but felt slightly let down, particularly by its gory ending. I like my horror to be about the power of suggestion, not blood – another factor, quite probably, behind my love of Dartmoor. I amped up that power of suggestion on the way back by ignoring the classic American Werewolf advice to stick to the path, although this wasn’t the most swashbuckling move, as I remained thoroughly aware of where the path was the entire time. As a result, every bit of me up to shoulder height – and a few bits beyond – was mud-spattered, but that had been very much part of the plan at the day’s beginning. Where is the pleasure in being clean if you have never got dirty?
A lone set of headlights winked around Rippon Tor in the distance, and the temperature underwent a drop that felt like a small old cushion being pulled from beneath us. We’d done almost nine miles, my hip clicked, my calves ached, and Billy limped a little on his back left side. We jumped peaty puddles in unison as if tiredly choreographed. Multiple gorse perforations incurred on the climb to Buckland Beacon gave me shin burn. Half an hour earlier I had been stroking the head of a cheerful storybook sheep in daylight; now it was abruptly apparent that this upland was not just the setting for the unwritten ghost stories in my head, but a place where, if you were tired enough and cold enough and lost enough, you would probably not take long to perish. I was glad to reach the car, to drop Billy off and to fantasise about the hot bath I’d soon plunge into. I nagged myself into making a quick stop at the supermarket on the way home – partly for me, but primarily to get some food of a slightly better quality than normal for my cats, due to the stab of guilt I felt for feeding some of theirs to Uncle Fuckykins. If feeding him was to be a regular event, some prandial hierarchy needed to be imposed. While queuing to pay I checked my phone: there was a message from my dad, who’d found out I was walking today. ‘DON’T STAND ON TOP OF ANY CLIFFS IN THE WIND,’ he said. ‘AND WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS
