You wouldn’t know this in-between land exists, looking up towards the moor from a few miles south on the top of the hill above my house: small routes that don’t lead anywhere commercial, where nature smells busy. Because it’s always there, hovering at the edge of your vision, and its character continues to define the ground beneath it for miles, Dartmoor seems closer to where I live than it is. It’s in fact around twelve miles to get to a part that’s high and tussocky and rough enough to call moor. My aim today was simply to reach that bit, nothing more; merely to touch it in the way you touch the end wall of a swimming pool before turning to do the next length.
Knowing Billy’s penchant for winding up creatures from other species, including me, I’d learned not to let him off the lead if there was even the slightest possibilty that some livestock might be around, but as we left a field via a sheep-rubbed stile to join a steep rocky holloway, I set him free. Almost instantly he spotted two pheasants and shot off at a fair, scrappy clip. I gave chase then slipped on the steep sharp rocks beneath my feet, bumping down the hill on my back a few yards and scraping a chunk of skin off the region on and around my elbow. I walk so much these days that I tend to average two or three falls a year. Being philosophical, I reasoned that it had been about time I’d got one of them out the way.
The hills here, on either side of the A38, are less hills, more imperious, bolshie organic emerald walls. At the bottom of the holloway I reattached Billy to his lead and we joined a lane then crossed the dual carriageway and climbed the steep path to the ruin of Buckfastleigh church, which can be seen from the main road poking its head up out of the trees atop a steep bluff, as if watching avidly for trouble. The gradient from the main road below is so steep that it made the conflagration that engulfed the church in 1992 absolute hell to put out, the fire engines having to pump water uphill in a vain attempt to save it. This was the second fire allegedly started by Devil worshippers to wreck the church, following another in 1849, and it finished the place off, leaving its open-air vestry a haven for crows, bats and ghosts. The most ominous crows and bats are generally not recognised as individuals, but the most infamous of the ghosts is Richard Cabell, an evil seventeenth-century squire who is supposed to leave his tomb every year on the anniversary of his death and ride across the moor with his pack of Devil hounds. At other times the hounds circle his grave, shrieking in a blood-curdling fashion, and it’s said that if you walk around the tomb seven times backwards, Cabell – or worse, even his master the Devil himself – will bite your fingers: more or less the opposite of the alleged effect of doing the same around the yew at Stoke Gabriel. It was hearing the story of Cabell in 1901 that prompted Arthur Conan Doyle to exclaim, ‘I am totally having that!’ or words to that effect, then proceed to write The Hound of the Baskervilles. An electrician called Max told me about the caves under here, which stretch for almost three miles beneath the A38 and contain a freak stalagmite-stalactite which resembles a figure in seventeenth-century clothes and is known locally as the Little Man. Arguably even more unsettling than any of this is the pagoda-like building on top of Cabell’s tomb, which was erected by locals to ‘trap in’ Cabell’s evil spirit. Its concrete heaviness and incongruity are scary in a mundane way. A bat might reject the structure on the grounds that it found it too chillingly bland. If you were being kind, you might compare it to one of the less imaginative small-town toilet blocks of the 1960s. I realise its purpose is purely supernatural-functional, but I do wonder if someone could not have gone to the effort to add a couple of nice picture windows or a bit of wisteria?
In scary patches of countryside such as this, which were frequent on our walks, Billy performed a useful function, having a not dissimilar effect to the one a song from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack might have on a night alone in a haunted manor house. There are an inordinate number of crows gathering here, and I don’t like that mortsafe on that grave over there, you found yourself thinking, then, Oh! It’s all OK! Look! Billy is here, bouncing up and down like a small haberdashery Space Hopper with teeth! As a black dog, he was a let-down to the mythology of his tribe. You’d be hard pushed to see the church in more frivolous circumstances than at lunchtime on a bright spring afternoon like this one, directly after rain, accompanied by an animal like him. All the same, I still got an inner chill from the place. I did not want to stay around it for too long.
The gradient increased severely on the last part of our hike, and I was conscious of the skin missing from my arm after my fall in the holloway, but I couldn’t stop now. I had set out to touch the moor and that is what I was going to do. On the lane near Wallaford Down, Billy found a good stick, one of the crumbly lichen-pimpled ones you get on the tarmac on and near the moor after a
