Explore the Dartmoor National Park with a Cicerone guidebook - Introduction

Very often people have asked me when I return home after one of my expeditions to the Himalaya, Tierra del Fuego or Baffin Island, whether I do not find Dartmoor rather tame and unexciting after the great mountain ranges of the world. Settling down to write this guidebook to Dartmoor has made me pause, think and try to justify and back up my claim that I find Dartmoor a most exciting, interesting and intriguing corner of our varied world.

Dartmoor has been called, rather glibly, the last great wilderness in England. This, of course, is true for whatever that really means. It is indeed a huge, largely uninhabited, lonely area of moorland, of some 365 square miles. They also say that you can be, on Dartmoor, further from a road, and therefore I presume civilisation, than any other wild area of Britain south of the Scottish border. On the North Moor near Cut Hill and Fur Tor it is over 3 miles (2km) to a road, if you count the military road from Okehampton Camp, and on the South Moor, near Stringers Hill and Erme Pound, the nearest road is again over 3 miles away.

So that is one reason why I find Dartmoor attractive. I love the wild, lonely, remote areas of uplands and mountains. Even at crowded holiday periods you can still get away from the masses and walk all day without seeing a soul.

Then, even if I have only been away for a few days, when I return to my home near Widecombe-in-the-Moor, as I get out of the car I take a deep breath, for Dartmoor has a strange, indefinable scent that changes with the seasons. Sometimes the misty air is full of the smell of damp, peaty moorland, at others the pungent scent of gorse; in March when the farmers are swaling (burning the moor to improve the grass for grazing), the wind brings a waft of burnt heather and gorse or the smell of the smoke itself.

Meldon Reservior

Blacktor Falls, River Meavy

The rolling, sweeping horizon of Dartmoor with its huge skies always thrills me. Except for a few steep-sided valleys you are never shut in on the moor; you always have the feeling of distance and vast open spaces. Everywhere, except in prolonged summer drought, there is the presence of water; quaking bogs, small streams and the peaty, moorland rivers tumbling down over water-rounded granite boulders, while high overhead the skylarks pour out their own evocative liquid song.

Of course a lot of the landscape, certainly on the margins but also in some of the remote river valleys, where the tinners have been at work, has been fashioned and changed by man. Man has lived, hunted and worked on Dartmoor since prehistoric times and obviously has left his mark, from hut circles, stone rows and megaliths, to tinners’ spoil tips and blowing houses, to newtakes, peat cuttings and ancient fields, to china clay works, forestry and dams.

I find this history of man on Dartmoor, especially the prehistoric period, fascinating. I still feel a strange, prickling sensation in the scalp when I am alone in one of the areas of hut circles or stone rows. Almost I sense the spirits of the Bronze Age people of 4000 years ago. It is no wonder that Dartmoor has its share of legend and folklore and up in the deep peat hags of Cut Hill you could almost believe in the stories of pixies!

Sadly there are very few of the true, old Dartmoor farmers and their families left in our modern times. Men and women for whom a trip to Exeter or Plymouth was a once-a-year outing, who thought nothing of travelling to market in gig or cart, taking two or three hours there, and back again, whose slow, hard life revolved around the seasons and the harsh taskmaster Dartmoor.

Life and the old ways have changed from the days when every small village had its bakery and blacksmith, when the grocer, the butcher, even the fishmonger from Brixham, the haberdasher and tailor delivered to the door of remote farms by pony trap; when harvest suppers and whortleberry gathering parties were part of the year's major social events. Modern farmers on Dartmoor are a different breed, but just here and there are a few folk whose memories reach back into the old days and the ways of their fathers and grandfathers before them.

The wildlife on Dartmoor is not outstanding but when you do come in contact with the secret inhabitants, it is the more exciting. The buzzard, I suppose, with its moth-like wings and the mewing call, like a kitten, is the most common big bird on the margins of the moor and in many way epitomises Dartmoor with its soaring, wheeling freedom or sitting like a sentinel on a pole or bare tree surveying the world. Then there is the thrill as a couple of red grouse get up with a clatter and their loud ‘go back’ call, or the excitement or the brief glimpse of a reddy-black, arrogant hill fox loping off in no hurry. But it is the skylark, that minute speck in the blue summer sky, with its bubbling song, that brings back a surge of happy, childhood memories of walking or riding on hot, breathless days into the heart of the moor and I still scan the skies trying to find the little, soaring creature pouring out its ecstasy.

The Nine Stones lookng back to Cullever Steps with High Willhays beyond, Walk 34

I hope therefore to share with you, through this Guide, some of the magic and mystery of Dartmoor. I should like to show you places to visit that I think will interest and fascinate you, so that like me, you will become a person who loves and appreciates this lonely wilderness and will return to it again and again, for it has a haunting, almost hypnotic influence on those who walk there.