A half moon broke through the rifts of racing clouds. In its cold light I saw beyond the trees a broken fringe of rocks, and the long, low curve of the melancholy moor.

...Arthur Conan Doyle
Hound of the Baskervilles

Dartmoor

Monday, March 18

Today, helped by gusts of wind and sporadic bursts of rain, we enjoyed the most dramatic day of our stay in England; we visited Dartmoor. Dartmoor is hard to describe; we don’t have moors in this country, at least none that I know of, and I suspect Dartmoor may be unique even in England, the land of many moors. It is certainly unlike the Yorkshire moor we passed through later in our travels which was dry, painted in browns and grays, and reminded me of the eastern Sierra.

Perhaps the closest thing we have to Dartmoor in California would be the coastline near Bolinas, but only if you eliminated the ocean, replaced the scotch broom with gorse and gave the land a week or two of steady rain. Dartmooor is damp. We walked over ground that was covered with moss so wet it was like walking on a sponge.

Maybe you would describe Dartmoor as melancholy, especially if you were Arthur Conan Doyle seeing it by moonlight whilst in search of a mystery. It is sparsely inhabited, and it is a barrens at least from the perspective of egocentric humans. It would probably be hard to grow cantaloupe up there, but the Dartmoor ponies seem happy to call it home, and it is where you will find the headwaters of the River Dart. So, though much of Dartmoor is deserted, if it appears desolate, it is at least partly because humans long ago cut down the trees that used to grow there. Observed during the day by tourists from semi-arid California, Dartmoor is far too various and interesting

to be melancholy. We were there on a gray day, but Dartmoor showed us many colors, all placed in a setting of brilliant greens. Then there was the topography: rolling hills that climb slowly to a plateau overlooked by weathered peaks, called Tors that are topped with eroded granite boulders. Above the boulders were “rifts of racing clouds” The rain, the wind so strong it almost blew the four of us up and over Hound Tor... all contributed to a dramatic day on the moor.

The other thing about Dartmoor, apart from its scenic beauty, is its history which is as present there as it is in the rest of England. We visited Postbridge, a “clapper bridge” or simple bridge of stone slabs that dates from medieval times. We also climbed up and over Hound Tor to explore the remains of a medieval village – a huddled collection of square stone foundations surrounded by a stone wall on a hillside overlooking a fine panorama of the moor.

But the real historical highlight of Dartmoor, at least for me, was Grimspound, the remains of another village, this one dating from the late bronze age. Here is a description of Grimspound from The Intelligent Traveller’s Guide to Historic Britain by Philip A. Crowl:

Agriculture implies permanent settlements. Traces of such communities can be found in various parts of southern England. Of these the most noteworthy is Grimspound on the edge of that bleak and forbidding wasteland called Dartmoor. Only the foundations remain, but they reveal a village of twenty-four huts spread over an area of about four acres surrounded by a wall nine feet in thickness and originally about six feet high. The huts are fifteen feet in diameter, each containing a hearth or cooking hole. Some show evidence of having had raised platforms or benches which presumably acted as beds. Cattle pens were built against the inside of the enclosing wall. The village dates from around 1000 to 800 b.c., and was a pastoral community that lived by farming and grazing.

Grimspound gave me pause. It is quite sobering to stand on the bones of a civilization that existed three thousand years ago, and realize that children once played there with their father’s tools (and must have left them lying around otherwise how did the British Museum end up with all those bronze hammers), that men and women sat outside those huts in the evening talking about the good old days while the village drunk staggered past, that the protective wall may not have kept all the village’s cattle inside or kept all the village’s enemies outside. Oddly, about the only difference between Grimspound and the medieval village we visited earlier in the day is that the houses were square in the medieval village while they were round in Grimspound. Both were constructed by building a low wall or foundation of stones and topping it with a thatch roof and, in the case of the medieval village, perhaps wattle and daub walls. The greater age of Grimspound was evident in its cruder stonework, but the difference is evolutionary. The English still build like the third little pig: by stacking one rock or brick on top of another. Why not? There are plenty of stones lying about, and the skills they began to establish at Grimspound eventually allowed the English to build towering cathedrals.

There is a superb website, The Jurassic Coast, developed by the South West Grid for Learning, that provides information about the geology of Dorset and Devon and the various kinds of stone that are used architecturally throughout the country.

At the end of the day we stopped for cream tea in Moretonhampstead, a good-sized little town, well maintained but of obvious age, almost in the middle of the moor. The cream tea (remember: scones, clotted cream and jam followed by almost certain death from heart disease) was served by a friendly chap who also dispensed thick dollops of advice about whether the jam or the clotted cream should go on the scone first. (It had been a slow day for tourism in Moretonhampstead, and I think the locals were bored. I could almost hear the snorts of laughter from the back room at this bald-faced attempt to convince the Yankee rubes to put the jam on the scones first. Americans may not know which side of the bread the butter goes on, but we surely know enough to put the butter on before the jam.)

The day, which had begun inauspiciously in an ugly industrial area on the west side of Exeter (I thought I was in Concord until I noticed the English license plates.) where we picked up our rental car, then continued with the beauty and fascination of Dartmoor, ended in farce – a moment of such low tragi-comedy that I won’t insult you by relating it.

© Copyright 2003 Terrell Hillard
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