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Dartmoor

Ponies, rocks, and farmers in frocks

Dartmoor is one of several areas of moorland in south-west England. Rising between Exeter and Plymouth, it's the easternmost part of the same great batholith which stretches westward under the Cornish peninsular like a granite sea-serpent, its humps rising through the softer surrounding rocks to form Bodmin Moor, Land's End and eventually the Scilly Isles. In Mortal Engines I turned Dartmoor into Oak Island, and in some ways it really is an island, though its surrounded not by sea but by the lower, kindlier countryside of South Devon. Around the moor's edges the land is soft and green and rolling, the valleys thickly wooded, the exposed earth a rich, pinkish red. But if you follow the winding lanes up onto Dartmoor you enter a different world entirely, a high and windy one where the hills are crowned with wind-carved granite tors so unlikely-looking that it's sometimes hard to believe they are not the ruins of man-made structures, or gigantic modern sculptures.

If you read the tourist brochures, or the bumf put out by the Dartmoor National Park, you'll usually find Dartmoor described as a 'wilderness'. It's not. Parts of it are certainly remote and desolate, but it is just as much a human landscape as any street in London. Farmers and miners have worked and changed these hills since prehistoric times. There are deep quarries, abandoned now, reclaimed by grass and water. There are places which, in living memory, were busy industrial sites; the tin workings at Heathercombe for instance, quiet again now, where you'll often surprise a heron fishing among the flooded pits. Dry stone walls wind all over the lower slopes of the hills, marking the boundaries of farmers' fields and pens, sometimes spanning streams or climbing up improbably steep slopes, sometimes supporting regiments of tall, pink foxgloves, thick tangles of rowan and holly, or rows of giant, shock-headed beech trees. Some of these walls may be a thousand years old, and the raking sunlight of early morning and late afternoon reveals still older boundaries, the low, overgrown banks of earth and stones called 'reaves' which bronze-age farmers made. At Grimspound, not far from my home, the tumbled remains of a thick bronze-age wall surrounds a group of hut circles in a saddle between two tors.

All over the moor you'll find such traces of prehistoric people; their homes and their ritual spaces. The standing stones of Scorhill Circle may not be as tall as those of Stonehenge, but the place has much more atmosphere, and it is just one of many; there is a restored double circle called the Grey Wethers, and long avenues of monoliths at Batworthy, Down Tor and Drizzlecombe. Single stones stand tall and eerie on Shovel Down and Beardown, and there are dozens of rows and cists and circles too small to even have names. New Age nutters* like to see these sites as traces of some pre-Christian, goddess-worshipping religion which revered the land and was probably into feminism and recycling too.

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