A field report on Dartmoor, family history, Leather Tor and the rock group Sea Power
Dartmoor can seem a wild vastness – a remote, sombre, unpopulated place. But, walking across the moor on a sunlit Sunday, the number of old manmade structures is amazing. Bridges and viaducts. The remains of metal-smelting works and horse-drawn railways. The 1:25,000-scale Ordnance Survey map is studded with other signs of human incursion. Tinner’s hut (remains of). Pit (disused). Blowing house (remains of). Flying over all this stuff are three small birds emblematic of this territory. Skylark, wheatear, stonechat. The stonechat’s harsh, rasping call is said to resemble two stones being struck together. Up on the moor this bird can sound like an intimation of the past – of a time when Dartmoor resounded with the noise of granite being cut, of tools being sharpened.
On the moor there are structures even older than those built for the mining and movement of tin, china clay and granite. There are the remains of Bronze Age settlements such as Grimspound – alongside standing stones, burial chambers and Christian crosses. I’m on the moor for a long walk and to sleep out under the sky. I have with me my twig-fuelled Ghillie-Kettle (TM) and an army surplus Gore-Tex bivvy bag. I hadn’t done this for a while, but it’s exhilarating to sleep out in the open spaces, gazing up as the stars come out. I start the day by taking the train to Ivybridge, a few miles from our home in Devon. Then I walk north toward Princetown, where the 13th-century Siward’s Cross will pretty much mark the end of my first day’s journey.
So, this excursion amounted to a bit of spontaneous outdoor leisure but, as I’d packed my bag, I’d realised there was further ancient labour I could investigate – age-old endeavour for which I hold original historical documentation.
I’m one of six children. Before any of us were born our parents worked, briefly, on Dartmoor. They’d seen an advert asking for a couple to work as live-in staff at a pub. Mum had grown up in the north of Ireland, Dad in Sunderland. They’re both now dead, but Dad had occasionally talked about the pub.
Mum and Dad married in 1956 and they arrived on Dartmoor in the middle of a cold winter, circa 1960. They were, typically, hard workers. Along with the above pub business card, I have to hand a battered copy of Dad’s school-leaver report. He was “top of his form”. He’d been trained up for office work: “…high marks in mathematics, shorthand and bookkeeping”. But our parents’ Dartmoor pub work didn’t last long.
Dad said the landlord was an unpleasant character. And Mum and Dad had their idiosyncrasies. They’d arrived at the pub with a pet cat, which I don’t think they’d mentioned. The pub was snowed in. There was disharmony over cat sustenance. The landlord had a dog but he was reluctant to share its food with the cat while the shops remained out of reach.
Our family history might have been different if Mum and Dad had been model Dartmoor pub employees. What if they’d flourished in Devon? Maybe they wouldn’t have had all us children. In this alternative reality, the thing that has most defined both my own working life and our collective family-cultural history might never have materialised – the rock band which started life as British Sea Power and later became just Sea Power. What if our two youngest siblings, the band’s two singers, had grown up in the middle of Dartmoor rather than on the edge of the Lake District?
For over 15 years now I’ve lived in Devon, the county that contains Dartmoor. For all that time I’ve known about Mum and Dad and the Dartmoor pub. But I’d never gone to find the place. Now, as I packed my bag for my night on the moor, I suddenly thought I could try and complete this mission. I was sure the pub was somewhere near my walk’s scheduled end.
I started the walk on the southern edge of Dartmoor, heading north. The places and names kept coming. Hangershell Rock. The Dungeon. Knatta Barrow, Heron Magna. I was on the Two Moors Way. It follows the route of an abandoned railway, which had transported china clay off the moor. When I see Dartmoor’s vast china clay workings – both abandoned and current; shining out bright white in the landscape – I always think of my own work history. Magazine work has been a constant for me as I’ve variously reported on or promoted arts and entertainment. China clay is a key component of the pages of glossy magazines – those shiny publications that, even now, move through our lives, showing us this, telling us about that.
As I walk on past Hobajohn’s Cross – olden-days intimation of Lord Jesus – two young men ask me if there are any streams near by. It’s hot and they want to add to their supply of drinking water. We get talking. They’re called Roman and Tito and are from Slovenia, formerly part of Yugoslavia. I ask them if they know about Laibach, Slovenia’s leading totalitarian music group. They say they don’t but they like the sound of the Laibach cover of Queen’s One Vision and say they’ll investigate. In turn I give them rambling instruction on Dartmoor water sources. I head onward, moving onto the Abbot’s Way footpath, It follows a route once used by monks, travelling between Tavistock and Buckfast Abbey.
As I near my destination I find what seems a good spot for sleeping out, without a tent, under the sky. With this sleeping space assigned, I head into Princetown, home to HM Prison Dartmoor, which is currently closed because of fears over the radioactive radon gas that percolates up from moorland granite. I’m looking for an evening meal, but there’s only one pub open and they’re hosting a local get-together with a buffet. The pub kitchen is closed. I have a pint of IPA and, on my way out, discreetly make an unsanctioned buffet selection: three falafels, two sticks of celery, one mini samosa. I head back out onto the moor. Sunset is in progress.
Truth to tell, the Abbot’s Way footpath had been hard to follow. I often found myself trudging uncertainly across progress-sapping tuffets of purple moor grass. But, overall, direction had been easy to maintain. Just north of Princetown there’s a tall TV/radio mast. Through the second half of my 20-odd-kilometre walk the radio mast was a useful beacon. And it was still visible in the gathering dusk, with Dartmoor ponies roaming in the foreground. My bed for the night was up on a tor, pictured below. I’d never slept out on Dartmoor before, but I’d sometimes found myself wondering if there might be any perils here – any chance of a sleepwalking pony treading on a recumbent moorland dosser. Up on the tor I was safe from local fauna. I lay out my bivvy bag on a flat, moss-covered slab of granite.
It was lovely to lie there with the stars and planets coming out. First Mars. Then the twin stars of Castor and Pollux. I had on a hat and several layers of clothing. I was inside both my sleeping bag and the outer carapace of bivvy bag. The weather forecast had said it wouldn’t get colder than 8°C overnight, but there was a chill wind blowing over the tor, pulling at my the bivvy bag. Sleep was an interrupted thing, but I did eventually nod off. I woke at 4.20am, with the Moon bright in the dawn sky
It’s a wonderful feeling to be lying there as the day’s light eases in. I’d gathered a bag of dry twigs before I bedded down. By 5am the Ghillie-Kettle was blazing* and tea was on the way.
I wasn’t sure on the location of Mum and Dad’s pub. I looked up “The Dartmoor Inn” on my smart phone. The only pub of that name in the area was in the joyfully titled hamlet of Merrivale. It was about five miles northwest. I packed up and got on my way. Would it be the same place? The same moorland public house where Mum and Dad had enjoyed brief employment 70 years ago?
I was in Merrivale by 8am. The Dartmoor Inn was clearly the same one Mum and Dad worked at.
I wondered if our parents ever got to look around the surrounding tors and moorland – and the remains of another blowing house, just upon the hill. If so, Dad had never mentioned it. Perhaps there wasn’t time for that, surrounded as they were by snow, tormented by tensions over cat food.
The pub was closed when I arrived in Merrivale, but it looked like a nice spot. The menu on the door indicated it was a bit of a steak place. With fish and chips for “22”. No vulgar pound signs here. As British Sea Power had started their career, Dad, then approaching 80, had suddenly become an autodidact devotee of alt-rock and independent record labels, holding forth on anyone from The Smiths to the Butthole Surfers. What would Dad have made of the way the pub now evidently embraced the ways of pop and the discotheque. Outside the pub was a poster for a DJ night, complete with steak/sound-system puns.
At 8.50am I boarded a bus, heading homeward. I was the only passenger. The route was curving, with good views to the moor. The journey brought a nice closing flow of Dartmoor places and place names. Leather Tor. Devil’s Bridge. Sweltor Quarries (disused). Horseyeatt. Rock Plantation. I thought of our parents out here – all that time ago, all those years ago. Lots of love, Mum and Dad. Thanks for everything.
All photos by the author.
*For the record, I was ultra-cautious about fire on Dartmoor. The Ghillie-Kettle’s fire base is a self-contained compartment and I had it set up on moist grass and moss, up on the granite of a tor. I doused the ashes well with water when done.
References
England’s Landscape: The South West by Roger Kain (English Heritage/HarperCollins, 2006).
Dartmoor Tors Compendium by Josephine M Collingwood (Tavicinity Publishing, 2017).
Dartmoor 365 by John Hayward (Curlew Publications, 2022).
