Once again, the annual Ten Tors event was forced to adapt to the current situation and this year went ahead as a virtual event with teams taking part across the country ensuring that the unique spirit of this most excellent event could live on. I was over the moon to have my piece ‘Tougher than a 4-minute mile’ published in the event booklet as well as some thoughts on what I gained from Ten Tors over the years. It really was an honour to be part of things again. Fingers crossed for a full return to business as usual in 2022!
The Fox Tor Café, Princetown, on an unusually sunny day
THE CAFE OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS
It had always been a place of mystery – out of bounds and with a distinct aura of otherworldliness. Its riches were legendary, there were those lucky few who had passed many an hour in its warm embrace, refuelling and taking stock. It was a den of desires dutifully fulfilled, a beacon with an almost magnetic attraction drawing us ever closer. On many occasions I had passed by, sodden and melancholy, but always moving on and out of its orbit - like a rogue comet it seemed I was not destined to land here. Until one day my chance came – albeit at the ultimate price.
The Fox Tor café, unassuming and modest, stands squeezed between the Railway Inn and Tor Royal Lane in the high moorland village of Princetown. There is nothing particularly special from the outside – its off-white and slightly weather-beaten façade is sliced through with a functional lamplit burgundy sign proclaiming its hostelry status. The triplet of sash windows on the upper floor are closed and dark but emanating from the misted glass of the lower two apertures are beams of warm light like eyes puncturing the perennial fog that cloaks the village for much of the year.
I’m tired – more tired than I’ve ever been on one of these Ten Tors training walks. The previous day has really taken it out of me and I’m not the only one – two of our team have already dropped out. The reality of the situation is hitting me hard and the prospect of trudging another 30km northwards to Okehampton Camp is soul-destroying. The truth is my body gave up hours ago and it is only mental fortitude, drawn from the deep well of experience that is tenuously carrying me onwards. However, wobbling along the track somewhere between Nun’s Cross and South Hessary Tor, I realise the tank is empty and I’m running on fumes. It’s time to concede – the first and last time I would do this. I would sell my soul, so to speak, down at the crossroads of the B3357 and the B3212, for a few hours in the garden of earthly delights.
On opening the bright red, glass-paned door I cross the threshold and pass into a mythical and ethereal domain, hitherto exclusively the reserve of group leaders, teachers and ex- students up here to help out for the weekend. Hots mugs of milky tea throw clouds of steam skyward and there is a distinct fug of damp outdoor wear desperate to dry out before the next onslaught of meteorological inclemency. Huge plates stacked precariously with delectable morsels of every breakfast combination imaginable are brought out from a hidden kitchen at the back. Teetering towers of hot buttered toast are placed on wooden tabletops whilst the more adventurous opt for teacakes and muffins. Every conceivable culinary requirement of the discerning hiker, worn down after days of rehydrated space food, Smash and Angel Delight, is on offer. Simply put, we are in heaven.
My hardier companions have already crossed into the wilds of the north moor, doggedly soldiering on to glory but I am seated in the bosom of this hallowed place, so revered and respected by those who have taken communion here. A feeling of contentment washes over me. I have paid a high price indeed to be here but the disappointment and regret that was felt so keenly just moments before ebb away as I eagerly tuck into my first plate of bacon and eggs.
Rearview Mirror, Dartmoor 1997
I’ve been rummaging through my archives and came across a photographic project I worked on back in 1997. Looking at a lot of my early work, it’s clear how much of an influence Dartmoor was - especially the period from ‘97 to 2000. I tramped many a mile with my trusty film cameras and these images have their roots in a walk around the Princetown area in October ‘97…
These photographs are 100% analogue - no digital manipulation was used. All images were shot on Black and White film (Ilford FP4), processed and contact sheeted. The contact sheets were then photocopied onto acetate, cut into strips and then used as “negatives” to print from. The results are an abstract, textured, dreamscape - the essence of Dartmoor seen through the fogged windowpane of time.
J12 - B3212 Postbridge to Warren House Inn
O8 - Track from South Hessary to Nun’s Cross Farm
P9 - Nun’s Cross Farmhouse and Tree
P9 - Looking east over Nun’s Cross Farm and Foxtor Mires
P9/Q9 - Track to Higher Hartor from Nun’s Cross Farm
Q9 - Higher Hartor
SX 626 738 MISTY MOORLAND HOP
Friday, 6pm. The maths teacher, Mr Blaxland, shoved the over-used cracked cassette into the tape player and turned the volume up all the way - the driving riff of Led Zeppelin’s Misty Mountain Hop drowning out the excited adolescent banter going on in the back of the dark blue, Leyland DAF minIbus. He swung the vehicle brusquely around Tiverton’s last roundabout, accelerated down the slip road and powered onto the dark motorway, bound for the moors.
Until now it had all been day walks but this weekend in early March we were to get our first taste of sleeping over, albeit under a real roof. This was considered a practice run for the coming weekends under canvas, out in the wilds. We were to learn advanced navigational skills, emergency procedures and field craft to add to our burgeoning knowledge of the wild places. It was also going to be a weekend full of unbottled teenage frivolity, violent pillow fights and general one-upmanship over fellow classmates. Our poor teachers…
7am, the West Dart’s omnipresent babble and gurgle filtered in through the head high open window next to my top bunk - the moor’s call to rise and shine. A slice of morning stole its way in through the fogged glass of the west-facing wing - and boys’ dormitory - of the training centre illuminating the sleeping forms on the institutional hard metal bunks. I wiped the moisture from the pane and could make out a figure down on the river bank rooted to the spot making slow movements with its arms and occasionally, carefully lifting a leg - it was Mr Bennet from the science department doing his morning Tai Chi session. The day had begun and he’d beaten us to it. It was time to get up.
To start the day on Dartmoor is something special and rare indeed - to really feel like you belong. You haven’t arrived tainted and abused by a modern and urban life - the superficial fakeness clinging to you as you step out of the car, impossible to shake off. The required metamorphosis is too much to endure in a single day and you find yourself stalked by a malignant shadow, glimpsed from the corner of your eye at every turn, ready to pull you back to a spoiled and fastidious reality. No, you must have truly started your day up here to feel wholly cleansed and at one with your surroundings. Better still, spend a second night and reap the rewards of beginning a further day here and bask in the sensation of having left normality behind - the first day serving as a buffer to your former life. Staying at the Dartmoor Training Centre afforded its residents this rare treat and by the Sunday morning I never wanted to come back down.
After a clattering and boisterous breakfast, Mr Evans - our de facto leader - ran through the order of the day, going through the route cards and triple-checking the equipment that would be required. We split into our teams; Ants, Bees, Caterpillars and Dragons, swung our overloaded packs onto our backs and headed off over the undulating vastness of the south moors.
6pm. Tired and battered with heads down we trudged north east on a scant footpath that seemed only to exist on our map. The wilds of the infamous Foxtor Mires lay off to our right, mysterious and foreboding in the murky twilight. The dark bulk of Skir, Naker’s and Crane hills hugging the bog whilst Childe slept eternal in his granite tomb a mile distant. Skirting Royal Hill, the training centre came into view, pin pricks of light piercing the misty gloom that had descended upon us. We followed our beacon and in no time were kicking off sodden boots and stinking socks in the drying room and making our way barefoot to the common room. The buzz and excitement that can only come from a healthy dose of fresh air and day’s exercise filled the wooden floored space while tall tales of bottomless bogs and macho prowess did the rounds.
Freshly showered we basked in the glow of day’s work done and entertained ourselves in a typically teenage manner, running riot creating memories to feed off in a long distant future. As I lay in my bunk that night, wrapped in the cotton wool of assured time and place, I felt invincible - the moor had provided me with a shield that would protect me from whatever life may throw my way. I knew then that there would be many more weekends like this to come, enveloped in these magical 365 square miles. I drifted off, Led Zeppelin’s lyrics from the drive up here swirling in my satisfied mind:
So I've decided what I'm gonna do now
So I'm packing my bags for the Misty Mountains
Where the spirits go now
Over the hills where the spirits fly, oh, I really don't know…
SX 588 932 TOUGHER THAN A 4-MINUTE MILE
The opening bars of Chariots of Fire tinkle into my fitful slumber - the clanging piano notes falling like icicles onto glass. I’ve been tossing and turning most of the night in a stupor of excitement, phantom route cards, laminated maps and indigestion from a COG’s kitchen battered fish overload. The day has arrived, the moment we’ve been training hard for. All those hours, days and nights spent up on the moors in all weathers will finally bear fruit over the next 34 hours. 5am and the sun has yet to rise. In the dark of the canvas tent there is movement, somebody next to me stirs and rolls over trying desperately to get an extra 5 minutes sleep, letting out a moan of despair. My mind briefly has time to reflect on yesterday’s scrutineering by the army and their unwavering strictness in what we must carry with us over the weekend. There was a flat “no!” to my teammate’s non-nutritious Pot Noodles as a posible dinner and much doubt cast on another’s idea of a change of warm clothing - a pair of nylon socks and a thin T-shirt not cutting the mustard. But the military checks are carried out for good reason as we will be pushed to our absolute limits, both mentally and physically, over the course of the next two days in an environment that has thrown both snowstorms and heatwaves at unsuspecting participants over the years.
Slipping into our short lived fresh, clean and warm clothes, we huddle around as the grey dawn sheds light on Okehampton Camp. The brooding bulks of West Mill and Yes Tors rise menacingly to the south over the corrugated roofs of the Lego-like huts of the military base and beyond the world seems to fall away. We are on an island, pushed up out of an ocean of order, humdrum and routine. Here we can run free, follow our own rules and make important decisions that would be impossible adrift in our everyday lives. The excitement is palpable with our dedicated teachers - having selflessly given up countless free weekends - milling around making sure we’re packed and ready, shepherding us to the starting line and out of their control. I swallow the last morsel of decent food for a while and group up with my team, a team that I will be sharing every waking (and sleeping) moment with over the course of this great adventure.
Filing our way up the footpath from the camp and onto Black Down, there is a feeling of impending otherness - a keen, crisp sensation washing us clean. We are about the embark on something very special as yet unknown to us. The moor waits patiently ahead ready to sculpt and mould us as it has the great granite boulders and outcrops that dominate this landscape. We will morph as one and forever more carry the time worn scars and bleached memories of this awesome place. Sir Ranulph Fiennes appears, a brief and rousing speech is delivered, a gun fired and we are off - into our futures, presents and pasts.
SX 566 890 IN THE VALLEY OF THE FOX
Black-a-tor-Copse - the name, folkloric and musical trips off the tongue like the lilting gait of the cantering ponies of the moor. Wedged below ledge on either side; Fordsland to the east and the stark escarpment of the Slipper Stones and Branscombe’s Loaf to the west, this is Dartmoor at its most dramatic and lofty. Here granite has been pushed to its limit - 2000ft and more - above the the rolling tunic of Devon’s long-cultivated farmland. In a slender gap no wider than a kilometre the high peaks and plateau swoop swiftly into a narrow gouge 800ft below, draining the newborn Western Okement River off the moor to Meldon reservoir and the kitchens and bathrooms of Okehampton.
Early January and frost has paralysed the land, contorting the thick flat-stemmed grasses into crippled forms rippling down the steep hillside to the close-clipped dip and curve of the valley floor. Dropping down from High Willhays, the highest point in Southern England where snow has been found well into June, we spot the fox several contours below. Its burnt orange coat is set in profile against dusted white tufts as it stands, frozen into the landscape, smelling the air. We have been seen long before we see. We stand transfixed, seemingly the only living things for miles, locked in a symbiotic seance journeying together, back to a simpler time. A sudden movement of the animal snaps us back. It turns and it is gone, bounding downhill and across the threshold of stunted oaks into the Copse.
We follow our token totem and cross into another realm, the gnarled black limbs embracing us as we venture deeper into an old world. Along with Wistman’s Wood faraway to the south, it stands as the only remaining ancient forest on Dartmoor. But here it is as wild and remote as Wistman’s is tamed and accessible by the hordes of hikers and tourists from Two Bridges and Princetown. This is one of the Wild Places. Boulder and branch compete in an epic battle through deep time, melded into one living organism. Passing through is like entering the womb of creation, unfettered by the unnatural laws of civilisation. A tumbling torrent of pure nature; a remnant of what came before jutting spectacularly into the 21st century, piercing the arrogant bubble of merciless man. The sound here is deadened, broken only by the call of a crow and the susurration of the rushing water below. We stop and take stock, reset. Never has there been a better place to reset. The brief sun disappears over Corn ridge and the day is almost done. Reluctantly we leave the wood and head northwards and back to an uncivilised world.
SX 597 724 THE WINDS OF CHANGE
I stand, arms outstretched, a stiff westerly punching my chest. Mum clicks the shutter and freezes me forever - rooting me to this spot, immortalising the moment and setting it free on film. Dad resists the bugging tug on the taut lead as our dog, Amy, fights for freedom and a chase. My younger sister looks on, no doubt wondering what on earth we’re doing here. But it is my 14th birthday and therefore my choice. I have chosen here, 1500ft up on the back of my new favourite thing; Dartmoor. A team of teenagers, around 16 years old, heavily laden with packs and maps, appears from the south chatting loudly. They stop at the boulders around the base of the Tor and pull out high energy snacks and supplies. The wind blows stronger.
I take a bite of my chocolate covered Kendal Mint Cake and stuff the remainder back into the side pocket of my pack. “Let’s move ‘em up and move ‘em out!” comes a cry and we shoulder our kit and head north, downhill to Princetown leaving the family behind. At the wooden gate where moor meets road my comrades and I pass four guys with guitars and a camera heading up to the Tor. We turn and watch them trudge along the muddy path, and comment on their lack of preparedness in their towny attire of jeans and trainers. The wind drops slightly.
Grasping my acoustic bass by its slender neck, and squeezing past a gaggle of teens out on a training walk, me and my bandmates laugh and joke, hopping from tuft to tuft and avoiding puddles as best we can in our wholly unsuitable clothing. I know this fact and feel a little uncomfortable as I have been here before many times but never quite like this. 30 minutes later and we are clambering over the rough rock and mustering the best album cover poses we can. The shutter is clicked - haven’t I done this before, a decade ago? Someone suggests it’s beer o’clock so we jump down and turn heal north again to the nearest inn where there will be a fire, warmth and company; more memories made. As we walk across the carpark I notice a wedding celebration going on in the function room, the bride and groom pausing for the camera as they cut the three-tiered cake. The sun beats down and the wind has dropped.
It’s been an amazing day. Sunshine illuminating the burnt orange grasses of the western moor, more photos taken than I can remember. My entire family and close friends, gathered, surrounded by a natural splendour that shines and dazzles even the most jaded and urban. “I had no idea it was this beautiful up here!” an uncle confides - “isn’t it just mist, drizzle and bogs?”. As my Angie and I smile for the camera, framed by the french windows, I notice a familiar face walk across the courtyard, but the fleeting recognition fades, the family crowds round and the cake is cut. Later, we wander up to the Tor, the sun sinking lower below the beech hedge on our right. Over the brow ahead a family of four come into sight, two young children skipping happily down the track towards us - the oldest maybe 12. I turn and smile to my new wife. A rare moment of serenity hits as we pass.
An early evening breeze picks up keenly from the west and we make our way to the car, the four of us glowing from an afternoon’s tramp and a quarter century on South Hessary.
SX 578 673 LIFE IN THE GUTTER
Gutter is a beacon. A place to kick off sodden boots and lay tired limbs down on the close clipped grasses of the verdant knoll that floats like a vivid green ship, ordered and tamed - altered and created by the hand of man - in a wild tempestuous ocean of nature’s mad chaos. A hard fought for island after a day’s battling with the elements. Our prize.
Here we have all we need and more. Water is drawn from the stream flowing out from the Mire to the south and there is even a spring sprouting from the spiky reeds on the opposite bank. The ground is flat and smooth and tents are flung up with ease, doors flapping in a rough circle around the steaming stoves cooking up a tasteless dehydrated mush. Fresh socks are fumbled for in the deep recesses of our packs whilst our weekend guardians turn a blind eye to contraband goods stolen in, buried deeper still beneath the socks. Our bodies are weary after 12 hours of hard physical endurance but the food, drink and dry cotton revives us and we talk and laugh as the warm spring sun arcs lower into its infinite cloud dappled sky. And then it is gone, silhouetting the boulder strewn top of Gutter Tor and briefly illuminating the golden green grasses that run along the rounded ridge.
As the dimpsy half-light fades, another light show begins; stars appearing, slowly at first then in an unstoppable torrent of bright white jewels cascading above us. A low moon rises over a stand of Scots pine to the east, a soft breeze whispering through its branches mimicking perfectly the slow tug of a wave on a shingle shore. We have crossed through the delicate veil of reality into another world - a shared experience for the lucky few, unaware of the deep significance these rare moments will have on our unimagined futures.
SX 673 685 ON A BEARING DUE SOUTH
The white tip of the needle hovers eagerly between the bold black lines in the compass and points south. My mind is occupied with a single thought; I must not let this needle move, a millimetre either way for just one minute could have catastrophic results. Visibility is down to a handful of metres, my teammates following keenly at my heels - the six of us packed closely together as one entity snaking cautiously on along the flanks of Holne and Buckfastleigh Moors.
We appear to exist in a vacuum, all colour sucked out of the milky bubble we float along in. Sound too has been erased and the air refuses to move. The moor’s infamous mists have transformed the landscape into nothing. Time bends and warps in a wormhole of wanton disorientation; I could be anywhere at any time in history. We drop 50 metres and suddenly, spectacularly, time floods back in with a wave of realisation; the world - my world - opens up to the east, falling away steeply to the ploughed fields and clipped copses of mechanised man. In an instant it is swallowed up once more as we climb the rising bulk of Snowdon, doggedly sticking to our 180 degree bearing.
I learn to embrace this experience. It is unique and sought after - that rare moment of being both outside one’s self and at the same time centred wholly within one’s very being. There is no distraction, no creeping brooding fear, no doubts, no aspirations to be knocked down. I am here with one fixed purpose. A grey shape fades into the whiteness from another dimension and beckons me out of my reverie, obliterating this higher state. My fixed purpose has borne fruit and we have reached our quarry. We enter the canvas tent to stamp our card - the sixth of ten. It is good to have goals - a fixed point to aim for - but it is what lies in the in-between, the getting there, that truly captivates and inspires. We button up our Goretex and head out once more - out of time and out of space.
SX 616 893 DOWN AND OUT (OF SIGHT)
It’s tempting to take the rutted, peaty track due south from Oke and then a sharp left but I opt for the marshy plateau that spurs south-east tramping as the crow flies. Taking the easy option does Steeperton a disservice, avoiding its buttress-like flanks rising steeply from its arrow head of brooks. It also avoids a secret spot - my secret spot. Down here, next to the cascading copper current, and squeezed between the tussocked high banks that claw up and into an outsider’s sight, I am induced into a dream. A lone tree stands mottled and wind whipped, yet slightly taller than its more exposed cousins - lashed as they are by westerlies bent on destruction. I sit awhile under a budding branch and take in the limited view; a peek of Taw Marsh opening out to the north, wet and shining. From here it’s a 400ft calf-crunching climb to the hut atop tor. I rest up, knowing the clamber can wait. There are birds nesting here and their spring song lifts me. Small fish dart from granite pool to eddying inlet; there are civil war musket balls buried in the silt speaking of a less peaceful moment. The thought of conflict invades my meditative mind - man’s mad memory threatening this otherwise natural scene. A buzzard, high in the stark sky pushes this malignant malady away - for now at least - and I am filled with the wonder of the natural world once more. I swing my pack over my tired shoulders and leave my private eden for the peaks and troughs of the high moor.
SX 562 837 IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
I’m laid out on my back, the thick springy riverbank grasses holding me more comfortably than any mattress. There is no sign of man, not even a footprint, for no man has trodden here for days, maybe weeks. Grey granite clitter litters the green to brown grasses which blend from a dark emerald at the water’s edge to a russet red higher up the valley side towards the great marauding mires that proliferate the high moors in search of their next victim. A lofty Tor esconds itself just beyond the visible ridge-line to the west - its empty flagpole swaying in a brisk breeze. Down here, however, it is still with only a slight zephyr moving upstream against the current through the deep cleave to the south and forking due north and east, bouncing off the flanks of Amicombe Hill. I have been here before; a summer’s jolly clambering up over Brat and Chat and down Rattle Brook with friends for a starlit night, the sound of bubbling water lulling me to sleep and permeating my dreams. Another time on a training walk, heavy feet carrying waterlogged boots ever further south towards Lynch, Great Mis and a bed for the night. A few years later I was back shadowing the inheritors of our fortune, spying from above with field glasses and radio, wishing time had stood still for just a little longer, not yet accepting that all things must pass. In truth I have wandered through this place many times but many years have passed now and in travelling my mind’s memories I was not surprised to make my first port of call here. I will lie a little longer, skylarks dancing and babbling overhead backed by the sparse scudding clouds, their shadows moving over me choreographed by nature in an unending elemental light show. There is nothing pressing to do today…
DARTMOOR; A LIFELONG JOURNEY INTO THE WILD
I wrote this piece as an ode to Dartmoor a couple of years ago and it won first prize in a Wanderlust Travel Magazine writing competition.
An unbroken chain of encounters with the wild in Southern England's last great wilderness.
The view from the Youth Hostel window, framed and distorted through the mottled and dusty glass of passed time, will never leave me. It remains a powerful snapshot of a 12-year-old boy's first encounter with the Wild and began a lifelong love affair with the sublimeness of untamed landscapes.
Stark, wind-blasted hills rose sharply from an impatient broiling river fighting its way to a more pastoral scene further downstream. Fast clouds shifted frantically, scudding across a wayward sky while nature’s local avion population tried, in vain, to grab onto a thermal before being rudely buffeted and blown by an omnipresent westerly. Short, stunted trees all pointed in an easterly direction contorted and crippled by the prevailing winds whilst hardy livestock sheltered in the feeble protection they offered. On the horizon great bulks of granite commanding respect and awe had broken the saturated surface of dark peat and copper grasses and lay scattered and stacked in a random natural puzzle. Here all sides were jagged, with unfamiliar angles and gradients. The rounded edges and smooth contours of the rolling fields from my everyday surroundings seemed a world away. This was different, this was wild. I could have been on another continent.
Dartmoor, winter 1992 and our year 8 teachers had taken us on a week-long trip to the Moors for several days of hiking, orienteering and adventure. It was my first foray into the exotic and the otherness of the experience had seeped into me like a drug. It was to leave me with an unshakable and persistent addiction that would carry me all over the world but would always lure me back to the place where it all began.
Over the subsequent years I was to soak myself in Dartmoor's wilderness, drawn to its disregard of the industrialised world, its infinite quirks and idiosyncrasies refusing to homogenize and fall into line. Dartmoor, to me, was wild and free and served as a constant reminder of what is real in this world. Rebellious and unpredictable it was a teenager's perfect role model. As I grew older, so too did my knowledge and understanding of the Moors. I couldn't keep away. I have walked hundreds of miles over it and slept countless nights in it, wild-camping in the middle of everywhere cushioned by its heather and grasses. When I was down, stressed or upset, a few hours with it would ground me and re-boot my emotions.
For over a decade now, I've lived on the continent, separated from my beloved Dartmoor, shackled and sea-locked from its otherworldly powers. Whenever I'm back in England, though, it is where I go. I have celebrated many of my birthdays there, recorded music with friends there, I even got married there.
Last summer I found myself on the Moors once more, this time with my wife, children and parents, 3 generations enjoying the delights this special place offers. It was another wild encounter in an unbroken chain that stretched back a quarter of a century. As we passed the National Park sign embedded in a carved chunk of granite at the side of the road I felt the familiar pang of excitement in the pit of my stomach, experienced a thousand times before but never dimming. I was home.
Driving back to the "normal" world along the serpentine ribbon of asphalt that wound its way through the fern-clad moorland we dipped into a lush valley. A few houses, little more than a hamlet, appeared as if out of thin air and amongst them I recognised a familiar building; it was the Youth Hostel I'd stayed in when I was a child. The daylight was fading and a warm low light was emanating from a single window. As we passed I could have sworn I saw what looked like a 12-year-old boy looking out, as if in a trance, contemplating the sheer wild beauty of Southern England’s last great wilderness, my Dartmoor.
