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.
