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…