On most days of the year there is a guide-led walk on Dartmoor. These walks, advertised in the Dartmoor Visitor, are ideal for a lazy person like me who enjoys tramping across the high moor from time to time but prefers someone else to do the map-reading and the worrying about not getting lost. Each walk listed in the Visitor is given a title, such as ‘Peaks and Pixies’ or ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’, and an Ordinance Survey map reference. The map reference tells you where to meet and usually refers to a car park.
Whenever I go on one of these walks, I often get off on the wrong foot, as it were, because I’m improperly dressed. The other walkers gathered in the car park will be velcroed up to the neck in the latest lightweight hiking gear, toting silly little day packs containing emergency provisions, and wielding titanium walking poles. I usually turn up in a pair of trainers, and, if it’s particularly cold, an ancient, and not particularly waterproof, anorak. After identifying which member of this expensively equipped expedition is our guide, I’ll then step forward to say hello and pay my five-pound joining fee. And the guide, whose duty it is to ensure that everyone is appropriately dressed, or at least carrying a set of waterproofs, will look me up and down and express reservations.
These volunteer Dartmoor guides, many of them elderly, are an interesting crowd. Intellectuals, many of them, they love the moor with a passion that in some cases has tipped over into quiet, pantheistic worship. Most are amateur historians. There is a greater concentration of Bronze Age remains up on Dartmoor than anywhere else in Europe, and if you press them gently on the subject, some will surprise you with some ambitious, crackpot theory or other about the significance of the stone rows and standing stones. Was it Dartmoor’s lonely barrenness and hostility to man that first seduced these volunteer guides — like attracting like? I imagine so. Most conceal the full extent of their misanthropic natures behind a polite or even convivial exterior. Others don’t bother.
‘Are you sure you’re going to be warm enough?’ the guide might say as he hands me a square blue ticket. I might even hear titters from the other walkers. Rather than confess that I’m not wearing the proper customised gear because I simply can’t afford it, I snobbishly try to imply that the trainers and anorak are a protest against consumerism. Which is a complete load of rubbish because I’m usually green with envy at some of the jackets I’m seeing in the car park. Any deaths on our walk and I’ll be first among the corpses, stripping them of anything labelled Rab or Marmot, Brasher or Berghaus.
‘Yes, I’ll be fine,’ I answer with dignity. ‘Have you no boots?’ ‘I prefer trainers, thanks.’ ‘And what about your lunch? Have you brought anything to eat?’
Here I might show a Crunchie or a peppermint Aero. Then, with a resigned shake of the head, perhaps, or a tight little grin, the guide will close the boot of his car and lead us, like so many sheep, out of the car park and up the nearest barren hill.
Imagine my surprise and satisfaction last week, then, when of the three of us who assembled in the car park for ‘Mysteries of Merrivale’ walk, I was the only person suitably shod. Dartmoor was so thoroughly sodden after a wet week that I’d taken the rare precaution of borrowing a pair of waterproof boots for the day. And then our guide arrived looking terribly crestfallen, saying he’d stupidly left his boots at home and would have to do the walk in his driving shoes — a comically insubstantial pair of beige suede slip-ons.
He was an elderly gentleman and I did feel sorry for him. We offered to not complain if he cancelled the walk, but he refused, leading us out of the car park and immediately into a waterlogged mire criss-crossed with turbulent streams. I can’t remember seeing an adult, let alone an adult in a position of authority, wearing footwear so disastrously unsuited to the prevailing conditions. After gamely squelching across, losing first one slipper then the other, he must have been very relieved when we came to the raised track of an old granite railway where the going fortunately became easier and a lot drier. We kept to this track for an hour or so then halted beside an abandoned granite quarry for lunch.
‘How are the feet? Cold?’ I said, trying to inject a sympathetic note into my voice. ‘It’s surprising, actually,’ he said, ‘how the water in your shoes warms up after a while and then it’s not so uncomfortable.’ He was a real trooper, this guide was. I’ll say that for him.
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