Semi-recluse (me) seeks dilapidated cottage on Dartmoor to rent

So now I must find somewhere else to put my books and live sometimes. Dartmoor, I thought: one of the wildest places left in England yet just 20 minutes to Exeter St David’s station, if my car starts, and another 20 to Torbay hospital along the new bypass for appointments and treatments.

What I have in mind is a miner’s cottage with bracken growing against the granite walls and an indefatigable little stream passing close by for use when the pipes freeze. There would be no wifi, no phone signal, no BBC radio or television. Final demands would be left in a postbox at the end of the unmade track half a mile away. The cottage would be a bit dilapidated but the roof would be mostly sound and the chimney would draw.

The advantage of this spartan severance is that deep silence you get up there when the wind isn’t blowing. Also that magical sunlight in the mornings and evenings and in the winter glittering snow and hoar frosts. Ravens, kites, owls, foxes, weasels and stoats for neighbours. And ragged sheep, Galloway cattle and semi-wild ponies grazing right up to the front door.

By an odd coincidence, Robert Louis Stevenson has described my ideal place far better than I can in a poem of 1887. I came across ‘The House Beautiful’ the day before yesterday and was astonished to see my reclusive fantasy so accurately described. To unappreciative eyes seeing from a distance, his ‘naked house’ on a ‘naked moor’ is ‘bleak without and bare within’. But he lives there and sees the moor in all its moods, the ‘incomparable pomp of eve’ and the ‘cold glories of the dawn’ and the ‘wizard moon’ ascending, creating ‘a cheerful and changeful page’ which — the way he tells it, anyway — turns his lonely existence into a beautiful year-long hallucination.