Travel Special – Devon: Bleak beauty

I overheard the following inter-cubicle exchange in a mixed changing room recently. ‘So where do you live?’ ‘We live on Dartmoor.’ ‘Dartmoor! How lovely!’ ‘Well, yes, it is amazing. But we’ve had quite enough of it now and we’re moving back down to the coast. In the two years we’ve lived up there, we’ve had enough rain and fog to last us a lifetime.’

I smiled as I stuck my right leg through the wrong hole of my swimming shorts. Very wet, Dartmoor is. In fact sodden might be a better word. It rains for days on end. The 365sq mile plateau is the first port of call for rain blowing in off the Atlantic. Seventy inches of rainfall spread over 200 days of the year is not unusual.

And she’s right about the fog, too. It gets on your tripe. The day can start clear and dry and by lunchtime all is obscured by a cold, damp whiteness. Here’s William Crossing (1847–1928) whose encyclopaedic Guide to Dartmoor (1909) is the Dartmoor monomaniac’s Bible: ‘I have known my surroundings to be entirely obscured, and objects 20 or 30 yards distant rendered invisible, where ten minutes before there was not a sign of what was coming, and the mist has continued for several days.’ His tip for drying out wet boots overnight is to pack them with oats, which as well as soaking up the moisture, swell, preserving the shape of the boot. It says it all about the Dartmoor climate that towards the end of his life, Crossing, a loveable man and a ­virtuoso on the tin whistle, was so stricken by rheumatism that he couldn’t put pen to paper.

Fog and torrential rain often come together. Even the hardy Dartmoor ponies — descended, it is thought, from domesticated animals turned loose during the dark ages — even these shaggy creatures stand there in the rain looking shocked, as if they can’t quite believe the miserable existence which has been allotted them.