Under a lowering sky

Back on track with the abstinence regime after the debacle at the dog lunch, I treated myself last weekend to a guided walk on Dartmoor. The walk, advertised in the Dartmoor Visitor, was called ‘Crock of Gold and Childe’s Tomb’. Twenty Gore-Tex-clad people, some with ski poles, plus yours truly, dressed appropriately perhaps for a longish journey on the District Line, met at Princetown, under the massive granite walls of Dartmoor Prison.

The guide introduced himself as Brian. He was clean-shaven, 50-ish and if you closed your eyes when he spoke he might have been Alan Bennett. The first piece of information he gave us was that there were nine Brians in the Dartmoor Guides Service. Brian collected a fiver from each of us then led us out of Princetown village towards the open moor.

Once out on the moor, the cold wind stung the eyeballs. And what a dismal, desolate scene! Wind and cold had leached all pigment from the landscape leaving everything a sort of anaemic brown colour. The range of low hills Brian was leading us towards was sinister in its desolation.

The going was relatively easy at first. Brian informed us that this was because during the first world war the track we were treading on was surfaced with crushed granite by a chain gang of conscientious objectors. Soon, however, the Conchies Road, as it was known locally, petered out, and, as the sky went blacker and blacker, we lit out across a sort of tundra. After a bit we came to a Bronze Age burial chamber and Brian motioned us to gather round. Even this broken remnant of an ancient civilisation was a comfort to the spirit amid such a barren waste. This was the burial chamber known as Crock of Gold, announced Brian.