I was working my way north-east heading away from the crowded coast of the Devon Riviera up into the green farming land that goes unnoticed in East Cornwall. Suddenly, over the crunch of my boots came the sound of oom-pah music. A fairground blast of a bawdy dance which brought to mind the smell of candyfloss and popcorn. By chance I had happened on a fairground organ museum. For the rest of the day the organ’s repertoire kept coming back to me. I marched to the songs of the first world war. Even my arms swung in true military fashion.
By the time I had reached the River Tamar it was late afternoon. I felt every one of the twelve days that I spent in Cornwall. My feet objected to pounding the hard road on the bridge. As I stepped towards Devon my boots sent shock waves up my shin - each wave reaching a little higher until even my jaw felt jarred.
As I looked back towards the sign saying Kernow, I realised that Cornwall had taken on hugely distorted proportions in my head. Like a white fly on a head of broccoli I had weaved in and out, up and down taking in each fold of its infinitely extending coast line. I had experienced first hand the mathematics of fractals. Somedays I felt that I had walked a circle, returning next morning to the same sea.
I felt sad to be leaving the light on the Cornish coast but I was glad to feel that I was moving again even if it was at the expense of my feet.
I had arranged to meet Pauline in Tavistock that evening but after linking up with her I decided that I wanted to go on. With the rhythm that my body was making it was getting easier now to be walking than to be standing still. I crossed over the fast flowing Tavy and looked up at the rising ground before me. Once again I was climbing, up the lane that would take me to Peter Tavy - right to the edge of Dartmoor.
Dartmoor. Even now the name weaves a dark spell. Dartmoor the amorphous. Dartmoor the anonymous. It defies me to come up with an easy image to encapsulate what it felt like to wander around in the thick mist that descended as I made my way up onto this plateau of old rocks and dark bogs.
I had expected a lot of Dartmoor, the last bit of upland on my route, and when I left off walking the night before at Peter Tavey I had almost been disappointed to see the tors clearly visible above me. Dartmoor, I felt, should be cloaked, wrapped up in its own mystery like a haunted tower in a gothic novel. I was not disappointed next morning as the weather had become dark and the clouds had already obscured the view of the high Tors. My friend Louise had rung up the army range wardens and added another fear to my list. The Army were carrying out a day of live firing on Dartmoor. Somehow stumbling around in the mist had become even less attractive. I needed to stick to a safe route that avoided the firing ranges.
Even with the detours I had planned on the map, Dartmoor was a test of my navigating skills as there was nothing visible from which I could take a bearing. The mist moved only to reveal more mist. I was forced to judge my direction by my compass, using my watch to guess how far I had gone in a particular direction.
Even the professionals were not finding the conditions easy. At one point as I wandered compass in-hand, three camouflaged figures materialised out of the mist . At first I panicked. I thought I had stumbled into the exercises. It was only when the figures politely asked me whether they could have direction to Peter Tavy that I realised they were lost.
Part of the dark connotations that I attach to Dartmoor’s name come from its prison. The mist eased as I came to the main cross-Dartmoor road. I could just make out the prison’s walls and barred windows in the distance. It didn’t look like much in the haze. An oversized farm. But it would be easy on the outside with the freedom of the moors to underestimate the bleakness of the place. I wondered what Dartmoor looked like from inside the bars- a rapidly vanishing walker against a wide, bleak landscape.
After the drama of the firing ranges, the start of the next day was a bit prosaic. I wandered up an old railway cutting northwards out of Bovey Tracey and started to scour the map for possible footpaths going east.
The pickings were pretty slim so after a short walk up through the trees of Stonelands Waste I was back to beating time on the roads. With the road came the rhythm and with the rhythm came the songs.
I was endlessly surprised at the montage of music my head decided to play in the Summer of 1996- after ‘Pack Up your Travels in your old Kit Bag’ I ranged into more modern territory with a couple of songs that I did not even know I knew. Despite the effective radio silence I had maintained during the walk I had picked up an amazing amount pop music from out of thin air.
‘Three Lions’ had become a favourite in these later stages - and I altered the chorus to ‘Gavin’s coming home’. I had even been affected by Girl Power and surprised a postman in rural Devon that morning with my one man interpretation of the ‘Wannabe’ video.
I was in an excellent mood as I walked towards Starcross. I had planned to rejoin the South West coast path and I was looking forward to a short stop before I caught the ferry across the River Exe. The night before I had been reading an old book about the area and I had been intrigued by its descriptions of the railway that passed right by the ferry landing. A fine example, the book had said of the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s mercurial mind at work. Not only did he plan to build this railway line so that it is practically in the estuary of the river Exe but he also planned that this line should be an atmospheric railway, a revolutionary new way of moving trains. I was intrigued to see how much of his railway was still left. He was not entirely successful in the execution of his designs.
The principle of the atmospheric railway is frighteningly simple. Stationary pumping engines created a vacuum and the air rushing in behind this vacuum blew the carriages down the line. The speeds achieved by this system were quite remarkable for the mid-nineteenth century, some of the test trains travelled at 70 miles per hour. However, an exposed sea estuary was not exactly the most practical place to try out a revolutionary new system. The sea spray rotted the leather flaps used to keep the system sealed and when a lubricant was used to keep the seal airtight, rats and mice found the lubricant so tasty that they ate their way through the leather. Brunel finally admitted defeat when the trains kept on breaking down and took a thumping financial loss on this railway line by replacing the atmospheric system with conventional trains. Even today the line has problems and it is the most expensive piece of track in England to maintain because of its exposed position.
This story does have one positive note to it. Brunel still holds the unofficial world record for the fastest rat out of a drain pipe. The rodents that got into the system were fired down the line when the system pressured up, sending the poor beasts hurtling out into the pumping stations.
It was a short ride on the ferry down the Exe, passing around the sandbar of Dawlish Warren. I soon found myself at Exmouth, back at the seaside. Dartmoor had refreshed my interest in ice creams and beach rides. As I walked I watched the families on the beach.
As you may have realised by now, in planning to walk this trip I had come across many places whose name alone intrigued me and just a short walk from the prom of Exmouth was one of the names that I liked the most of all. I had come now to The Highland of Orcombe.
The Highland of Orcombe. Orcombe the Avenger. When I first found this name on a map I thought it sounded like the home of a barbarian warrior. I was disappointed when I got there to find it was only a scrubby bit of cliff. However my disappointment at its lack of a gothic grandeur did not last long as just beyond the Highland someone had built some holiday chalets next to a Marines’ base. I sat for a while laughing at the strange juxtaposition of these two worlds. On one side of a wire fence it was all small babies crying, while ten feet away figures in khaki performed feats of endurance . It must have been tough to see peace so close at hand. I am not sure how the holiday-making parents put up with their lot!
It was almost evening. My vision had become violined, all silky-stringed.
I had returned to the red rocks. I had returned to the fire theme. I felt like a conductor walking on the cliffs on my own. I raised my arms and the world caught fire. I looked down in Ladram Bay it was like a recapitulation of a favourite refrain. A reminder of the Valley of the Rocks.
© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004
