This was more of a tea-and-cake occasion with a chance for neighbours to catch up and chat (or day I say gossip?). But there was a festive atmosphere provided by The Grimspound Border Morris, a troupe of Morris dancers based in Newton Abbot.

Morris dancing can trace its roots back a long way, back to the 15th Century in a courtly context, but at some point in the 16th Century it was taken up by mere mortals and became a folk tradition. It has its variants in different parts of the world, but here in SW England it had all but died out until it was revived around 1900 or thereabouts.

There are several styles of Morris dancing, and this troupe followed the Border tradition from counties bordering Wales. This can include face paint, ordinary clothes decorated with ribbons or strips of cloth pieces or coloured paper collectively known as ‘raggies’. Border Morris also favours dancing with stout sticks rather than the gentler variants where handkerchiefs are wafted in the air. Bells, it seems, are optional, and the Grimspound Border have done away with them, opting for a more up-to-date steampunk vibe that I think works really well when combined with the traditional feathers and foliage.

Folk traditions have always, and will always, change over time, and with their enthusiastic dancing and charming smiles, the Grimspound Border Morris brightened what had been a drizzly autumn day. In fact, the rain was becoming a nuisance to the musicians, especially the guitarist using an amplifier. I dashed home for an umbrella and stood in as a temporary provider of shelter.

Mrs C used this photo as evidence that I’d joined a band, but alas, it was not so.

The rain persisted, so we cleared the decks in the skittle alley and the dancers adapted their style to make use of the space. In a very British way, this make do and carry on attitude added to the fun, and I enjoyed the day immensely.

The video is cut together from several dances over two performances, one outside and one indoors, and I won’t be winning any prizes for filmmaking, but I hope it gives a flavour of the day.

What other aspects of Devon life shall I cover?

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There’s More?

Well yes.

Over on my blog at michaelcampling.com, I wrote a humorous piece about the possible origins of Morris dancing, so I recommend that you hop over and read that too:

Author Michael Campling

Big Green Men and Whacking with Sticks

Read more

a year ago · 4 likes · 1 comment

That’s it for this week.

All the best, and I’ll be back with another Postcard soon.

Enjoyed it?

I learned a lot and future videos will be better.

Over to you:

Have you been to Exeter Quay? Would you like to?

Do the places match your imagined locations when you read my Devonshire Mysteries or Devonshire Crime Thrillers?

Do you have a favourite waterside place for a stroll and a coffee or a beer?

Can you say Cricklepit Bridge three times fast?

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There aren’t libraries and theatres and shops and pubs and cafés and restaurants and all that stuff. It’s very quiet and very peaceful. We know a lot of our neighbours. We might know some better than others, and be friendlier with some more than others. You know, that’s the way of it anywhere. But it’s a bit like if you live on a street, perhaps, or in a large building. Well, that’s the whole village. That’s all there is.

It’s like we have a street; there’s no more to it. There are a few people on farms dotted around, some of whom we know. The nearest village is slightly larger, and that’s up the hill. It’s a steep hill, so it would take most people about ten minutes to walk it. Otherwise, you’re looking at a three-mile trip to go to a bigger place, although they are still small. The towns of Chudleigh and Bovey Tracey are nearby, and they’re very small. They have their own kind of vibe as well. They’re very much small rural towns, although getting bigger, with lots of house building going on.

Not here, though, because in this little village we are protected. We are within the bounds of the Dartmoor National Park, right on the edge of it, hence the name. The Dartmoor National Park Authority is very much in charge of what is allowed and what is not allowed in terms of development. So if somebody wanted to do something out of character with the area, or something that was going to destroy the landscape, the Dartmoor National Park would step in and prevent that. They try to keep the environment as it should be. It’s a delicate balancing act. They don’t own the land. The land in national parks in the UK, if you don’t know, is owned privately. It is not owned by the state in any way, and it is not owned by the National Park Authority. They are simply a regulatory body if you like. When the National Parks were set up by an Act Of Parliament in 1949, these very special areas were created in the UK. The first was the Peak District, established in 1951. The National Park authorities have been protecting these sites ever since. The parks are all beautiful in their own way, and they’re all different.

Dartmoor is an intriguing place. It’s very hilly, and a lot of it is rural. We’ve got this lovely rolling landscape of green fields, hedges and trees, with lots of small fields. It’s not a place where we have big farms, and that’s quite nice in its own way. Within the national park, they tend to be small, family-run farms, sometimes owned, sometimes leased. They might have a small dairy herd, or they might grow food: potatoes and carrots and things. It might be an organic farm. It’s quite a good area for that kind of thing; organic food is not that difficult to get here. There’s plenty of it around.

So we’ve got a curious mixture of modern and ancient rubbing alongside each other. People lived here going way back to the Neolithic period. There’s evidence of settlements, and there are new things going on now too. The national park isn’t totally static. It has some very special environments, like temperate rainforest, which is not something you find that commonly, and those areas are managed carefully. There are other trusts that take care of some of them. There are commercial plantations for conifers and softwood, and there are reservoirs for water, some of which are also used for fishing. So it’s a very varied landscape.

We have, of course, the coast, and the fishing industry is not what it once was. It does still exist, but it’s a lot smaller than it used to be. There are places in Devon that have a very proud heritage of the fishing industry, but particularly with modern methods of fishing, that industry has shrunk to very small levels. We won’t get into arguments about the EU and fishing quotas and stuff like that because I don’t know enough details to explain it all properly. No doubt that is part of it, but the modern interconnected way of agriculture, fisheries and farming has left a lot of smaller concerns behind. So it’s a place where there have been changes, and there will continue to be changes.

The environment itself has changed due to the climate. You can look back at the old settlements up on Dartmoor and think, “Well, this is really bleak. The soil’s very thin, it’s granite bedrock. What on earth did they do here?” And the answer is that the climate was different, and there would have been trees, not just an expanse of gorse bushes. There would have been farmable land, and the winters up there would not have been quite so harsh in some periods, I believe. So those forests are gone, and villages were abandoned. The medieval village I’m particularly thinking of, which I’ll do a piece on, is up near Hound Tor. A whole village, abandoned.

What else have we got? We’ve got a strong artistic and creative community. There are a lot of craft people living and working in Devon and around this part on the edge of Dartmoor. There’s a lovely craft centre in Bovey Tracey where very skilled craft people exhibit and sell their work. It is very skilled, very amazing stuff and expensive to buy, but quite something.

The landscape up on the moor can sometimes seem bleak and foreboding, but to me, it gives you a bit of a thrill. There’s something wild about it. It’s like being in a wilderness up there. The fact that you can climb a hill, stand by a tor (an ancient outcrop of rock that was once molten, and has been there so long that the softer rock around it has worn away, leaving a rocky outcrop) is remarkable. They’re very craggy, and some of them are huge. They’re made up of rocks of different sizes that have been weathered and eroded by wind and rain, and carved into amazing shapes.

There are some at Hound Tor that people have given names to. Hound Tor itself, from the old word “hound” meaning dog, is a place where you can say, “Oh, I can see that looks like a dog.” There are other parts that might look like a person or an animal. And that’s just at Hound Tor. So I find that quite exciting.

You can stand up there and see for miles, and everything seems very far away, even though you’ve been on a ten-minute drive, or a little longer perhaps if you’re exploring further into the moor. It feels very different. It feels very separate. You get this lovely big horizon all around you, the hills rolling into the distance. You can see a few farms dotted about, and a few heads of cattle perhaps grazing in a field in the far distance. There are ponies up there, roaming about on the moor, and cattle roaming about on the moor too, not in huge numbers. The livestock are managed and owned by private individuals who, I suppose, have grazing rights up there.

For me, it’s an inspiring place, and I think that’s why people come here on trips and on holiday. There’s something inspiring about it. It feeds the soul in some way. There are a lot of things that can seem quite strange, e.g. the Neolithic settlements and the medieval village. There are standing stones. There are what we call clapper bridges, which are strange little stone bridges over parts of, for instance, the River Dart (hence Dartmoor). The River Dart is crossed by several bridges: some regular stone-built ones made from stone blocks, and others that are called clapper bridges: vertical stones with flatter stones balanced on top. They’ve been there for a long time, and they’re interesting as well.

So you get a sense of time, you get a sense of people living in this landscape for a very long time, and the fact that there’s evidence still there. There are things like burial mounds and ancient ruins, and so on. There’s mythology here, there are legends, there are stories I’d like to explore and delve into. There are some people, of course, who would still like to think that there are pixies and so on. Pixies Corner and Pixies Holt are names of places that still reflect these beliefs, these legends.

So when I came to thinking about what I was going to write next, having been writing science fiction and time travel (quite out-there topics) I wanted to write something that felt very real to me, something where I could bring something not many other people could. I wanted to bring the authenticity of a place, and I wanted to bring the place into my fiction. I wanted there to be a sense of what it’s like to come to live on Dartmoor as an outsider, which is of course what I did.

I was keen to explore what it’s like to make that adjustment, to make this place your home, to be changed by it, and to change it in a way by being here. Just as places influence me, I will influence a place just by being there. And I wanted to share it as well. I wanted to share this beautiful place with people. I wanted to bring readers in and say, “Here’s this amazing place. This is what it’s like.” And because it’s such an inspirational place, interesting things could happen here.

I really wanted a big contrast, and for the incomer I wanted him to be a fish out of water. So I thought, well, he’s got to come from London because it couldn’t be more different. Occasionally, I go to London for a writers’ conference, and I’m usually quite glad to leave. It’s quite exciting to be there, and the difference in what is going on is stark. If I look out today (I’m at the back of the house) I can just see fields and trees from where I am. If I go to the front of the house, I see the little street and the village. There’s probably nobody there at all, and if I wait a while, a car will go by, or maybe a couple of people will ride by on a horse because there’s a stable nearby. I will also see across fields. I look from the front of the house, I look out at the houses on the other side of the street, and then the rest is fields. It’s that simple: just fields, and maybe a horse, maybe some sheep. I can see the hills, and that’s it: trees, fields, hedges. So wherever I look out, I’m going to see this amazingly beautiful landscape, and people aren’t allowed to build a big housing estate here because we’re in the national park, and I am very grateful for that. If I were to move three miles down the road outside the park, I would be surrounded by houses everywhere, and I don’t particularly want that. Once you’ve been out in nature for a while, you find yourself reluctant to go back.

So I wanted that journey for my main character. I knew he had to be very smart. He’d worked in a corporate environment and I had been a computer programmer in a financial institution, but my job had been in the late eighties and early nineties, and I wanted my new sleuth to be an up-to-date character. I set Dan in the contemporary world of big corporations. I thought I didn’t have to go into too much detail about what Dan did, but he was somebody with an eye for detail, somebody with a very sharp mind. He could march into boardrooms and face up to conflicts, not minding asking awkward questions and pushing people a bit. Okay, that doesn’t make him the nicest person in the world to begin with. But I hope he’s redeemed by the fact that his slightly aggressive lifestyle had backfired on him. He couldn’t take it. It wasn’t really him. He was acting up into a role that he’d carved out for himself within the rat race of the corporate world in London. But he couldn’t keep it up.

If he had kept it up, he probably would have become a rather soulless person, but it wasn’t him, and he stepped out, just as I stepped out of my sort of corporate job. Dan was forced to leave by basically having a breakdown, but I didn’t have a breakdown, I’m glad to say; I just made a choice to leave. But he had to be pushed into it, somehow. And as luck would have it, his sister had this unused holiday cottage in a little village on Dartmoor, so he was going to go there temporarily.

So my working life has become the life I live, and it all ties together in this rather wonderful way. I live on Dartmoor, I write about Dartmoor, I think about Dartmoor, I visit Dartmoor whenever I can. Whenever I’m not at my desk tapping away, I’m either popping onto the moors, or I might pop into one of the local towns. Occasionally, I go to Exeter, one of the cities here, or maybe Plymouth, or I visit the coast, which is not within the national park but is not very far away, and it’s beautiful coast in Devon. So it all kind of ties in. This is my world.

So I thought, I want to share this with people and not just through fiction. I want to share it in a way that brings it alive, and also I was keen to know more for myself. I’m quite intrigued. I knew a few odd bits here and there: some myths and legends, a few facts about the medieval village, a little bit about the standing stones at Merrivale. I’ve been to see those, years ago.

Devon was a mining area and it was a quarrying area. I know bits about the old tramway that used to take stone. Funnily enough, did that tie into my first novel? The fact that it’s set in an abandoned quarry and that there are Neolithic settlements seems like a strange coincidence, but I don’t actually remember that far back. I can’t say whether I was influenced by Dartmoor at the time or whether it went back further because there was an abandoned quarry near where I lived when I grew up in Yorkshire. I think the setting possibly came from that.

In the here and now, I wanted to find out more about Dartmoor. I wanted to delve into the history of a quarry, or a mine, or a port, or some standing stones. I want to sort of get some facts because there are lots of half-truths and bits of folklore and myth and legend knocking around, and they are fascinating. I want to look into those as well, but I also want to get behind them. I quite like research. I’m a bit like Alan Hargreaves in the Devonshire Mysteries. I quite like looking into things and getting the detail. And I’ve started doing that already. More on that in future pieces.

So it’s about sharing this place and this way of life, and I really hope that comes across. I hope it seems like a joyous thing to step into and to enjoy. I hope you’ll come with me and stay with me, and let me know if there are things you’d like me to look into. Let me know if there’s something you’ve enjoyed or want to know more about because there’s always going to be a place for comments. Have at it!

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I’m really looking forward to bringing stuff to you, but it’d be great to hear what you’d like to see as well. Maybe there’s something extra I can do for you, maybe I can answer questions. Let’s see how it goes.

In the meantime, I’ll stop there and say: welcome to Postcard from the Edge of Dartmoor.

I’m Michael Campling.

Thank you, and goodbye for now.

Hailing from North Yorkshire, where the folks are known for plain speaking and flat vowels, it took me a little while to become acclimatised to the Devonian accent. Fortunately, I’d already lived in Cheltenham in Southwest England for about five years, so I’d already gone south, and so had my accent. I’ve always had a tendency to pick up the accents of people around me, and when I bumped into an old school friend a few years ago, he informed me that I’d lost my original accent. My northern vowels can still return at times, especially if I’m visiting North Yorkshire for more than a few days, but I suppose my voice has landed somewhere in that neutral space between North and Southwest.

There have been a few notable incidents on my journey to assimilation into the Devon way of life. I distinctly remember a waitress in a tea room informing me, in her soft Devonian tones, that they’d run out of scones but could offer crumpets for afternoon tea. I was quite smitten with the lovely mellowness of her voice. Needless to say, I ordered the crumpets and was very happy with my lot.

A bit later on, in a hardware shop in Bovey Tracey, Mrs C and I were perusing the crammed rows of shelves when we heard a young man speaking loudly to some of the shop staff. The shop was Bob Arnold’s, and it had a bold statement on its window, proclaiming it to be: “the shop that’s bigger than it looks.”

This was no idle boast. The shop went back a long way and the aisles were filled with pretty much anything you might need, from wood stain to pots and pans. It was the kind of place where you could find exactly the right hinges or screws for whatever project you were working on at the time.

The shop has closed now, of course, as many of these small independent shops have gone from high streets across the country, most of them put out of business by online shopping and out-of-town stores. It’s a pity, because we’ve lost something we’ll never get back.

In Bob Arnold’s emporium, there were usually two or three staff on duty, all of them men and, it’s fair to say, past middle age. They wore overalls which, in my memory, were brown, though they may also have been dark blue. These outfits were another lovely old-fashioned tradition that seems to have disappeared from shops.

The word “overall” seems to mean different things in different parts of the world, so picture something like a lab coat that a scientist might wear, but dark blue or a sort of muddy brown. If you went into a hardware shop or a bicycle shop, the chap behind the counter would be wearing one. My grandad worked in a factory where they made agricultural machinery and I believe he wore the same kind of overall at work. He also wore them while tinkering in one of his sheds (he had several), protecting his clothes as he fixed up something that had been broken.

But to go back to the hardwood shop and that youthful customer. He was quite a tall young man, with a strangely high-pitched Devon accent, and he was there to complain about the quality of a rat trap he’d bought recently. The trap had bent, apparently, and failed to catch its intended victim. This was a particular problem because, as he explained, he was having a competition with his mate to see who could catch the largest rat. I remember Mrs C and I sharing a look and thinking, There are rats so big they bend the traps? Where have we moved to? It was quite an eye-opener.

My next encounter with a very thick Devonian accent came after we’d moved to the house where we live now. I was pottering about in the garden, squatting down to weed the small flower bed near the fence. As I wielded my trowel to attack the offending dandelions and strands of ivy, a head suddenly appeared over the top of the fence. The man’s face was flushed, his skin darkened by the kind of sunburn you get from working outside all day, and his unruly mop of wiry hair gave him a slightly crazed look.

He launched into a loud speech in strange, guttural tones. Somewhat startled, I got to my feet, and because I couldn’t untangle a single word of what he’d said, I assumed it was a foreign language. I was on the verge of apologising for not speaking German, but then he spoke again. I picked out a word or two and realised he was English, just with a very strong accent.

My synapses caught up and decoded what he’d said. Apparently he’d heard the noise of me digging, perhaps the soil and stones rattling against the fence, and he’d assumed some kind of animal was scrabbling about and trying to get free. We exchanged a few words and I understood most of them.

The man was a local and I was to encounter him several times over the following years, often because he wanted something. He was well known for asking to use the telephone, as he didn’t have one in his house, and he’d sometimes ask people for a lift or to pick up some shopping. He often seemed quite brusque, but I think that was partly down to his manner of speech. He could also be kind.

One day I was driving to work when he appeared in the road, arm outstretched to stop me. I pulled up and opened the window, assuming he was after a lift or some shopping, but in fact he was holding out a metal clip designed to hold a cotter pin in place. A few days previously, he’d seen me struggling on my allotment with a big old rotavator (that’s a rotary cultivator, for those who don’t know), trying to fit one of the sets of blades to the shaft. He’d worked out that what I was missing was a new clip to hold the cotter pin in place, so he’d found one for me and waited in the road until I came past.

The man passed away years ago, but I still have that clip, and it’s still doing its job on the rotavator.

Intonation aside, many aspects of the Devon accent are relatively easy to understand, though they can sound confusing at first. Referring to a young girl as a “maid” is easy enough, and the same goes for “boy” for a man, although it’s pronounced more like “bey.” Somebody might say, “All right, bey?” Meaning, “Are you all right?” or “How are you?”

Online sources tell me that “maid” can be used for an adult woman, but I “haven’t come a cross that usage. I can say though, that “bey” is frequently used for men of any age. It’s part of a laddish culture, I suppose, standing in for words like “mate”, and not derogatory in any way.

The accent can be harder to follow when folks miss out words or rearrange them slightly, and it can take a moment for newcomers to glean the slightly obscured meaning. For instance, “Where’s that to?” or “Where’s he to?” means “Where is it?” or “Where has he gone?”

Words are also dropped in phrases such as “I’m going Exeter” instead of “I’m going to Exeter,” or “He’s going Newton Abbot.” Unusual, but not impossible to understand.

Then there are words you won’t hear anywhere else. The one that springs to mind is “dimpsy,” which refers to that quality of light in the early evening as the day heads towards dusk. People might say, “It’s going dimpsy,” meaning it’s time to put your car’s headlights on. Another sweet one is addressing somebody as “my lover,” which sounds a little direct but it’s just a friendly greeting and has no regard for age or gender.

Some commonly found Devonian words are corruptions. “Great” sometimes becomes “girt.” and “potatoes” becomes “teddies”. It’s claimed by some that “teddies” should refer only to King Edward potatoes, but I think it’s simply a corruption of “taters,” itself a corruption of “potatoes.”

Another corruption is the word “dreckly,” meaning “directly” in the sense of “I’ll do it directly” i.e. “I’ll do it in a moment.”

Another phrase I like is “proper job,” which you’d say to someone who’s done something well. Where I’m from, we’d say, “You’re doing a grand job” but “proper job” is more likely be a standalone phrase rather than a full sentence. Say you’ve dug a vegetable bed and prepared it nicely, a passing gardener might nod and say, “proper job.” There’s even a brand of ale named after it.

“Ee” or “er” generally mean “he” or “her”, but they can also refer to inanimate objects, especially “ee”. If you were bringing somebody a drink, for example, they might indicate the table and say, “Put ee there” or sometimes “Put ‘im on the table.”

This is by no means an exhaustive list; it’s simply a reflection of the phrases I’ve heard, and I’ve sometimes picked them up. In my books, The Devonshire Mysteries and The Devonshire Crime Thrillers, you’ll find references to characters who have trouble understanding one another at first. IN one of the mysteries, Alan teases Dan (a dyed-in-the-wool Londoner) when Dan unconsciously uses a Devonian phrase, and DC Spiller has to explain to a colleague from London that a local can’t understand his accent.

It’s my way of bringing my experiences into my stories, and I hope it adds something to the flavour.

Sadly, I think that a lot of localised accents and dialects are slowly being changed as people absorb the language they hear on television or online, and those distinctive voices of long ago are lost in the verbal muddle.

Perhaps the Devonian accent will fade in time, but if you visit Devon having read this, you won’t be surprised if somebody refers to you as “my lover” or “bey,” and you’ll know that “Proper job” is high praise indeed.

On the whole, Devon’s a friendly place, and I’m sure you’ll soon pick up the local language, wherever you’re to.

Thanks for reading.

Do you have and fascination words in the local dialect where you live?

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Behind us you can see the lovely countryside of the Teign Valley, on the edge of Dartmoor. It’s nice, isn’t it? We like living here. What do we like about it? The fresh air, the friendly people, the allotments, the trees and the hills. We’ve got a good deal of all those things around here.

The hills are very good for you, and we certainly get plenty of walking up them. We live halfway up the side of a valley, so we either set off uphill or set off downhill and have to walk back uphill. Whichever way we go, there’s a hill. And if you’re thinking we could just go sideways, well, we can’t, because there are private fields and you can’t just march anywhere you want.

It might seem like I’m flouting that rule, but although it’s not marked, there is a public footpath through this field somewhere, with signposts and everything, but the path itself isn’t marked out or fenced off, so people tend to just head through the middle. Sometimes there are horses here and sometimes not, because there’s a stable next door and they have use of the field as well.

This is glimpse of the produce competitions in this very small but friendly show. Classes such as longest runner bean or best three onions have been hotly contested for generations, and it’s great to see these traditional events still going on, but I fear the show wasn’t as popular as in years gone by.

In our busy modern lives, I wonder how many of us have time to make chutney and jams and tend to our gardens with such care. As a full-time dad I did all three, but now that I’m a self-employed writer, I bake sourdough and make a few cakes now and then, but unless there’s a special occasion, it’s hard to find time for growing produce properly or making pickles and preserves.

Still, there will be a village show next year, so maybe Mrs C and I will be attending as competitors rather than observers.

And you never know, we might even win something in the raffle.

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Our eldest son’s Labrador, Maggie, came to stay with us recently for a little holiday. She’s only one year old, so although she’s a sizeable dog, she’s still very much a puppy and absolutely full of boundless energy. Maggie is lucky enough to live near a large park, but she’s a city dweller at heart, so coming out to stay with us for a few days opened up a whole host of new horizons and a vast assortment of enticing scents.

You can see from the photos that she had a whale of a time running around in the nearby field. We’re lucky in that a public footpath runs through the field and the path isn’t fenced off, so the owners don’t seem to mind people and dogs having the run of it, as long as everyone cleans up after themselves, which of course we did.

When you’ve had an older dog who’s grown very calm, relaxed and, dare I say it, a little set in her ways, it comes as something of a shock to have a young and more enthusiastic dog around the place, especially when you consider that she’s been dropped into an unfamiliar house and garden with unfamiliar routines. Maggie is a lovely dog, but I’d forgotten just how much time and energy and patience it takes to look after a dog at that free-spirit stage of their lives.

In many ways it was a genuine delight to have a dog in the house again, but there were times when it was a little tricky, especially now that Mrs C and I are perhaps the ones who’ve become a little set in our ways.

But if we found Maggie’s restless energy a bit tiring, I’m sure she thought that some of our behaviour was utterly bewildering. Why did we want to sit down when there was fun to be had? Why couldn’t we see the exciting possibilities presented by a chunk of rotting wood? And what was the point in going inside when the night was still young and there were strange hoots and cries to listen to?

In particular, it seemed that my habit of singing to myself as I wandered from room to room going about my daily chores was a source of concern for her. I’m not entirely sure how long I’ve been doing this, but most of the time there’s no one here to mind, and Mrs C has no doubt long since grown used to my noisy behaviour.

I have an excellent memory for lyrics, but I’ve never been blessed with the ability to sing in tune. Apparently, the actor Pierce Brosnan received a review after his appearance in the musical Mama Mia! that said, “Pierce Brosnan couldn’t hold a note if it had a picture of the Queen’s head on it.”

I can sympathise.

For Maggie, my vocal offerings were clearly a cause for alarm. She didn’t seem to know whether I was in distress or simply unhinged, and there was a definite look of dismay on her face whenever she heard me. And being a dog, of course, she could hear me wherever I happened to be.

When Maggie had gone and it was just Mrs C and me again, the house seemed very quiet (apart from the singing), and we quite missed her. There’s something very lovely about a friendly dog greeting you with wild excitement even when you’ve only been out of the room for ten minutes. She treated us like long lost relatives every single time.

Maggie’s visit rekindled our dreams about the possibility of having a dog again one day. Perhaps those dreams never went away.

We certainly take notice whenever we’re out on a walk and we pass a lovely dog. We often ask the owner if we can stop and say hello to his or her four-footed companion. It’s a kind of vicarious dog ownership, really. We get to stroke the dog and make a fuss of it, then we walk away, leaving the owner to deal with the muddy paws and the poop bags.

We are definitely dog people, but there’s something to be said for a quieter life with fewer responsibilities. And of course it means I’m free to carry on with my singing.

I suppose most people would consider that a dubious advantage at best, so if Mrs C turns up one day in possession of a new puppy, we’ll perhaps be able to guess the reason why.

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One of the things I’ll be featuring regularly in Postcards from the Edge of Dartmoor is running, because it’s such a big part of life out here. I run on the lanes and roads around the moor, and I take part in local events too, including my local parkrun. Now, if you’ve been following along, you’ll know that this one has a rather ironic name, Parke, with an ‘e’ on the end, and I’ll get to why in just a moment.

First, though, let me set the scene, because this is no ordinary parkrun. It’s not in a municipal park or a town centre green space. It’s set in the grounds of a beautiful country estate, and that makes it a very different experience from anything you’d find in a city. As I look around, there are people toiling away in the distance, paths ranging through big open fields, and, yes, cows. Actual cows, grazing peacefully right next to the track where about 150 runners have just plodded past. Whether they’re cows or bullocks I honestly couldn’t tell from where I was standing, but it’s a beautiful sight, and it’s definitely not something you’re likely to encounter at your local urban parkrun.

The cows can occasionally be a bit of an event in themselves. Sometimes they get a little excited and start running alongside the runners, or they’ve been known to cut across the path entirely. They’re not aggressive creatures by any stretch, but they can get spooked, and they are big and heavy. Mrs C, for one, is not exactly keen on a close encounter with a cow on the home stretch. It adds a certain something to the finish line experience, let’s say. It certainly makes you think, “Well, that’s not going to happen in the middle of a city.”

As I recorded this video I crossed a cattle grid, which I’m so used to by now, so I picked my way over it without thinking. But for visitors, it’s all part of the charm.

And it is charming, genuinely. The paths here aren’t smooth tarmac. They’re rough and stony, with muddy patches, especially in winter when it gets quite slippery. There are a couple of decent-sized hills and a few smaller ones, which catch a lot of people out if they’re not used to running on hilly terrain. Devon is hilly though, so we’re fairly used to it. I passed someone after the run who was telling her friends, quite loudly, that, “You have to keep watching where you put your feet, it’s not natural.” Which is wonderfully ironic, of course, because it’s entirely natural. You’re running through nature. A stony path is about as close to nature as it gets.

Now, about that name. Parke, with an ‘e’, is named after the house itself, which is right there on the estate. It’s a grand Georgian building, and it’s rather beautiful. I’ll confess that Georgian is about the only period of architecture I can confidently identify, thanks to school lessons about proportion, the pillars around the door, the tall windows, and that satisfying, solid, boxy design. I’ll do a bit of research into the history of the house and share it properly another time because it deserves its own piece. What I can tell you is that at some point it was given over to the National Trust and is now the headquarters of the Dartmoor National Park Authority. Not a bad second act for a country mansion.

We’re just outside Bovey Tracey here, which you can see up on the hill behind the estate. It’s a lovely spot, and the whole parkrun experience feels very much like a Dartmoor experience rather than just a Saturday morning jog. We get quite a few tourists joining the run, and I think some of them arrive expecting a gentle plod around a flat park. The look on their faces when the hills and the mud and the cows appear is always quietly entertaining.

If you’re enjoying this kind of slightly different window into life on the edge of Dartmoor, I hope you’ll stick around. I’ll be bringing lots of different pieces here, from running to the landscape, the history, the quirks and the characters. And yes, I’ll do that research on the house. It might just become its own little story.

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Postcards From the Edge of Dartmoor

A writer's view of daily life on the edge of Dartmoor. Stories, landscapes, local characters, curious history and an air of mystery. A weekly postcard from Devon, delivered in words, pictures and sound.

By Michael Campling

Thank you for your company.

Take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you next time from Dartmoor,

Michael Campling

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And we live in the Teign Valley area, which you can see in the video above which was made very near our house. There’s also a photo of the village itself, nestling in amongst the trees.

I realised that Dartmoor has become an important part of my life, and it’s not just the beautiful scenery. The people, the diversity of the landscape, the myriad narrow and winding lanes, the captivating villages and the fascinating history are all part of the attraction.

So I created this publication, Postcards From the edge of Dartmoor, to share the experience of living and working in this mysterious and intriguing place.

This is the very first post, so it’s only a very brief introduction to me and my corner of Devon: a brief glimpse, if you will. There is so much more to come.

I’m going to try and capture the essence and spirit of Dartmoor, telling its stories from the past as well as sharing my own experiences. There are mysteries here and legends too, not surprising when you realise that Dartmoor has been inhabited for thousands of years.

There are signs of ancient settlements, stone circles and standing stones, and much later theres medieval village that was abandoned and left to fall into ruin.

There are ancient wooded valleys and Sites of Special Scientific Interest including areas of temperate rainforest which is a very rare type of habitat.

Of course, there’s folklore to look into as well as the various ghostly tales that seem so well suited to Dartmoor, and let’s not forget the stories told through song and dance and art.

Devon is more than Dartmoor. There are historic towns and villages and the coast has a special history of its own, from smugglers’ tunnels to fishing ports to naval bases.

There’s modern life to think about too. Village fetes to city festivals encompass a wide range of interests and activities. Traditional crafts survive well here, and there’s a busy art scene too. As if that wasn’t enough to be going on with, Devon has become a centre for good food and drink, so I can show you more than scones and jam. I’d like to share some recipes too.

I make a rather fine sourdough, if I say so myself, and my chutney is out of this world and my mincemeat is excellent.

There’s so much to get our teeth into. I’m looking forward to researching, exploring, sharing and generally getting enthusiastic about this very special place.

I hope you’ll enjoy it too.