I’ve been here a long time, and I really feel as though, although I am still a Yorkshireman at heart, I feel like part of Devon now. I feel part of this Dartmoor community, the countryside community. Because obviously, there are cities and towns, and they feel distinctive out here. Sixty houses in the village where I live, and we are a rural community, and it is special. Much as it can be inconvenient because obviously, we don’t have a lot of stuff on our doorstep.
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!
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.
