A Day on Dartmoor
“We’ll go to Dartmoor for the day,” we said. “It’ll be fun,” we agreed. “Let’s go to Nun’s Cross Farm and then head on down the road to Bellever.”
It seemed that a plan was in the making. An early(ish) start, a drive up to Tavistock for breakfast at a yet to be decided venue and then up onto the moors we’d go. And strangely, things were going in accordance with the blueprint for the day. We were at Morrison’s in Tavistock, filling up with the all day breakfast in the café and adding a few carefully chosen calorie boosting snacks for later. It’s a rather agreeable town; one of the small number I’ve found myself at total ease in. I could add Totnes and Clevedon to that list of places where the majority of the residents appear to lead a quiet yet happy existence, seemingly at peace with themselves. I’m probably wrong of course, and you’ll have your own favourites, but these are the towns where I feel as if I could slip into the neighbourhood and push my shopping trolley quietly around the local Morrison’s without being noticed. I’m rather fond of Abergavenny too for that matter. There’s something about the familiarity of the homely Aldi opposite the big car park and the chippy we almost always stop at after escaping the busy westbound M4 at Newport.
From the gentle streets of Tavistock we climbed out of town on the road towards Princetown, across a grey rainy landscape dotted with lone sheep and grazing ponies, passing the big car park at Pork Hill where the ice cream van that’s forever parked there wasn’t doing any business of note. From Princetown we’d take the long single track lane right to its end near the abandoned farm. Here we mostly sheltered from what was turning into incessant sheets of rain, breaking cover at appropriate intervals to drag a shot or two from the empty wilderness. It was nearly Christmas on a Monday afternoon and hardly another soul was seen. From here we moved on to Bellever, a forest captured so atmospherically by a number of you and a place neither of us had ever managed to visit before. We had a plan to walk up to Bellever Tor and breathe in the big vistas of Dartmoor at its most magnificent bleakness. But along the way we kept finding distractions to hamper our progress in the form of green mossy stone walls lurking in the shadows, put there to slow us down. A good thing perhaps, as we turned left instead of right and ended up on the wrong tor completely. “Do you think that’s Bellever Tor over there?” I asked, pointing towards the eminence on the other side of the forest. “Yes, I rather suspect it might be,” Lee responded as we quickly ditched all notion of heading up there before the end of the day. Getting here had been fun enough, and in retrospect we were probably better off where we’d ended up, photographically speaking at least. Ironically it seems we’d managed to find ourselves on top of Laughter Tor, although we hadn’t yet seen the funny side of it.
It's the sort of forest that lulls you into a world of old fairy tales. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised me if a young girl had passed through here carrying a picnic basket, dressed from head to toe in red, pursued by a slavering wolf disguised as her grandmother; he in turn followed by a woodsman bearing a large axe. I wonder what Freud made of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm for that matter, but I can see why forests like this led them into the darker places of their imagination. No doubt it’s besieged with visitors during the busy season, but there’s an air of dank silence about the place on a winter afternoon when all the colours of the spectrum are reduced to just a handful of greens and browns. It was much more fun being here now, discovering dry stone walls clad in cloaks of bright damp moss. In this spot, not only the vibrant wall stood out among the darkness, but there was also an odd patch of bright light in the top left hand corner of the frame that appeared to bear no relation to where the weak winter sun was supposedly lurking behind the clouds. It seemed that the camera and lens were in unanimous protest at the conditions I‘d dragged them out into that day, and conspired to produce a washed out space that intensified the only patch of bright light under the trees. It was obviously going to be fun drying things off later. These modern cameras may be weather sealed, but I still felt like I was taking too many chances beneath the dripping conifers. A judicious crop would help me to rescue the image, yet for a time I was uncertain of it. In the end I decided it told the day’s story well, and I rather liked it.
It seems odd that we chose one of the shortest days of the year to drive for ninety minutes each way when there’s so much closer to home, but we were still happy we’d done something different for a change and visited somewhere new. Something that challenged us a bit. It was a relief to get into a warm car with heated seats for the journey home though. There are so many places on the moor to explore more fully, including the tor we’d failed to identify properly on the map. So many reasons to return then.
A Day on Dartmoor
“We’ll go to Dartmoor for the day,” we said. “It’ll be fun,” we agreed. “Let’s go to Nun’s Cross Farm and then head on down the road to Bellever.”
It seemed that a plan was in the making. An early(ish) start, a drive up to Tavistock for breakfast at a yet to be decided venue and then up onto the moors we’d go. And strangely, things were going in accordance with the blueprint for the day. We were at Morrison’s in Tavistock, filling up with the all day breakfast in the café and adding a few carefully chosen calorie boosting snacks for later. It’s a rather agreeable town; one of the small number I’ve found myself at total ease in. I could add Totnes and Clevedon to that list of places where the majority of the residents appear to lead a quiet yet happy existence, seemingly at peace with themselves. I’m probably wrong of course, and you’ll have your own favourites, but these are the towns where I feel as if I could slip into the neighbourhood and push my shopping trolley quietly around the local Morrison’s without being noticed. I’m rather fond of Abergavenny too for that matter. There’s something about the familiarity of the homely Aldi opposite the big car park and the chippy we almost always stop at after escaping the busy westbound M4 at Newport.
From the gentle streets of Tavistock we climbed out of town on the road towards Princetown, across a grey rainy landscape dotted with lone sheep and grazing ponies, passing the big car park at Pork Hill where the ice cream van that’s forever parked there wasn’t doing any business of note. From Princetown we’d take the long single track lane right to its end near the abandoned farm. Here we mostly sheltered from what was turning into incessant sheets of rain, breaking cover at appropriate intervals to drag a shot or two from the empty wilderness. It was nearly Christmas on a Monday afternoon and hardly another soul was seen. From here we moved on to Bellever, a forest captured so atmospherically by a number of you and a place neither of us had ever managed to visit before. We had a plan to walk up to Bellever Tor and breathe in the big vistas of Dartmoor at its most magnificent bleakness. But along the way we kept finding distractions to hamper our progress in the form of green mossy stone walls lurking in the shadows, put there to slow us down. A good thing perhaps, as we turned left instead of right and ended up on the wrong tor completely. “Do you think that’s Bellever Tor over there?” I asked, pointing towards the eminence on the other side of the forest. “Yes, I rather suspect it might be,” Lee responded as we quickly ditched all notion of heading up there before the end of the day. Getting here had been fun enough, and in retrospect we were probably better off where we’d ended up, photographically speaking at least. Ironically it seems we’d managed to find ourselves on top of Laughter Tor, although we hadn’t yet seen the funny side of it.
It's the sort of forest that lulls you into a world of old fairy tales. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised me if a young girl had passed through here carrying a picnic basket, dressed from head to toe in red, pursued by a slavering wolf disguised as her grandmother; he in turn followed by a woodsman bearing a large axe. I wonder what Freud made of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm for that matter, but I can see why forests like this led them into the darker places of their imagination. No doubt it’s besieged with visitors during the busy season, but there’s an air of dank silence about the place on a winter afternoon when all the colours of the spectrum are reduced to just a handful of greens and browns. It was much more fun being here now, discovering dry stone walls clad in cloaks of bright damp moss. In this spot, not only the vibrant wall stood out among the darkness, but there was also an odd patch of bright light in the top left hand corner of the frame that appeared to bear no relation to where the weak winter sun was supposedly lurking behind the clouds. It seemed that the camera and lens were in unanimous protest at the conditions I‘d dragged them out into that day, and conspired to produce a washed out space that intensified the only patch of bright light under the trees. It was obviously going to be fun drying things off later. These modern cameras may be weather sealed, but I still felt like I was taking too many chances beneath the dripping conifers. A judicious crop would help me to rescue the image, yet for a time I was uncertain of it. In the end I decided it told the day’s story well, and I rather liked it.
It seems odd that we chose one of the shortest days of the year to drive for ninety minutes each way when there’s so much closer to home, but we were still happy we’d done something different for a change and visited somewhere new. Something that challenged us a bit. It was a relief to get into a warm car with heated seats for the journey home though. There are so many places on the moor to explore more fully, including the tor we’d failed to identify properly on the map. So many reasons to return then.