Ali was going nowhere. She was perfectly happy to sit in the van with her knitting, her book and the kettle close at hand while I headed out into the gloom, keen to acquaint myself at last with this icon of abandonment in the wilds of Dartmoor. With enough to keep her entertained, I had full approval to disappear into the mist and not come back until lunchtime. I’d seen your photos of it enough times, and although Dave, Lee and I had discussed the matter more than once before, none of us had yet paid homage. Now I’d taken it upon myself to undertake a scouting mission and report back to the other members of the Three Happy Snappers, as we’ve long since dubbed ourselves. And although it was the middle of summer, conditions were perfect. A cocktail of mist and rain with saturnine clouds that shifted shape as they hovered over the empty landscape.
We’d overnighted in a quiet layby, two miles from the main road through Princetown, itself an outpost up on the weather beaten moors. We weren’t supposed to do this of course, because the great British public distrusts and detests people who live in four wheeled homes unless they’re paying thirty pounds a night or more to stay on a campsite. A campsite where you can’t experience the emptiness and sense of isolation that a landscape such as this demands. Another instance of the irresponsible few spoiling it for the rest of us. It seems to have become a particular issue on Dartmoor over the last couple of years, with a well publicised battle taking place between landowners - including hedge fund managers from the capital if you will - and campaigners for the right to roam. Anyway, we’re fully self contained in every sense - no unnecessary blemishes ever come from our van, not unless you’re especially offended by tyre treads in the mud. To wake up and hear the silence, to feel the stillness in a place like this brings a sense of calming joy that’s hard to describe. Especially when nobody knocks on the window menacingly during the night.
As I walked along the track towards the old farmhouse, I realised that I was close to a parallel route just a couple of hundred yards to the west. One that brought a not so distant memory for me. Five years earlier I’d been talked into taking part in a half marathon for the first time, a race that led from Princetown down off the moors towards the small town of South Brent. “All downhill,” we were told - well that was an untruth for starters. It was called “The Great Escape,” a not very oblique reference to the nearby presence of the infamous Dartmoor Prison, a place to which two centuries earlier, French prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars had been marched all the way from the quaysides of Plymouth to serve out their sentences. Grey, grim and overwhelming, it dominates the small town, a bizarre tourist attraction that fits into the harsh landscape like an ugly scar. The starting point for the thirteen mile race also happened to be the nineteen mile marker for a much longer event called “The Crossing,” that had started at Okehampton and led to the same finishing line that we were aiming for. As I settled into the first mile, taking an easy pace into the unknown, the first of the ultra marathoners came breezing past, a hydration tube poking out of his backpack and a pair of sunglasses casually draped over the top of his brow. We’d run one mile and had already started on the jelly babies, while he’d done twenty, yet he surged on ahead of us as if we were standing still. We all still had twelve miles to go, but he’d be resting his weary bones long before us. I pushed on, already feeling crushed, reaching into my survival pack for another life affirming jelly baby as I did.
Today the going was much easier. No long distance races to complete this time, just an easy half mile along a rutted trail, pockmarked with muddy puddles that made the going that bit more enjoyable with my welly boots on. And as I reached the top of a shallow rise, there it was, nestling in the landscape, surrounded by a natural moorland bowl of green hills covered in bracken. There were a number of trekkers out and about too, brightly clad in orange and yellow rainproof attire, most of them youngsters earning points for their Duke of Edinburgh Awards. “Gold!” snorted one of the girls scornfully to her companions in response to my question as they carried on past along their yomp towards Princetown from the dark slopes to the south. “If this is bronze,” I wondered, “what on earth does gold involve? Crawling up the north face of the Eiger on all fours?”
Oddly, the 4G seemed to be more than adequate here. I told Ali I was still alive and having a lovely time, before sending the other two happy snappers a handful of phone shots to pique their interest. Meanwhile I continued to move around the boggy terrain, trying a number of compositions from various distances, forever looking for foreground delights to include in the shot. Sometimes this might be a lone boulder, a patch of water or long grass, and as I moved closer to the subject, the boundary wall became an engaging feature.
Finally, more than two years later I looked at the raw files - mainly because a number of you had been there recently and come away with your own interpretations - those shots had inspired and jolted me into action at last. In fact I’d been back twice myself and shared images, but neither of them really captured how this place feels on a dark and filthy day when the rain barely stops and the mist crawls over the moor and fills the space around you - a day such as the one on which I’d made that first scouting mission, when I stood at the wall and peered into the past and imagined a time when this would have been a living and breathing farmhouse. Apparently you can rent the place if you don’t mind waking up to a gaggle of paparazzi skulking around behind the tufts of long grass in their wellies. Maybe a gang of well adjusted adolescents carrying huge backpacks as well. And a couple of escaped felons wearing suits covered in arrows, looking for a place to hide. On second thoughts, perhaps we’ll stay in the van instead - on a nice homely campsite surrounded by a chain-link fence, with a fierce looking warden and a large dog. It can be scary out there on the moors.
