Grimspound and Inhabiting Art

by Rod Mengham

  Summer is for the insects, and the different tempos of stridulation. Crickets pause and resume dialogues with the sound of nagging sheep, and there are glistening slugs on the move. Flying insects lob themselves onto your shirt, rolled up into small black torpedoes, the first stage in a plan you hasten to cut short. The birds usually make short work of the caterpillars, but occasionally you will find a dead yellow and black striped caterpillar wearing a funereal ruff of rainwater spheres on its furred back.

  The ponies are rarely seen in the summer months. It is winter when they tend to come down from the hills and drift towards the roads, harassed by gales. I often find their hoof prints, fringed with a few upthrusting bunches of ice nodules, showing they have been here recently but have moved on, it is too cold. Once in summer, I was climbing the approach path when suddenly there was the quick reek of Dartmoor ponies, twenty one of them including foals, stock still to the north of the path. They watched while a big dog fox crossed the path and paused to look at me. It was 11.10 in the morning.

  But humans are the rarest of all visitors. There are voices on the wind, the cries of children, calling from one tor to the next, but I rarely share this space with others. I have grown possessive of it. Certain timbres of voice make me nervous. I reach the great south wall and launch a defender’s curse at a file of Ramblers approaching across the valley. As two walkers cross the compound, I cannot help listening to the narrative of a burned child, abandoned by her mother, cherished by her father. The female walker tells the story without judgement, with a careful sense of relevance. And then I have to realise that the conversations of walkers connect with the deepest meanings of this place, with the reported speech and narratives of a knowable community. The great compound walls are the pretext for a shift from lyric to epic, from elemental songs to a larger world of smaller things, of more varied relationships, a range of personalities; and then there is the further shift, to marching songs, the ones that carry you into unknown territory.

  Winter is not the marching season here, nor even the walking season. It is when various bits of soft tissue rigidify, vital organs start to freeze into inaction, and the skull becomes a conducting plate for polar extinction. You have to pace yourself, to make your knees last, and the only conversations are with the wind and the sky. Winter sky descends on Grimspound, the first tendrils of cloud hang at the very edge of the settlement. As the wind pounces from one bush of heather to the next, light begins to fail in seconds. The cloud begins to push away all sound. I see the bents stirring but cannot hear what makes them do it. A cold haze brushes over the ridge to the south in a series of festoons when suddenly the bottom drops out of the nearest cloud; a whirling nebula of vapour plunges down in loosening spirals, it powers towards me, and there is no cover.

  In summer, the wind as it blows around the body mixes frequencies and volumes in ways that influence each step. Shifting passages of light open up and close between the fast-moving clouds, although there is one pillar of cloud that does not move among the shoals of drifting vapour. The wind, concussing among the stones of the wall like an erratic motor, blows from all quarters. It beats lightly about my shirt, while the sound of a heavily freighted bee corkscrews into the brain.

  Looking south to the next ridge, sunlight pools across the hillside, into small elbow-shaped valleys, and then withdraws, to the ebbing sound of distant earth-movers. There is a ruched blanket of warm air, but always to the west somewhere, a great dark blue cloud. In the middle distance, a single hiker is traversing Hameldown, while clouds pour overhead at five times his rate of progress. On the very top of Hameldown itself, various distances are plumbed by the ear, as the bracken creaks nearby.

  At what point did my search for evidence lead out of sight, to the nowhere of the vanishing point? Start with the microscope, then the telescope, then worry about the middle distance. I could not channel all the details, keep them within bounds. The flow of information did not lead back to source, only to a spongy indefiniteness. The series of visits I made began to evolve its own narrative, its own rules of composition. At a certain point it became an obscure necessity to compare Grimspound with its nearest Bronze Age neighbour, the more remote, the more exiguous, Berry Pound. Completely effaced by bracken in summer, completely cut off by waterlogging in winter, Berry Pound can only be reached, and inspected, in spring.

  Berry Pound is faintly discernible from the opposite side of the steeply banked valley of the East Wedderburn river. Its perimeter merges with a later field wall that has used up most of its stone. The remaining fragments of compound wall consist of enormous, immovable boulders, many almost totally blackened, although the pigment is only superficial. (Was this fire damage caused by the nearby competitors at Grimspound?) A dried up watercourse runs alongside the north wall, in the manner of Grimslake. The perceptible rubble spread is just as wide as at Grimspound, with a possible gated entrance more or less due north, facing downhill. I have tracked the footings of at least eight hut circles, mainly in the south-west quadrant. (At Grimspound, the greatest settlement density was towards the south-east.)

  Imagine my delight on discovering a washing place directly below the settlement, created by placing a boom across the East Wedderburn river. The architecture survives intact. I think about drinking the water – I want to celebrate – but for some reason, decide not to. Minutes later, I find a sheep’s head in the next pool upstream. Then I realise I am using full stops for the first time in my notebook – something inside me looking for a terminus. I could wander around for ever with a mental divining-stick, but the evidence of place can only take me so far back in time, an imagined time. When does the flow of time find a direction? The Grimspound notebook consists of lineated diary entries in verse that have all been completely rewritten. As I walk back from Berry Pound, the weather changes, stray drops of rain falling on the paper. I write with a roller-ball, the ink is soon blotted, and I close the book. Uphill and downhill through a tunnel of rain everything I write dilutes and dissolves.

  2

  THE CLIMAX of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is set in Grimspound. This is not the moment in which the villain is identified by Holmes or Watson, or the scene in which they first encounter the gigantic hound. Both these events are gripping and are triumphs of detective-story plotting. But the scene in which the hermeneutic tension of the book is brought to its most critical intensity is the one that deals with Watson’s discovery of the lair of the mysterious ‘man on the tor’, the unknown stranger whose connection with the baffling series of events unfolding on Dartmoor is as certain as it is unfathomable. The lair is in fact one of the hut circles in the prehistoric compound. Watson discovers it after following the young boy who is supplying the ‘secret man’ with food and information:

  The boy was nowhere to be seen. But down beneath me in a cleft of the hills there was a circle of the old stone huts, and in the middle of them there was one which retained sufficient roof to act as a screen against the weather. My heart leaped within me as I saw it. This must be the burrow where the stranger lurked. At last my foot was on the threshold of his hiding-place – his secret was within my grasp.

  As I approached the hut, walking as warily as Stapleton would do when with poised net he drew near the settled butterfly, I satisfied myself that the place had indeed been used as a habitation. A vague pathway among the boulders led to the dilapidated opening which served as a door. All was silent within. The unknown might be lurking there, or he might be prowling on the moor. My nerves tingled with the sense of adventure. Throwing aside my cigarette, I closed my hand upon the butt of my revolver, and, walking swiftly up to the door, I looked in. The place was empty.

  But there were ample signs that I had not come upon a false scent. This was certainly where the man lived. Some blankets rolled in a waterproof lay upon that very stone slab upon which Neolithic man had once slumbered. The ashes of a fire were heaped in a rude grate. Beside it lay some cooking utensils and a bucket half-full of wat
er. A litter of empty tins showed that the place had been occupied for some time, and I saw, as my eyes became accustomed to the chequered light, a pannikin and half-full bottle of spirits standing in the corner. In the middle of the hut a flat stone served the purpose of a table, and upon this stood a small cloth bundle – the same, no doubt, which I had seen through the telescope upon the shoulder of the boy. It contained a loaf of bread, a tinned tongue, and two tins of preserved peaches.1

  Watson is expecting to encounter a kind of savage, someone or something barely human, in this prehistoric jumble of stones he thinks of as the ‘burrow’ of an animal. What he discovers instead is a half-full bottle of spirits and a small stock of bread and tinned goods. It is the tinned tongue that stands out, rivets our attention, speaks to us. What does it mean, to preserve a tongue, detached from its body, in a book that is full of disembodied, dislocated voices, voices out of place, in the wrong place at the wrong time? Watson takes up his station in the hut, waiting ‘with sombre patience for the coming of its tenant’ (p.120), and is warned eventually of his reappearance by aural, not visual, means: first, by the ‘sharp clink of a boot striking upon a stone. Then another and yet another’, and finally by the sound of a voice, not the coarse voice of a brutal stranger, but the urbane, cultivated ‘well-known voice’ of Holmes himself. Watson’s astonishment at hearing the familiar in place of the strange – it is as if the strange were ventriloquising the familiar – makes him lose hold of his own voice: ‘For a moment or two I sat breathless, hardly able to believe my ears. Then my senses and my voice came back to me.’(p.121)

  Voices, utterances, are unsettled, unhoused, airborne, wandering. They are most disturbing when they cannot be attached to particular bodies, precise sources:

  Again the agonized cry swept through the silent night, louder and much nearer than ever. And a new sound mingled with it, a deep, muttered rumble, musical and yet menacing, rising and falling like the low, constant murmur of the sea. (p.126)

  The ‘new sound’ is unnerving because it seems to have no precise location, ebbing and flowing into an elemental background. Holmes attributes it to the Hound, correctly, as it turns out. But both he and Watson are incorrect in assuming that the ‘agonized cry’ of its victim belongs to Sir Henry Baskerville. It requires a little further detective-work to establish its owner as Selden, the escaped criminal. The cry is housed temporarily in the wrong place, just as Holmes’s bivouac at Grimspound is never suspected as the habitat of Holmes himself. A prison is a holding pen for criminals but in no sense is it a home or natural habitat. The main point here is that the detective camps out in a place built originally as a settlement for people whose characters and identities have long since vanished out of all knowledge. The vocabulary of settlement has already been introduced in the description of Stapleton, the lepidopterist, approaching the ‘settled butterfly’, except that Stapleton is not being described directly; Watson is imagining the way the lepidopterist must operate in the process of describing his own wary movements while searching for evidence of ‘habitation’. To call a butterfly ‘settled’ is almost to mount a contradiction in terms. And in fact, one might say that the only settled butterfly is one that has been caught, dried, mounted and framed. Conan Doyle’s choice of lepidoptery as Stapleton’s main pursuit enables him to place ideas about settlement and preservation at the centre of his text. If Stapleton needs to kill things in order to be able to preserve them and fix them in place, what can be said about a text that tries to fix voices in place, make them settle, in a location which is only allowed to speak of itself ventriloquially through a tin of preserved tongue?

  The very first description of Grimspound in the Hound is provided by Stapleton:

  ‘Prehistoric man lived thickly on the moor, and as no one in particular has lived there since, we find all his little arrangements exactly as he left them. These are his wigwams with the roofs off. You can even see his hearth and his couch if you have the curiosity to go inside.’

  ‘But it is quite a town. When was it inhabited?’

  ‘Neolithic man – no date.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He grazed his cattle on these slopes, and he learned to dig for tin when the bronze sword began to supersede the stone axe. Look at the great trench in the opposite hill. That is his mark. Yes, you will find some very singular points about the moor, Dr Watson. Oh, excuse me an instant. It is surely Cyclopides.’ (p.69)

  Singleton encourages us to imagine a hilltop citadel abandoned like a landlocked Marie Celeste, with all its ‘little arrangements’ left intact, which anticipates Watson’s discovery of bedding, cooking utensils, and supplies. And the all-important tin of preserved tongue will be conjured up out of the grazing cattle and tin-mining that Stapleton mentions here. His choice of the term ‘wigwam’ makes us pause over the question of what counts as permanent settlement. How permanent is the Grimspound settlement if no one has lived in it for thousands of years? How permanent is any dwelling? During the course of the narrative, Sir Henry Baskerville returns to his ancestral home on Dartmoor, but it is the first time he has set foot anywhere near it. The Baskervilles seem like a fixture in this landscape, but Sir Henry has spent his career in Canada, just as his predecessor, Sir Charles, spent his in South Africa.

  The last word of the extract, ‘Cyclopides’, seems to lead off on a different track, but in fact it returns us to questions of habitation. Cylopides are moth-like butterflies from South Africa, never found in England except as lepidopterists’ specimens. Conan Doyle’s imaginary butterfly has come to rest momentarily – or rather, is taking off from – the ‘cyclopean’ architecture of Grimspound. This adjective was used by Pausanias to describe the masonry of bronze age sites in Greece, especially Mycenae and Tiryns; Pliny traces its origin to Aristotle, recording a belief that the massive blocks of limestone found at these sites could only have been set in place by a race of Cyclops. When Conan Doyle first set eyes on Grimspound, in the early June of 1901, it must have struck him as a Mycenae of the north, which is exactly what it looks like today. The huge and immovable stones embedded in its gate and walls have given it a greater claim to permanence than many later structures. The circumstances of that visit in 1901 were recorded by Conan Doyle’s so-called collaborator, Fletcher Robinson, in terms that reflect on the narrative choices made later in the Hound:

  From the bog, we tramped eastward to the stone fort of Grimspound, which the savages of the Stone Age in Britain… raised with enormous labour to act as a haven of refuge from the marauding tribes to the South. The good preservation in which the Grimspound fort still remains is marvellous… Into one of these [stone huts] Doyle and I walked, and sitting down on the stone which probably served the three thousand year old chief as a bed we talked of the races of the past. It was one of the loneliest spots in Great Britain… Suddenly we heard a boot strike against a stone without and rose together. It was only a lonely tourist on a walking excursion, but at the sight of our heads suddenly emerging from the hut he let out a yell and bolted… as he did not return I have small doubt Mr Doyle and I added yet another proof of the supernatural to tellers of ghost stories concerning Dartmoor.2

  It may be that Robinson’s anecdote is coloured by his reading of the Hound: the detail of the boot striking against the stone is put to telling use in Conan Doyle’s narrative. But his account of the physical dispositions reverses the relative positions of advantage and disadvantage in the Hound. Watson settles himself in the stone hut but is unsettled by the arrival of a stranger; in Robinson’s version it is the other way round. Conan Doyle takes every opportunity to complicate the identifying marks of a settled state. His Sir Henry Baskerville is both a tourist, a Canadian visitor, and the scion of a family with deep roots in the vicinity. Seen from the point of view of Dr Mortimer, who collects human specimens as avidly as Stapleton collects butterflies and moths, Baskerville has all the identifying marks of an aboriginal: ‘A glance at our friend here reveals the rounded head of the Celt, w
hich carries inside it the Celtic enthusiasm and power of attachment.’ (p.55)

  Baskerville, the human artefact, is environed by museum specialists, experts in classification and conservation. But Mortimer is given the role of protector, while Stapleton belongs to the genre of collector as exterminator, his private museum illustrating how far he will go to achieve his own vision of order, whatever the cost to other creatures, animal or human:

  The room had been fashioned into a small museum, and the walls were lined by a number of glass-topped cases full of that collection of butterflies and moths the formation of which had been the relaxation of this complex and dangerous man. In the centre of this room there was an upright beam, which had been placed at some period as a support for the old worm-eaten balk of timber which spanned the roof. To this post a figure was tied, so swathed and muffled in sheets which had been used to secure it that one could not for the moment tell whether it was that of a man or a woman. One towel passed round the throat, and was secured at the back of the pillar. Another covered the lower part of the face and over it two dark eyes – eyes full of grief and shame and a dreadful questioning – stared back at us. In a minute we had torn off the gag, unswathed the bonds, and Mrs Stapleton sank upon the floor in front of us. As her beautiful head fell upon her chest I saw the clear red weal of a whip-lash across her neck. (pp.151–2)