by Tom Cox
If you drive north from the Cap, you’ll find yourself in some quiet valleys, where, if it’s night-time, you have no satnav, your phone has run down and you can’t charge it because crisp crumbs or beach sand or maybe both have clogged up the cigarette lighter socket behind the gearstick, you can get lost for well over an hour. If it’s daytime, and you navigate more successfully, you’ll eventually hit the Blackdown Hills, and you’ll know the moment you have because that’s when the mounds and mumps and buttocks start to act less like individuals and the person who paints the landscape adds a bit of black to the green on their palette. In the Second World War fires were lit on The Blackdowns, to lure German bombers away from Bristol, and when I walked in them they always seemed a bit smoky – never more so than in November 2017, when I climbed through Prior’s Park Wood.
As I emerged from the wood, feeling sure I had reached the top of the hill, I was surprised to find another sharp incline ahead of me, and another crown of mist. Out of the silence I heard the heavy thump of hooves, and through the mist I saw the hot breath of three stallions who were chasing in circles around a field at the summit, violently, as if conjured out of a secret hole in the earth by a spell. Their size and power was awe-inspiring and the ground shook underneath them. What I was seeing had a flavour of America’s Old West, a shocking reminder that men and women rode and tamed these animals, nonchalantly, but a flavour of something very English too. I wanted to watch them but also – despite being shielded by a fence – to move away, and as I did, a larger than average dog of unspecific breed leapt at me from behind a hedge. It bounced beside me as I walked, like a toothy punk in a mosh pit, and nipped at my jacket – not exactly vicious, and certainly not quite friendly, just … possessed. ‘Don’t worry, it’s OK,’ I told the dog, again and again, before I realised that my instructions were aimed not at the dog but at myself. It was as if the whole fifty-square-yard circle of land was possessed and I would not have been surprised to find a large ancient stone at its centre, glowing.
Afterwards, I walked along a fast road, dodging cars driven by people that, like the horses and the dog, seemed more untamed than most of their breed, and was glad to get into calmer country: first a fallow field behind a barrier of beech trees with exposed roots, then gold-carpeted paths through thick evergreen woodland, and an even deeper locked-in quiet. Even through this calmer part of my walk, some of the energy from that invisible circle on the hilltop carried over. I passed a bare witching tree with sharp prongs reaching towards an orange crack in the sky, and then a child’s toy panda trapped in dying brambles, which from a distance resembled an esoteric hedge spirit, then along more quiet paths with mist sinking down onto them. I finally reached a village pub, where I stopped for a drink and to make some notes. The countryside in the approach to the pub was somehow simultaneously savage but rigorously organised: a neat but very Gothic church, a bonfire set up two days in advance for Guy Fawkes Night, with a scarecrow trapped inside, dressed sensibly ahead of a potentially cold night. The inside of the pub was raucous and cramped, alarmingly so for 4.30 p.m. on a weekday in a scenario that did not involve a stag or hen party. I was hot from walking fast to beat the dark, so I took my pint outside to the deserted beer garden, and began to write about my walk in my journal. After a couple of minutes, I became aware of a shadow looming over me. ‘What are you doing? Writing in your diary?’ a voice asked. The tone was not totally unfriendly but had dashes of School Bully and cider in it. I looked up and saw that it belonged to a wide-shouldered bald man. I initially put him at about forty-seven, which, after talking to him for a few minutes, I revised down to a hard-lived thirty-eight or thirty-nine. We chatted a little while, and a few of his friends joined us, smoking roll-ups. They observed that I didn’t come across as someone from round there, and I told them they were correct, and that I lived in Devon, not far from Dartmoor.
‘I’ve been to Dartmoor,’ said the bald man. ‘Fucking horrible place.’
‘What took you there?’ I asked.
‘I was in the prison,’ he said.
‘That prison used to get its food from my great-grandma’s family,’ I said.
‘Well, tell them it’s shit,’ he said.
The bald man’s friend told me about the birds of prey he had seen in the woodland above us: huge hawks. ‘You haven’t asked him what he was in for,’ he said, pointing to the bald man.
I told him that I thought it would be a bit impolite of me to do so.
‘Go on!’ the avian enthusiast told the bald man. ‘Tell him.’
‘Stealing women’s knickers. I got three years.’
‘He’s not right,’ said the avian enthusiast.
‘If he’s right,’ said another, older man, who had joined us, ‘I don’t want to be.’
A middle-aged woman emerged from the bar and made our party larger, and the bald man started to engage in flirtatious chat with her. I noticed a sign next to us, which advertised the area as a ‘Man Creche’, offering women the chance to ‘go shopping’ or ‘relax’. What about the women who didn’t want to go shopping, and who preferred to relax by getting pissed up? Were they welcome here? And where were these shops of which they spoke? I’d just walked ten miles and hadn’t seen a hint of so much as a petrol station. You get these ideas into your head, when you’re in the West, that everything gets more raw and empty the further you probe away from the middle of the country, down towards the bottom of the sock of the peninsula, but that isn’t the full story. Rules like that are unwise generalisations. They are for the Keiths, not the Candice-Maries, of the universe. This was a raw place: much rawer than the place, over an hour farther west, where I was living at the time.
*
That same autumn was the one when I ended my long dry spell and saw my second West Country hare: three years after the one I’d seen near my house in Devon, and a year and a half before the one I saw on the Isle of Purbeck. It happened on the day I finally got around to climbing Brent Knoll. I’d been going straight home, on my way back from another steep walk, then changed my mind and decided that my investigation of the big stemless onion by the M5 was long overdue. All I’d seen was a flash of brown in the stubble field below, nothing like as clear as my East Anglia hare sightings, but the movement, the zigzag, as it ringed the base of the hill, was unmistakable.
Ring the Hill: the phrase had good connotations. I liked the idea of a hill as something you might get in touch with in a crisis, big or small … at a point when you needed perspective: ‘Dial 999 and choose option 3, “Hill”, to speak directly to a hill.’ ‘Fun hills are waiting to chat just with you. Calls cost 60p per minute peak time!’
Brent Knoll was everything I’d hoped it would be and more. It was a more sociable companion than its rival, Crook Peak, and despite the shortfall in height the view from the ancient fort on the top was somehow better. I realised the corner of the Bristol Channel, the moment where the north coast of the South-West Peninsula begins, was much closer than I had thought. I’d realised this before, but obviously needed to re-realise it for it to totally sink in. There was some very strange, flat land down there: mudflats, pillboxes, sunken boats daubed with graffiti. It was a small fenland with various geographical laws of its own. SLURRY LAGOON. TOXIC GAS. NO ENTRY. DANGER OF DROWNING, a sign had warned me at the beginning of the six-mile walk I’d done down there, which kind of set the tone. The sea became a thing gradually, out of miles of flatness, without seeming to know it had become sea. Down in that corner at West Huntspill I’d walked up Plymor Hill, which, at just two feet high, has been acknowledged as the smallest hill in England. I had tried to notice the ascent, but I might have tried too hard and merely imagined it. From my vantage point at the top of Brent Knoll, I turned to the east, where I could see Glastonbury Tor, fifteen miles away. South of that was the Wellington Monument, where I’d walked through more strange Blackdowns Mist, more like steam than mist, just above Popham’s Pit, named after the corrupt Speaker of the House of Commons and Attorney Ge
neral who allegedly perished there in 1696, having been flung violently from his horse. The pit purportedly leads directly to Hell, where Popham’s spirit was held on probation until, after some hard praying from his widow, he was permitted, at the meagre rate of one cockstride per year, to return to Wellington Church, four miles away. Above the pit is a tree that two foresters tried to cut down in the 1860s but had to stop, after hearing ‘pitiful cries’ emerging from a disembodied voice in the trunk.
I am not sure how many cockstrides it took me to get to the bottom of Brent Knoll, but it didn’t feel like many. I kept my eye out for the hare on the way down. At the bottom, before I left, I decided to have a look inside the church. Its neat and friendly exterior was juxtaposed with a series of gruesome medieval carvings on its bench ends, depicting the trial and execution of a fox by hanging. It was an unexpectedly sombre end to a pleasant day and it prompted my thoughts to flick back to a walk I’d taken with a friend over the corner of the water, deep inside the peninsula, when the friend had told me about the time he and his brother had been taken fox hunting as a child, and, as the youngest member of the party, he’d been anointed with the blood of the murdered animal. He was a quiet and reclusive character, sensitive and gentle, a slower walker than me who took time to listen to the countryside and was always having intense encounters with animals. We’d been walking up to Bowerman’s Nose at the time, a tall pile of rocks on east Dartmoor, not unreminiscent of a stack of pale sheep dung, but which people also said was the effigy of a medieval hunter, transformed to stone by a coven of witches after upturning their cauldron during his pursuit of a hare. Talking about this hare folk tale led the friend to recall his one West Country encounter with a hare, which had happened on a deserted Devon lane at night, on his route home from the pub. It had not lasted long, but long enough to be a little different to his other encounters with wild animals, and he said it would probably stay with him forever. The hare, crouched in the middle of the lane, had locked him in its gaze, and both of them had frozen. In that position, for over a minute, they had both remained – until the hare finally turned and zigzagged away. And for just a second, before the hare made its escape and got on with its unknowable business, the friend had been certain he had been stared at by the eyes of a man.
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE DRESS CODE
(2014–17)
If I’m going to speak in depth about the Magic House, I should probably begin at the railway station. There are persuasive arguments for starting on the riverbank, or on the wildflower path leading down to the back gate from the top of the hill, or even in the pub, but I think the station is the place, because that was the walking route I took back to the Magic House most often, and the direction I was coming from when I first set eyes on the Magic House, which is a place where, in the nicest possible way, you cannot escape an ambience of rail travel. The station is also where you might say The Compound starts. That’s what I would announce to friends who were visiting for the first time, when we passed through the old stone gates of the estate: ‘We are now entering The Compound.’ It was a joke, a reference to the place’s otherness, its illustrious yet flawed past as a social experiment, and the idea that, once within its boundaries, you might not be able to escape, but now, with the perspective that comes from having been back on the Outside for eighteen months, it seems more like a plain statement of fact. The Dartington Hall estate in south Devon is a mixture of many things and isn’t really like any other place on earth. Once you’ve been part of it, you never entirely leave.
What is interesting to me now is that I remember walking past the Magic House on my first visit to Dartington in late 2011, noticing it from the pavement on the opposite side of the road – which a surprising amount of people don’t – and wondering what its function was. I don’t think I even realised it was a residential building, less still the kind I would ever want to live in. It looked dark and unwelcoming and Gothic, possibly a former chapel, and I was finished with dark old buildings and was now utterly under the spell of the light, functional living spaces of the mid-twentieth century, some of which – designed by the Swiss-American architect William Lescaze – I had come here specifically to see. What I didn’t know was that the Gothic front was a disguise. The Magic House was a sweet old grandma in a Dracula mask.
Sweating profusely in weather that was November’s only in name, I lugged my heavy bags on up the hill and did not give the building another thought for well over two years. Because I’m me, I had decided not to take a taxi to the estate from the hotel in Totnes where I’d stayed the previous night, and instead to walk with my suitcase and rucksack two miles from the far end of town to the hall, passing the station where I’d arrived for the first time two days earlier. Between March 2014 and the end of 2017 I would do the same walk – or at least the latter two thirds of it – close to a thousand times. By then I would be familiar with the shortcut: you nipped through the car park beside the westbound platform, down a small alleyway behind the disused Dairy Crest plant, whose huge chimney dominated the skyline of the town no less than its Norman castle or medieval hilltop grid of merchant houses and jumbled terraces. You passed graffiti and penitential-looking hoops of barbed wire, rounded a bend, then hit some trees, which brought you out at a junction of paths beside the river.
There is a shockingly dark spot in those trees, so dark that I find it hard to believe that there could be a darker spot of countryside within half a mile of a town in the whole of the UK. You’re still within a hundred yards of residential streets at this point, which makes the darkness all the more unfathomable. Soon you will be properly out of town, into the untrammelled countryside of the estate, but you will find nothing as inexplicably dark on the paths there. On the nights when I had no phone battery or torch and walked back from town and hit the dark spot, I would often lose my sense of direction entirely, realising I was walking back the way I came, as if the dark spot itself had spun me around. And I am generally a person with a good sense of direction. On one occasion, I hit the dark spot, fell over and grated an amount of skin on my arm that would have not been viewed as a frugal addition to an Italian meal, had it been parmesan and not skin. I was a little drunk, but I don’t think that was the reason I fell; it felt more as though the dark spot had been in a particularly black mood and had dashed me to the ground. The official entrance to the estate was another couple of hundred yards on from the dark spot but I began to think of the dark spot as a curtain in the land, a partition where you became briefly invisible – the unofficial entrance to The Compound.
I had only been dimly aware of it at the time, but during my initial visit Dartington was going through a period of transition. The legendary Arts College there had been shut down a year before as part of a drive to save money, and a rebranding process was underway which would involve the vans of estate workers being emblazoned with inane, airy slogans such as ‘Driven By Ideas’, and the beautiful, cosy White Hart pub in the fourteenth-century Hall being relocated to a bigger, adjoining room and laid out in a manner that my friend Jay once memorably likened to ‘a 1980s German techno bar’. By 2014, when I arrived as a tenant, the estate was in a quiet, sluggish period. There was a lot of resentment in Totnes regarding how far it had strayed from the original vision of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, the couple who’d bought the estate in 1925 for £30,000 and had turned it into a charitable trust, a school, a working farm and an arts venue, generating hundreds of jobs in what was at the time, largely as a knock-on result of the Industrial Revolution, an extremely deprived area of the British countryside.
Anyone who had lived in the TQ9 postcode for more than a few years remembered a time when you could wander along the River Dart and into the woods of the 1,200-acre estate on a summer evening and stumble on an impromptu piece of theatre or live music. They could not help but notice the drop-off in attendance at gigs in town since the college had closed and the students had gone, and many were saddened that the estate had turned its focus towards corporat
e weddings and other functions and away from community and creativity. But all of life is relative. Not being saddled with the comparisons that having known Dartington in its heyday entailed, I simply marvelled at how amazing it all was. My first spring and summer were one long dream where, while being regularly told how terrible it had all become, I wondered what administrative error had allowed a scruffy ill-educated northern oik like me to live in a place so picturesque, historically esteemed and spiritually untarnished. TOTNES: TWINNED WITH NARNIA announced the defaced sign at the bottom of the lane. But the sign was facing in the wrong direction. Everybody who knew Dartington and Totnes knew the real Narnia was through the gateposts and up the hill.
In late 2013 and early 2014, I had been looking unsuccessfully for a place to rent in south Devon. Because I was doing my hunting from my home in Norfolk, at a 350-mile disadvantage, everything decent in my price bracket was snapped up before I got chance to see it. Then the happy memory of my visit to Dartington three autumns earlier popped into my head. ‘They had lots of buildings on that estate,’ I thought. ‘And people probably live in some of them.’ I wrote to the Trust, who put me on a waiting list for their rental properties. The houses were thin on the ground and Dartington employees got first refusal, but timing was in my favour; just as my contract was coming to an end on the bungalow I’d been renting as a stopgap in Norwich, a terrace on the north-west side of the estate became available. Better still, it was one of the flat-roofed modernist Lescaze buildings that I’d been fetishising on my earlier trip: the smallest one on the estate.
