Well might you wonder how long this particular piece of string is...
...and I can tell you that it is eight miles long, the approximate distance that my Walking Friend and I covered on that tramp out to Grey Wethers (and you from your armchairs). Neither of us has a kilometric brain so each of those marks, one every 2.5 inches, equals a mile.
None of this is to scale on a computer screen but right-click and this might enlarge enough to get the gist of our walk. Note The Grey Wethers (upper middle), Waterfall (the diversion, left of centre) and Postbridge from whence we had set off and hoped to be reunited with the car eventually.
In our after-walk discussions over the carrot and ginger soup we agreed that the distance we had walked that day was at about the limits of our comfort zone for now, so this piece of string, tracked across future mapping exercises, will gives us a rough idea of distance. I'm sure we could do it by GPS routing but how boring is that and it's deceptive too. The OS walking route times must be on the winged feet of Mercury or else I've clicked the Go By Bus button by mistake. So we sit with our map in the Fox Tor Cafe (this place is legendary, dogs and muddy boots welcome) wind our bit of good-old-fashioned string up and down tor and valley, taking into account contours and terrain and our own walking speed whilst knowing that we are within our capabilities.
Funnily enough, the day after The Grey Wether's jaunt, though I wasn't creaking, I didn't feel like walking far so I sat in the kitchen with my pile of Dartmoor books (which live under the Kayaker's picture of the girls in Northern India) ...
And I sat and read, perused the map again and then created, because the other thing that I am determined to do this year...here we go again...is to keep a walking journal. Now I am no artist and certainly no cartographer but I do want a record of where I've walked so I've made a start...
Having sketched out our route I filled in the details and then had a dabble with a tin of water colour paints and a water-filled brush that KatefromCheshire gave me when we met a few years ago (thank you Kate)
It seems a bit of a travesty to be honest. The details are quirky and particular to the day (click and it should enlarge embarrassingly) and nor is this to scale, but it is enough to jog my memory of the walk which I could do again if I wanted to. I am blessing the fact that I slogged through A Level Geography too, because at least Ordnance Survey maps make some sense, I find a good OS map as interesting to 'read' as a book these days...Miss Cassells would be proud of me, and yet could I ever see what use it might be when I was sixteen.
Quotes and poems are going in there too...
This from The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane...
'Whenever I return from the moors, I feel a lightness up behind my eyes, as though my vision has been opened out by twenty degrees to either side...'
and this is something that I find holds fast for the following days too.
Along with our treasured copy of High Dartmoor by Eric Hemery and Crossing's Guide to Dartmoor, another book now coming into its own is Quartz and Feldspar - Dartmoor: A British Landscape in Modern Times by Matthew Kelly. I invested in this in the depths of winter, and though I found reading it cover to cover quite hard work, the book comes alive when I'm out there walking because it is now filling in fascinating details along the way.
Matthew Kelly also walks out to The Grey Wethers..
'As the Dart chuckles on the left and cows chew watchfully, you push through dense scratchy gorse...where the East Dart veers to the left, heading west and then north to its head at Cranmere Pool, the path goes straight on...the landscape now opens up, the waste stretching into the hazy distance..breathing and step synchronise overlaying that indistinct but generalised moorland ambience.'
I sat at the kitchen table and walked it over and again in my imagination, remembering that Trial by Gorse and smiling...
'Near this high point on the path are the Grey Wethers, two intersecting stone circles...walking among the stones they take on the mobility of sculpture and it is difficult to take a photograph that squeezes these stunted stones into a single frame.'
My problem too.
Matthew Kelly goes on to quote 1840's Dartmoor walker Samuel Rowe, who turned to Keats and lines from Hyperion for an explanation of the mysterious power of the Grey Wethers...
One here, one there,
Lay, vast and edgeways, like a dismal cirque,
Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor
When the chill rain begins at shut of eve
In dull November.'
Ah, if only Keats could have seen it in April.
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