Parts one, two and three.

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We had finally met the Dartmoor Mists.  As advertised, they snuck up on us in no time, with little warning.  One moment they seemed a mile away, the next moment, we were swathed in them, barely able to see each other.

No matter.  We were at the top of Yes Tor and all we needed to do was follow our walking guide to the next point.  It would be easy enough to orient ourselves given that we finally knew our location.

Except it wasn’t.

The mists hid all the landmarks we needed to move towards.  So the walking guide?  Pointless.  One down.  I thought of our GPSs.  Then I thought of the vapour messing them up if I took them out.  The mists were so thick at this point, it would have been akin to pulling out electronics in pouring rain.  Sadly, we hadn’t thought to bring a waterproof cover for them.  Two and three down.  The Compass.

And this is where I got another shock.

I have a reasonably decent sense of direction.  My husband drives, I navigate, and rarely – very rarely – have I led us wrong.  It’s just one of those things that clicks for me.

Now you hear that thick mists can muddle you.  That you can end up going in circles in them.  That you lose all sense of where you came from, which way you need to go.  But no amount of anecdotes or horror movie trope knowledge can match the sinking feeling of actually experiencing such disorientation.

I thought we’d come up Yes Tor from this direction.  Of course we had.  This rock here looked familiar, didn’t it?

But The Compass said nope, you came up the diametrically opposite way.

“I promise you we came up this way!” I said, knowing how lost and desperate I sounded even as I said it.

“It’s okay,” said my husband gently. “Let’s just follow The Compass to our next landmark.”

Climbing up Yes Tor, we’d gone through less than a hundred metres of mist.  Now though?  It had spread all the way to the very distant bottom and as far as the eye could see.  There was just no end to it.

So we went on down through the mist, taking frequent readings on The Compass.  We seemed to be going nowhere useful.  We could have passed every single landmark without noticing it through the shrouds around us.  After a while, long past the time we should have reached our next stop, we realised that yes, we were lost again.  This time in the mist with nothing to orient ourselves by.  It was three in the afternoon by this point.  We had maybe another three hours of daylight ahead of us.  And mists?  They only grow thicker as evening gathers.

“Let’s just head back to the reservoir,” said my husband, “and let’s risk the GPS.”

“Okay.”

We got out the GPS.  Booted it up.

“You are off-road.  Location not found.”

Hmm.  Let’s try the other GPS.

“Sorry.  Signal not found.”

It’s not a pleasant feeling, that, being stuck goodness knows where, unable to see more than a few feet ahead, and your primary means of navigation – the ones you’ve been saving as your last resort – ditch you.  No, it’s not a pleasant feeling at all.

Logically, I knew we couldn’t be more than five, maybe six miles, from civilization.  But in which direction?  If we picked the wrong way to go, we had at least a  twenty mile trek before we hit somewhere populated.  Twenty miles.  More than thirty kilometres.  That’s three-quarters the distance from one end of Singapore to the other as the crow flies.  And we had just a few hours of daylight left.  We couldn’t afford to pick the wrong way.

Out came The Compass.

I kissed it for good luck.  I did.

“It says that’s where we started,” I told him. “Double-check for me, please.”

“Think you’re right.”

“Here goes nothing then.”

We changed direction and started moving in a straight line the way The Compass told us to.  There wasn’t even a hint of a trail the places we were walking now.

And then I met my first bog.

It didn’t swallow me like the poor pony in The Hound of Baskervilles, but it was miry enough that I almost lost a shoe.

I had to shake my head at how ridiculous our situation was.  All my fears – mists, being lost, bogs – everything was coming together.  The only thing that was left was for us to hear a dull howl echoing through the mists.

We trudged on.  I kept checking The Compass to ensure we were on track.  My husband kept checking the GPS.  “Sorry.  Signal not found.”

We trudged on.  By this time, I’d stumbled into enough boggy patches that my shoes were soaked through, mud was caked on my trousers, I’d been pricked a few places by the gorse bushes that seemed so beautiful from a distance.

And then I saw it on the ground.

A skull.

Something had died out here.  Had been picked clean until only its bones remained.  Picked clean by what?  We hadn’t seen a single animal on the moors except some sheep.

So there I was.  Lost, soaked, blinded by the mist, staring at a skull that, in homage to every cliche out there, was grinning up at me.

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To be continued.

• 

Thus far, we’ve been witness to the dire warnings our explorers were given about Dartmoor and the start of their expedition.

We were meant to follow the Red-a-ven brook for a while before veering off into the wilds.  This bit was easy.  When you have a dancing, tumbling stream as your guide, it’s hard to go wrong.

Far in the distance, we could see some mist.  But it was very far off.

“Hmm,” I said to my husband. “Looks like we’re going to have the mists after all.”

“That’s okay,” he replied. “They’re pretty far away.  Plus, they’ll be cool so we won’t sweat from all the exertion.”

My husband, the optimist.

We continued on for a good hour.  And realised we had somehow veered off the planned route.  Or at least missed a landmark we were supposed to have hit.  I felt a gentle little undercurrent of doubt.  My thoughts were (a) we’re kind of lost, and (b) hmm the mists.  But then I remembered – I had my husband, The Compass, broad daylight, assorted guide books, and multiple GPSs.  Pah, I thought.  My tinge of doubt, embarrassed by its silliness, stuck its tail between its legs and slunk away.

We still needed to figure out where we were, so we climbed up a small hillock to have a look around and consider our options.  We referred to the guide, checked the GPS, got some compass readings and had a quick discussion.  Yup, we concluded, we were definitely lost.

Hmm.  At least the mists were still far off.

We finally decided to ignore all our pathfinding gear and use some common sense.  The convenient thing about a hiking route that involves the highest point in a landscape is that if you’re not sure where to go, you can just head for the tallest thing on the horizon.  Logic!  There was a pretty high hill in front of us that seemed to tower over everything else.  It had to be Yes Tor.  We made for it.

At the foot of Yes Tor, I looked up and groaned.  I am utterly out of shape and for a tiny 600m hill, the rocky tor on top seemed a mile away.  It probably was.  The hills in Dartmoor aren’t the inverted V shape that kids use to represent mountains.  Instead, these hills have a gentle upslope that goes on forever until suddenly you discover you’ve reached the top.  Still, my goal was in sight and up we went.

A while later, I stopped to catch my breath.  The rocks on top seemed discernably closer.  Good.  I turned around to take in the view.  The vale of the Red-a-ven was down below.  Green hills, covered with heather and flowering golden gorse, faded into the distance.  The countryside rolled out in front of me for miles and miles.  This was the land of Enid Blyton, not the Baskervilles!  I could picture the Famous Five having a picnic on the slopes here.  I bet George wouldn’t have been winded by this climb.

Any surviving thoughts of hellhounds and death-by-bog fled.  All was well with the world.  Flowers were blooming, brooks were babbling, butterflies were flitting.  Peace and harmony abounded.  Gloriously content, I turned back to continue the climb.

The top of Yes Tor was gone.

Shrouded by mist.

In the minute or two I had my back turned, the mists had appeared.

Every single doubt I had ever had in my life about Dartmoor came triumphantly roaring back.

“Should we turn back?” I asked.  I certainly wanted to but didn’t want to be the nervous nelly party-pooper.  Please say yes, I thought.

“Of course not,” he said. “We’re nearing the top.  You can do it.”

And so we climbed on.  As we hit the rocky tor near the top, visibility dropped sharply.  The miles and miles of gorgeous vista I described earlier?  This is what it had turned into.

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Continued in Part 4.

• 

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle is set in Dartmoor.  He paints a beautiful yet bleak and utterly unforgiving picture of the area with his descriptions of the bogs on the moors.  Let me quote one passage for you…

“A false step yonder means death to man or beast. Only yesterday I saw one of the moor ponies wander into it. He never came out. I saw his head for quite a long time craning out of the bog-hole, but it sucked him down at last. Even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place. And yet I can find my way to the very heart of it and return alive. By George, there is another of those miserable ponies!”

Something brown was rolling and tossing among the green sedges. Then a long, agonized, writhing neck shot upward and a dreadful cry echoed over the moor. It turned me cold with horror, but my companion’s nerves seemed to be stronger than mine.

“It’s gone!” said he. “The mire has him. Two in two days, and many more, perhaps, for they get in the way of going there in the dry weather and never know the difference until the mire has them in its clutches. It’s a bad place, the great Grimpen Mire.”

That’s some evocative stuff right there.  It made the moors seem mystic and dangerous – nature, untamed and wild.  The child I was when I read this book was enraptured by the romance of the area.

Other random reading over the years just added to this mystique.  I picked up factoids  about the mists that settle on the moors.  Mists that waft out of nowhere and blanket the region within minutes.  Mists that confuse and perplex, robbing hikers of all sense of direction as they wander within its opaque veils. Mists that seem really freaking deadly when conflated with the Doylean bogs and mires.

All this atmosphere and build up served to put Dartmoor near the top of my must-visit list.  That child who read The Hound of the Baskervilles twenty years ago really, really wanted to go there.  And now that I was on the same continent, in the same country, I decided to carpe some diems and make her happy.  My husband and I fixed on a trip over the Easter weekend.  A-hiking we would go.

I was over the moon, picturing the vistas, the craggy tors, the feel of bracken and heather underfoot.  Maybe we would find an arrowhead some prehistoric hunter dropped.  Maybe we would even hear some poor, wretched animal sink into a fog-enveloped mire.

Although I’m sure that was a purely fictional passage Doyle inserted just to build tension.  Purely fictional.

Probably.

Feeling extremely self-conscious about being led by fears picked up from Sherlock Blooming Holmes – it’s the 21st century for heaven’s sake! – I purchased The Compass.  I use capitals because it turns out, 21st century compasses are fairly complex and this one felt like an entity in its own right.  It wasn’t just a needle indicating North – there were also rotating dials and measuring marks for map scales and an inbuilt magnifying lens and all sorts of arrows pointing everywhere.  In fact, The Compass was so complicated, it came with a 12 page guide booklet.

The day before Easter weekend, I very self-consciously read this guide.  I still felt embarrassed about taking the whole thing so seriously because, come on!  A jillion hikers tramp around the moors on a daily basis.  Even Boy Scouts go there to earn their badges.  Boy Scouts!  And here I was picturing death and dismemberment by phantasmal hound in a fog-ridden, bog-riddled Hades.  Good grief.

So we went there, armed with backpacks filled with The Compass - in case we got lost on the moors for days and needed help getting out.  And a book of maps – in case we got lost on the moors for days and needed help getting out.  And our car’s GPS – in case we got lost on the moors for days and needed help getting out.  And an internet-enabled mobile phone with GPS – in case we got lost on the moors for days and needed help getting out.

As you can see, redundancy was key.  Paranoia?  Heck, no.  Dartmoor was just not going to have the satisfaction of seeing me floundering in its foggy boggy morasses, no sirree, Bob.  Not me, not mine.

We also loaded up on chocolate bars and potato crisps – in case we got lost on the moors for days and needed sustenance.  And 2 litres of water -  in case we got lost on the moors for days and needed non-bogliquid potations.  And a DSLR with a tripod – in case we got lost on the moors for days and it was very beautiful.

All this for what was likely to be a 6 hour hike in broad daylight.

We Were Prepared.

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Continued in Part 2.

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