Letters From The Moors - A Sister's Journey 4

Hello and welcome to the Dartmoor Way with me Liz Scott.

I hope you enjoy my 110 mile journey around the outskirts of Dartmoor National Park in Devon in the UK.

I walked this with my sister in 2023 and following our trek I wrote a series of 10 letters to my sister sharing my memories and experiences of each day.

Today we start on day four Monday August the 7th.

This was a walk from Bovey Tracy to Morton Hampstead and was 10 and a half miles.

Dear sister,

By day four we were getting into our stride.

We knew the routine with the cars,

We understood the need for snacks and food as we walked and we were feeling competent with the map and we'd found our rhythm.

Our fourth day started on very familiar territory.

This is a path we have trodden so many times.

It is a path that has many warm memories,

Particularly memories of walking it with mum and your young son my nephew and my energetic dog Buzz.

In those walks Buzz would race off to the woods sniffing out squirrels and then charge back along the path to find us again.

His excitement about life and energy was palpable.

What a contrast to him now in his more aged years where he slowly sniffs and walks around but has no energy for chasing squirrels anymore.

It's so special when places like this spark the warmth of memories.

It means we can partially revisit the past and enjoy its secret,

Hidden,

Latent energy.

As I watched the dog walkers,

Families and cyclists make their way on the same path,

I wondered if they too were laying down memories that would resurface in years to come.

Once we were a couple of miles along the people thinned out and we wound our way down lanes to follow the River Bovee through Pullabrook Woods.

I hadn't walked on this side of the River Bovee so I was curious as to what I would discover.

I always feel a sense of excitement when I move from a footpath I've walked before to someone new.

One of my favorite parts of walking is to piece together a mental map that is built around areas I know with the addition of new territory.

Do you remember we saw lots of fungi?

One of the advantages of being slightly faster at walking is that I had plenty of time to stop and identify them on my phone.

One of the most beautiful was identified on my app as the Death Cap.

How could this shining golden beauty be so deadly?

It's only since getting home and looking it up that I realize it has its name for a reason.

It says it is the most toxic mushroom in the world and is responsible for many poisonings because it's often misidentified.

I left it alone but marveled that I'd seen it.

The woodlands of Pullabrook sparked mixed feelings for me.

It's probably a bit like seeing animals in zoos,

Creatures that are meant to roam the wilds,

To explore,

To hunt,

To live and to survive off their instincts.

These creatures are still beautiful but there is a certain sadness of seeing them caged and this is how I felt in Pullabrook.

It is a wood of farmed trees.

They are tall and straight and grown for timber.

It had a sense of being barren.

It was too neat.

The wood piles we found made me shiver slightly.

Over the past few days I'd been falling in love with the energy of trees and here the bodies were piled up for all to see.

My logical mind told me it was a good thing.

They are going to be used.

This was a farmed landscape.

We need wood.

However,

My heart silently cried for the death of these magnificent beasts.

Pullabrook woods turned into houndtool wood and then we came to the hamlet of water.

As I write this,

My mind is starting to play tricks.

I think water was a quaint,

Oldy-worldy,

Thatched hamlet.

I don't have any photos.

Am I remembering the right place?

I think it was at this point that you said you recognised having walked there before.

Your memories of walks done in the past was becoming a recurring theme.

We seemed to keep coming across paths and benches and lanes where you would look around as if recognising an old friend and try to remember why you knew this landscape.

As we walked past an old hedge of trees just past water,

You were convinced of having been there before and the memories seeped back.

As you were grasping for those memories and trying to locate them in time,

I wondered how many other people had walked these routes.

I went on a bit of a flight of fancy,

Wondering if maybe memories were lying like dust on the ground,

And as we walked over this dust,

It was stirred,

And as it stirred up and we breathed it in,

We woke up the sleeping memories within.

In other words,

Memories don't reside in our head.

They live in the landscape,

Wanting to be discovered and rediscovered again,

And we are the catalyst that revives these old memories.

As we walk through.

.

.

I'm a bit hazy about the route we then took.

I remember seeing the massive granite boulders in the woodland,

Which reminded me of another place on Dartmoor called Lustley Cleve.

The trees were growing around these imposing slabs of granite,

Some as big as cars.

It gave the woods a sense of being ancient and wild,

As if from a fairy tale.

What a contrast to the neat timber of Pullabrook Woods.

The further we walked,

The more we seemed to be back in the territory of old,

Traditional woodland.

One wooded path seemed to lead to another,

And I remember walking through nature reserves that were being managed to support wildlife.

Out of the woods we followed lanes,

And my next clear memory is walking along a track that took us to North Bovee.

At a ford in the river,

Large stones curved across to the other bank.

These stepping stones were beside the ford,

And we took a few photographs of a horse and cart with a tourist group aboard,

Crossing the river.

The horse's hooves splashed as the wooden cart creaked and squeaked across the sand and stone.

I had a fleeting thought of paddling,

But the sandy shores put me off as I began to imagine getting sand in my toes.

It would be an unnecessary discomfort for feet that still needed to walk a few miles.

That compelling voice of yesterday,

The one that had me paddle in the River Lemon,

Was quieter.

Was it quieter,

Or was my mind noisier?

I'm not sure.

But rather than paddle,

I started to jump across the stepping stones,

Stopping halfway,

And turning around to make my way back to you on the bank.

As we found our way to the village of North Bovee,

The church clock struck three o'clock.

Just before we made it to the village,

We spied a butterfly sunning itself and showing off its silky red coat with big button-like eyes.

You were thrilled to spot it was a peacock.

This was the elusive peacock butterfly that you'd been trying to describe to me over the past few days.

Here it was,

Unhurried and unashamedly flaunting its beauty.

We even managed to get a photo of it.

It seemed unfazed with us,

Chattering excitedly,

Clicking dozens of photos on our phone.

The last part of our day took us over fields and stiles,

All the way to Morton Hampstead.

We both felt this was territory we knew from previous walks.

We knew one of Mum's friends who lived nearby,

And we'd walked with her through some of these fields.

As we got closer to the town,

We knew we were trekking through fields and along footways that people over hundreds and hundreds of years had trodden before.

This was a soft and safe rural Dartmoor landscape.

It seemed comforting and like an old friend.

We found our way back to the car park,

And we congratulated ourselves on a steady walk and another successful day.