‘Death to Man or Beast’
Sink your feet into Sherlock Holmes’ eeriest location: Dartmoor.
SQUELCH. GURGLE. BOTHER. At least I think I said ‘bother.’ It may have been a zestier word beginning with ‘b’ and ending in ‘er’ that rippled through the Devon mizzle across the brown-green morass into which I had just plunged my right leg.
Cool bog water percolated through the thin gaps between gaiter, overtrouser and walking boot, soaking into my woollen sock. It was going to be one of those days when I would be hoofing a small reservoir around with me. As I scrambled to my feet, my thoughts flew back to an ominous line in the classic detective novel that had brought me here: ‘A false step yonder means death to man or beast.’
The sinister quagmire described in the book doesn’t exist in the real world, but it was based on the broad tract of waterlogged ground that had just tried to gobble my boot. It’s possibly the most famous bog in fiction, and fortunately for me the author had ratcheted up the dangers for dramatic effect. Only my pride (and a cherished sock) met a grisly end.
The novel in question is The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which first appeared in serial form back in 1901. Every month from August that year, readers of The Strand Magazine were drip fed the gripping exploits of the author’s consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his companion John H. Watson. Revived after an eight-year hiatus, they swap London’s seedy streets for the ‘desolate’ wilds of Dartmoor in a beastly tale that ranks among Conan Doyle’s most celebrated works. Without giving too much away, it’s enough to say the case involves a greenhorn squire, a family curse and an entomologist with a shady past. I’ll come to the monstrous mutt later. The ‘melancholy moor’ and its gloopy mists are as much characters of the book as the fictitious inhabitants of Grimpen. But it’s not until chapter six that the action moves to Devon’s stark granite
uplands, so vividly described by Watson: ‘Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream.’
Soon after Watson’s arrival at Baskerville Hall, we’re introduced to the novel’s eeriest setting: the ‘great Grimpen Mire.’ And it’s here – or at least the mire it’s modelled on – that I found myself knee-deep in fetid water on a suitably bleak day. I was practically wading in the footsteps of Conan Doyle. Widely identified as the inspiration for his ponyswallowing swamp, Foxtor Mires lies secluded in a granite hollow, two-and-a-half miles from Princetown in the southern expanse of Dartmoor National Park. Fed by four moorland streams and topped up by rainfall, the peat which has accumulated in this natural basin over millennia acts like a giant sponge, releasing the water as a trickle into the River Swincombe. And just like its treacherous twin in fiction, there’s a single path weaving across from north to south ‘which a very active man,’ or indeed woman, can seek out. Take it from me, it’s best traversed in summer, when the maze-like mires are at their least sodden.
Conan Doyle came upon Foxtor Mires with the help of his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson, then a journalist for the Daily Express. It was his tales of monstrous hounds and family feuds in his native Devon that drew the famed author to the moor. His coachman Henry Baskerville gives his name to the story’s young squire.
Taking lodgings in Princetown’s Duchy Hotel while he penned the story, Conan Doyle scouted for settings on foot. Covering up to 18 miles a day, it’s clear from the book that he was an avid walker, returning ‘pleasantly weary’ from his outings, as he wrote to his mother in June 1901. His principal characters are forever traipsing moorland paths from door to tor. Then there’s the old buffer Frankland at Lafter Hall, who obsesses over rights of way. And earlier in the story, in the upstairs study of 221B Baker Street, we also see Holmes poring over a large scale Ordnance map procured from Stanfords (the famous London purveyor of maps and travel books, still trading today).
“My spirit has hovered over it all day,” he declares to Watson. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to deduce that Conan Doyle himself had also acquired such a chart of Dartmoor for his own explorations, as you or I would slip Explorer OL28 into our rucksack today. He must have studied it intensely, for much of the real Dartmoor leached into the fictional geography of the story.
Princetown and its infamous convict prison feature prominently. And in his reports to Holmes, Dr. Watson also refers to a Black Tor, a Vixen Tor and a Bellever Tor (spelt ‘Belliver’ in the book). They’re all place names that Conan Doyle had either plucked from his map or chanced upon in his lengthy moorland wanderings. On the turnpike road near Postbridge there’s also a cluster of houses which bear the name ‘Merripit’, where (spoiler alert) the novel’s antagonist resides. An isolated farmstead called Fernworthy (now the site of a reservoir and forestry plantation) is upgraded to a village in Sherlock Holmes’ world, where the town of Bovey Tracey becomes Coombe Tracey.
Some locations go unnamed, but it doesn’t take much sleuthing to narrow down the possibilities. For the fang-like rows of ancient standing stones we can assume that Conan Doyle had the megaliths of Merrivale in mind, while way out east, the Bronze Age hut circles of Grimspound are a shoo-in for the bivouac where Watson discovers Holmes hiding out on the moor. Aficionados also point to Bellever Tor as the gnarled granite outcrop where the detective’s ebony outline is silhouetted in a silvery moon. But anyone looking for Baskerville Hall on Dartmoor may be disappointed. The strongest contenders lie outside Devon.
“‘Its tenacious grip plucked at our heels as we walked, and when we sank into it it was as if some malignant hand was tugging us down into those obscene depths… ” DR. WATSON DESCRIBES THE GRIMPEN MIRE
There’s Clyro Court near Hay-on-Wye, where it’s believed Conan Doyle was a guest of Ralph Hopton Baskerville, and heard the story of ‘Black Vaughan’: the ghost of a medieval nobleman who haunted Hergest Ridge, with a bloodhound (carrying his severed head) in tow. He would also have been familiar with Black Shuck – the devil dog of East Anglia, whose apparition is said to be an omen of death. It’s possible that Conan Doyle learned of it in Norfolk, where he and Bertram Fletcher Robinson visited Cromer Hall on a golfing holiday. A Gothic pile complete with yew alley up until the Great Storm of 1987, it’s arguably the closest match for the Baskerville family seat.
In Devon folklore, the snarling black dogs come in large litters. There are the spectral Wisht hounds prowling Wistman’s Wood and the firebreathing pooches that howl at the grave of Richard Cabell, the villainous squire of Brook Hall near Buckfastleigh. So feared was he by townsfolk, iron bars guard his chest tomb. It was undoubtedly the legend of Cabell, as told by Robinson, which inspired the cursed Hugo Baskerville in Conan Doyle’s story.
In the book it transpires that the gigantic hound was kennelled in the tumbledown ruins of a tin mine, secreted on an island of dry ground in the middle of the Grimpen Mire. Off the page it can only be Whiteworks, the roadhead hamlet where I’d earlier set off across Foxtor Mires.
Just as in the novel a ‘thin peninsula of firm, peaty soil tapers out into the widespread bog.’ And as it did for Holmes, Watson and Inspector Lestrade in the penultimate chapter, the path ‘zigzags from tuft to tuft of rushes among those green-scummed pits and foul quagmires.’
In the book there are ‘small wands here and there’ to mark the way. But walkers in the real world are afforded no such help in navigating Foxtor Mires. There’s next to no tangible trace of the long, green dashes defining a bridleway on my OS map. It’s no path for confident strides, that’s for sure. Instead I take small, tentative steps, and periodically test the mattress-like peat by gingerly probing it with my walking pole. It’s spookily silent, except for the sucking noises made by my boots. I feel my way from tussock to tussock and try to sidestep the deepest pools, heralded by spongier patches of sphagnum moss. In summer, as it is when the story begins, the mire is stippled white with cotton-grass too. It also sees a flowering of deadly crimson pompoms belonging to the roundleaved sundew – a carnivorous plant that feeds on insects lured in by its sugar-tipped tentacles.
It’s a relief to reach the far side, where a faint trod grows clearer, rising to a wayside cross daubed with lichen. Over 200 of these granite waymarkers dot the moor, erected to guide lost souls in grim weather, with many dating back to the Middle Ages. Some line the route of the Abbot’s Way, a medieval trackway across the moor between Buckfast and Tavistock Abbeys, supposedly waymarked after four wicked monks perished in a snowstorm.
Another wayside cross lies half-a-mile to the east, in the lee of Fox Tor. Curiously, it’s plonked atop a box-like prehistoric burial archaeologists call a kistvaen. Known as Childe’s Tomb, it’s the locus of another legend. Like the wayward brothers of Buckfast Abbey, Childe the Hunter froze to death in a blizzard, albeit hunkered inside his disembowelled horse.
All around Foxtor Mires the land is fertile with
“I take small, tentative steps, and periodically test the mattress-like peat by gingerly probing it with my walking pole.
strange landmarks and sobering stories that no doubt fed the imagination of Conan Doyle. There’s one last location to investigate. Tracking an enclosure wall west, I come to lonely Nun’s Cross Farm, thought to be a model for Merripit House. In the book it’s home to Jack and Beryl Stapleton – the brother and sister who we slowly suspect are not all they appear to be. Like a child’s picture of a house, admittedly a haunted one with grey walls and shuttered windows, it abounds with stories of its own. Did the tale of a farmer’s wife who left and never returned rub off on Conan Doyle too?
The weather closes in again as
I leave and catch a parting glimpse of Foxtor Mires wreathed in mist.
I’d be lying if I told you it was anything but forboding at that moment, but that’s largely what made it so beguiling to Conan
Doyle. It’s a fitting lair for a demonic hound. And as dear
Watson puts so eloquently, it can be uncannily beautiful too: a ‘mottled expanse of greensplotched bog which stretched away until it merged into the russet slopes of the moor.’