Teen spirit and the Ten Tors
Sixty years ago this month, three Army officers organised an expedition on Dartmoor to give young civilians a taste of outdoor adventure. Today, 2,400 teenagers annually are rising to that challenge
Now here’s something to tire those teenagers. Lucy Higginson reports on a tough Dartmoor challenge
When, in 1960, three Army officers decided to run a Dartmoor youth expedition to give young civilians the experience of navigating, bivouacking and field cooking so enjoyed by the Army’s junior leaders, they could not have imagined that more than 2,400 teenagers would still be gathering to do it 60 years later. The Ten Tors event is widely respected as one of the toughest weekend challenges any teenager will tackle. Over-subscription means few teams east of Wiltshire get in, although thousands of children are motivated to get fit, take up walking and learn to navigate, since 40 or so may find themselves vying for one of six places on each team.
Just making the starting line, therefore, is an achievement, a point emphasised with much military chutzpah as it gets underway at Okehampton Army Camp on the first Saturday in May. If this helps stoke nervous energy, so much the better: each team must navigate a route of 35, 45 or 55 miles, passing through 10 checkpoints and carrying full overnight kit, by 5pm on Sunday. Ducking into shops or public loos is forbidden, as are mobile phones and GPS devices. For a teenager, this is, of course, the definition of hell.
“Friends do ask, ‘Why would you walk for fun?’” agrees Helena Campbell, 15, of Devonport High School for Girls in Plymouth. Having completed the 35-mile route in 2019, she’s back this May for the 45-miler. With Scottish blood and an ex-army father, she decided “it seemed like a challenge and fun”. For her, the most magical part is setting up camp on Saturday night and tucking into a sleeping bag. “There is literally nothing like it. But I also like having nice conversations while you walk and becoming close friends with people sometimes you don’t expect.”
Helena’s energy may be exceptional but if today’s teenagers are as inactive, unfit and
screen-obsessed as we are led to believe, how does Ten Tors remain so popular — and is its role today more important than ever?
Geoff Cooke, a maths teacher and Ten Tors challenge manager at The Gryphon School in Dorset, certainly thinks so. “I’ve written to The Queen saying every school needs a Dofe manager,” he asserts. “We are too focused on academia, and things like this give them so much.”
Cooke’s ex-army roots are apparent in his lingo and the rigour of his training: “I tell my guys the two biggest failings are map reading and not being fit enough.” He starts them off reassembling jigsaw-puzzle maps of Dartmoor and runs two pre-school fitness sessions a week, plus a rucksack walk round the school grounds every Wednesday. “Most are town children and don’t have that stamina.” Few have experienced Dartmoor before but he prepares them for map reading blind in fog with a ‘night nav’ exercise.
Ten Tors insiders will tell you that it’s not always the First XV types who shine on the moors but the ones who can map read when they’re boss-eyed and laugh about stumbling groin-deep into a river. “It’s easy to pick the school gladiators but I don’t do that,” agrees Cooke. “I’m looking for good map readers, leaders and comedians who keep up morale. There is always somebody who surprises me with their guts.”
We are too focused on academia, and things like this give them so much
He recalls one younger boy who melted into tears with a twisted ankle. “But he hobbled through the pain barrier and kept going. He’s not a big chap but he had that bulldog spirit.” Another who “nearly made me fall off my seat” when she put her name forward is 17-year-old Alice Main. Alice has scoliosis but completed the 35-mile event in 2018 after two years in a back brace. “I was enjoying doing my Duke of Edinburgh silver award and wanted to try something harder,” she explains. “Dartmoor was a bit of a shock — I’d never been anywhere without a footpath before. But we were the first all-girl team from The Gryphon and we had to prove we could do it. When we finished, I said: ‘Don’t ever let me near Dartmoor again.’ But here I am training for the 45-miler. Walking is something we do as a family now — hopefully Ben Nevis next.”
Magnus Jackson, 17, of Gordon’s, a state boarding school in Surrey with strong military links, also found his Ten Tors experience life-changing. “You do question at the time, ‘Why am I doing this with nearly 20kg on my back?’ But I have such good memories and it taught me there’s something I’m good at,” he explains. “Sport has never really been my thing but it sparked an interest in walking, and it’s what I do now.”
Magnus and younger sister Lucia owe their participation to (ex-para) teacher Mr
Fox, clearly a man of huge influence, since they both still attend his EMT (Early Morning Training) gym sessions at 7am three times a week — voluntarily. Lucia completed despite “properly messing up my ankle” by tor two. But she gave an Army medic the slip and carried on, and has no regrets although she was on crutches for a month afterwards. “But imagine saying you’d just pulled out of the Ten Tors,” she reasons.
While Ten Tors is largely the Army’s creation, the current director, Lieutenant Colonel Crispin d’apice, explains that running it is as much an exercise in teamwork as completing it. “The Army funds it, helps run it and carries the risk for it, but there is no such thing as a single-service event,” he says. “We have Naval helicopter support and Royal Navy and RAF volunteers who sit out on the moors. We also rely on others, including the police, Dartmoor rescue and National Park Authority. We use about 24 different routes but teams split up pretty quickly and their trackers are monitored in the Ops centre.”
Though he clearly loves the event (and did it three times himself), he admits: “I don’t sleep hugely well over the weekend. Though we have a safety bubble and helicopter support, trackers, a medical chain and contingency plans, you are taking responsibility for other people’s children. There is the biggest sigh of relief when everyone is accounted for on Sunday afternoon.”
The weather, of course, can have a huge impact, though 2007 is the only year no one completed (it was abandoned due to flooding). Perhaps to deter the wary, the Ten Tors website shares some blood-curdling meteorological accounts, including this from 1996: “A cold northerly wind throughout Saturday gave way to heavy rain and snow overnight, and blanket fog with driving rain and snow persisted throughout Sunday. Two checkpoint tents were demolished by wind, and early on Sunday afternoon a mass
evacuation from the moor was organised. The RN helicopters played a crucial role, particularly on Kitty Tor, in some unspeakable conditions even for them.”
Completion rates of 90%-plus when it’s fair, as it has been recently, tumble by 20% if it’s not. “You see some fairly emotional people who ‘just can’t go on’,” says Lt Col d’apice. “We really encourage people not to drop out last thing on Saturday night but to have a sleep and a good meal and see how they feel on Sunday morning.”
Quite aside from the challenges posed by distance and climate, participants’ briefings also address what to do if you’re bitten by an adder or find unexploded ordnance. Understandably, there is a compulsory training weekend for managers and minimum Dartmoor training requirements for participants.
The teamwork ethos extends between as well as within teams. Geoff Cooke is forever grateful to Sherborne for feeding his first entrants in camp from their catering tent. It’s a favour he’s able to pay forward to a fellow state school now The Gryphon has bought its own field kitchen, from which parents churn out spag bol, bacon butties and porridge before the starting gun. “Why would you watch six kids eat a boil-in-thebag sitting on the grass if they could eat with us?”
Asking young people what Ten Tors has taught them produces very mature responses, ranging from the practical (“You don’t need a mess tin each”) to the insightful: “Recognise people’s weaknesses,” replies Helena Campbell. “And to try to catch a heavy pack before it bothers someone.
“I live on the South side of Dartmoor and thought I’d know it all,” she adds. “But we trained on the North Moor, which is more wild with no road access. It really has changed how I think about the moor and about distances.”
Most have witnessed how a tired teenage strop can destroy a team – “A leader isn’t a leader if they don’t look after everyone,” says Magnus Jackson – and there can be few who haven’t regretted their decision to take part at some point. But it strikes me that this is the point: as JFK said about visiting the moon, they do it “not because it is easy, but because it is hard”. People describe the ruggedness of high Dartmoor as ‘lunar’ and have struggled, survived and ultimately loved this place for thousands of years, as the stone circles and Bronze Age ruins testify. It’s how you deal with the misery that matters, and the majority leave with a sense of achievement and renewed self-belief. “We’re training the adventurers of tomorrow,” attests Cooke, who’s never prouder than when children ask to borrow kit for their own expeditions afterwards.
Or, as Helena Campbell puts it: “You’re not always meant to like it... but you should definitely do it.”
The 2020 Ten Tors has been cancelled and a future date is yet to be confirmed.
You’re not always meant to like it but you should definitely do it