WALK A GHOST TRAIL

Dartmoor, South-West England

Dartmoor is an eerie place. Perhaps it’s the bleak openness of the elevated moorland interrupted by craggy tors of granite. Perhaps it’s the cloak of prehistory that lays across it; stone circles, cairns, burial cists and other ancient constructions scatter the map. Or maybe it’s the wealth of myths, legends and ghostly tales that have their origins on the moor.

The most famous is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. While a work of fiction, it is said to have been based on the tale of a pack of hounds that ran howling across Dartmoor following the death of an evil squire. More deathly hounds, these belonging to the Beelzebub himself, are said to drive travellers to their deaths off the top of the Dewerstone, a 100m high granite outcrop. The ghost of Lady Howard is also said to travel the moor in the form of a black dog, running alongside a coach made from the bones of her dead husbands.

Canine spectres aside, there are plenty more ghostly goings on, from haunting Roman legionnaires and Tudor hunting parties to an evil sprite who accosts drunks, and disembodied hands that grab the wheel to force drivers off the road. Some are focused on physical parts of the moor, such as the Coffin Stone, the coffin of an evil man that was split apart by the wrath of God. Or Crazywell Pool, which shows the next parishioner to die if looked into on Midsummer’s Eve. Or rock outcrops transformed from the bread and cheese offered by a cloven-hoofed stranger to a wary bishop and his servant. Wherever you go on Dartmoor you’ll be walking in a landscape of legend, and quite possibly not on your own…