Hill to Tor - Coming into the View

Yesterday was a day to collect wood, and the forest was misty with a dusting of snow, but none on the paths. The Belvedere looked much bigger, magnified by the mist, and the woods below were just lacy smudges, lines against the sky and the hill. The Challenge trail was dark and dripping, and at the top the tors of Dartmoor were barely visible.

Today however, I was at those tors, and the walk to Haytor Rock parallel to the road (from the Widecombe to Bovey Tracey direction) was brooding with snow on one side, and thick mist shifting and changing the landscape extraordinarily from each level and bend in the road. The way up one tor had it all - ice, snow, mud, sleet and fog! Although not too much of any of them, but the fog turned me back as it seemed pointless to trudge through the sludge for no view. Turning instead toward Hay Tor, where the panoramas opened up and closed in with amazing frequency and sudden splendour or menace.
One vista was darkness and snowy slopes reaching up to where fog obscured the top (from where we'd just come). Below us the land fell away toward a sea of mist that gave way to farther views where the sunlight had been on the way to Widecombe, but was no longer. Then up ahead, dark greys alternating with luminous white or strange ragged lights at the base of the sky. The sleet turned to rain and then eased, the wind was at our backs and the mists were all the product of the swiftly melting snows and ice.
As we walked, the landscape dripping and running with thaw water, the afternoon darkened - was it getting late already, being January? No, it was the mist and the fog, black clouds above. Hound Tor was visible, sudden views of the vale, then closing in and covered soon after. When we got to the bottom of Hay Tor, the cloud base was like a great shadow which seemed to be eating up the world. Ahead, the rocks of the Tor itself loomed like intense black gates, forbidding and of incredible sharpness against all the greys and mists and gloom. Walking up the Tor, tiny pieces of ice were scattered about like confetti made of crystals, and at the top, the silhouette of my fellow walker was unreal in its dramatic effect standing black against the darkness with the black rocks to the right. As I gained the flat summit, to my amazement, everything changed, as the vale below on the other side, previously unseen, all came into view with spectacular transformation - the sun must have been shining far to the left on the snaking road which glittered like a silver thread, and ahead in the vale there was colour in the landscape, all greens and blues instead of the white and black through which we'd walked, and the sky above that particular vale was brightness and white, with hints of blue, it was like a vignette of Heaven, with just to the right, the darkness so intense and so set off by the rocks as a frame, that it undoubtedly looked like Hell. John Martin's paintings were the only metaphor I could use to describe the mind-blowing contrasts of the panorama all around - 'The Great Day of His Wrath' on one side or 'Judgement Day' on the other? It took one's breath away, and I was truly grateful to have caught such special effects of weather and Moor, on a day when one might have thought that with all the fog and mist, that one would hardly see much at all. As I turned back (having run out of time), the afternoon thinking of turning into evening, the way looking back toward Exeter and the Sea, was storm-black, punctuated by lights that only acted to accentuate the theatre of sheer menace that such a light and such a cloudscape spoke of. In a sinister failing light against that terrifying backdrop, I made my way back to the van lost in wonder. Every special effect we have is drawn from an idea first given in nature, and every horror film, every black and white photograph, every dried ice scene, every supernatural theatre production, perhaps Tolkien's Mordor all owed their origins ultimately to days such as this.
It was beyond description or compare, and I am well aware that to make the attempt is to fall short and indeed to run out of words to paint the picture. But in homage to it, I had to try. What a way to start the New Year, marvelling at the marvellous, half out of one's senses and lost in the theatre effects of the world-stage. All hail to Dartmoor.
Forgive the purple prose, I have just received a copy of Ann Radcliffe's 'Mysteries of Udolpho' for Christmas, and the novel is more poetry than prose. I had read it before, but she was a writer who helped to define the Romantic movement in terms of uniting and codifying the picturesque by writing novels as travel writing combined with classic paintings imagery in the very late 1700's. Suffice to say, it was then, a completely Radcliffian afternoon.

The Thaw

Having been up to Dartmoor the day before, it meant that one knew that the ice and snow must have melted at last. As last year, Telegraph Hill had been closed, the road that leads to the Haldon Hills from the east.

Up on Dartmoor, the landscape had been monochrome, and the roads turning to streams with borders of slush, as the suddenness of 7 degrees hit the frozen tors and moor. Around Widecombe there had been a shifting mist, sometimes turning to fog as huge amounts of melt water evaporated into the air. Stopping at Haytor Rock, on the way it been snowy, on the way back, huge patches of green showed new streams everywhere. The sheer amount of water meant that surely it would be sinking mud? No, the ground was hard, as if still frozen solid. Walking up the hill merely meant avoiding the many streams. At the top, as there was everywhere, a swathe of snow remained. It was untouched in many places, truly deep and crisp! and with a backdrop of the stone cliff. It was definitely snowball time! The crystal pure snow making wonderful instant compacted shapes. The fog lifted and drifted, darkening, and incredibly, within half an hour, the ground that had been firm turned to the mush that one had thought that much water should do. Boots splashed at every seemingly green patch of ground, and began to sink, where before they had not.

Up on Haldon ridge, it had melted almost entirely. The heaps of dirty snow were just where it had been piled to clear the roads. The paths were muddy, naturally, the adventure trail more of a stream, but the light was like a photographic studio. At a heady 10 degrees celsius, the Forest felt positively balmy in comparison to the previous wintry conditions, and many of the trees were livid green with mosses. Single dew drops hung from delicate branches in the thaw, and some of the barks of the thinner trees and saplings felt so mouldy and damp that they would imprint to the touch. They were shedding bark from the frosts, renewing themselves, perhaps?

Many of the most picturesque twists of roots and apoplectically writhen stumps were backlit with a soft dark light, their viridian greens sharply contrasting the with dark greys and browns and rusts of the January forest hollows. On the ridge, so much water vapour came off the pines that they looked as if they were smoking with a chill damp fire. The mist after thaw again.

On the path off the ridge that joins with the bridle path again, past the part where broken tiles (many tales of those!) lie recalling that lost folly landscape (that I have a fantasy was there), was a tiny palisade fence made of thin logs to the right. I went over to it - and it marked the top of a steep dip. Below in a beautiful shallow bowl of the forest, was an exquisite electric green tree, short, with its bare arms open in the shape of a many-fingered hand. There it was, the centre of a small fort, the ramparts defended with logs, the drawbridge the little palisade. A new feature - one of the amazing things about the Haldon Hills is not that they change so dramatically with light and shade, season, weather, time of day, but that there is always some new feature to be seen, whether by nature, an arts project connected to the Gallery, CCANW, or the Forestry Commission or - well, who knows? On one tree on the same path, there's a piece of bark hung up - which looks, whether by chance or design, exactly like a mask.

And then the day darkened - the cloud had come over the hill at last, and it began to spit a light rain. Back just in time before the heavier rains began...