Last week, I finished my Dartmoor blog back at the car at Haytor, after a 10.13km round walk taking in Smallacombe Rocks, Becka Brook, Greator, Hound Tor and Saddle Tor, which is where I should have started.
So let’s go back to the campsite.
I mentioned that it was steep and it was basic. It had amazing views and I very reluctantly admitted that yes, it had been a pig to find but… yeah, those views. It also had a takeaway down in the old stables, where you could go and pick up a bacon sandwich for breakfast or a pizza in the evening, and an honesty shop in the next stall. I’d had a short walk around the village on Friday night and decided that a fridge-fresh can of 7Up wasn’t what I’d pictured for the evening but it would go down well on a hot evening. It went down even better on Saturday, fresh from my moorland hike.
I did very little when I got back. I had a lunch to finish off and I had an entire flask of hot chocolate. The Mountain Leaders I usually walk with always take a flask of tea or coffee and we make at least one stop in the morning just to sit for five or ten minutes and have a drink. So I’ve kind of got into the habit of making some hot chocolate, even though I probably wouldn’t drink it if left to my own devices. Well, I didn’t drink it. It was windy and the cold wind bit at my ears but it was a pretty warm weekend and I had no desperate need to sit and warm up with a hot drink.
The thing about the hot chocolate was that I’d bought a tube of 70% Madagascan flakes from my favourite small local chocolatier. I’d been excited about trying it. I’d made a mug – and a branded mug at that! – on Friday night and discovered to my sudden and unexpected disappointment that it was bitter as hell. If I’d thought about it, I’d have assumed that making it with milk would balance out the fact that it’s not milk chocolate flakes and sweeten it. Nope. I do sometimes add sugar to hot chocolate but in this case, I needed to in order to make it drinkable. I admit, that had been in the back of my mind every time I’d heard the flask slosh as I walked. With sugar, it’s fine. But I won’t be buying another tube.
(But while I’m here, I’m going to sing the praises of the flask. It’s the Lifeventure Thermal Mug (in Matt Red, if you really want to know) and I’m on my third. The seal went on the first (shiny silver) and I don’t know what was wrong with the second (matt black) to make me buy a third, given that I do occasionally still use the second. It may be relevant that I have a padded insulated jacket for it but I’ve always found it keeps drinks hot for a really long time. I made Saturday’s hot chocolate at about 9am and it was getting on for 4pm by the time I finally opened it up and tried it and it was still hot. Not burn-a-hole-in-your-tongue hot, but plenty warm enough.)
I spent most of the afternoon finishing off my lunch and hot chocolate and reading a book. It’s The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (affiliate link!) and I loved it the first time I read it. I tried to re-read it during lockdown but my brain will only accept 80-year-old Girls Own fiction at the moment so I gave in. In a tent, sitting on the side of a hill, finishing a cheese roll and hot chocolate, my brain clicked into place and I tore through it in under 24 hours. And although I’d come to Dartmoor to hike, it was also the first time I’d been away from home since March. I was on holiday. I’ve never been a read-by-the-pool type – I’d be in the pool – but this was my summer 2020 on holiday reading by the pool moment.
Campers like campfires but farmers don’t necessarily like scorched patches on their fields or, indeed, the entire hillside going up in flames. As a compromise, therefore, the campsite provided little metal firepit buckets and there was wood for sale in the honesty shop. The inevitable result was sitting outside my tent draped in my sleeping bag at 9pm watching the little red-orange beacons light up around the field. I’m not a confident fire-lighter so I didn’t have one myself but it was very pleasant to sit there and watch – and smell – other people’s campfires before retreating to my steeply-sloping tent. At one point, I popped up to the teashed for water and watched a dog watching sausages cook on one of the campfire.
On Sunday morning I was up earlier than I’d really intended. A breakfast of cereal and chocolate spread (separately; and not much chocolate spread! I don’t like it on bread and so when I’m camping I’ll occasionally sit with a spoon and just nibble a bit) and orange juice was eaten in the tent’s porch while half-watching the blinding low morning sun rise over the spectacular view and then I had to pack up. I’m not a light packer and especially not when camping. I’d packed my bedding in an Ikea trunk (you know, the zip-up version of the Big Blue Bag) and I had my general stuff in a backpack. And then I had five bags devoted to eating. I had two bags of food because you might as well not be hungry when you’re spending the entire weekend outside. I had my plate bag, containing all my eating utensils. I had my washing-up bag, because it’s the most convenient way to wash my eating utensils when campsites provide a sink and nothing else. And I’d made a third drawstring bag, which contained my kitchen stuff – the plastic box of matches, salt & anything else that needed to be kept dry, my pots & pans, my grater, my stove & gas etc. It’s a lot to pack and unpack but it’s actually a really good way of organising everything. It didn’t take long to pop everything into the relevant bag and throw it in the back of the car. I skipped the hot chocolate today and went off for Haytor again.
I planned to walk some of the tors that had been near but not on my route yesterday, following approximately the route given in my guidebook of Bonehill Rocks, Bell Tor, Chinkwell Tor and Honeybag Tor, which had all appeared pretty close to Hound Tor. I’d noted several small car parking spots as I’d been walking and it turned out astonishingly different to find them when I was in the car. The spot I eventually settled on wasn’t on the map but it seemed a handy place.
Now, let’s be honest. I had no idea where I’d parked. I thought I’d parked just north of Bonehill Rocks and thought that the tor behind my car looked surprisingly big and far away compared to what I could see on the map. I had no idea whether the rocky outcrop I’d stood on was Bell Tor or just a lower outcrop of Chinkwell Tor. I had to come home and plug in my GPS to see where I’d actually been before I discovered what I’d done.
So, actually I’d parked at the foot of Top Tor, an entire road junction further south than I’d realised. I walked across a sloping but otherwise smooth and easy bit of moorland to Bonehill Rocks, which I’d taken for Bell Tor. I should have realised something was amiss when I passed a road and a car park below “Bell Tor” which weren’t on the map but I didn’t. So the rocky outcrop was the real Bell Tor and then the minor mountain above it turned out to be Chinkwell Tor in its entirety. I’d figured out that the top, at least, was Chinkwell and I knew the one beyond was Honeybag and I really should have climbed it but my legs weren’t cooperating. When I walk uphill, my calves tighten very painfully until there’s no elasticity and then I cry in pain. I’d wound them up nicely on Saturday and now I was doing it all over again in my attempt to climb Chinkwell. To get to the top of Honeybag, I’d have to go downhill some forty metres and then climb up thirty again, not to mention doing it in reverse to ho back, and I knew my legs wouldn’t take it. To skip ahead a bit, it took four days of gentle daily walks at home that I’d barely recognised as slopes before my calves finally let up and I could even walk around the rec without stopping to groan and gasp and wail out loud at the pain.
At Bell Tor, there was a very easy way to climb up on top of the rocks. I’ve never done that before. I’ve seen people standing dramatically on assorted tors but it’s a bit more climby and scrambly than I’m willing to bother with usually, so this was a fun novelty. It had been windy yesterday and it had started off windy today but standing up there, I was convinced that I was about to be carried off to the land of Oz. I hastened down, badly, because hopping down rocks when the lower halves of your legs don’t work properly is fun.
On my way up Chinkwell Tor, I encountered the highlight of the weekend: a twelve-week-old black & white spaniel puppy by the name of Maisie, extremely excited by her first day out on the moor, sniffing everything and everyone. “She’ll want to say hello to you,” her owners said. “If you don’t mind?” Absolutely not! The moment that little speckled nose came into view, I wanted to scoop it up and cuddle it and I was delighted to spend a moment playing with the soft puppy trying to climb up my leg in her desperation for some attention from the stranger. I’d seen a few dogs – some people had posed three of them nicely on the rocks below Bonehill before scampering up Bell Tor and I’d seen another couple coming down but this was the first one that had made a beeline directly for me.
Up at the top of the tor there was a broad flat plateau, a small outcrop and a big cairn. And horses. There’s always livestock roaming freely on Dartmoor and I’m well acquainted with fluffy cows on top of Haytor but I’ve never seen horses on top of a tor. They looked at me with curious disinterest as I balanced my camera on a rock, set the timer, hoped it would stand up to violent gusts of wind and then tried to take selfies with the cairn. I know better than to try to touch them but as I made my way back, I held out my hand and talked to them; mostly reassuring them that I was coming by but I wasn’t going to hurt them and they needn’t be startled, especially to the one busily eating with its back hooves in the path. You don’t want to startle the wrong end of a horse and get kicked.
That would do for the day. I still had a long drive home and my legs were in no condition to do much more in the way of hills. I looked back across the row of tors to my car in the distance. I say “distance”. I’d walked more or less a straight line from one tor to the next and now I measure it on the map, I was a little over a single kilometre from my car. I’m always lazier on the second day than the first. And although it was gentle, the fact was that my car was uphill from Bonehill on the return journey.
I pause at Bonehill to eat some of my lunch. It was far too early for it and I wasn’t really hungry but I thought maybe some food would give my legs a bit of encouragement for the return journey. The wind dropped on the way back – it had been freezing but now the air was still, I could feel the sun. It was hardly worth sitting down to take off and pack away my fleece – when I stood up from the rock I used as a shelf, I realised my car was less than two hundred metres away.
Because of the impending long drive, I sat in the car and cooled down and ate my lunch before setting off. I’d done enough to cover my daily 2km walk but I’d done nowhere near a logbook walk. That had never bothered me before but now I had nine and nine is basically halfway to twenty, which is how many I need for my level 2 qualification. I’d never wanted to do it before but now, with half the logbook walks done, I was having a change of heart. I think I’d like to have that badge and that casual “Yeah, I’m a qualified open country walking leader”. So expect eleven more walks on this blog and then a story about my assessment weekend, which won’t be until at least September 2022.