Walking the Moors

This is a post that originally appeared on my old website in August 2014. It's one of the posts that was too large or complicated to be migrated to my new blog platform in 2018, and I'm steadily (well, erratically) migrating those old posts manually so that they'll be on the blog going forward. I've edited it down to fit the new platform.

For two years Megan and I have been planning a vacation around walking the moors, and like any long-anticipated vacation it seemed forever in coming, and then it was over in an instant.

London - August 4/5

Bovey Tracey - August 6

This day was about getting in position to start the trek: a train ride from London to Exeter, then a taxi to the Riverside Inn in the village of Bovey Tracey.

Sunset at Haytor

The iconic image of Dartmoor National Park is a tor – an outcropping of granite boulders at the top of a hill – and the best-known of all of Dartmoor’s 100+ tors is Haytor. We had planned to start our hiking at Haytor the following day, but conditions seemed ripe for a good sunset so we took a taxi out to Haytor just before sunset and then walked the 4 miles back to town after dark. This spontaneous decision proved to be a good one, as that evening turned out to be the only colorful sunset of our entire trip.

Buckfastleigh - August 7

Buckfast is a small village on the River Dart, and home to Buckfast Abbey, which will celebrate its 1000 year anniversary in 2018. It’s a picturesque setting, and the Abbey Inn where we stayed has great places to sit outdoors along the river. We somehow managed to score the only room with bay windows overlooking the river, a nice touch.

Buckfastleigh is known in Scotland as the home of buckfast tonic wine, the preferred drink of young soccer hooligans. I wanted to try some, but a local bartender explained to me that it's not actually available in Buckfastleigh any longer, and is now brewed and distributed by a company in Northern Ireland.

Ivybridge - August 8

The walk through Buckfastleigh was nice, but after that it was going to be several miles walking along a busy road, so we decided to catch a taxi to Ivybridge so that we could spend an evening walk up into the countryside on Two Moors Way instead.

Ivybridge and Two Moors Way - August 9

This was planned to be a rest day in Ivybridge, but since we hadn’t put in a full day the day before we decided to put in ten miles along Two Moors Way, including a visit to the high oak woodland of Piles Copse.

Two Moors Way, which runs coast to coast all the way across Devon, is the biggest, smoothest and busiest trail in southern Dartmoor, and we spent the next two days exploring it. It is an easy trail to walk, and for the first eight miles out of Ivybridge it’s a gentle grade wide enough that you could easily drive a car on it. The miles pass almost effortlessly, and it tracks a high ridge so you have far-reaching views most of the time, often in all directions.

Biologists who study Dartmoor believe that it was likely covered with forests long ago, and those trees were likely covered with moss. The sheep, horses and cows that have roamed Dartmoor in recent centuries have made it impossible for such delicate forests to survive, except for three high oak woodlands where the ground is too rugged for grazing animals to get at the trees and moss, and so the ancient forests survive. the ground is typically rugged because it’s covered with large boulders. We visited two of Dartmoor's high oak woodlands on this trip, and found that moving through these forests was as much a matter of climbing as hiking. It was easy to see how this terrain is not conducive to the grazing of large four-legged animals.

On this day we visited Piles Copse, a high oak woodlands located about four miles north of Ivybridge, at the bottom of a steep hill below Two Moors Way. This one isn’t visited very often, and the trail is pretty overgrown, but we happened to meet a local man who was familiar with the route and gave us some tips.

Here's a story of our stay at Sportmans Inn that I didn't include in the original blog post but I'll go ahead and share a decade later, because it was probably the most bizarre moment of the entire trip. We were awakened at 2AM by the sound of a loud and angry woman's voice coming from the sidewalk directly below our window. She was apparently on the phone, and confronting her boyfriend with the fact that she knew he had been cheating on her - with a man. That's not the bizarre part. The bizarre part was that she had planted a webcam in their apartment, and she was just getting off work (perhaps from the bar of our hotel, we weren't sure), and had just viewed video from the evening. "I know he was there this evening, I saw what you two were doing while I was at work. You promised me you weren't into that any more!" Good grief!

Two Moors Way and Abbot's Way - August 10

This day was the centerpiece of our trip, 20 miles of wandering the moors in high winds that were remnants of Hurricane Bertha, with an unexpected great dinner in the village of Scorriton before arriving at our destination, Two Bridges Hotel.

Two Bridges Hotel - August 11

Two Bridges is the smallest town we stayed in, with a population of about 100, and we spent two nights at this luxurious hotel in the heart of Dartmoor, enjoying their food and drink and also taking a hike up to nearby Wistman’s Wood, another high oak woodland.

In the afternoon, we walked a mile north of Two Bridges to the second high oak woodland of our trip: Wistman's Wood. Because of its convenience to Two Bridges and the highway, Wistman's Wood is the most visited of Dartmoor's high oak woodlands, with a well-marked trail.

There are numerous myths and legends associated with the Wistman's Wood woodlands, probably because they have a haunting other-worldly look to them. Many of the myths are associated with darkness and werewolf-like creatures that come out at night. People have reported seeing the ghost of Francis Drake leading a pack of Spectral hellhounds that terrorizes the area. We were on the lookout, but only saw grandparents with grandkids and trekking college students in the area.

I meant to go back after dark, but the cider was flowing too freely back in the pub to allow for further exploration that day.

Chagford - August 12

There were intermittent rain showers the morning we left Two Bridges, and we decided to take a taxi to Sandy Park Inn, and then hiked through pretty Teign Gorge to Fingle Bridge. Megan would have been up for another long trekking day, but my hips (both of which would up being replaced the following year) were grateful for the taxi ride.

Sandy Park Inn was the smallest and oldest inn we visited: just three rooms total, in a building that started out as a traditional 16th century coaching inn. Despite its age, this place had the most reliable wifi and best water pressure of anywhere we stayed on the whole trip. It’s a family-owned and operated business – the daughter cooked our breakfast, her brother hauled in firewood, and the sister-in-law checked us in.

Exeter - August 13

Done with our hiking, we returned to Exeter and took some walks in the area around Exeter Cathedral.

London - August 14