Helena

Alison

Midsomer Norton, UK

Complete your 110-mile trek, discover the magic of ancient woods, and celebrate a journey of sisterhood.

English

It's day 10, the final day of the walk around the circumference of Dartmoor National Park. Today, Liz encounters the stark contrast between the scars left by quarrying on the moors and the lush beauty of an untouched woodland. She feels a mix of sadness at seeing the impact of human activity and joy in witnessing nature’s resilience and ability to thrive.

Letters From The Moors - A Sister's Journey 10

Hello and welcome to the Dartmoor Way with me, Liz Scott. I hope you enjoy my 110 mile journey around the outskirts of Dartmoor National Park in Devon in the UK. In August 2023, I completed this walk with my sister, and following it, I wrote a series of 10 letters to her, sharing my memories and experiences. This is day 10, and today we walked 12 miles between Shore Bridge and Ivy Bridge. Dear Sister, Well, this was our final day, and we were back together, just the two of us, returning to home territory and starting to say farewell to our special pilgrimage. For me, this 10 day trek had been a walk of rainforests, and we certainly packed in even more rainforests into this, our final day, a special highlight being Dendel's Wood. But let's go back to the beginning of the day. It started with some steep steps up from the car park at Shore Bridge to Cadover Bridge. It was a muddy and rocky and steep path. The worn, damp track was ribbed with tree roots and punctuated with broken clay pipes, spiking out. These long, round clay pipes were ghosts from a previous era, a Victorian era, when the clay from the quarries was mixed in water and drawn off the moors through these pipes. The evidence of man marking the landscape, taking, excavating, and destroying nature was going to feature today. As I walked along these paths with cracked and broken pipes, I sighed with sadness at the mess that litters our world, all in the name of progress. At Cadover Bridge, the damp grayness lay low in the skies. The car park was nearly empty, and we found ourselves pretty much alone at this often crammed beauty spot. I think the weather was keeping everybody away. We crossed over the road and followed a track that neither of us had walked on before. This tarmac track was easy to walk on. You continued to bob down and pick up stray sweet wrappers, placing them methodically in your litter bag. Your aim was to pick up three pieces of litter a day, and you'd done it religiously, every day of the walk. I loved the way you did this. It was the tiniest and minutest of efforts to stem the tide of man's impact on the world, and yet it was something, there was a glimmer within me that saw its significance. This might seem like a drop in the ocean, but a drop, multiplied many billions of times, is the ocean. As the tarmac track came to an end, we found ourselves beside a granite cross, an ancient waymarker on the route to Plimpton Priory. Blackerton Cross at one time would have been an important landmark, but now it is nigh on forgotten and it is lost in a land of clay works, which are deep, wretched white scars torn into the earth. My heart felt cold as I saw them. Here, the carcass of Dartmoor had been ripped open and left barren, bleak and white. Many of these quarries had been flooded and these lakes were closed in with metal fences. There were danger signs posted around, and straight leets, rather than rolling babbling brooks, were slashed into the ground to bleed the water away. I saw all of this with a sense of sadness. What were we doing to our world? You had a more positive eye, and you pointed out nature reclaiming the whiteness of the clay works, trying to re-establish itself again. It was good to be reminded that nature never gives up. The boundary of Dartmoor National Park ran alongside these clay monstrosities. The quarry pits are just outside the National Park. If I turned my back to them, I saw the moorland and the tors reaching up to the sky. If I turned towards them, my heart went stony with coldness. We kept on walking until we were away from the pits, and once again surrounded by moorland and a sea of gorse blossom creating a haze of yellow. As our eyes looked eastward, we spied Hangar Down and Western Beacon. I flickered with recognition at these landmarks from home. We were walking home. We were nearly there. What must it have been like for pilgrims in years gone by to return to familiar territory, having been gone for weeks at a time? We dropped off the moor and onto a stony track that was going to lead us towards the River Urn and home. I didn't want the day to end. I wanted to continue walking. Was it you or was it me that suggested we visit Dendel's Wood? It was going to mean a two-hour detour, but we were both keen to explore and eagerly agreed to go off the path. We found our way down a steep plain and then up an old track and along until we reached the edge of the wood. I felt like a little bit of a naughty child going off task. Dendel's Wood wasn't part of our timetable. We should be knocking off the final miles of our walk, not adding to them, but we didn't care. We were back to trusting our intuition. When we got to the wood, it felt completely and utterly magical. A rich, loamy green smell of damp deliciousness and the dripping of mosses, lichens and fungi. Tree branches lay rotting across the floor of the woodland, streams cascaded down in waterfalls. This was like a scene out of Tolkien, a moment of pure joy. The sense of supernatural oozed If I squinted my eyes and softened my focus, maybe I could see and feel the others that live and inhabit around, others that we rarely see, but those that are ever-present. I savored this experience totally. It was the absolute pinnacle of the walk. All the trees I had seen and touched and talked to, the sacredness of these woods, the sacredness of the woods I had passed through, all of it seemed encapsulated in this soft, verdant space of holiness. I was not sad to leave this place, because I knew without doubt that I would return. It seemed both a secretive spot, but also a place to be celebrated. What a joy. We got back onto the trail and followed it over Wisdom Bridge and then up towards Hertford, turning off near Hall Farm to pick up the path to the River Urne. You know this place so well. You have traveled it often. You were leading the way back home. In a meadow tall with yellow grasses, we stopped transfixed as we watched a swallow scoop and swoop across the field. It felt as though it was performing just for us. We watched it, trying to photograph its acrobatics. It was totally absorbed in the hunt. In its world, we didn't exist. For us, this swallow was a blur of focused energy, glinting in the sun. When at last we reached the River Urne, I felt the bubble of excitement that our journey was nearing completion, and my heart was totally full of gratitude of a trip that had exceeded expectations. We followed the river down and then at last wound our way under the viaduct and onto Station Road in Ivy Bridge. At the end, we were met with your middle son, his girlfriend, and my husband, and a bottle of champagne to celebrate. The two sisters had done it. We had walked the entire circuit of Dartmoor. I knew that we would walk again. This was not going to be the end of our pilgrimages. It was just the beginning. What a joy to do this walk with you.