I get up this morning prepared to give Torquay a second chance. Agatha Christie loved this place, I love Agatha Christie, ergo I want to love it too. I go down to breakfast with a spring in my step. And am immediately accosted by what can only be described as Manuel from Fawlty Towers. The table he widely gestured me to is not set. I must move. Move immediately. He sighs at my incompetence and firmly escorts me to a different table. This one is by the window, where someone has spilled tea down the wall. It has a delightful view of where a packet of chips has been thrown at the window. However, there is a toast machine. I get carried away by the excitement of this, put my bread through too many times, and end up with charcoal. Luckily, everything is edible when smothered in marmalade.
Torquay is no less dispiriting in the daylight. I wander across the front to the harbour and pavilion. With its green, domed roof, palm trees, and neo-classical architecture, the pavilion was probably once very pretty. Now, it is propped up with scaffolding at one end and has several boarded up windows. The harbour is quiet, with dozens of boats moored up and a pile of wooden fishing baskets stacked behind a gate. I feel pretty satisfied that I’ve seen everything there is to see, or everything I care to see, in Torquay.
After visiting my office in Plymouth, I continue on to Dartmoor – where I hope to see wild ponies. I have fond memories of Dartmoor. My granddad took us once as children, on a family holiday, and I was struck by the prettiness of the hills and the purple heather. We were lucky enough to see ponies that time and, much to my delight, one kicked my sister. And, despite it being unlikely I will see that miracle again, Dartmoor does not disappoint.
As I wind my way up from Plymouth, the roads narrow and hedges draw in around the car. Crooked black and white signs direct first to towns and then, after a while, to the barest hamlets. I pass the rather spectacular, gothic tower of Buckfast Abbey – some little cherub has had a go at the sign a few miles back, so it now says “Fuckfast 3 1/2 miles”, and this pleases me a very great deal. Then, I am back to twisty, winding lanes. At a crossroads, a thatched cottage with wisteria covered walls stands on the other side of a bridge over a silvery, trickling stream. A pair of green Wellington boots sits beside the front door. Sheep aimlessly crop the grass in fields on every side. And, at long last, I clatter over a cattle grid and find myself quite suddenly on the moors.
The moors rise and fall in gentle, brown and green, heathery undulations. The toppled ruins of old buildings tumble picturesquely on the tops. It is all windswept plains, wide and open to the sky. I stop at a bridge where flat, grey stepping stones cross a wide river and, quite by accident, come across an interesting looking track. It leads up the hill, through the heather, and along the road a ways, before turning out again onto expansive, brown moors.
I drag and scramble my way up a set of giant steps cut into the hillside, through a gate, and up, up, through dust and ochre-coloured heather. It is so quiet. No sounds besides the scratching of the grass in the wind, the crunch of stone under my boots, and the occasional shriek of a bird. Along the top, down and up, and at length I find myself on a road across the moors. On this road, I pass the old prison (now a museum); a grim, stone complex, it is rendered somewhat spooky by the low, white mist which begins to roll in around my ankles. I continue some way, looking for the parking place where I’ll catch my lift. And it is on this route that, as I turn a corner, I finally find my ponies. A herd of stocky, chestnut females cropping grass. They pay me, and my photo taking, no mind whatsoever.
I reach my destination just as the sun starts to set, painting the sky in streaks of orange over the distant hills. In this otherworldly, ancient landscape it is all too easy to imagine the scampering feet of piskies or the hand of a ghost on one’s shoulder. After all, this is the place where Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles roamed. Which sparked the imagination of the poet, Ted Hughes. And, in the mist, in the gloaming, with a stone circle at your back, it is not hard to see why.
