Circular

Last week I walked a route suggested by Deborah Martin in Trail mag - a circular route on North Dartmoor taking in Cosdon Beacon, Hound Tor, Wild Tor and Watern Tor.

The walk also took in two stone circles - White Moor and Scorhill - and passed the beautiful swimming hole at Shilley Pool.  I'll be back there for a wild camp later in the season.

Some sections needed a bit of navigational improvisation, linking up the unmapped paths that you find all over the moor, and which usually take you where you want to go ... except for when they just disappear into a bog.

I took what looked like a shortcut from Watern Tor, hand-railing the North Teign River along to Scorhill Down, that was mostly dry, although the few sections of bog-hopping probably made it slower than the higher and longer traverse in Deborah's instructions.

I love the expansive mystery of Dartmoor - its brutal emptiness makes distances illusory, and bad weather can change everything so quickly.  The modern world is distant.  Over ten miles I saw two humans from afar, a few ponies and some sheep.

Dartmoor does stone circles like nowhere else.  What happened to the Bronze Age people who lived here and dotted the moor with settlements and monuments?  One theory is environmental collapse:  once the forests were all felled, the hunting was over and the acidic peat soil was over-grazed and over-cropped.  Sounds depressingly plausible.

Whatever their original function, Dartmoor's stone rows and circles strike me as perfect art works in the landscape:  purposeful, social, universal, unfathomable.  Time has blurred its meaning, but the poetry endures.

   

Linear

The 'Illuminating Hadrian's Wall' event this weekend succeeded in creating a sense of occasion to mark 1600 years since the end of Roman Britain.  www.illuminatinghadrianswall.com   Quite an achievement really, as no-one I know remembers celebrating it before this weekend.   And how thoughtful of the Romans to time their departure so as to coincide with British Tourism Week!

The wall and its remains sketch a line from coast to coast, transformed by gas torches into a piece of giant dot-to-dot land art for about an hour on Saturday night.  The best site-specific art directs your attention to what is already there, and this was no exception.  The wall follows a natural, defendable ridge line for most of its route - a fantastic landscape feature to use as a starting point for outdoor art.

Famously built to keep the Scots out of England, the wall is now more of a connector than a barrier, attracting visitors from both nations and beyond.  The event linked the English North West with the North East, drawing audiences from both.  Carlisle and Newcastle are only 60-odd miles apart, but the intervening hills have created cultural distinctiveness to die for - you could hear both accents among the crowd.

The best part of the event was seeing so many people out on the ridge together, enjoying the landscape and the change from day to night.   Sadly, the visual spectacle of the illumination was for me rather eclipsed by modern light pollution:  traffic on the A69 created a far more solid and striking line of light than that along the wall. 

The next day, I paused in the Lake District for a quick hop up Blencathra.  The route from the valley bottom up Hall's Fell Ridge is a classic, with a rocky narrow finish bringing sudden and revelatory views when you emerge right at the mountain's summit.

 

Here is a ridge that is a buffer between sky and land; a ridge that takes you on a linear journey into another world of extreme beauty.  Ridges don't just connect places - sometimes they can transcend that and connect the individual to the universal.  Art doesn't have the monopoly on that.