Dartmoor has always been part of the background to my life.
Although I have been based in Mongolia since 2006, Dartmoor is the landscape I grew up with and the one I continue to return to. Since spending more time in the UK supporting my mum after my dad died during the pandemic, it has once again become part of my everyday life.
My dad is a large part of that connection. He taught me to navigate using a map and compass on Dartmoor. He trained me, and later other teams, for the locally well-known Ten Tors Challenge. He was a member of the Dartmoor Search & Rescue Group. Eventually, he became a Dartmoor walking guide.
He knew the moor in extraordinary detail. He could name tiny flowers such as tormentil and eyebright. His favourite Dartmoor bird was the ring ouzel. He could look across a landscape and tell you what ridge, valley or tor you were looking at. He could navigate at night either in the fog or using the stars.
And it did not matter how many times he saw Dartmoor, or from which direction he approached it. He loved it.
As do I.
I also love maps. Proper paper maps. And being from the UK, I have a particular affection for Ordnance Survey maps and all the detail they contain. Dartmoor is one of my favourite places to explore through a map: the contours, old tracks, rivers, tors, boundary stones, ancient settlements and names that make you wonder about the people who first used them.
There is something satisfying about looking at a map before heading out and then watching those lines and symbols turn into an actual landscape.
Dartmoor covers 368 square miles, but statistics do not really explain how it feels. It is open and exposed. Often windswept. Granite dominates much of the landscape, with more than 160 tors rising above the moor. But between them are wooded valleys, rivers, enclosed farmland and small communities.
I spend most of my time on North Dartmoor, partly because that is the side closest to where I live.
One of the signs that tells me I am nearly home is Cosdon Beacon. There is a well-known group of trees beside the A30, where Devon meets Cornwall, known as the Nearly There Trees — a landmark familiar to generations of people heading west into Cornwall. Cosdon is my own version. When its rounded shape appears as I approach Okehampton, something in me relaxes. I know where I am.
One of the things I like most about Dartmoor is that the landscape is never just scenery. You can walk across what feels like an empty stretch of moor and suddenly come across a stone row, a hut circle, a boundary marker or the remains of a settlement.
Dartmoor has an extraordinary concentration of archaeological sites, with thousands of prehistoric hut circles, Bronze Age field systems and ancient monuments scattered across the landscape.
Coming across them changes the way I look at the moor. It is easy to describe Dartmoor as wild or timeless, but people have been living, farming and moving through these landscapes for thousands of years. I often find myself standing beside some small piece of stonework trying to imagine who put it there and what their daily life looked like.
That human story continues. Dartmoor is still a working landscape, surrounded by small communities whose lives are shaped by their proximity to the moor.
Farming has influenced these landscapes for thousands of years and continues to do so today. East Okement Farm, close to where I live, is the highest working farm on Dartmoor and sits on one of my favourite local walks. It is also where we took our dog for sheep training.
For five or six weeks we returned there for a few hours a week. Over those few weeks we had almost everything Dartmoor could throw at us: beautiful autumn sunshine, thick mist where you could barely see your own feet, heavy rain, and times when the hedges and grasses were covered in gossamer threads beaded with water.
But my affection for Dartmoor is not only about the open moor itself. I love Dartmoor pubs. Not necessarily the ones that have successfully reinvented themselves as excellent places to eat — although many have, and I completely understand the need for diversification.
I mean the ones where a packet of crisps still counts as a meal. Where the wallpaper looks as though it might not have been updated for a few years and nobody expects you to order anything more elaborate than a pint. They still exist and I love them whatever the season or weather.
A wet winter afternoon when you arrive with damp trousers and cold hands. A summer evening when the doors are open and people spill outside. Or simply somewhere to sit after a long walk when taking your boots off feels like it might be the greatest luxury imaginable. There is something reassuring about places that have not felt the need to become too polished.
And then there are Dartmoor’s rivers. I hesitate to call what I do wild swimming because that makes it sound far more organised or exciting than it usually is. It is more often an unexpected cold dip.
You find yourself beside a river on a warm day and decide to get in. There has been no planning. You have no towel. Certainly no dry robe. Just a slightly ridiculous few minutes of taking clothes off behind a rock before stepping into water cold enough to produce either a scream or an enthusiastic embrace of the whole thing. The dog watches in consternation, clearly questioning your judgement. And getting dressed afterwards takes an age because your feet have acquired half the riverbank, everything is slightly damp and pulling your trousers back on while balancing on one leg turns out to be considerably harder than it should be. It is rarely elegant, but I love it.
Unpredictability is part of Dartmoor too. It has a reputation for weather, and fairly so. Its altitude and exposure mean you often seem to get more of it. Clear skies can disappear. Mist can roll in. A sunny morning can become a wet afternoon surprisingly quickly.
And yet winter is probably my favourite time of year on the moor. It can be empty, bleak and desolate. But I find that invigorating rather than depressing. There is something about being out when the landscape feels stripped back. Fewer people. Fewer distractions. Just wind, granite, sky and the need to pay attention to where you are.
South Dartmoor still tests my navigation more than I would like to admit. It’s wide, open landscapes often demanding more map-reading confidence than I feel I can give them. But perhaps that is another reason I like Dartmoor. It does not always make things easy.
And despite being close to towns, roads and cities, parts of it can still feel remarkably remote. That contrast is one of the things I value most.
Dartmoor is not untouched wilderness. It is a working, lived-in landscape. There are farms, villages, artists, businesses and communities dealing with very modern pressures. But it can still feel wild. It can still feel ancient. And, even after a lifetime of knowing it, it can still make me stop and look.
