| This article first appeared in British Heritage magazine in the June/July 1998 issue. |
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| 'I am writing a new novel-a real chiller', wrote Arthur Conan Doyle from his hotel room in the Dartmoor village of Princetown. He was referring to what became the most popular of his Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles. |
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BY JIM HARGAN Conan Doyle first heard of Dartmoor's hounds of hell in March 1901, while staying in Norfolk with his friend Fletcher Robinson. On those cold, rainy evenings, Robinson told stories he had learned as a child living on the high moors of DartmoorÑhorrifying stories of a creature known as The Dewer, an amalgam of the Devil and earlier pagan nature gods, who stalked the moors in the company of a huge black dog and chased unfortunate wayfarers over rocky cliffs to their deaths on the rocks below. More frightening yet, he sometimes led a howling pack of gigantic, red-eyed hounds on 'Whist Hunts', emerging from Wistman's WoodÑa collection of gnarled, twisted oaks of incredible ageÑto hunt down the souls of unbaptized babies.
Conan Doyle, captivated by these folk tales and by Robinson's vivid descriptions of life on the moors, chose to write his next novel about this bewitching locale. Within days he checked into a hotel in the most remote corner of Dartmoor, and hiked for miles over the empty moors with Robinson as his guide. Conan Doyle quickly decided that Sherlock Holmes was a fitting protagonist; his cold scientific mind served as the perfect counterpoint to the supernatural terror of the mythic hounds. Yet it was Dartmoor itself that became the novel's true main character.
Doyle set out to portray Dartmoor as he would any other character: with accuracy, feeling, and empathy. When he chose to use Sherlock Holmes as his principal human character, however, he also saddled himself with the down-to-earth, no-nonsense Dr. Watson as narrator. Getting an old army officer like Dr. Watson to write a imaginative portrait of Dartmoor presented a challenge. Conan Doyle cleverly overcame casual, seemingly trivial details. Watson travelled across abandoned quarries, prehistoric ruins, and isolated villages, recounting what he had seen in short snippets of description scattered throughout the text. Together, these observations form a sensitive characterization of the high moors of Dartmoor and the River Dart.
A large pill-shaped tableland in the west of England, Dartmoor spans a 20- by 30- mile tract of untamed Devonshire countryside. Rich valleys surround it with a patchwork of meadows, hedgerows, forests, and villages, forming a peaceful landscape dotted with stone bridges and thatched farmhouses. But above the valleys looms a boggy, granite-topped, moorland plateau covered in grass, brambles, and heather. The sudden contrast between the rich valleys and the empty moorland awed Watson on his first approach to Dartmoor. 'Behind the peaceful and sunlit countryside there rose, dark against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor, broken by the jagged and sinister hills.' Watson might well have preferred the peaceful valleys, but Conan Doyle had other plans for his narrator and he quickly continued on into the lonely moors.
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Watson describes his first drive into Dartmoor with so much detail that visitors can easily follow his route. His train arrives at 'a small wayside station . . . a sweet country spot'Ñcertainly not the Princetown railhead, centred in a moortop village near the infamous Dartmoor prison. The other two railheads, at Mortonhampstead and Ashburton, both fit Watson's description, but his long ride by wagonette into the heart of the moors can only have followed the ancient tin-miners' road at Ashburton.
The medieval route follows the River Dart deep into the heart of the moors. Local miners extracted tin in Dartmoor from at least as early as 1195, and by 1400 the mines had become extremely profitable. To the medieval miners who looked for tin deposits in the soil lining the banks of the River Dart, floods were both a blessing and a curse. Although the flood waters often revealed precious new lodes, they also washed out the road. To protect their main trade route from floods, the tin miners built two large stone bridges with high arches on massive, pointed piers. Holne Bridge and its upstream counterpart, New Bridge, now carry motor traffic. Today, lorries driving up the Dart road inch slowly across bridges built centuries ago.
As Watson and his travelling companions leave 'the fertile country behind and beneath' them, they enter the moors through a landscape of rolling grassy hills, broken by strange granite spires known as tors. While Dartmoor's granite normally does not erode or dissolve readily, local variations in mineral content can lead to weaknesses, especially when the minerals are exposed to the acidic water of bogs. These local weaknesses can cause the granite to become crumbly in spots while remaining strong in other places. Over time, this process has carved Dartmoor's famous granite towers, spires, and cliffs.
The tin miners' road ends in the midst of the moors, where it meets the old stagecoach road between Exeter and Plymouth. It may seem odd that the Exeter-Plymouth stagecoach trade preferred the hostile, empty moors to the rich valleys below, but they had an excellent reason to choose this route: mud. Watson observes that the roads in the rich valleys were 'deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, [with] high banks on either side.' Those high banks could easily trap a coach in a mudhole. On the high open moors, however, coaches could go around the mud. In the 18th century a string of inns along this road helped the remote Dartmoor natives supplement their returns from tin-mining and sheep-farming. Today, the old coach road remains the main highway through Dartmoor and many of its inns still serve travellers.
Watson's journey up the Dart brought him to an isolated island of rich fields along the upper East Dart River. This area's unique landscape was created by a group of 18th-century local gentry known as 'The Improvers', who believed that Dartmoor's rocky tors and boggy moors could be turned into productive farmland. During the late 1700s they put their belief to the test by 'improving' several moorland areas in the headwaters of the River Dart. The improvements did not turn a profit and never spread beyond their original core, leaving the rest of Dartmoor wild and uninhabited. But the improved River Dart moorlands remain as rich fields in the midst of the moors, little changed over the last two centuries.
This oasis of civilization, sparsely inhabited and isolated by wilderness, serves as the basis for the fictitious village of Grimpen, described by Watson as he travels from Baskerville Hall. The village lies just to the north of Baskerville Hall, and the dangerous Great Grimpen Mire lies just north of Grimpen. The village is unremarkable; 'a small grey hamlet', whose only two large buildings are the doctor's house and the inn, and whose postmaster doubles as the grocer.
The real Dartmoor has few moortop villages, as most of the moormen live in widely scattered farmsteads. One moortop village, however, matches Grimpen closely. Like its fictional counterpart, Postbridge lies on the moortop by the coach road, surrounded by a small island of improved fields. Postbridge's inn, built in 1789, stands alongside the coach road where it bridges the East Dart. By Conan Doyle's day the inn had been turned into the Temperance Hotel. (Although Watson mentions an inn at Grimpen, he never pops in for a pint of bitters.) The inn at Postbridge has long since relapsed to its old ale-serving ways, and now operates as the East Dart Inn.
While the village of Postbridge fits Conan Doyle's description of Grimpen, the real inspiration for Baskerville Hall and Grimpen is spread across the face of Dartmoor, and especially in the headwaters of the River Dart. Watson's impressive view from the local tor can be seen from North Hessary Tor, just outside Princetown. Sherlock Holmes' hiding place in a prehistoric hut matches Grimspound so closely that a visitor can make a good guess about the hut Holmes used. The goyals (standing stones) described by Watson are found all over Dartmoor, with the largest being The Grey Wethers, overlooking the East Dart above Postbridge.
Fox Tor Mire, with its twisting path, odd hillocks, and tin mine, must have been Conan Doyle's model for the nearby Great Grimpen Mire. He describes it as a very large moss bog lying to the north of Grimpen, beyond the Exeter coach road. The treacherous bogs consist of a bed of sphagnum moss floating on trapped groundwater. Careless walkers who encounter a bog can sink deeply into mud, or break through into deep water. Watson sees this hazard firsthand when he witnesses a pony sinking into the Grimpen Mire: 'Something brown was rolling and tossing among the green sedges. Then a long, agonized, writhing neck shot upwards . . . .' Later in the story, the murderer disappears into the Grimpen Mire, leaving no trace.
Small islands known as hillocks rise above the fictitious Grimpen Mire. In the novel, Holmes and Watson follow an obscure, almost invisible path to one of these hillocks. You can find similar hillocks in Fox Tor Mire, and you can reach one of them by a path nearly as treacherous and difficult as the one in the novel. The path is clearly shown on government-issued maps, and real-life adventurers can follow it, with some difficulty. At one end of the path lies a ruined tin mine, much like that described by Conan Doyle, while on the other end stands a medieval stone cross raised by monks to warn travellers against straying into the mire.
Baskerville Hall itself is the one thoroughly inauthentic feature of the novel. Conan Doyle describes it as a 14th-century castle, the likes of which simply do not exist on the moor. In the 1300s, as today, only a few tin miners and sheep farmers lived on the rough moors. Medieval barons had no need to build castles to protect such a land. In the late 1800s Conan Doyle found a dozen large manor houses in the vicinity of the upper Dart, but all of them had been built by the Improvers during the previous two centuries.
Several of Baskerville Hall's exterior features ring true, however. Its moor-gate, separating civilized gardens from rough wilderness, reflects a common Dartmoor feature. So too does its avenue of old trees, 'where the wheels were again hushed amid the leaves, and the old trees shot their branches in a sombre tunnel over our heads.' Such avenues lie randomly scattered throughout the Improved area. These tree tunnels are the overgrown remains of 'hedges,' stone walls topped with dense shrubs to keep sheep from jumping over them. Dartmoor farmers liked to top their hedges with beech saplings, tall trees that required annual trimming. When a farmer neglected any of these hedgerows for a few years, the hedge grew into a row of great beech trees straddling the stone wall. Such hedgerows lined both sides of the approach lanes to the Improvers' country houses. By Conan Doyle's time they would have grown into a double row of great beech trees, forming a tunnel-like avenue. You can see such an avenue at the approach to Prince's Hall near Dartmeet, an Improver's country house turned into an elegant small hotel.
Despite Baskerville Hall's isolation, Conan Doyle surrounded it with a remarkable variety of features. The moor-gate behind Baskerville Hall opens on to 'the wide moor,' yet Watson reaches a large tor after a very short walk. Beneath this tor Watson finds a prehistoric village of round huts, so well preserved that the roofs remained intact. This may seem incredible for an empty moor, but such relics are quite common in the real Dartmoor. The area contains the largest collection of Stone Age sites in all of Europe, with literally hundreds of ruined villages of small round stone huts scattered all over the moor. The larger of these Neolithic huts commonly cling to the sides of tors, as at Baskerville Hall. Centuries after their Stone Age builders abandoned them, several well-preserved Neolithic sites with unbroken hut walls were re-roofed by tin-miners. You can still see such huts, their roofs removed by vandals but otherwise intact, east of Postbridge at Grimspound.
Conan Doyle felt free to borrow Dartmoor's finest sites for his own purposes, but he used these sites in ways that closely followed the logic of Dartmoor's landscape. He always placed the features of Dartmoor in authentic locations, at realistic distances, and in proximity to their natural neighbours. Conan Doyle may have based his descriptions on an actual map of Postbridge, or he may have used his own talent and imagination to create Grimpen and its environs. Whatever his method, his literary Dartmoor transcends mere description and takes on its own colourful personality, second in Conan Doyle's writings only to Holmes himself.
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Hounds of Dartmoor |
Perhaps due to its isolation and harsh climate, Dartmoor has become saturated with local myths and folklore. Many of these myths centre around the mysterious Dewer, a mythical huntsman who terrorizes the local countryside. He appears in conjunction with a pack of evil, wild, red-eyed hounds, variously referred to as 'Whist Hounds', 'Wish Hounds', 'Yeath Hounds', or 'Heath Hounds'. Yet another name for these dogs, inspired by later non-pagan influences, are 'Gabriel's Hounds', an unusual name for such an evil pack, because in Christian belief, Gabriel is, of course, an archangel. The evil connotation behind this name actually comes from Jewish texts, where Gabriel is identified as the lord of the underworld.
Whatever you call them, these hounds are bad news. The legend says that anyone who meets up with the pack in the night will die within one year. There is no immediate consequence to running into them, and no particular way in which the unfortunate traveller will eventually meet his end. This rather vague tale probably once contained many more horrible details that have since been lost during the many years of telling and retelling the myth.
Another myth warns against attempting to follow the Whist Hounds on their jaunt through the moors. It is said that anyone who tries will meet his death by plunging over a cliff, known as the Dewerstone, on Dartmoor's southern tip. The pursuers fall to the sounds of sinister laughter (presumably that of the Dewer), mournful baying, thunder, lightning, and other sights and sounds associated with supernatural doom.
The prevalent myth describing how the Dewer and his hounds hunt the souls of unbaptized babies, was most likely created by a creative clergyman to coax nonbelievers, still hanging onto old pagan beliefs, into having their children baptized.
The Dewer and his Whist hounds are usually associated with Wistman's woods, located on the banks of the West Dart, which serves as the hounds' kennel during daylight hours. The woods have long been associated with supernatural events not necessarily associated with Whist Hounds or the Dewer. The supposed haunting of these forbidding woods can also be indirectly linked to early Christian tradition. Until the 13th century it was mandatory that all deceased members of the faith be interred in the yard of their parish church. At that time, Dartmoor belonged to the Parish of Lydford, one of the most expansive in England. Parishoners living in the remote villages of Huccaby and Hexworthy, eight miles from the church at Lydford, were forced to carry coffins on a long trek through Wistman's Woods, and across eight bridgeless rivers and streams, the last being the River Tavy, which boasts the swiftest current in England. It is no wonder that stories sprang up about the Devil haunting this corner of Dartmoor.
While the legends surrounding the Whist Hounds may clearly seem like the basis for Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur was also probably inspired by yet another 'Black Dog' myth. Unusually large black dogs with flaming red eyes and a 'satanic nature' are said to guard specific lanes, gates, or bridges of Dartmoor. Perhaps the most threatening of these hounds is the 'Black Dog of Dartmoor' who was said to strike fear into those travelling late at night on the coach road, chasing them until they reached their destination.
In myth, the lone Black Dogs are not as ferocious as either the pack of Whist Hounds or Sir Arthur's Hound of the Baskervilles. It is likely that Conan Doyle fashioned his tale by taking the more frightening traits of the Whist Hounds, placing them into the singularity of the Black Dog, and eliminating the Dewer and the pack in an attempt to simplify his plot.
- David J. Connell
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Photo Credits:
Title Photo by author, Jim Hargan
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