A few days ago, my old pal CJ, seeing I was heading for the moors, commented on a post warning me to “stay off the moors.” For those who didn’t spend their teen years in the early 1980s repeatedly watching a small cluster of films on videotape (The Blues Brothers, Stripes, Caddyshack…), that’s a reference to the 1981 An American Werewolf in London, in which David Naughton and Griffin Dunne do not in fact follow that sage advice. Nor do they, as they are also advised, stick to the road.

It amazes me how CJ’s four little words brought such a rich set of associations for me 35 years later. I remember how we used to crack up over that line of dialog. I also remember thinking the doctor (played by John Woodvine, who is in fact still around and working at 88) was the only voice of reason among a bunch of people doing stupid (but entertaining) things.

Now I am older than Woodvine was when he made that film, and yet at times I still feel like that kid watching movies. I’ve mostly dropped the habit of quoting things like movies and Monty Python and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (mostly… cf. the headline of this post) as a way to convey my response to the world, and I don’t watch the same movies over and over again, and I’m, you know, older. But that person is still here, and the time that has passed seems both very long and gone so fast.

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I was reflecting on this (remember way back when, I noted that walking alone gives me time to reflect) on today’s walk. Rising swiftly and sweatily up a lot of hill to get out of Ivybridge, the path finally hits the moors. From the trees and houses and stone fences and hedge-divided small plots of land, I suddenly emerged onto the moors, an immense rolling tower of stone covered in a layer of dirt that holds water to create tricky bits of boggy squelchy treachery where it looks like dry land, with few trees and views for miles and where people are dwarfed by the landscape.

The path climbs to an old flat path that was briefly, in the early 1900s, a railway line to a clay working (these hills were a source of china clay, used in making china, but also in making paper). The path follows this rail line for miles, giving one time to think. And with no one around (I saw probably six people all day, even from a distance), I was thinking about time in scales large and small. In a large scale, this landscape shows a vast indifference to man’s strivings; It was here and like this for countless ages before humans started putting up stone markers and building burial mounds on these high merciless hills. The landscape laughs at the intake of breath that is a hundred years in which a company formed to dig out the clay, built a railway, thrived for a decade, then closed when prices fell, then removed the track from the railbed. The long flat is still there, and the occasional ruins of a building at a few points along the way, but give it another hundred  or two hundred years and many of these building ruins will fade under the mud and the low scrub and grasses.

I was also thinking about time on the smaller scale, because my guide said that I would be walking about five miles on this railway bed. But I tramped and tramped and landscape kept passing by, and time started to feel elastic and perhaps circular, as if I’d been walking through this landscape forever. The wind was howling steadily around me, and the only other noise was the occasional trickle of water where a stream, invisible amidst the tight weave of tall grasses, was gurgling underneath. At a few points I developed a murmuring fear that somehow I had missed a turn and was no longer on the path. This was irrational, of course; my map and guide were clear about the end of the railway path, and if I had missed my turn off it, I could only go a little bit further before reaching the ominously named Red Lake. (God, what horrors lurk in Red Lake?)

I loved this part of the walk in an odd way, because it gave me time to reflect, and think about the course my life has taken, and what I might want to change, and whether I really want to eat more cruciferous vegetables to live longer.

But these little dashes of doubt were helped along by the fact that this path, once it hits the moors, is astonishingly badly marked. In the entire day I saw perhaps five markers, and they were not the big happy wooden posts with acorns that I’ve seen on most paths. Several were just scratchings on rocks, for heaven’s sake, as if the people laying out the trail looked at the empty enormity and thought “Hell, whatever mark we make will be devoured by time anyway, so let the poor beggars get lost.”

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This lack of markings got a little, shall we say, exciting right after I left the railway.The path, if you could call it that, was a climb up a grassy, boggy hill, on which many things looked kind of like the path until they got very wet. My guidebook, sometimes voluminous in its description of going over a freaking stile, turned strangely reticent.

“Cross the brow of the hill, passing to the left of a small stone structure. The path contours left and downhill into the Avon valley.” HA! That is some Grade-A blandness to describe what is actually happening, More like this: “With your boots getting wet as you try to find which of these little pressed down areas of grass is actually the path, pass over some area that seems a bit like a real path, but maybe not. Either way, ignore it. And that heap of stones up ahead that appears to be a ruin of a building? See how there are some trod down bits of the grass to its left? Yes, there are some to its right as well, and they look more promising, but la la la, this guide isn’t listening to you… So go left, maybe, and yeah, follow that down a hillside for a half a mile, even though there will be long stretches in which you aren’t sure it is a path anymore, and you will develop an increasing dread that you’ve gone the wrong way and will somehow have to ‘retrace’ your steps back up this monstrous mudslide and watercourse we are drolly calling a path. Best of luck, sucker.”

Fortunately, at that blasted pile of stones the guide calls a “structure,” I stopped and took out my map and compass and looked around at the hills to see if I could work out the most plausible direction. Then I plunged down the hill.

I nearly wept for joy when I first espied this clapper bridge (a bridge made by dropping big flat boulders across a river or stream). Then the path wound down along the other side of the river for seven or eight hundred yards in which the path got just as iffy as it was on the hilltop. There were a few moments when I was ankle deep in water and mud while standing amidst tall grass, thinking “Hmm, this could be a problem.” But I got through it.

Story of a walker in three selfies:

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Then of course, the path went up another hill and across more sweeping high moor, but this time with valleys full of woods and church steeples and civilization visible in the distance.

And eventually it descended down a long long hill, where I took a few wrong turnings that led me comically to the ends of paths that petered off into nothing, so that I had to retrace my steps a few times to get it right, But it ended at this lovely Chalk Ford of a river.

And then up a hillside and onto a rocky dirt road that winds for over a mile down into Scoriton. It was a wonderful day for walking, even with its challenges, and I had a nice long think for myself. And just to make me feel extra good about everything, it started to rain just as I got to the pub where I am staying. It rained in absolute sheets for much of the evening, as I ate dinner and watched it out the window. The forecast calls for cool but now rain for most of the day tomorrow, and this time I am hoping the forecast is right.