1. Witches’ Knickers
2. WOFFAL
3. Two Otters, Seven Beavers, Two Rivers and a Lynx
4. The Hillocks Have Eyes
5. World Turned Upside Down
6. The Best Waves
7. Full Jackdaw
8. Boats Against the Current
9. Black Dog
10. Dawn of the Dad
Acknowledgements
Supporters
Copyright
Tom Cox lives in Devon. He is the author of, among others, the Sunday Times bestselling The Good, The Bad and The Furry and the William Hill Sports Book longlisted Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Nice Jumper
Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia
Under the Paw
Talk to the Tail
The Good, The Bad and The Furry
Close Encounters of the Furred Kind
For The Bear (1995–2016) and Shipley (2001–2017).
RIP, little magicians.
Take the scorn and wear the horn
it was the crest when you were born
your father’s father wore it
and your father wore it too.
Hal-An-Tow (traditional)
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January. Haldon Hill, the border hill. Such a long, high wall in the sky as you approach it from the north-east, so thick with trees, always a tiny bit surprising that a few minutes later you can be on top of it in a car. Also surprising, perhaps, to my car itself, which lets out a harassed groan as I change gear for the final ascent. My ears pop hard as I reach the brow. It happens every time. When I’ve told hardy natives of the South West Peninsula the same thing, they have sometimes claimed I’m being overdramatic but I’m honestly not. Maybe it’s because my sensitive eustachian tubes spent too many years living closer to sea level, in a more recumbent landscape, but the altitude is too much for them. ‘Ppppop!’ they go, as always, maybe even a bit louder than usual today. What that noise signifies to me is that I have entered the unofficial country that I call home, comprising Cornwall and the western two thirds of Devon.
Haldon rises, dividing the land, around six miles south-west of Exeter, which has always struck me as the most sarcastically named of small cities: a place that, when you’re attempting to get out of it at rush hour, appears to have no exit at all. If you look at it another way, though, the name is apt. When you reside on the west side of Haldon Hill, as I do, Exeter feels like your exit to the rest of Britain: the beginning of that place which, when you’ve lived down here for any time at all, you start to think of as Everywhere Else. Draw a line directly south from Haldon’s summit and you reach the exact point where the cliffs change colour – soft sandy red giving way to gnashing dark grey. Haldon seems like a barrier and must have seemed an even bigger one before it was tarmacked over with dual carriageway. Evidence of several sunken medieval lanes ascending the hill has been found on its east side, but almost none on its western slopes. Weary fourteenth-century travellers from the east would arrive at Lidwell Chapel near the eastern base of Haldon and receive offers of hot food and a bed for the night from Robert de Middlecote, the monk who lived there. Middlecote would then drug them, cut their throats and dump their bodies in the well in the chapel’s garden – allegedly bottomless, like so much still water in folklore. ‘Ooh, bloody hell, I’m not going over that,’ you can imagine similarly weary Romans exclaiming, thirteen hundred years or so earlier, as Haldon came into view. ‘We’ve done enough conquering, anyway. Let’s just leave whoever lives over there to carry on cuddling boulders and worshipping trees, or whatever it is they do.’ The Deep South West was its own country then and remains so now. Making a home in it is still a commitment to a certain kind of life, with more potential to be a self-contained part of its own immediate surroundings. Pass over that long brow and the land begins to steepen and get more intimate with itself, employment becomes more scarce, communities become more scattered and the idea of a day trip to the middle of the country becomes more fatigue-inducing.
As often as not, you drive up to the top of Haldon in one kind of weather and descend in another. In Exeter today there’s been squally showers and the lingering grey of a collective tetchy mood, but as I come down the opposite side, the sun switches on its spotlight function and illuminates the valley. Dartmoor streaks away in front of me on the right, unearthly and moody and promising and electric. They say in Devon that if you can’t see the moor, it means it’s raining, and if you can see it, it means it’s about to rain. That’s a comic exaggeration, of course, but not a huge one. Today the moor looks like a giant outdoor factory where witches make weather. There are countless small bright gaps in the sky, like holes stabbed in a tent roof to let the light in, then longer, bigger, more jagged gaps, as if the person in the tent has lost patience and gone at it with a bread knife. Some hills are enigmatically yellow in a way that doesn’t seem to correspond with the cloud above them, others a dark green verging on black that’s no less confusing. I can’t get nonchalant about this view, and it’s become even more fascinating to me as I’ve become more intimate with the moor. I will glance across and try to work out which shape or shade might denote a patch where I’ve walked. Is that where the farm is that I walked past that time with the huge ball of wire outside with the variety of animal skulls placed in it? I will think. No. Perhaps that’s a couple of miles further north. Maybe it’s the wildflower meadow I was pursued across last April by a small, determined pig.
I press on past Heaven and Hell Junction, Heaven being the moor and Hell staring it down from across the tarmac in the form of Trago Mills, the vast, grotesque shopping and leisure park whose toxic-waste-dumping, UKIP-supporting, wildlife-shooting owners the Robertson family once printed adverts calling for the castration of gay men. Up another big hill, past Ashburton Junction One and Ashburton Junction Two – the one which looks like my junction, that I take by mistake when I’m tired – and I’m home, or as good as, heading seawards on the smaller road where home begins in the most graspable sense: a zigzagging one, full of roller-coaster dips and climbs. To the right of the road is the River Dart and, because the road attempts to use the river as its guide, it is at the constant mercy of its indecision. All the Dartmoor rivers are capricious, but none that race down from the moor prevaricate about their route more often than the Dart. The hills here are not like those in Somerset or east Devon, which have wide valleys and plains between them; they are a community, bunching together as if nervously fearing solitude. The Dart finds the tight rare spaces between them and curls around them at flamboyant length, making its scenic way to the ocean.
Just two of the hills in this post-moor, pre-coast landscape rise up in a more noticeable, individual way. Unlike most of their less spellbinding neighbours, both of them are known locally by name. The bulkier of the two is called Hood Ball Hill, a corpulent sovereign of a hill topped with a copse somewhat resembling a mullet haircut. Its lankier neighbour, around a mile away, is called Yarner Beacon, although it was initially introduced to me as the Dragon’s Hoof, a name that became even more appealing upon my failure to substantiate it using any historical or electronic source.
At Hood Ball Hill’s foot, as well as the river and the bridge where the road crosses to the water’s eastern bank, is the track belonging to the Buckfastleigh to Totnes tourist railway. The steam from the trains that run along this enhance the hill’s mystic quality like dry ice around the ankles of a wizard. Talk to the more shamanistically inclined around here and they might tell you that Hood Ball Hill is the Atlantean Temple of the Moon, to which people have been known to travel many miles in order to face their shadow, or at least that a ley line passes directly through its centre, carrying mellow vibes down from Glastonbury, eighty miles to the north-east. In the late seventies an annual hippy fayre was held on its slopes. I met a carpenter called Brendan in the pub at Staverton, one of the two villages Hood Ball Hill overlooks, who attended the fayre regularly as a child and remembers it as an event where people often dressed in sackcloth and there were always ‘lots of dogs running loose and having a go at one another’.
Nowadays Hood Ball Hill has no footpath and is strictly, even a tad angrily, sectioned off from the public. I know this because I have checked out the situation assiduously from every angle. I have, however, climbed Yarner Beacon several times, both after the advent of the new permissive path leading to its peak and prior to that as a wide-eyed trespasser. For weeks before I made my maiden ascent, the beacon would call to me. Every time I saw it I could think about nothing but getting up into the comb of trees at its peak. This hill fetish was new to me and I did not understand what it meant or what I hoped to achieve through it, but if anything that made it all the more powerful. I had moved here from one of the flattest counties in England, Norfolk, where I once had a neighbour who spoke longingly of ‘living in a house on a hill’. It was quite a big deal to him since they only have about six of them there. I lived for a long spell after that on what I thought was a hill but now realise was only a tussock with ideas above its station. People visiting me from Devon said they liked the place but asked how I coped with the flatness. I didn’t understand what they meant. It was merely a topographical characteristic, surely, not a malady? But as a resident of Devon’s South Hams region I soon began to get it. Flat landscapes have a subtle enchantment of their own, but a landscape dense with hills makes everything more of a fascinating puzzle. Voices and revelations tend to flood the head on a good country walk, as if imparted by well-meaning unseen sprites hiding in the countryside itself. These voices and revelations are imbued with a different magic when emerging from the secret folds and crevices that hills create. Being accustomed to that magic, then visiting a place where it appears to have been steamrollered and rendered ostensibly more prosaic, must come as a shock.
I like to climb Yarner Beacon on a clear day, gaze several miles into the distance towards the sea and try to pick out the location of the footpaths I’ve walked, which, after three years of living here, is almost all of them. I once made the mistake of moving to an exciting new part of the British countryside and not immediately investigating every bit of it forensically on foot and I don’t intend to make the same error again. From up here I’m always amazed at the way all the threads connect, their shimmies and jinks and thrusts being disguised when you’re beneath hilltop level, in the thick of it. It could be compared to the moment when, having only previously travelled through London by Tube, a person explores the city at ground level on foot and realises the unexpected interconnectivity of the stations, their surprising proximity to one another. So many of the paths here in south-west Devon are of a hidden nature: sunken lanes that were already old in Saxon times, created by landowners digging ditches on the boundaries of their properties and piling earth into continuous banks on their own sides. These holloways feel impossibly solid when, as a walker, you’re bracketed by their banks below the bulk of the land, in an eerily quiet semi-subterranean shale, fern, mud and moss world.
In winter this countryside is a totally different colour to Norfolk’s: reddy brown and green, as opposed to grainy brown and muddy grey. Rich rain-sodden earth and leaf mulch provide the reddy brown; plentiful moss, resilient fern and lichen add back-up greens on the borders of fields and meadows that stay more emerald luminous in the cold months than any other fields and meadows I’ve known. There is a strong argument in favour of every season here: autumn for its crunchy lysergic coppers and golds, its sunlit spider’s webs and sudden forgotten woodsmoke rush; summer because summer here is just dizzying with all the possible ways it offers to fill your time. But in winter as the land strips itself back it shows you new secrets and you feel like you’re getting a glimpse into something special behind everything else: intangible, ghoulish, a necessary dark pigment on the edge of the land of the living.
Restless from driving, I arrive home and go straight out again on foot, wringing the daylight out of the day. On a steep rocky holloway leading down from the hamlet of Aish the leaf veil has fallen back to reveal a ruined barn I never knew was there. One of its broken woodworm-riddled doors creaks in the wind as I pass, which is odd, as I hadn’t realised there was any wind. At the bottom of the hill, beside a water lane, on a fence in a stark garden belonging to an isolated cottage a well-known death figure has been made using thick black polythene draped over two crossed sticks. Hooded and faceless, he holds a lantern in one unseen hand and a scythe in the other. I step gingerly over to photograph him, and a man of baby boomer age wearing a fisherman’s jumper emerges from the front door of the cottage. ‘Ooh, he loikes the reaper,’ he says to me in a strong West Country accent that leaves me unsure if it is genuine or being put on for hillbilly Straw Dogs effect. Something ominous hangs in the air for twenty seconds until a younger man – possibly his son – emerges from the house, chuckling. I ask the younger man if he made the reaper himself and he confirms that he did, with the help of friends, and that it was the centrepiece of a recent New Year’s Eve party. There is no such levity to explain away another haunting site I see six and a half miles upriver, near Staverton: a fence post, recently denuded of nettles and bracken and draped with a blue shawl, matching floppy felt hat and off-beige scarf to form what looks chillingly like a small, stooped woman, turned away from the footpath, crying over some crippling recent tragedy. Of these two ominous home-made figures this is undoubtedly the greater piece of art, constructed using nothing but a banal pre-existing boundary marker and three dirty pieces of clothing, yet conveying absolutely no sense that, were you to touch her and ask her if she was OK, she would not turn round with glowing crimson eyes and gnashing teeth, crunch your skull into fragments and suck fresh blood from your neck hole.
I hike these paths more often in winter, when daylight is scarce and I am reluctant to waste what there is of it on car journeys to further-flung walking destinations. South Devon is by far the most touristy place I’ve ever lived, but in January, February and March you can take a route across the hidden places and get a genuine sense that no other human feet have preceded yours for weeks. One of my favourite walks is a thirteen-mile loop to the village of Tuckenhay. I love the way the village looks from the top of the valley in winter, with smoke billowing from the chimneys beside the creek and the jumbled houses climbing into the narrow opposing valley as if forming an unruly queue for a magic tunnel. This most recent winter I walked down the steepest of the hills leading to the village and was reminded of the time my dad drove down the same lane in icy conditions in an old, untrustworthy car during a family holiday in 1987. With unintentional perfect timing Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’ had been playing on the car’s cassette player as he drove, and the combination of the perilous road and the hysteria of the music sent my mum, me and my auntie Mal into fits of laughter. Now, on the same hollowed-out road, I spotted a hubcap eight feet above me, lodged in the mossy, ivy-strangled bank; above it, brassy robins flitted about. How had it got all the way up there? Maybe the driver of the car it had been attached to had been listening to Vivaldi too, and got carried away. That is, if the hubcap was a hubcap and not a tiny flying saucer that had veered off course and crashed, which was what it more realistically resembled.
My preferred route back from Tuckenhay is the most arduous and impractical one, along the creek bed, where hopefully the tide will be low. The first time I was about to take this route I encountered two dishevelled, wheezing walkers coming from the opposite direction, who told me that I shouldn’t try to get down there, since they’d only just made it through, and they, unlike me, had walking poles and proper anoraks with labels on them. Had they known me, they would have realised that ‘I wouldn’t try to go that way if I were you – it’s difficult’ is one of the three main motivational hiking phrases a person can say in my vicinity, along with ‘There’s a great pub at the apex of this route’ and ‘This hill is well known due to the coven which is said to have practised in the copse at its plateau during the middle of the seventeenth century.’ I thanked them and pressed on in exactly the direction I’d intended, negotiating slimy pebbles and fallen trees with relatively little trouble. But this latest time along the creek was tough going. Rain had wrecked the valley for the previous five days. Vast mounds of slippy alien bubble seaweed sat on top of even slippier wet rocks, like the soggy crust of a treacherous pie. I took an hour to walk a broken studded necklace of land that I’d taken just fifteen minutes to make my way over last May. I only narrowly avoided tripping over, although in some ways it wouldn’t have mattered if I had, since I was already a six-foot strip of pure mud-spatter masquerading as a human male. I had some shopping to do on the route home and thanked my lucky stars that I lived in the kind of place where the sight of a man who looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon buying biological washing liquid and bananas would raise few eyebrows. The seaweed smelled less pleasant than usual: it gave off a salty pungent rot threat. Some of it, blasted there by the storms of recent days during high tide, had caught in the branches of the gnarly oaks which stuck out on precarious crooked noses of granite above the creek. Above it was another lonely haunted-looking barn I’d not previously spotted. A few strands of black binliner were caught in the barbed wire of the adjoining field. I’d not all that long ago learned the excellent Irish term for such a phenomenon – witches’ knickers. The creek formed a thin channel through the mud, then rounded the corner to merge with the river, which, like all other rivers in Devon at this time of year, had acquired that black look it does not possess even on the coldest and most unforgiving day of autumn, summer or spring. It whispered in my ear about the bad stuff it wanted to do to me, and I climbed away, back to higher, more solid earth, relieved. Further on, in a hedge on the hill above Sharpham, near the natural burial ground, I saw another example of witches’ knickers, far more elaborately and eerily crafted by nature: a curved strip of former black bag, complete with hood and slanted eyehole, which only someone in the most fierce denial about the dark side of existence would fail to admit looked like a demon – if not the Devil himself – reclining among the thin twigs, watching weary travellers struggle up the hill and idly planning their fate. If I looked closer, which I did not quite want to, I half-expected him to be casually examining his fingernails. A few weeks earlier similar nearby hedgerows had been strewn with redoubtable, undying wild clematis. Forgetting what the folklore name for it was, I asked a man emerging from a nearby garden if he knew. ‘Those? They’s dead men’s whiskers,’ he said. He was incorrect; the name I was looking for was in fact old man’s beard, but I preferred his term and resolved to use it on all tenable future occasions. Now, though, the wild clematis seemed to have vanished. We had entered January, winter’s peak. Time of tax return terror, bare trees, delusional gym resolutions and scheming hedge demons. Too bleak even for the strong and wiry whiskers of the deceased.
If you spend enough time out walking and witnessing this stuff you realise that there was always a predestiny to the ghosts and monsters that have, for centuries, spilled from the imagination of rurally situated British writers: if the people who invented them hadn’t made them up, someone else would have, or at least ones not unlike them. The countryside – particularly the gnarly, craggy, knobbly countryside of the Deep South West – and the creaking, weather-blasted architecture of that countryside, especially when stripped back by seasonal change, is too rich with spooky imagery for it never to have happened. I am hugely inspired by this on my walks, to the point that it can send me into a minor state of witchy rapture, and I welcome its onset, but, even so, winter is not my season. It claws at me with its mucky nails and strips me back until I’m in the proper fallow state to best receive and fully appreciate my true season, which is spring.
I love spring. I feel it in every fibre of my being. This is not an unusual feeling of course for a human who wants to feel warm and sensually switched on, but there might be an extra, biological factor to it for me. I was born in May, the middle part of the month, when everything has usually fully kicked into gear, and May is when I feel most alive, most me, and never more so than here in Devon – because it’s more fertile and wild than anywhere I’ve lived before and because that makes you feel more entrenched in May’s essence.
I love May so much, I attended three Devonshire May Day festivals last year. At the most memorable of these I walked down Lustleigh Cleave – a dramatic cheese-wire slice in the wooded land on Dartmoor’s softer south-eastern edge – on the first roasting hot day of the year to watch the crowning of the Lustleigh village May Queen, a tradition revived in the early 1900s but stretching back unknown centuries prior to that, and a perfect day out for anyone who tends to see the original 1970s version of The Wicker Man less as a horror film and more as a sweet, well-meaning documentary about agroforestry. After descending the Cleave’s soft wood-sorrel paths past standing stones and glistening streams, I and my five companions for the day entered the village orchard, where a maypole awaited us. To the maypole’s immediate rear was a large rock with a stone seat on top of it and five decades of young female names carved into it. A person could perhaps find a scene in Britain more suggestive than this of the declaration ‘We are ready for the sacrifice’ but it would be difficult. Outside the village hall old black and white photos of previous Lustleigh May Queens were displayed, and out of the ingrained habit of a person who has watched The Wicker Man fifty-seven times I could not help but check to see whether or not the 1972 photograph was missing. ‘They do love their divinity lessons,’ said my friend Andy in his best Christopher Lee voice. It was always only going to be a matter of time before somebody did.
May’s pay-off is felt even more acutely on the edge of the moor, the celebration of it perhaps even more necessary. Suzi and Fergus, whose hard-to-find house we have walked down the Cleave from today, have been snowed in for long periods during all but one of the twelve winters they’ve lived here. In that time, Suzi – a careful driver, like most people who live on or near Dartmoor – has written off three cars on these narrow lanes. Even the psychedelic moorland spring comes with its dark side: this time last year Suzi and Fergus had a weasel slaughter all but one of their thirteen chickens in two days flat. Deeply traumatised, the lone survivor had since moved next door. As I climbed back up the Cleave to my car, I was followed by a special Dartmoor sun: that sun you feel is palpably closer to you than it is elsewhere in the county, simply because you’re a little nearer to the roof of the world. The air had a slow, sparkly quality, as it often does on the moor, and this seemed to follow me home then stick around for the next few days. Cherry blossom and dandelion seed heads floated through the air in my garden, adding to its psychedelic reinvention. My cat Ralph, who has fantastic sideburns and a rugged late-hippy-era look about him, walked lazily through the blossom with a beatific expression on his face, and I felt like I was watching a dream sequence from a road movie made in 1969 by cats about cats.
All around us, everything was growing frantically. The garden’s copper beech hedge went from rust to dazzling green in barely more than a day. I mowed the lawn, nipped inside for a shower and a cup of tea, and it seemed that while my back was turned another twenty daisies had appeared. I mowed it again soon after, shaping two thick new border areas and leaving them free do their own thing where I’d scattered wildflower seeds, a decision that, though relieving me of part of a weekly chore, was made out of a wish to encourage more bees and butterflies into the garden rather than pure laziness. My current lawnmower had been a birthday present from my parents two years previously. Along with its assembly kit and instructions, the mower arrived with a lined pad marked ‘NOTES’. In here the true mowing connoisseur was presumably intended to make observations on the quality of his mow. My dad told me not to mow any pebbles because a bloke his friend Jeff knew mowed one and the pebble shot up and sliced off one of Jeff’s friend’s Labrador’s testicles. I don’t have a Labrador, and if I did and it was male I would almost certainly have it castrated at the earliest possible opportunity, in the normal legal manner, but the advice stuck with me, and I am careful not to mow pebbles. I viewed the notes section in the mower handbook as absurd for a long time, but I adore notebooks and can’t stand to see any of them empty and unloved, even – and perhaps especially – if they’re plain and dull, so I began to put it to occasional use, recording my user experience as a weekly handler of the Bosch Rotak 43 Ergoflex.
Even after the lawn had been mown short and smooth, a dark diagonal line remained visible across the largest segment of it. This line led to the place just beyond some brambles, through a hole in my garden fence, where a group of badgers had made their sett: the most direct route there from the copses on the hill above my house where they went to forage for grubs and rodents at night. I’d first noticed badgers in my garden the year before last, when one took a similar path across my lawn at dusk. It looked like an animal surprised at its own ability to run. Soon afterwards, another badger went through my recycling and separated plastic from aluminium: a needless gesture, since it all goes in the same bag in this part of Devon, as dictated by South Hams District Council. The following year, close to Summer Solstice, as I was taking a long cut across the hill overlooking my house to the post office, engrossed in a Garrison Keillor podcast on my iPod, I very nearly trod on a much younger badger, who scuttled away into the thick hedgerow. As the afternoon wore on a mixture of emotions set in: annoyance at my absent-mindedness, elation and that special remorse that only comes with almost treading on a very young creature that resembles a small snouty folk-rock bear. I read up on badgers a little when I got home and discovered that they are omnivores and not, as I first thought on a hasty misreading, ‘omnivoles’, which, being not a real word, does not in fact mean a vole who is in every place at once, which to me seems a shame and a missed opportunity. A couple of foods that badgers especially enjoy, I learned, are peanuts and cat biscuits, both of which I had a decent supply of in the house. At dusk that night I took some of both up to the hillside in bowls and sat in the long grass where I’d almost trod on the badger, determined to make amends. A bonus sight greeted me a few minutes after I arrived and scattered some of the peanuts and cat food: not just the reappearance of the original young badger from earlier, snuffling about on the shorter turf, but a shyer, smaller sibling, in the long grass and weeds a few feet away. Neither seemed hugely bothered by my presence, perhaps not yet being fully schooled in the lesson that human beings are massive bastards. I crouched in the grass and watched the two badgers for a quarter of an hour or so then emptied the remainder of my peanuts and cat biscuits from my bowls, which they duly chomped, the bolder one coming within about a foot of eating from my hand.
Over the ensuing days, without any special effort on my part, my life became very badger-themed. The following week I visited the annual summer Scythe Fair at Thorney Lakes in Somerset. To remind myself about the fair’s imminence, I wrote ‘Scythe Fair!’ on the appropriate day on my calendar. ‘Why does it say “Scythe Fair!” on your calendar?’ my girlfriend asked, and I told her that it was because I was going to a scythe fair. The Scythe Fair featured several stalls selling scythes, old and new, while children romped in freshly scythed grass heaps and competitive unisex scything took place in the central arena, some of it (male only) topless, some of the competitors surprisingly youthful. This gave the place the slight look of a Grim Reaper Hogwarts. Jay, my companion for the day, who suffers from the most virulent hay fever known to man, had not quite allowed for the results of this in his planning, so I took refuge with him and his ever-reddening damp face in the far corner of the fair, away from the scythed grass. Here I got talking to Leslie on the Dorset for Badger and Bovine Welfare Group stall; who was raising awareness about the government-endorsed badger cull, which, based on deeply questionable scientific evidence and with a ludicrously wasteful budget, was moving further into the South West. I told her that I’d recently fed my local badgers peanuts, and she said she went a step further and made peanut butter sandwiches for her local ones every day at dusk. The badgers had come to expect this and, with time, even view it as their right, but one evening when they arrived in her garden with their typical punctuality she realised she was fresh out of peanut butter. She searched her fridge and freezer but the only slightly appropriate meal she could find was a dish of oldish ratatouille from her freezer which, if she was honest, she wasn’t sure if she was ever going to get around to eating. ‘They loved it,’ she told me. ‘But they ran off with the dish afterwards.’ She paused and a wistful mood appeared to overcome her. ‘I really liked that dish,’ she added. At one of my spoken-word events only a couple of days after this a member of the audience told me about a close friend who’d been bitten on the bottom by a badger in the garden at a house party in Exeter, which made me wonder not just about the finer details of the attack but whether I was going to the right house parties. A couple of initial small signs of a sett appeared in my garden a week or so later. The badgers reconsidered and abandoned this but in early spring 2016 the other sett, at the end of the diagonal path in the lawn, appeared. Intrigued, I set up a trail camera not far from its entrance.
Each of the three springs I’ve experienced in Devon has been markedly different from the other two. When I arrived from Norfolk in March 2014 it rained relentlessly for weeks, transforming low-lying fields into lakes, then a fierce sun finally hit and the whole place exploded in fluorescence, giving me unrealistic expectations of just how many primroses and bluebells I might find squeezed into an average South West Peninsula woodland copse from here on. After a dark, dingy winter, spring 2015 brought a strange, stark heatwave. With April barely under way, the footpaths near my house were full of walkers in shorts, and the trees, still largely leafless, appeared almost harassed, like people being hurried out of the house to an engagement when they have not yet finished getting dressed. But last spring was just about perfect: mist that seemed to paint itself over all the right bits of the land then got burned away slowly by an assertive, calm sun, creating tingling days that were warm but not too warm in their middle then cool and atmospheric at their close. Days that made you realise that the chief reason people talk about the weather a lot in casual conversation is not out of dullness or awkwardness; it’s because somewhere deep inside we realise that weather is our one true leader. I want to grab days like this hard and wring every bit of goodness out of them, which is why spring is a time when I am not always the working beast that I should be. I am a Morning Person, whose best creative energy comes between the hours of 6 a.m. and noon, and must, vitally, be bottled during that period, but when I sit at my desk on a bright morning in spring it’s invariably with the febrile sense that there’s a party going on outside and everyone but me has been invited. Oscar Wilde said, ‘Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast,’ which is nonsense, but sounds pithy and smart and makes you seem devastatingly hip to actual dull people if you quote it in your favour. Announcing ‘I’m a night owl’ is full adulthood’s equivalent of a flamboyantly lit underage cigarette. It’s a statement designed to impress: all people who say it naturally seem more interesting and mysterious. Perhaps they frequent jazz clubs and consort with beatniks and intellectuals? Certainly they must do something fascinating with their lives and not just, say, stay up late scrolling through Facebook. I know a penchant for waking early is going to win me few friends, but I’m not going to hide from it to try to make you like me. My love of mornings is as undeniable as two or three of my limbs. But it is not synonymous with any antipathy towards night-time or Night People. I can happily go to bed late but I’ll still invariably be awake at dawn. If I choose an early night, it’s out of a mixture of self-knowledge and self-preservation, and if I am doing spring in the best way – which I do not always have the self-discipline to – early nights become increasingly important.
On a Sunday in the early part of spring 2016, a couple of weeks after I’d first arranged the trail cam near the badger sett in the garden, I skipped down the lawn to retrieve the memory card from it. The sun was peeking over a row of beeches like a pastoral equivalent of the classic graffiti of Kilroy and his wall, and the owls of the valley had just handed the avian noise baton over to the Dawn Chorus. This morning the band, which was rapidly becoming one of my all-time favourite British ones, right up there with Led Zeppelin, Pentangle and the Stones, was working on a fuller sound: lots of new session players were chipping in and trying out new ideas, including a pheasant, the ensemble’s answer to a notoriously unreliable bagpipe player who stumbles in, still drunk from the night before, blows a couple of off-kilter notes, then leaves. Still in my pyjamas, I walked down to the river, inhaling overpowering wild-garlic stench, and immediately saw a kingfisher zipping along above the surface, fish in beak. As I walked back along the lane, a small white van pulled up beside me and its driver wound down his window. ‘Bloody hell, the things you see around here in the morning!’ said the driver. ‘I thought you were an escaped convict from Dartmoor prison, dressed like that.’ It was Ian, my plumber. Ian is a Morning Person too, and it was his trail cam that I had borrowed to film the badgers.
‘Any luck over the last couple of days?’ he asked.
‘Neh,’ I said. ‘Got a magpie yesterday. At least it was the right colour scheme.’
In a fortnight of striving to catch the badgers on film I’d so far managed to get one good clear eleven-second video of one scuffling around and another of a tail – thick and almost certainly badger-owned – wafting about in the corner of the frame. I’d also managed to record six other moving things that were manifestly not badgers: that magpie, two field mice, my left leg, a fox and my industrious female cat Roscoe returning from a hunting expedition with a mole dangling from her mouth. The mole, although assuredly deceased, wobbled slightly from side to side, so if you counted it as a moving thing too, that made seven in total. I said, ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie, and how’s your wife?’ to the magpie. I always say, ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie, and how’s your wife?’ to solitary magpies, as popular superstition dictates that I must, for good luck, but doing so can become very tiring as there are a lot of magpies where I live and very few of them are in steady relationships.
I went inside and checked the results of last night’s surveillance: no badgers. I got the impression that they had become wise to the trail cam. All my latest footage had turned up was another mouse, and even she had appeared a bit self-conscious. I’d woken in the night, looked down from my bedroom window and seen one of the badgers skittering across in front of the doorstep in what could easily be perceived as a cocky dance, yet, even though I’d scattered peanuts and dry cat food in the perfect place and aimed the trail cam directly down the line of their diagonal path . . . nothing.
Looking at that diagonal path – more multispecies A-road than badger byway – was instructive. It was a reminder that most of the paths in the British countryside were not planned by people in suits with clipboards and agendas; they were made organically, by silent, casual committee: a mixture of animals and humans deciding on the best route to suit their needs and forging defiantly ahead. Desire lines is what they call them in the transportation planning industry. I recently spoke to a woman from Maryland, on the east coast of the United States, who’d never visited rural Britain and was astounded to learn that I could walk in the countryside and get up close to cows and sheep that did not belong to me. Coming from a place where most of the greenery and all of the arable land is sectioned off from walkers, she found it an entirely alien concept. It’s conversations like this that make you realise how privileged we are in the UK to have the green lanes, bridleways and footpaths that we do, allowing us to clamber over stiles nibbled by horses into farmyards filled with inquisitive guineafowl or wild meadows where we might surprise a pheasant and it might surprise us back with a loud ch-kooick as it explodes from the grass. Later during the morning on which my conversation with Ian the plumber had taken place I set off on foot down to the river and in what seemed like no time at all was cuddling a large, docile ewe, a sheep I’d taken for a troublemaker the first time I’d seen her, waiting for me on the path above the Dart, but who it turned out just wanted to say hello and find out whether I needed anything. I told the sheep that she was the best sheep I’d ever met, then immediately felt bad because it was something I’d told lots of other sheep, even though this time I genuinely meant it.
I believe it is my duty to get to know my immediate natural world thoroughly, to not be complacent about it, as it’s the least I can do as a gesture of thanks to it for being kind enough to allow me to live within it. My need to explore my home county on foot – sometimes as much as sixty miles a week of it – also comes as a natural by-product of being one of those odd people who are excited by the design of an old kissing gate, a small pool in a depression at the top of a tor or the blotched patterns lichen makes on a boulder in a spinney. Not everyone will impulsively go ‘Ooh’ upon seeing moss and navelwort laying siege to an old wall – they will need some sort of violent modern stimulus to be prompted to lose control in an equivalently undignified way, and I accept that totally – but I am someone who does. I think my time on local footpaths, and in various places just off them, is also a reaction to something I’m told repeatedly about the way I should live, almost every time I turn on any electronic device with a screen. The whole world is there on the screen, for the taking, and a hive of demanding voices encourages us to absorb as much of it as possible, and keep up with it frantically, as it moves on, and it is always moving on, more swiftly and forgetfully than ever. If you’re someone with a thirst for knowledge, you can very easily get sucked into the excitement of this, before you realise it’s a flawed, impossible pursuit, and it’s not making people, en masse, any more knowledgeable. What it instead often leads to is a brand of knowledge that’s thousands of miles wide and half a centimetre deep: a pond-skating mentality of misleading screenshots and thinly gleaned opinions and out-of-context sound bites and people reading hastily between the lines while forgetting the vital thing you also need to do when practising that skill is to read the lines themselves. The idea of getting to know an area of limited size extremely well works as an antidote to this, and even in a very small area there is always more to know. You can reduce your space right down – to one hedgerow or wall or flooded out-of-use tin mine – and there will never be enough time to know it all.
It could be argued that I have a particularly fertile area in which to do my local investigations, but I’ve done it in another very different place too: Norfolk. And when revisiting the places in the East Midlands where I grew up – rural areas, but localities defined not by hills and rivers and water lanes and creeks but by parks and chip shops and factories and railway cuttings – I’ve been drawn to do the same, to start looking behind the obvious in a way that never would have occurred to me in the distant past: at the thirty-mile view from the hill above your aunt’s old semi and the haunting tower at its hazy edge, at the lovingly designed pattress plates on an abandoned brewery or the stag beetles beneath some bark on an eerie broken oak in a copse behind a litter-strewn lay-by not far from the motorway junction people take if they want to go to IKEA.
This part of Devon isn’t perfect either. Just like other parts of the British countryside it has litter and barbed wire and and recklessly driven cars and motorbikes and horrendous fuckwads who put their dogs’ shit in plastic bags then leave the bags on tree stumps and in hedges. It contains people too, contrary to popular belief: quite a lot of them (I’m not counting the horrendous fuckwads who bag up and leave the dogshit as people). Without ever really intending to do so, on the walks I take nearer my house I regularly update an internal top three of regularly spotted walking strangers. As of May 2016, this read – and had read for several weeks – as follows:
1. Lycra Santa
2. Man Who Narrates Events To His Bulldog As They Occur
3. Woman Who Never Says Hello Back To Me And Smiles Like She Has A Little Secret
May is the time when the bluebells in the woods near my house take over from the primroses. In a path on Lustleigh Cleave redolent of old faery activity – the kind without gossamer wings or wands – I ate one of the last ones of the year, on Suzi’s urging, and it tasted not unpleasantly of flour and untart lemon. In Devon – less so than in the part of Norfolk where I used to live, where they are far thinner on the ground – I think of primroses as heralding spring, more than the daffodils that emerge in late January, which are often just early tester daffodils, sent out on suicide missions. In the folk song ‘The Blacksmith’, written at an unknown point by an unknown author, but brought into the modern age transcendentally by Planxty and the lesser-heard artistically bold initial incarnation of Steeleye Span during the early 1970s, the narrator sings of her lost metal-forger-love’s ‘good black billycock’ hat ‘crowned with primroses’, and I can see how such attire might be an extra bit of salt in the wound of losing him. She also sings that, were she with the blacksmith, she’d ‘live for ever’. Part of the magic of primroses is that you never see them die: in decline they are simply subsumed amid the growth spurts of lankier vegetation until one day it hits you that they’re no longer there.
Near a bank of them still fighting valiantly for space beside a fish-ladder tributary that makes a no-nonsense dash down to the Dart, I ran into my gardener friend Andy.
‘Oh, I was just thinking about you,’ Andy said.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Why was that?’
‘Someone’s nicked a shopping trolley and dumped it down there on the path. I thought to myself, If Tom’s heading down here today, he’s going to walk straight into that.’
I was touched that Andy would think about my welfare in such a way. His comment was also perhaps indicative of the fact that I had now lived in this part of Devon long enough for my rampant doziness to have become fairly common local knowledge. My status as someone who is a very observant person in some ways goes hand in hand with my status as someone who is a very unobservant person in lots of others. Combine this with my short-sightedness, and if I’m walking the paths at the edge of my local town, Totnes, at the same time as someone I know, there’s a high probability that they’ll see me before I see them. This can present a problem. I’m always worried about being perceived to be ignoring friends or acquaintances when in fact I’m just off in my own myopic dream universe. But I can overcompensate too. When a well-dressed woman in late middle age walked down the river path towards me one day last spring with her arms stretched out in greeting I readied myself to say hello. Was she a friend’s mum I had been introduced to at the pub a few weeks ago? The industrious widow I did stone-row conservation up on the moor with two winters ago? As she got within a few feet of my face I realised that the answer was an emphatic no to both questions. I had definitely never met this person before.
‘Can you tell me,’ she asked, arms still open, then paused, and I got my geographical head on, poised to offer succinct directions – perhaps to the castle, or the wharf, or the medieval hall a couple of miles up the river, ‘whether Nietzsche was Russian or German?’
‘German,’ I answered.
‘Well done!’ she said and walked briskly on.
A few weeks later, buying avocados at the greengrocer’s, I ran into the woman again. She didn’t appear to recognise me from our previous encounter but asked me why it said ‘Traffic’ on the T-shirt I was wearing. I told her that they were one of my favourite bands.
‘Do you go to Glastonbury to see them?’ she asked.
‘No, I haven’t been for years,’ I said. ‘And they split up in 1974.’
‘Is that your wife?’ she asked, pointing to a woman I’d never seen before, who was standing in the doorway, minding her own business.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t have one of those.’
‘And if you keep wearing T-shirts like that, you never will!’ she said, and walked off.