This Means Moor
This week: Dartmoor, the police, cables, chairs and sleeping cold...
Happy Friday!
And welcome to the Heliocene, the epoch in which humankind finally recognised the supremacy of our nearest star over all puny lifeforms.
I spent most of this past week tramping around Dartmoor: five days and eighty kilometres of the kind of hiking that I will always struggle to classify as ‘work’. But that is undoubtedly what it has now become: yesterday I submitted my first two invoices as a professional outdoor instructor.
‘Lucky’ doesn’t begin to cover it.
Above: An extremely lucky human
This Means Moor
Dartmoor demands from its ramblers an ancient glossary: kists, reaves and leats; logan, staddle and bond stones; clitter, cleaves and clappers; growan, pluton and tors. The map could be read as a found poem; the land invites explorations historical, geological and botanical.
Here you’ll find not only the eponymous moorland, but also featherbed bog, heathland and ancient oak forests. At least 13 rivers arise on Dartmoor. Rivers arise—wonderful.
Above: Waterfall on the East Dart River, one of the many that arise on the moor
If you live in the southeast of England, then you don’t have ready access to wilderness—and you haven’t done since the Industrial Revolution. The closest for many is Dartmoor: 368 square miles of granite, an intrusive layer of plutonic rock; crystallised magma cooling into geology a sprightly 280 million years ago.
Wilderness is a charm. I write these words sitting in a box. Natural light does shine through the transparent panes on one edge of the box, but I’m isolated from the outdoors: not even a scent of nature can penetrate my sealed box. I had to buy an atomiser to pump out the restorative smell of Scots Pine.
My senses are no use inside the box, they can only cause discomfort—like when the rubbish truck goes past or the gardeners turn on their leaf-blowers. Inside the box, textures are polished smooth and geometry is planed square: these cushions, the carpet under my feet, the wood of the desk.
Unless I’m cooking, eating or bathing, this box holds my senses in suspension so that I can tether myself to the abstractions of the knowledge economy. The painted box makes me feel pinned, as in T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:
When I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin?
Well, I say that Prufrock should begin by leaving Middle England. Dartmoor, ho!
Above: Wild camping among the ruins of Foggintor quarry, granite from which helped build Nelson’s Column
Wilderness is where we go to unbox ourselves. It’s where our senses can hardly believe their luck: gorging on stiff smells and stubborn ground. It’s where we revel in the full breadth of our human faculties: endurance, strength, ingenuity, forbearance, comradeship, imagination and foresight.
We seek the wilderness for respite from the human mania for order and abstraction. The welcoming wilderness of Dartmoor, all jagged sights and weathered touch, feels orders of entropy more chaotic than my little box—but even this alien wasteland isn’t there in spite of us humans; it’s there because of us humans.
Above: A distinctive Dartmoor contradiction of ancient stone circle surrounded by modern pine plantation, Fernworthy Forest
Ten thousand years ago, I wouldn’t have found the barren land I trudge through today. Instead I would have been thrashing through the darkness of vast oak, hazel and elm forests, thorns clutching at my sides. It’s hard to believe, but this blasted heath once wore a technicolour dreamcoat of trees, covering all but the highest tors over 460m.
Indeed, the richness of the land and its warmer-than-now climate drew Mesolithic, Neolithic and then Bronze Age farmers and Dartmoor was once busily populated with industrious agriculturalists.
It was these happy-go-lucky folk who did the hard work of forest clearance, setting fires to burn clearings in the canopy for crop fields, which they parcelled off with stone wall reaves. On the high moor, where agriculturists fear to tread, cattle and sheep were grazed, happily gobbling up any green shoots of recovery in the forest.
These civilisations were a triumph, each successive generation a right winner. Writing of the landscape transformation in England more broadly, Oliver Rackham in The History of the Countryside goes so far as to claim:
to convert millions of acres of wildwood into farmland was unquestionably the greatest achievement of any of our ancestors
But with every tree cut down, landscape erosion tilted the ecology toward invisible processes that couldn’t be handled with the woodcutter’s axe. Over thousands of years of human occupation, the soil gradually acidified and the decaying vegetation of the dying trees became the peat bogs for which Dartmoor is now famous.
The climate changed, becoming wetter and colder, and gradually the people abandoned their huts and longhouses. And what they left for their ancestors was a wasteland: bare scraps of ancient oak woodland in an exposed landscape that is playground to the west wind.
Above: The classic view of Dartmoor: pony, clitter (rubble), Bronze Age menhir (standing stone) and an awful lot of exposed moor and heathland. And the television tower
But our forebears left something else behind as well. Something special. Today we recognise how special this special land is with a scattering of special titles: we call them Special Areas of Conservation.
There are 256 Special Areas of Conservation in England and Dartmoor boasts no fewer than four of them: Northern Atlantic wet heaths; European dry heaths; blanket bogs and old sessile oak woods—the latter includes the stunted oaks and layered lichen of venerable Wistman’s Wood.
Above: English oak growing among the moss-coated clitter of venerable Wistman’s Wood. Moss grew so thickly on the trunks that we found filmy ferns thriving at head height
If our forebears hadn’t stripped Dartmoor, would any of this wilderness be here? Would we find rare stag’s-horn clubmoss on the heath or Sphagnum imbricatum growing on the bogs? Would we have this sanctuary for the otters, the cuckoos and the horseshoe bats? And would I be here, unboxing myself?
On average, there’s two and a half times more rainfall on the moor than on the nearby Exe Estuary; I had four days of solid sunshine, only one where the weather got ‘a bit thick’.
I told you I was lucky.
Above: Maidenhair spleenwort, a wee fern, growing between the cracks in an old stone bridge across the Cholake River
Abolishing the Police
Abolishing the Police (An Illustrated Introduction) … provides rigorous and accessible analyses of why we might want to abolish the police, what abolishing them would involve, and how it might be achieved, introducing readers to the rich existing traditions of anti-police theory and practice.
Here are a few other things I’ve written recently:
🌱 Sentinels of Social Transformation in Borneo (Forests, Trees and Agroforestry, 29 September)
🌍 Happy Global Day of Climate Action! (25 September)
📚 A Fortune-Teller Told Me (Books Make Books, 17 September)
🥛 Maybe we’re doing okayish (11 September)
📣 Death of an Anarchist (4 September)
Any more for any more?
The first British people were black. With blue eyes. Also lactose intolerant. Cool.
Did you know that the cable you use can have a dramatic effect on how quickly your devices charge?
Did you also know that the comfort temperature range on your sleeping bag assumes that you’re using a sleeping mat with a R-value of 4.8? Most sleeping mats, including mine, are waaaaaaaaaaaay lower than that—not much better, in fact, than sleeping directly on the ground. Chilly.
Your gaming chair is trying to kill you, a funny article on the history of gaming chairs written by my friend Lewis Gordon. I’ll have nightmares about the ‘scorpion cockpit’.
Via the Future Crunch newsletter: ‘Four of the world’s six largest economies now have end dates for their carbon emissions. Bloomberg’.
Honestly, Future Crunch is the best thing on the internet at the moment:
Careful of that news live wire. It’s hanging there, well within range, and sizzling away like crazy right now. There's a lot of electricity running through it, millions of volts worth of ‘presidential’ debates and parliamentary sandpit fights and political dumpster fires and rising death counts and arguments over lockdowns.
We’re not suggesting you pretend the cable is invisible—it’s hard to ignore those sparks—but at least be sensible and put on some heavy duty gloves if you’re going to handle it.
We’ve still got a long way to go with this pandemic and if you keep on electrocuting yourself like that you're going to be a wreck by the time it’s over. The world needs you at full capacity for what comes next.
Amen.
I’m splitting my time this weekend between a family gathering and the important job of assessing the expeditions of young people in the Chilterns. I’m expecting burnt porridge, wet feet and broad grins.
Big love,
dc:
CREDITS
Hello, I’m David Charles and I wrote this newsletter. I publish another newsletter about reading called Books Make Books. I’m co-writer of BBC Radio Wales sitcom Foiled, and also write for The Bike Project, the Center for International Forestry Research and Thighs of Steel. Reply to this email, or delve into the archive on davidcharles.info.
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