We came into Devon meaning to pass through, and stayed the better part of a week. Dartmoor tends to do that. You pull in at the edge, promise yourselves a single night, and the moor keeps handing you reasons to stay.
Walden never actually crossed into the park. We found a spot just outside the boundary and walked in from there each morning, which felt like the right way to meet a place like this: on foot, slowly, with no particular schedule and the weather making most of the decisions.
The tors
Dartmoor is granite that never quite finished being buried. All across the high ground the rock breaks through the grass in great weathered stacks, the tors, some of them the size of a house, worn round and soft-edged by a few hundred million years of wind and rain. We spent our days walking from one to the next, scrambling up whichever looked climbable and sitting at the top while the cloud shadows raced across the moor below.
There is nothing manicured about it. The paths come and go. The bogs are real, and will take a boot if you are careless. It is the kind of landscape that asks a little of you and gives back more, and by the third day we had stopped checking the map so often and started simply following the ridgelines.
The ponies
Then there are the ponies. Dartmoor ponies have roamed here for centuries, semi-wild and entirely unbothered by us. You come over a rise and there they are, heads down in the grass, tails to the wind, working the moor the way they always have. They watched us pass with the mild indifference of animals who were here long before the footpaths and will be here long after. We kept our distance and our hands to ourselves, which is the deal, and they let us share the hill for a while.
The weather does as it likes
Dartmoor weather is its own character in every day. It would be blue and still at breakfast, sheeting rain by mid-morning, and clear again about the time we had given up and pulled the waterproofs on. We learned to stop fighting it. The reward for walking through the wet was the light that came after, and more than once the whole sky cracked open into a rainbow that seemed to stand right on the moor.
One evening it gave us two at once.
We came for a night and left after almost a week, boots caked, thoroughly rained on, already talking about when we would come back. Some places you visit. Dartmoor you get weathered into. It is rugged and unsentimental and quietly beautiful, and it never once performs for anyone. That, we think, is exactly why it stays with you.
