mention all the soils derived from them. In 1991 he took six Dartmoor moorstones, sculpted them and sited them in the nearby Teign Valley as part of the Common Ground charity’s ‘Local Distinctiveness’ project. One, split in two and intricately carved on its inner faces, sits on atiny island in the river Teign; another, in a wood, has water flowing from its summit; a third was built into a gap in a drystone wall. All are publicly accessible. For him, granite is the most elemental of stones: ‘stuff personified’ as he calls it, ‘quintessentially dumb matter … the mother of all rocks’.
*
We’re climbing the second tor’s slopes through sodden, browning bracken when we find it: three vertebrae, human-sized, chalk-white but fused between with bright orange cartilage. Next there’s a rib, and then another, chewed a little at the ends; then a wide smudge of fleece pounded by perhaps a year’s rain into the turf and looking like nothing so much as sodden tissue paper thrown carelessly down. A few paces on we come across a whitened skull with its empty eye sockets and one curly horn; like the vertebrae, it’s been picked completely clean by microorganisms, and washed by a winter’s worth of rain.
Rain is essential to the process of decay, providing the moisture that fungi and detritivores need to survive. Without enough rainfall, decomposition can slow right down, plant matter desiccating, dead animals – if they are not scavenged – becoming mummified, as saprophytic bacteria and moulds struggle to take hold. Too much rain, though, can be equally bad: prolonged flooding can produce anoxic conditions in the top layersof soil and lead to a rise in toxic by-products of decomposition, such as hydrogen sulphide – which in turn makes it difficult for worms and other invertebrates to survive. Soil fertility depends on the decay of plant and animal matter, aided by five million nematodes, ten million bacteria and ten thousand million protozoa per square metre of soil, and the autumn rain that’s falling softly around us today is helping everything rot down, from the browning bells of the heather to horse dung and the remains of this dead sheep.
Not that the living ones we pass seem very bothered. Whiteface Dartmoors, bred to cope with the poor upland grazing (and to withstand the weather), they are ‘hefted’ or ‘leared’ to a patch of this unfenced landscape from which they won’t stray, and the knowledge of which will be passed down from ewe to lamb: where to take shelter when the rain really sets in, where the best moor-grass is and where water may most easily be found. It won’t be long until these ewes are brought down off the moor to be bred, but for now they graze, dirty grey between the grey rocks and sky, utterly unperturbed by the drizzle that beads on their lanolin-rich wool. The Dartmoor ponies with their thick manes and tails are the same, the guard hairs of their winter coats shedding the raindrops easily so their skin beneath remains dry.
After Top Tor the sky lightens slightly and the mizzle fines briefly away, though the sun can’t quite breakthrough the low cloud. ‘Rain in the air has … the odd power of letting one see things in the round, as though stereoscopically,’ writes Nan Shepherd in her extraordinary paean to upland landscapes, The Living Mountain. ‘New depth is given to the vista … when the mist turns to rain there may be beauty there too.’
We can see other walkers on the next tor, the bright dots of their wet-weather gear incongruous against the old landscape – as must be our own. Two buzzards wheel easily overhead, looking for carrion or any small mammals that might take advantage of the brief respite from the weather; a fox scat, dissolving in the rain to grey fur and little bones, shows that there are plenty about.
By the time we’re coming down off the moor the drizzle has thickened again. We pass through a gate fastened with a lovely old iron latch,
*
We’re climbing the second tor’s slopes through sodden, browning bracken when we find it: three vertebrae, human-sized, chalk-white but fused between with bright orange cartilage. Next there’s a rib, and then another, chewed a little at the ends; then a wide smudge of fleece pounded by perhaps a year’s rain into the turf and looking like nothing so much as sodden tissue paper thrown carelessly down. A few paces on we come across a whitened skull with its empty eye sockets and one curly horn; like the vertebrae, it’s been picked completely clean by microorganisms, and washed by a winter’s worth of rain.
Rain is essential to the process of decay, providing the moisture that fungi and detritivores need to survive. Without enough rainfall, decomposition can slow right down, plant matter desiccating, dead animals – if they are not scavenged – becoming mummified, as saprophytic bacteria and moulds struggle to take hold. Too much rain, though, can be equally bad: prolonged flooding can produce anoxic conditions in the top layersof soil and lead to a rise in toxic by-products of decomposition, such as hydrogen sulphide – which in turn makes it difficult for worms and other invertebrates to survive. Soil fertility depends on the decay of plant and animal matter, aided by five million nematodes, ten million bacteria and ten thousand million protozoa per square metre of soil, and the autumn rain that’s falling softly around us today is helping everything rot down, from the browning bells of the heather to horse dung and the remains of this dead sheep.
Not that the living ones we pass seem very bothered. Whiteface Dartmoors, bred to cope with the poor upland grazing (and to withstand the weather), they are ‘hefted’ or ‘leared’ to a patch of this unfenced landscape from which they won’t stray, and the knowledge of which will be passed down from ewe to lamb: where to take shelter when the rain really sets in, where the best moor-grass is and where water may most easily be found. It won’t be long until these ewes are brought down off the moor to be bred, but for now they graze, dirty grey between the grey rocks and sky, utterly unperturbed by the drizzle that beads on their lanolin-rich wool. The Dartmoor ponies with their thick manes and tails are the same, the guard hairs of their winter coats shedding the raindrops easily so their skin beneath remains dry.
After Top Tor the sky lightens slightly and the mizzle fines briefly away, though the sun can’t quite breakthrough the low cloud. ‘Rain in the air has … the odd power of letting one see things in the round, as though stereoscopically,’ writes Nan Shepherd in her extraordinary paean to upland landscapes, The Living Mountain. ‘New depth is given to the vista … when the mist turns to rain there may be beauty there too.’
We can see other walkers on the next tor, the bright dots of their wet-weather gear incongruous against the old landscape – as must be our own. Two buzzards wheel easily overhead, looking for carrion or any small mammals that might take advantage of the brief respite from the weather; a fox scat, dissolving in the rain to grey fur and little bones, shows that there are plenty about.
By the time we’re coming down off the moor the drizzle has thickened again. We pass through a gate fastened with a lovely old iron latch,
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