twisted and looped and hung with a single silver droplet of rain, and take a little sunken farm track down into the valley. The old bitumen has been entirely lost from the two edges, which now gurgle with fast water; a channel has also been scored through the centre, exposing the loose stones and rubble beneath. It’s clear that at some point in the long, wet winter a great quantity of water ran off the moor and down this lane.
Several rivers are born on the moor: the East and West Dart, of course (which meet at Dartmeet), but also the Bovey, Avon, Erme and Plym, the Teign, the East andWest Okement and dozens of tributaries and man-made leats dug to take water to individual farms and hamlets. And on a day like today you can see (and hear) the rain coming down off the moor in a thousand places. Tiny becks and rills, too small even to have a name, creep in creases through peat or make use of paths; water sheets sideways across roads and trickles down field drains; it gurgles at roadsides and swells the moorland streams, where it can find them, until they roar white and unstoppable on stony beds. Thinking about the water coming off the high ground calls to mind Alice Oswald describing the source of the East Dart in her hypnotic, ventriloquial, forty-eight-page narrative poem, Dart :
I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river
one step-width water
of linked stones
trills in the stones
glides in the trills
eels in the glides
in each eel a fingerwidth of sea
from ‘Dart’, 2002
Despite Dartmoor’s many blanket bogs and mires, it is considered a ‘flashy’ catchment area due in part to its impermeable bedrock, which means that when it rainsthe effects are seen almost immediately in its waterways. When the drizzle falling today on the high ground reaches the sea at Dartmouth it will find a wide, deep-water harbour, very different from the gin-clear, rocky rivers of the high moor with their fast, white eddies and tin-coloured depths. There, at last, it will become part of the sea, only to evaporate, condense, and fall again – perhaps on Devon’s uplands – as rain.
The track joins a narrow road between drystone walls and we put the dog on the lead in case of cars. The grazed, improved pasture on each side of the road is so green compared to the upland landscape we’ve just left. Spiky rushes may be making inroads here and there into damp corners and along the field drains, but these are the green postage stamps of the English imagination, here made from ‘newtakes’ – no longer newly taken at all – and walled off cleanly from the dull pewter and bronze of the moor above. But cultivation often comes at a cost: not only is unimproved land usually more biodiverse, but it also tends to hold on to water better. A recent study by the Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, showed that one square metre of intensively improved grassland held just forty-seven litres of water compared to the 269 litres per square metre held by unimproved ‘rhôs’ pasture with its naturally occurring purple moor grass and sharp-flowered rush.
The old drystone walls bounding the road where wewalk are shaggy with moss and dog lichen and pinned with medals of pennywort and the delicate buttonholes of maidenhair spleenwort, all beaded silver with rain. A few paces ahead of us a stonechat perches on the top of the wall and flicks his wings insouciantly. The call he makes echoes almost exactly the clash of wet pebbles loosed from the disintegrating road surface under our boots.
We pass through a hamlet where water drips from the eaves of a lovely old thatched longhouse, now with two expensive cars parked outside. A little burn gurgles in a stone-lined channel thick with yellow and brown ash leaves, and a dozen or so fieldfares startle from a garden and cluster into a hedge, a foretaste of the big flocks the coming winter will bring. Then we leave the road and take a
Several rivers are born on the moor: the East and West Dart, of course (which meet at Dartmeet), but also the Bovey, Avon, Erme and Plym, the Teign, the East andWest Okement and dozens of tributaries and man-made leats dug to take water to individual farms and hamlets. And on a day like today you can see (and hear) the rain coming down off the moor in a thousand places. Tiny becks and rills, too small even to have a name, creep in creases through peat or make use of paths; water sheets sideways across roads and trickles down field drains; it gurgles at roadsides and swells the moorland streams, where it can find them, until they roar white and unstoppable on stony beds. Thinking about the water coming off the high ground calls to mind Alice Oswald describing the source of the East Dart in her hypnotic, ventriloquial, forty-eight-page narrative poem, Dart :
I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river
one step-width water
of linked stones
trills in the stones
glides in the trills
eels in the glides
in each eel a fingerwidth of sea
from ‘Dart’, 2002
Despite Dartmoor’s many blanket bogs and mires, it is considered a ‘flashy’ catchment area due in part to its impermeable bedrock, which means that when it rainsthe effects are seen almost immediately in its waterways. When the drizzle falling today on the high ground reaches the sea at Dartmouth it will find a wide, deep-water harbour, very different from the gin-clear, rocky rivers of the high moor with their fast, white eddies and tin-coloured depths. There, at last, it will become part of the sea, only to evaporate, condense, and fall again – perhaps on Devon’s uplands – as rain.
The track joins a narrow road between drystone walls and we put the dog on the lead in case of cars. The grazed, improved pasture on each side of the road is so green compared to the upland landscape we’ve just left. Spiky rushes may be making inroads here and there into damp corners and along the field drains, but these are the green postage stamps of the English imagination, here made from ‘newtakes’ – no longer newly taken at all – and walled off cleanly from the dull pewter and bronze of the moor above. But cultivation often comes at a cost: not only is unimproved land usually more biodiverse, but it also tends to hold on to water better. A recent study by the Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, showed that one square metre of intensively improved grassland held just forty-seven litres of water compared to the 269 litres per square metre held by unimproved ‘rhôs’ pasture with its naturally occurring purple moor grass and sharp-flowered rush.
The old drystone walls bounding the road where wewalk are shaggy with moss and dog lichen and pinned with medals of pennywort and the delicate buttonholes of maidenhair spleenwort, all beaded silver with rain. A few paces ahead of us a stonechat perches on the top of the wall and flicks his wings insouciantly. The call he makes echoes almost exactly the clash of wet pebbles loosed from the disintegrating road surface under our boots.
We pass through a hamlet where water drips from the eaves of a lovely old thatched longhouse, now with two expensive cars parked outside. A little burn gurgles in a stone-lined channel thick with yellow and brown ash leaves, and a dozen or so fieldfares startle from a garden and cluster into a hedge, a foretaste of the big flocks the coming winter will bring. Then we leave the road and take a
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