12 MAY 2007, Page 58

Low life

Leading light

Jeremy Clarke

On Thursday last there were two guided twilight walks on offer to the Dartmoor tourist. One was A Bat and Moth Walk, the other Antiquities of Dartmoor. High Dartmoor’s stark and sullen solitudes are the perfect antidote to the hurly-burly of modern life. You can wander around up there among the greatest concentration of Bronze Age settlements, burial mounds and ceremonial monuments to be found anywhere in Europe, then return calm and refreshed to the clamour and babble of the Blairite bazaar. If you’re going after sundown, you’ll need a warm hat, though.

The Moth and Bat Walk was unfortunately cancelled due to lack of interest. ‘It’s all rather discouraging,’ said the man on the other end of the phone when I tried to book. So Antiquities of Dartmoor it was. You didn’t have to book for that one, you just turned up at the grid reference given in the visitor guide at the appointed hour.

Three other punters besides myself had chosen this walk — all of them women. One was a professional dog walker, one a chemistry teacher, the other a history teacher. I know this because the dog walker was particularly keen to know what everybody did for a living. (I said I packed mutton rings for a frozen food company.) The three of them took to one another immediately and chattered away like longlost sisters from start to finish of the walk, keeping up the banter even on uneven ground in the dark.

We had two guides: one leading, the other bringing up the rear. The one leading us was middle-aged, slightly nervous, and dressed like Nanook of the North. The one at the back was elderly and stooped but seemed more at ease in his surroundings. At the start of the walk the older one had said to me, ‘Do you come up on to the moor often?’ as if all the best people come up on to the moor and that he expected I was among them. When I said, ‘Only about once a year,’ he looked a bit shattered. It was very much the leading guide’s show, however. It was he who led us from antiquity to antiquity and lectured us about them.

First stop was on a hillside at the bottom end of an avenue of standing stones. The sun was dropping behind the western horizon by now. Treeless slopes littered with the remains of prehistoric settlements stretched away as far as the eye could see. The 21st century seemed disconcertingly remote. ‘This prehistoric stone row,’ began the guide, ‘is one of 76 known stone rows on Dartmoor.’ The women, all of them were dressed as if they’d come straight from the beach, suspended their lively conversation about a programme on Radio Four they’d heard recently to listen sceptically for a moment to what this man was banging on about now.

The hip-high stones ran in parallel lines uphill for 50 yards or so, after which the pattern became more complex and ill defined. ‘Can anyone hazard a guess as to its purpose?’ he said, with the calm confidence of someone holding four aces. Nobody could, or was willing to risk one. Twenty feet away a hunting kestrel was riding the breeze, the stop-go patter of its wing beats clearly audible. The older guide had heard it all before, presumably, and turned his patient, weather-beaten face towards the rapidly diminishing sun.

Well, the function of this particular stone row was as a lunar calendar, said the guide. It was aligned with the point on the horizon where the full moon rises on the day of its lowest trajectory, which comes around every 18.6 years. It was his own theory and he’d proved it by witnessing the alignment with his own eyes last year. Other stone rows pointed to the nadir of the bright star Arcturus’ journey around the northern skies. The sisterhood scoffed. ‘Arcturus!’ they jeered. ‘Why Arcturus!’ And why the moon? And what imbecile nonsense it was to assume that the stars are in exactly the same place today as they were 4,000 years ago! Such sturdy scepticism was to their credit. Even the poor old Bronze Age, it seems, can’t escape our patronising, half-witted attempts to remake the world in our own image.

I turned just in time to see the molten rim of the setting sun shrink to a single point of light and vanish. Then I asked the older guide to tell me what he thought. ‘Not far from this spot,’ he said, ‘Norman Scott’s Great Dane, Rinka, was shot dead by Andrew Newton. Was Andrew Newton a hitman hired by Scott’s ex-lover Jeremy Thorpe? We’ll never know. Are the stone rows astrological calendars? We’ll never know. In both cases the truth is probably more complicated than people imagine. Let’s leave it at that.’ ‘Amen,’ I said, cramming my warm hat over my head.