On a clear Saturday evening, we welcomed a fantastic group of people onto our Dusk Sensorial walk at Sharpitor. This special event was the first inspiration walk of our Wild Words writing callout and we were delighted that so many people were keen to join us and be guided through connecting with the Dartmoor landscape at dusk. Curated by Kirsteen McNish, an experienced outdoor and community event organiser, this walk invited participants to slow down and turn off their phones. Our Chairman, John Howell, assisted in hosting the walk, bringing his decades of experience as a walk leader and guide. We were also joined by photographer Dave McMahon, who was documenting the walk.

Kirsteen McNish shares some of the context and aims of the walk: ‘As we pass from one hinterland of a season to another, we welcome in the change of the light, the perspectives of the seasons that have passed and the sensorial to welcome in the beginning of Autumn’s breath coming in on the wind. On this walk we gathered, turned off our phones, watched, listened, adjusted the lens we looked through and walked with strangers.

‘What can we see in this light that otherwise might be invisible? What is our sonic understanding? What can we touch or feel under our feet and between our fingers? We brought forth single words to star the encroaching dark, to dissolve into the nest of the sunken Tor considering the approaching new season and all that has passed before us.’

It felt important to welcome people to connect with Sharpitor in particular, as the summit of the tor is one of the four land holdings owned by the DPA. During World War II, RAF Sharpitor was established on Peek Hill, featuring a mast and buildings. In 1956, the station granted permission to be reconstructed for the “Gee” radio navigation system and intended to be occupied for a decade. However, delays occurred and the proposal came to nothing. Subsequently, Devon & Cornwall Police and Plymouth Corporation attempted to gain permission to build a reform school at Sharpitor. A public inquiry in June 1973, attended by Lady Sylvia Sayer representing the DPA, resulted in the refusal of development on the site. Today, Sharpitor stands untouched and inviting, a prime example of a collapsed summit tor with whole communities of rare mosses and lichens growing amoung the rocks.

Kirsteen told us: ‘I could not have hoped for a better group of people that were generous, inquisitive and open to both John and I as group leaders and to each other. As the wind whipped up atop the tor I felt a communing and the freedom it brought, the looks on each face and the energy brought collectively to do what we so rarely do – to stop, watch, listen and congregate in silence.’

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Clittered rocks lead to the summit, a stone row like broken teeth, barely visible amongst tussocks, yellow star flowers clumped with heather, pinheaded yellow fungi discreetly hidden under grass that ripples here like waves. Burrator reservoir shines like the moons surface in the distance bouncing off light of a fading sun. From the sunken nest we sit, a 360-degree vantage point, a clock, a cog in the year.  The dorsal fin of Leather Tor, somehow otherworldly rises into view stealthily under fleeting light- a patina of yellow and green beckoning us forth, almost animal like in its bulk – an imposing eruption from the depths.

Reaching the top, we meet a triptych of places – Cornwall waves to us here in a thousand blues, fields criss-crossing like stitches or a cracked bird’s eggshell. The Tamar and South Hams seem to swell and rise, wraith like and shimmering.

Druids walked their paths here, using the rocking stones for rituals, heralding the seasons and an offering up to elements. It is said if you listen closely, you can hear whispers that the stones keep stored in their granite edges, faces appear too if you consider the rocks, turning their amphibian like faces to the skies, and nestling into each other, clustered and congregating.

Hut circles are secluded in lush bracken like rings in a tree trunk in eleven O’S, gaping and hungry, mouthing the moss and measuring the millennia. Fading light turns the rocks mauve, sheep graze like ghosts amongst the remains of 11 huts, 11 homes, 11 groups of kith and kin, drawn here for sustenance and the sacred. What hopes were brought here to rest in this otherworldly watchful place?

Suddenly an invisible source seems to whip up the ponies spooked by things we can’t see.  We are here, in the hinterland of Summer and Autumn starting to come into view in a spectral haze, colder whisps of wind being breathed into the hills, taking hold within browning bracken, reinvigorating lichen russets and golds about to turn as the Wheatsheaf skittish and dotting the grass spirals its song an arm’s length away, our guardian amongst the granite.

Sitting in the cleave of the hill, I sit snug from the wind in its large stone matchbox, a coffin, a place where things were held and felt, hair whipping face and stone. Behind my head a large stone finger points to secrets unknown beneath secreted in the soil. The hills are saturated and then dulled again, reminding us os all that is transient and constant, peopled and deserted.

The road snakes away to Princetown miniaturising horses, cows, people and cars, underlining the specks we are thrown to the wind. A haven is found here in its sunken summit, a nest, a vantage point, a hide, a home, a huish, a hush. A place to begin and end as the first fingers of dusk reach out over the horizon.

-Kirsteen McNish

Images: Simon Buckley, Not Quite Light photography

Main Image: Dave McMahon