ACROSS THE BARREN MOOR

When I saw little rabbits with their heads crushed on roads
I knew I rode the wheel of the galaxy
Ted Hughes – "The Scream"

Such is humankind's relationship with nature, with the Goddess that in his most basic state, in the most modern of settings, he is connected to the play of her laughter, an innocent caught in the fragrant breath of her whim. Whether it's little rabbits being killed, the pitched cry of the buzzard jostling with a crow storm, or the late glint of the Rowan berry; from the frantic clutches of society to the wildest beauty of her un-lidded eye, we are all subject to her bounty and her ire.

Dartmoor might be wild at times, but it is not the most inhospitable place in the world, despite its reputation in Britain. The landscape, at its most basic, is managed, the broadleafs kept at bay by the punitive grazing of ponies, sheep and cattle placed there by their common owners. This is not a popular view. Farmers in particular like to think of the moor as untamed, but this is hardly true. And yet, despite the artificiality, Dartmoor is complete and, in the most desolate of places up on the High Moor, existing on the edge of ruin. Or so it seems.

Humankind’s relationship with the moor has not been a static certainty. Up until the late nineteenth century, the landscape was more industrialised, centred on the mining of tin, lead and silver. But economics intervened to take trade away, leaving the remnants of a worked land with nothing to deliver. What became the moor that we now know was created mostly by the slow eradication of the broadleaf forests that would have covered the whole granite cap leaving just the outcroppings we know as Tors.

Intriguingly, the forest was probably cleared away by our distant ancestors, altering the landscape to their suiting, establishing enclosed settlements on the fringes and setting up monumental offerings to the sanctity of their own Goddess. Stone rows and circles, menhirs and burials, portrayed a simple but effective relationship with nature: as a primitive calendar, as way-markers and boundaries between social groupings, and as a means to celebrate the passing seasons.

So while the twentieth century brought with it roads and their cars and in turn pollution, while it has brought forth poles and humming wires, luminescent garb and the vibram tramp of so many feet, all this provides just a layer of modernity over the moor, and what still remains proud and upright are man's first gestures towards the Goddess. True, heartfelt gestures that may be as clear and direct as any farmer's intervention, any shot bird or roadkill rabbit.

The ancestors would have understood then, as we should now, that we are all living at her mercy; farmer, pony, bird, rabbit, all exist at the whim of the Goddess. And that, if it should need saying, is the theme of this column; that in all things, in our actions big and small, in our relationships with each other, with the landscape and the plants and animals within it, in all that, we are just stardust riding the galaxy's wheel. The garden is all around us and the Goddess is still as bold and brash, as fragrant and profound as she ever was.

image credit: Simon Ward

Home