Britain is crisscrossed by an amazing network
of ancient trackways.
These remarkable routes are our oldest roads and have been travelled
for more than 5,000 years.
He's quite small, isn't he?
He is small, but he's mighty.
Small but mighty. I like that.
Walked by pilgrims and traders, hunters and invaders,
Celts and Romans,
Saxons and Vikings, each track is bound up in myth,
mystery and legend.
Of all the archaeological finds I've come across, when I heard about it,
my jaw actually dropped.
I'm on a quest to connect the clues and rediscover the stories hidden
among Britain's ancient pathways.
I want to find out what it is that tempts today's travellers to go back
in time and rediscover these mystic tracks.
Do you reckon that's the North Star? It's not the brightest star
in the sky, but it's probably one of the most useful.
It's a bit like me!
Smell the leather. You can still smell it.
1,900-year-old leather.
Isn't that absolutely amazing?
This week, I've come to Dartmoor in Devon to walk the ancient routes
that connect Christianity and paganism through centuries-old
stories of sacred sites, extraordinary stones
and literature's most notorious hound.
HOWLING
These are the paths our ancestors once followed,
the ancient tracks that we in Britain can still walk today.
Dartmoor has been described as England's last great wilderness.
It covers an area of some 370 square miles.
Mankind has lived on Dartmoor since the Stone Age and, over time,
has left an indelible mark on this exposed landscape.
I've been to Dartmoor loads of times and, whenever I come,
I hear some new weird and wonderful story about the place that really
raises the hairs on the back of my neck but I've never walked across
the whole moor - I don't really know how the whole thing fits together.
I do know that this is going to be a journey through time.
I'm going to hear lots of tales from different periods and I've brought
my own timepiece with me as my companion, although exactly why,
you won't know till the end of the programme.
Across Dartmoor is a network of ancient trackways,
shrouded in history and mystery.
I'll be following a procession of medieval stone crosses along the
Abbot's Way, before heading in search of consecrated ground along
the old Lych Way or Way of the Dead.
Along my journey, I'll retrace the footsteps of Britain's greatest detective,
plunge the depths of a bottomless lake and come face-to-face
with a fantastical array of four-legged beasts.
And with a little detective work of my own,
I hope to unravel the timeworn secrets that remain deep-rooted in
this vast, untamed terrain.
CHORAL CHANTING
My journey begins at Buckfast Abbey on the edge of Dartmoor.
For many centuries,
people have been drawn to this sacred site in search of the divine.
Buckfast Abbey was mentioned in the 11th-century Domesday Book
and in 2018, will be 1,000 years old.
It's fortunes have ebbed and flowed through the years,
from wielding great power over medieval pagan societies
to its devastating 16th century demise,
after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries.
Then, in 1852,
French monks who had been exiled from their own monastery came here
to what was then a deserted, ruined and flattened ancient monastic site
and after a lot of hard work and inspiration,
they created this moorland sanctuary.
For these 19th-century monks,
re-cultivating this abandoned land was essential and today's monks
are equally self-sustaining.
Religion, it seems, has prospered here
by harnessing the natural world.
The monks' very survival has depended on it.
Spiritually replenished,
the abbot has offered to show me the first of the crosses that will guide
me across the wilderness ahead.
Is this the original position of this cross?
No, no, no, no.
It was brought from South Brent.
So what was the significance of putting it right here?
Well, because traditionally,
the Abbot's Way starts at Buckfast and goes on to cross the moor to
Tavistock and so this is really a starting point.
So this has become the first marker stone?
It's become the first marker stone, yes.
Yes. Oh, well. If you don't hear from me in a week...
We'll send the Dartmoor rescue after you.
It's all right, Tony!
Bye. God bless, bye-bye.
And as well as the abbot's good wishes,
I have another guide to enlighten my journey.
There's a little book from about 1935,
which gives a really nice picture of what it would have been like
travelling along this road.
It's called The Abbot's Way.
It was priced at sixpence and it says...
"For several hundred years, this thoroughfare witnessed
"colourful pageantry of medieval life."
It goes on to lament that, "Fragments alone remain today."
It's a funny word, that, fragments, isn't it?
But it's true - nowadays, all you get are these tiny little hints
of what life would have been like here and it's up to us
to use our detective work to pull them back together.
MAN SINGS ANCIENT FOLK SONG
It is really rather bizarre,
walking down a trackway in the 21st-century and coming across a
bloke singing a medieval song.
Yeah. No, this is something I do a lot.
I think it's a great way of connecting with the land.
I mean, we're in a land where, well, this is called the Abbot's Way now,
and monks and Abbots would have walked here in the past and we know
that it existed 1,000 years ago and this song I'm singing is the oldest
song we know of, written with the music and the words.
So we can be pretty sure that some monks would have sung this song,
maybe even on this path. Shall we walk a way together? Yeah.
Do we know much about the actual bloke who wrote that song you're singing?
He was called Godric of Finchale. Finchale? Finchale, yeah.
It's a part of Northumberland...
With my pilgrim for company,
I followed the Abbot's Way to where it splits into two -
one going to Buckland Abbey and the other to Tavistock and it's at this
junction where I find the largest and oldest
of Dartmoor's stone crosses.
Do we know what this cross is?
Well, it's called Nun's Cross,
or Seward's Cross and we definitely know that it was here in 1240,
because King Henry III sent 12 of his knights to perambulate
the Dartmoor boundaries and we know they visited this cross.
This is real history, isn't it?
It is, as is the song I sung earlier, which is...
We know will have been definitely sung at the time this cross was
around, because that was written in 1160, just before this...
We have a record of this cross.
So it's a great joy to be able to sing it here and connect the two.
Yeah, you serenade it and I'll head off up the hill.
Thanks, Tony. Lovely to meet you. And you. Bye.
HE SINGS ANCIENT SONG
My singing pilgrim makes me think of the first of Dartmoor's many
cautionary folktales.
As the moor rises gently to a high ridge,
I'm climbing one of three hills here -
this one known as Piper's Hill.
Way over there, can you see that mound of stones?
That's on top of the second one and a third one is that little one there
with the tree there and these
mounds are supposed to be pipers who are frozen for all eternity as a
punishment - and what did they do wrong?
They played their musical instruments on the Sabbath.
And that is a typical Dartmoor story,
that conjunction of the pagan and Christianity.
I wonder what the very first version of that story was.
If only these stones could talk!
Or pipe, I should probably say, shouldn't I?
Every step I make now across this magnificently bleak and stony
expanse takes me back in time,
back way beyond the struggle between church and paganism and back into
another glorious Dartmoor mystery.
I've got something for you here, look -
slap bang in the middle of a deserted moor, you've got this.
Great name, the Drizzlecombe Bone.
It's four metres tall, it's about six tonnes in weight and really,
kind of asks you more questions than it gives answers, doesn't it?
What period is it?
Well, it's surrounded by prehistoric stuff,
so presumably it's late Neolithic, early Bronze Age.
It's got this big knobbly thing at the top of it,
which presumably gives it its name, but most importantly, what's it for?
Is it some kind of way-marker?
Is it a place where people met, like at a fayre or something,
or is it like Stonehenge, part of some enormous prehistoric clock?
Which reminds me, time to move on!
These ancient places are a wonderful spark
for the traveller's imagination, each one a piece in Dartmoor's
grand, complex jigsaw puzzle.
Bidding the Bone goodbye, and with barely another soul in sight,
the mind tends to drift off to stories of the supernatural and of,
dare I say it, apparitions!
And there's one particular apparition that crops up all over
the high moorland of Devon and Cornwall - the Pixie.
In the old days, if a traveller lost their way and got really confused,
they were sometimes referred to as being pixie-led but I'm a seasoned
traveller, I know how to handle pixies
by using a very ancient trick.
If I put my coat on inside out,
it'll so confuse them that it'll keep them off my back and I'll be
able to stick to the right track.
Every year, the nearby town of Ottery St Mary is invaded by hordes
of local children dressed as impish elves, to mark Pixie Day.
CHURCH BELLS CHIME
SCREAMING
Legend has it these pixies were caught trying to silence
the town's church bells and banished to a nearby cave.
I think these pixies are a force to be reckoned with.
I'd better find their cave and pay my respects.
Oh, yeah, there it is.
Look, you see?
In there.
Now, I'm told that if I want to ensure that I get down safe,
then I have to leave some silver.
Here's two half crowns.
Two and six.
Five bob.
That should keep me safe on my journey back down again, shouldn't it?
Pixies and the paranormal held a particular fascination for the
creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The legendary writer was taken in by phoney photographs of fairies,
believing these celestial creatures to be real.
But lurking on the moor,
ready to inspire Conan Doyle's most famous novel, was the legend
of a very different apparition.
Not as charming as those pixies, though,
because here on Dartmoor, this...
HOWLING
..became the inspiration for the most spine-tingling tale
in the whole of detective fiction -
Sherlock Holmes and The Hound Of The Baskervilles.
The ancient Abbot's Way across Dartmoor
is a landscape steeped in centuries-old myths and legends,
and a location that inspired
one of our most iconic literary masterpieces.
The Hound Of The Baskervilles,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's love letter to Dartmoor and all its mysteries.
They reckon that when he came here in 1901 to recce the place,
he used to walk up to 18 miles a day
in order to find suitable locations
for his terrible tale.
The plot of this complex murder mystery
attributes the sudden death of the wealthy Sir Charles Baskerville
to a family curse involving a supernatural hound.
Dartmoor had provided the inspiration,
cast and backdrop for this beastly apparition.
And The Hound Of the Baskervilles also marks the resurrection
of the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle had killed off Holmes eight years earlier,
but the celebrated sleuth
simply couldn't be left out of such a ripping yarn.
The inspiration for The Hound Of the Baskervilles's
most bloodcurdling scene
is just a short walk off the Abbot's Way,
in Dartmoor's most dangerous bog.
Sherlock Holmes himself
said that Dartmoor would be the perfect setting
if the devil ever did really want to get his hands on the affairs of men,
and there's this wonderful bit at the end of the book
where the arch villain, John Stapleton,
is actually killed by the bog in the centre of Dartmoor.
It says, "Somewhere in the heart of the great Grimpen Mire..."
that's actually here,
"..down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in,
"this cold and cruel-hearted man is forever buried."
Right down there.
For pilgrim travellers,
straying from the safety of the path
and onto this wild, untamed bog was fraught with danger,
just as deviating from the Christian to the cult
was seen by many as a step too far.
But remarkably, it was this very path
that Conan Doyle himself chose to travel.
I'm intrigued to find why the writer
was so fascinated with Victorian spiritualism.
It's so bizarre, isn't it?
On one hand, you've got this kind of man
who invents fictional CSI,
and yet, on the other hand,
he was prepared to countenance stuff which, nowadays,
we would think of as weird and a bit daft.
It does seem like a contradiction to us now,
and I think we very much parcel these apart,
but in the 19th century,
believers thought that they had discovered a scientific religion.
And he said, "I believe it, because I've seen it.
"If I have to go back to believing in things that I haven't seen,
"I might as well go back to the old religions."
When I talk on this subject, I'm not talking about what I believe...
..I'm not talking about what I think.
I'm talking about what I know.
I'm talking about things that I've handled, I've seen,
that I've heard with my own ears.
It's kind of crude empiricism, right?
They thought that they were rejecting the old ideas,
that you had to believe on the basis of faith,
and now, you could sit at your kitchen table
and you could experiment.
You could rap, you could be with a medium,
and you knew that there was an afterlife
because you could see and touch and talk to the dead.
Is there anything in Hound Of The Baskervilles
that reflects his belief in spiritualism?
Well, that's quite a spiritualist story in many ways.
The Hound Of The Baskerville is very clearly an attack
on this old-fashioned idea of hell.
Sherlock Holmes jokes about, in this investigation,
he might be up against the devil.
What this story does is disprove the existence of this supernatural,
hellish beast, but it opens the door for other,
more modern understandings of supernatural phenomena.
It is odd, isn't it, that he should set this story
in the theatre of Dartmoor, which, on one hand,
seems to me, almost to epitomise the very early Christian religion,
and yet, on the other hand,
it keeps spinning off into weird and pagan beliefs
almost everywhere you look.
Yeah. Yeah, this place, where the primitive is always with us.
It's important, I think,
that you get a sense
that the ancient beliefs of the Neolithic people
maybe are not too dissimilar from the spirit beliefs
that he's arguing for elsewhere.
Whatever Conan Doyle's obsessions,
The Hound Of the Baskervilles is a wonderfully potent story.
So potent, in fact,
I feel the creature's brooding presence everywhere I look.
Wait a minute.
And here he comes. Thundering towards me.
It's The Hound Of The Baskervilles.
Aren't you gorgeous? No, not gorgeous.
Absolutely terrifying.
Have one of these. That's it.
The lovely Hound Of The Baskervilles.
Come on, come and show yourself.
Let's have a look at you. Look at that.
Isn't he lovely? Oh!
And very slobbery, too.
The Slobbery Hound Of The Baskervilles.
I promised you four-legged creatures on my wander through
this formidable terrain...
..but none say Dartmoor more
than these iconic ponies.
Running untethered across the moors,
I truly feel I'm intruding on their turf,
a visitor on their land.
But what I want to know is how far back these beautiful creatures
have adorned the wild Dartmoor landscape.
Well, not all the animals on Dartmoor
are quite as threatening
as The Hound Of the Baskervilles, are they?
Well, not all, except George when he's hungry.
These are Dartmoor ponies.
They are renowned for their fantastic temperament,
being children's riding ponies.
But, of course, they have a long history connected to Dartmoor.
I suppose, in the old days,
they would have been working horses, wouldn't they?
Yeah, I mean, if you go right the way back through history,
they were used in tin mining...
You know, this is the old-fashioned quad bike, isn't it?
This is the proper quad bike.
She so wants to walk on,
but there is one question that I want to ask...
Don't be impatient. ..before we go,
which is, do we know that there were little ponies on Dartmoor
a long time ago, like, in the Bronze Age?
Well, we do. Isn't that amazing?
Prehistory, we have proof, because, in the 1970s,
there was an archaeological dig carried out on Shaugh Moor,
on the other side of Dartmoor, and from seed samples that were taken,
they actually found some hoof prints,
and they were similar-sized to a Dartmoor pony's feet.
So, yes, we had cattle, sheep and ponies on Dartmoor 3,500 years ago.
We've got the answer to the question now.
Do you want to walk on? Come on, then.
Back on the Abbot's Way to Sheepstor Church,
and I'm keeping my ears peeled for a group of bell-ringers
who can help me figure out
the baffling tale of nearby Crazywell Pool.
You see, Dartmoor has no natural lakes,
so I think getting to the bottom of this aquatic conundrum
might not be as easy as it seems.
BELLS RING
Hello, Peter. Good morning. Good morning.
How long have you been associated with the bells in this church?
70 years.
And were you the first of your family?
No. Father and grandfather both rung in this church.
So, what's the link between the bells and the pool?
There's a lot of history,
and maybe some legend attached to Crazywell Pool.
Parishioners wanted to know what depth it was.
Grandfather said they had six bell ropes
from the shore to try and measure the depth,
but it ended in failure.
So, it was even deeper than six ropes tied together?
Yes. It is mysterious, isn't it?
There's a lot of mystery attached to it.
The site of this bottomless, dark-water lagoon
is marked by its namesake, Crazywell Cross.
This lake is so well hidden,
that when it's approached from the open heath,
it only reveals itself at the last moment.
There it is.
Imagine a long bell rope dropping into that.
BELL CHIMES
At 100 feet, 200 feet, 300 feet,
they still haven't got to the bottom.
360. They've run out of rope, and still it goes down and down.
Infinitely deep.
The Water Board say it's a Tudor tin mine,
and it's actually 16 feet deep.
The locals say that's rubbish, the Water Board never measured it,
or if they did, they didn't do their job properly.
But what it proves, indisputably, is that in a landscape like this,
you can believe anything you like, even things which aren't possible.
At least, not in the material world.
The hound, the pixies, the occult leanings of Conan Doyle.
I've certainly encountered
more than my fair share of Dartmoor's superstitions,
but even greater mysteries lie along the Abbot's Way.
Up ahead, I'll become spellbound by an ancient witch,
and find out who won the battle between a vicar and a savage beast.
ANIMAL GRUNTS
Dartmoor, a land of sweeping views and enduring legends, and as I
follow the primitive tracks across this epic landscape,
I'm continually drawn back in time by exhilarating vistas
that fuel the imagination.
Then suddenly, appearing like a mirage,
I'm halted by the sight of something actually very real.
Somewhere where serving time comes with the territory.
Surrounded by unrelenting wilderness,
you could call it Britain's Alcatraz.
And I for one am more than happy to keep my distance.
There's not much doubt what that is, is there?
Dartmoor - the most infamous prison in the whole of Britain.
Imagine, even if you managed to get over those perimeter fences,
what would you see in front of you? Freedom?
No, just mile after mile of bog-land - wherever you went,
you would be able to be seen.
Not much chance of escape.
No wonder today, that single word, Dartmoor,
is still the epitome of gloom and terror.
For Dartmoor's prisoners, time must have moved very slowly.
But not for me, as the constant tick-tick-ticking tells me it's time
I travelled on - or travelled back, I should say,
back in time beyond recorded history, back thousands of years, in fact.
This is Merrivale,
one of Dartmoor's most significant Bronze Age settlements.
Maybe I'm a bit weird,
but this kind of thing in the landscape gets me really excited.
Can you see that there's a long row of stones and it goes, look,
it's got to be 200 metres in that direction but it's not just one row.
Look, there's a row here and there is a row behind it.
Incredibly impressive.
Huge amount of work.
And if that wasn't enough...
Look, you've got exactly the same here.
The twin rows of stones, absolutely parallel to the first row.
And thirdly,
we've got some bloke who appears to be committing what looks like the
worst archaeological crime imaginable.
Is that a sander? It's not a sander. It's a scanner. A scanner?
Yeah. What it's looking for is a microchip
we've hidden on this stone.
Oh, thank goodness. Yeah. I thought there might be sandpaper on it.
I couldn't think of the word for the machine. Polishing it up. Yeah.
No, unfortunately, these stones are under threat from...
A lot of our granite artefacts, especially ones in accessible
locations, from theft. So to try and combat that,
we put microchips within the stones, so if they do get stolen,
will be able to hopefully track them down.
So you put in a little chip like you would in case your dog got nicked?
Exactly the same technology. It's the same type of microchip.
That is ridiculous. Why would people nick these?
They are thousands of years old.
They are irreplaceable. It's just so brutally stupid, isn't it?
Yeah. What do you think they originally were?
I think these monuments are very complex.
They're associated with the landscape views.
They're setting in the landscape as well and the burial mounds just behind us.
We've got the stone circle and other cairns in this area.
I think we've got a kind of approach, like a medieval church.
It could have been a processional way up to venerate the ancestors in
the cairn, or it could have been venerating the landscape.
It could have been a territorial marker.
So many different uses probably occurred at these monuments.
So in an odd way,
not that far removed from all the Christian crosses that I've seen
throughout here. I'm not going to say anything else.
I just think this place is so wonderful, I'm just going to wander around,
have a look at it. OK. Nice to meet you. Nice to see you. Bye. Cheers.
Whatever the reasons behind these stone rows,
archaeologists believe a prehistoric community thrived in Merrivale,
in what would have been a much warmer climate.
It's difficult to imagine now,
but this moorland was once abundant with luscious forests
and animal prey.
Today's terrain is relentless, and I have to pick my way carefully
through the stones to keep my feet dry.
Almost!
Dartmoor's endless capacity to surprise, though,
is about to offer up another arresting spectacle.
I've just come off my path a bit.
There's Abbott's Way, going all along the top of those hills there.
And suddenly, it's boggy morass and I'm soaking wet,
almost up to my knees now but the reason that I came here was, I can't
go any further than this, but I wanted to show you that.
That little tor thing is called the Sphinx.
And just like its statuesque namesake,
this remarkable rocky formation attracted Victorian travellers,
keen to see and - as this Victorian picture shows -
photograph the Sphinx for themselves.
But, Liz, you don't call it the Sphinx, do you?
I certainly don't, no.
That's known as Vixen Tor.
I think the Sphinx is a relatively modern name.
It's been known as Vixen Tor for hundreds, thousands of years.
Who was the vixen?
Well, the vixen, that is the notorious witch of Vixen Tor.
Called? Vixana.
Vixana! Vixana the Witch.
What did she do? She had a liking for travellers who were walking
across the path that you're on, on the Abbott's Way.
You mean the bog I've just been through?
Yeah, that one, the very same.
So she had a method of conjuring up a mist and luring unwary travellers
into her bog.
When she caught sight of them,
she would clap her hands and cackle with delight and pull down the mist
so the traveller was suddenly enveloped in this swirling,
mysterious mist, became scared, and, before they knew it,
they were sinking deeper and deeper and deeper into Vixen Tor mire.
And she'd leap off the tor, fly over on her broomstick,
where the fingers of the traveller would just be seen sinking into the
bog and before they disappeared, she'd snap them off
one by one - snap, snap, snap, snap - and suck out the inside...
..before running back up to the tor.
It's a great story.
I could listen to that all day but there's another thing about this
environment that really impresses me and that's the sense of time here.
You go off, you've been walking for a couple of hours but actually,
you've got no idea how long you've been walking.
Do you find that? Oh, absolutely.
Time disappears. I think it's one of the other magics of the moor.
Time stands still. It has no meaning.
Well, unfortunately, time does still have meaning for me.
I've got to get on.
Anyway, very nice to talk to you.
If you hear a scream in the next quarter of an hour,
you'll know what happened. Thanks a lot. Bye. Bye.
Vixana sounds like a right horror story.
Almost on the outskirts of Tavistock now,
if I were a medieval pilgrim,
I think I'd be ready for another sign that I'm on the right path.
Standing steadfast among the golfers,
the seven-foot-high Pixies Cross may well provide spiritual guidance
for players praying for a good shot.
It certainly is a miracle that the cross has withstood the march of
time to stay on course!
Pilgrims and monks used the cross to point the way to Tavistock Abbey
and escaped prisoners from Princetown
were whipped at the cross as punishment.
In some ways, though, it's incredible that these crosses
still exist at all, with dramatic tales of total upheaval
during the Reformation.
The one that intrigues me most took place in the 16th century,
when Henry VIII got rid of all the monks and dissolved all the monasteries
and imposed a set of much more puritan vicars in their place and
the village of Walkhampton got this particularly zealous vicar,
who was absolutely determined to get rid of every last religious icon,
every crucifix, every statue of a saint,
every cross in his entire parish.
When he found out about the Pixies Cross, he instructed his
parishioners to destroy the offending granite emblem.
However, with no volunteers forthcoming,
he took the tools and the task into his own hands.
So he's all on his own attempting to hack away the old cross when
suddenly, he hears this roaring noise and he looks down and there is
a big black bull,
staring him right in the eyes with dribble coming out of its mouth
and pawing the ground with its hoof and he clearly wants the vicar to
get out of the way but the vicar isn't backing down and the vicar
stares at the bull and the bull stares at the vicar and the vicar
stares at the bull and the bull stares at the vicar and eventually
it's night and neither of them are going to back down and eventually,
next morning, all the villagers are gathered round and there's still
this stand-off until finally,
they manage to extract a promise from the vicar that he won't
destroy the cross...
..and they lead the bull away.
While the story of the bull and the parson may be just another of
Dartmoor's many legends, it does hint at a deeper meaning -
something about nature versus religious obsession
though in this case,
it was bullish persistence that ultimately saved this ancient cross!
My walk across Dartmoor may not yet be complete,
but the final ticking of the clock is looming
as I follow the old Lych Way, or the Way of the Dead.
# The old Lych Way... #
Having laid the Abbot's Way to rest,
I'm now in the wake of the dead
on the all-together more macabre old Lych Way.
This Way of the Dead was the final journey
for Christians who died on this moor.
Their religion meant that, no matter where they passed away,
their body had to be laid to rest in consecrated or sacred ground.
Lych is an old English word for corpse
and a lichway was a path that they used to carry the corpses
along on their way to get buried.
A lich gate was the little gate in the side of a church
that the corpse came through,
and a lich-owl was another word for a screech owl,
cos people used to think that the noise it made was an omen of death.
# They'll lift me up
# And lay me down
# Lay me down
# Gently down
# Till I reach consecrated ground
# Along the old Lych Way. #
Enroute, I encounter folk singer Steve Knightley,
who weaves this path's rather mournful undertaking
into beautifully evocative verse.
Song called The Old Lych Way, which sounds great
when you sing it in a church or cathedral.
But it's sort of like old English, and there's a piece of almost
Latin plainsong in it. Yeah.
And it mentions the places along the route
where people would stop just to rest.
You can imagine carrying a corpse 12 miles
is a pretty exhausting task.
But it isn't actually an ancient song?
No, it's not an ancient song,
but it's very much in that style, you know.
It's very much in that sort of timeless folk style, if you like.
You know, this area really confuses me
because on one hand, looking out here,
it's just burgeoning with life, isn't it?
All the flowers coming out,
the leaves looking so intensely green,
and yet this is actually a way of death.
You imagine what it's like in midwinter here,
when you're carrying your nearest and dearest 12 miles, Lydford is,
that way to the west.
It would have been the most extraordinary,
I mean, a tragic way of taking your loved ones to be buried.
So, Lydford...
Uphill? Is that where you're heading? Yeah.
Uphill all the way. See you.
All uphill. Good luck.
Cheers. I'll see you.
# They'll lift me up
# And lay me down
# Lay me down
# Gently down
# Till I reach consecrated ground
# Along the old Lych Way. #
And, like Steve, these local actors have also been inspired
by the old Lych Way,
as they recreate the dramatic procession of the deceased
to a Christian burial and the next life.
They, too, are reconnecting with the past
as they negotiate the same primitive clapper bridges
that once conveyed Dartmoor's dead.
# Cross the Dart again
# Along the old Lych Way
# Along the old Lych Way. #
It's compelling to think of the urban flow
of generations of human settlement
in a place so enduring as Dartmoor,
the moors and woods bearing witness down the millennia,
and none more so than the magical and primeval Wistman's Wood.
The name Dart, as in Dartmoor,
is said to derive from Derwent,
the ancient name for oak trees.
LYRE PLAYS
It's here I have my first meeting
with a member of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids.
And, by the sound of it, a man in perfect harmony with nature.
Andy, that music so appropriate for this wood, isn't it?
Yeah, it's perfect, isn't it?
Just the kind of soundtrack to a landscape like this.
And this is what Dartmoor would have looked like before it was a moor?
Absolutely. This is one of the, um...
the last remaining pockets of ancient woodland on Dartmoor.
Um, and, yeah, once the whole of Dartmoor
would've been forest like this.
So, really, when we look out over the wild expanse of Dartmoor,
we're looking at, um...
..the ruins of an ancient wild wood.
Are there any particular stories or folk tales
that tie in this area with Druids or Druidism?
We know from Roman sources that the Druids worshipped in sacred groves,
and here we are in a sacred grove,
and this would've been a bit of woodland in the Iron Age.
So, who knows? Maybe...
Maybe there would've been Druids
performing their rights here on a full moon.
Well, certainly on an evening like this,
it feels as though they're still here, doesn't it?
Yeah, yeah. Well... And indeed one is! I am!
BOTH LAUGH
Good to meet you. Yeah, you too. Safe travels. Bye.
Enjoy your pilgrimage. Thank you.
Time is almost at an end
as my path along the old Lych Way reaches the Church of St Petroc's.
I've been a time traveller in Dartmoor,
discovering an ancient story where pixies and prisoners share its pages
with standing stones and Sherlock Holmes.
And here we are,
the final resting place on this historic path
along my journey through time
to a place where time itself is written in stone.
I've come into this church,
which is pretty beautiful anyways, isn't it?
Because I'm looking for a particular gravestone.
It was a guy called George Routley.
I think it's...
..just...here.
He died around about the beginning of the 19th century
and I don't think you'll be very surprised
to hear from his epitaph that he was...
..a watchmaker.
"He departed this life November 14th, 1802.
"Wound up in hopes of being taken in hand by his maker
"and of being thoroughly cleaned, repaired,
"and set going in the world to come."
What a creative way to end your days,
from someone who's craft marked the very essence of life.
And, on that timely note,
my pilgrimage has come to an end.
Well, I finally achieved my ambition,
I've walked all the way across Dartmoor,
and I think it's quite appropriate that I should've finished
talking about a watchmaker because in many ways
Dartmoor is frozen in time, isn't it,
with little flashbacks in stone and in words?
We've had literary stories,
old wives' tales,
tales in song,
tales about the moor itself.
It is an extraordinary landscape.
And, personally, what I like most about it
is the fact that, even in the second decade of the 21st century,
it's still pretty much untamed.
Subtitles by Ericsson