21st-Century Yokel. Tom Cox

holes stabbed in a tent roof to let the light in, then longer, bigger, more jagged gaps, as if the person in the tent has lost patience and gone at it with a bread knife. Some hills are enigmatically yellow in a way that doesn’t seem to correspond with the cloud above them, others a dark green verging on black that’s no less confusing. I can’t get nonchalant about this view, and it’s become even more fascinating to me as I’ve become more intimate with the moor. I will glance across and try to work out which shape or shade might denote a patch where I’ve walked. Is that where the farm is that I walked past that time with the huge ball of wire outside with the variety of animal skulls placed in it? I will think. No. Perhaps that’s a couple of miles further north. Maybe it’s the wildflower meadow I was pursued across last April by a small, determined pig.

      I press on past Heaven and Hell Junction, Heaven being the moor and Hell staring it down from across the tarmac in the form of Trago Mills, the vast, grotesque shopping and leisure park whose toxic-waste-dumping, UKIP-supporting, wildlife-shooting owners the Robertson family once printed adverts calling for the castration of gay men. Up another big hill, past Ashburton Junction One and Ashburton Junction Two – the one which looks like my junction, that I take by mistake when I’m tired – and I’m home, or as good as, heading seawards on the smaller road where home begins in the most graspable sense: a zigzagging one, full of roller-coaster dips and climbs. To the right of the road is the River Dart and, because the road attempts to use the river as its guide, it is at the constant mercy of its indecision. All the Dartmoor rivers are capricious, but none that race down from the moor prevaricate about their route more often than the Dart. The hills here are not like those in Somerset or east Devon, which have wide valleys and plains between them; they are a community, bunching together as if nervously fearing solitude. The Dart finds the tight rare spaces between them and curls around them at flamboyant length, making its scenic way to the ocean.

      Just two of the hills in this post-moor, pre-coast landscape rise up in a more noticeable, individual way. Unlike most of their less spellbinding neighbours, both of them are known locally by name. The bulkier of the two is called Hood Ball Hill, a corpulent sovereign of a hill topped with a copse somewhat resembling a mullet haircut. Its lankier neighbour, around a mile away, is called Yarner Beacon, although it was initially introduced to me as the Dragon’s Hoof, a name that became even more appealing upon my failure to substantiate it using any historical or electronic source.

      At Hood Ball Hill’s foot, as well as the river and the bridge where the road crosses to the water’s eastern bank, is the track belonging to the Buckfastleigh to Totnes tourist railway. The steam from the trains that run along this enhance the hill’s mystic quality like dry ice around the ankles of a wizard. Talk to the more shamanistically inclined around here and they might tell you that Hood Ball Hill is the Atlantean Temple of the Moon, to which people have been known to travel many miles in order to face their shadow, or at least that a ley line passes directly through its centre, carrying mellow vibes down from Glastonbury, eighty miles to the north-east. In the late seventies an annual hippy fayre was held on its slopes. I met a carpenter called Brendan in the pub at Staverton, one of the two villages Hood Ball Hill overlooks, who attended the fayre regularly as a child and remembers it as an event where people often dressed in sackcloth and there were always ‘lots of dogs running loose and having a go at one another’.

      Nowadays Hood Ball Hill has no footpath and is strictly, even a tad angrily, sectioned off from the public. I know this because I have checked out the situation assiduously from every angle. I have, however, climbed Yarner Beacon several times, both after the advent of the new permissive path leading to its peak and prior to that as a wide-eyed trespasser. For weeks before I made my maiden ascent, the beacon would call to me. Every time I saw it I could think about nothing but getting up into the comb of trees at its peak. This hill fetish was new to me and I did not understand what it meant or what I hoped to achieve through it, but if anything that made it all the more powerful. I had moved here from one of the flattest counties in England, Norfolk, where I once had a neighbour who spoke longingly of ‘living in a house on a hill’. It was quite a big deal to him since they only have about six of them there. I lived for a long spell after that on what I thought was a hill but now realise was only a tussock with ideas above its station. People visiting me from Devon said they liked the place but asked how I coped with the flatness. I didn’t understand what they meant. It was merely a topographical characteristic, surely, not a malady? But as a resident of Devon’s South Hams region I soon began to get it. Flat landscapes have a subtle enchantment of their own, but a landscape dense with hills makes everything more of a fascinating puzzle. Voices and revelations tend to flood the head on a good country walk, as if imparted by well-meaning unseen sprites hiding in the countryside itself. These voices and revelations are imbued with a different magic when emerging from the secret folds and crevices that hills create. Being accustomed to that magic, then visiting a place where it appears to have been steamrollered and rendered ostensibly more prosaic, must come as a shock.

      I like to climb Yarner Beacon on a clear day, gaze several miles into the distance towards the sea and try to pick out the location of the footpaths I’ve walked, which, after three years of living here, is almost all of them. I once made the mistake of moving to an exciting new part of the British countryside and not immediately investigating every bit of it forensically on foot and I don’t intend to make the same error again. From up here I’m always amazed at the way all the threads connect, their shimmies and jinks and thrusts being disguised when you’re beneath hilltop level, in the thick of it. It could be compared to the moment when, having only previously travelled through London by Tube, a person explores the city at ground level on foot and realises the unexpected interconnectivity of the stations, their surprising proximity to one another. So many of the paths here in south-west Devon are of a hidden nature: sunken lanes that were already old in Saxon times, created by landowners digging ditches on the boundaries of their properties and piling earth into continuous banks on their own sides. These holloways feel impossibly solid when, as a walker, you’re bracketed by their banks below the bulk of the land, in an eerily quiet semi-subterranean shale, fern, mud and moss world.

      In winter this countryside is a totally different colour to Norfolk’s: reddy brown and green, as opposed to grainy brown and muddy grey. Rich rain-sodden earth and leaf mulch provide the reddy brown; plentiful moss, resilient fern and lichen add back-up greens on the borders of fields and meadows that stay more emerald luminous in the cold months than any other fields and meadows I’ve known. There is a strong argument in favour of every season here: autumn for its crunchy lysergic coppers and golds, its sunlit spider’s webs and sudden forgotten woodsmoke rush; summer because summer here is just dizzying with all the possible ways it offers to fill your time. But in winter as the land strips itself back it shows you new secrets and you feel like you’re getting a glimpse into something special behind everything else: intangible, ghoulish, a necessary dark pigment on the edge of the land of the living.

      Restless from driving, I arrive home and go straight out again on foot, wringing the daylight out of the day. On a steep rocky holloway leading down from the hamlet of Aish the leaf veil has fallen back to reveal a ruined barn I never knew was there. One of its broken woodworm-riddled doors creaks in the wind as I pass, which is odd, as I hadn’t realised there was any wind. At the bottom of the hill, beside a water lane, on a fence in a stark garden belonging to an isolated cottage a well-known death figure has been made using thick black polythene draped over two crossed sticks. Hooded and faceless, he holds a lantern in one unseen hand and a scythe in the other. I step gingerly over to photograph him, and a man of baby boomer age wearing a fisherman’s jumper emerges from the front door of the cottage. ‘Ooh, he loikes the reaper,’ he says to me in a strong West Country accent that leaves me unsure if it is genuine or being put on for hillbilly Straw Dogs effect. Something ominous hangs in the air for twenty seconds until a younger man – possibly his son – emerges from the house, chuckling. I ask the younger man if he made the reaper himself and he confirms that he did, with the help of friends, and that it was the centrepiece of a recent New Year’s Eve party. There is no such levity to explain away another haunting site I see six and a half miles upriver, near Staverton: a fence post, recently denuded of nettles and bracken and draped with a blue shawl, matching floppy felt hat and off-beige scarf to form what looks chillingly like a small, stooped woman, turned away from the footpath, crying over some crippling