We went on a simple walk that was stunning beyond belief.
It was a Boxing Day walk that would suit the toddler in the back pack, the three-year old with short bursts of energy and the more athletic, happy to be out in the sunshine of a winter’s day.
The morning began with a light mist at the farm, and by mid-morning the sun breaking open thin blue lines in the sky. We drove to the western side of Dartmoor to a broad blue sky, parked along the road and followed the track signed to Yellowmeade Farm. A mile along we arrived at the edge of the old Foggintor quarry, and picnicked by the ruined working buildings in the warmest Boxing Day I can recall.
The quarry itself is like a secret micro-world, a great walled around cavernous space, with outer cliffs forty feet high, and paths where sheep have trod three hundred yards long. All echoing voices, and angular shapes to clamber over, and cold winter water where a few brave souls were swimming.
We left the quarry and looked across the moor to King’s Tor, a kilometre away, standing tall, almost as the western edge of Dartmoor. A mist descended like a curtain across the tor, and we thought to turn back, and then the band of mist lifted, and King’s Tor beckoned once again.
We picked our way across a boggy meadow, all tufted grass and sphagnum moss and pale blue crossed leaved heath, crossed the old railway track, and clambered up to the tor.
The height of the tor was bathed in sunshine, but the whole valley hillside dropping down west towards Tavistock a deep mist. We were above the clouds, yet little more than a thousand feet high. The other tors within this range of hills appeared as islands in a silver sea, smaller, wider, then sunk, only to rise again as the cloud reshaped itself.
It was a thing of beauty. A surreal sight. We saw rainbows in the mist. Diffuse spectrums, half colour and half mist. We saw circular rainbows in the valley below, as the mist fell, and if we stood in the sun beam at the right moment our silhouette was framed within the cloudy bow. Indeed, our silhouette in the mist was surrounded by a rainbow halo. Apparently, this phenomenon is called a Brocken Spectre.
It was a special moment, and we could have gazed forever, but we saw a group of trees in an old granite pound a few hundred yards away that we knew was close to the road, and made for that; but the mist came down, and we stumbled across vague paths, and crossed a stream we had not reckoned to be there, and slipped our feet into the bog, and reached the road eventually.
Turning back, King’s Tor itself was a sunlit island in a great white sea of mist. We drove eastwards and hit the fog before we reached Two Bridges, and drove in fog along the Hairy Hand road, and through Bellever, and over the stone bridge, up and over Riddon Ridge to our home valley of the West Webburn, thick in damp mist. The mist stayed all evening and into the night to linger long into the morning.
Who would have thought just a few miles away was the rainbow island of King’s Tor, peering sun-blest out of a deep swathe of white mist.
Curiosity shouldn’t end with Christmas. Curiosity is a life-time pursuit.
The day you stop being curious is the day you will miss the rainbow in the mist, and the clouds below the hilltop glistening in the sunshine. At Shallowford we are updating our charitable objects, and one of them will read: To stimulate a sense of wonder and curiosity in the world God created and of our place in it.
Stay curious.