In May 2013 I took a walk with three friends travelling from Wembury on Devon’s south coast to Lynmouth in the north. Our route took us across Dartmoor and Exmoor on a 117 mile long-distance path known as the Two Moors Way. Because of the restrictions caused by the current pandemic, a journey such as this is impossible at the moment. So, with my memory prompted by a set of old photographs, I’m making that journey again in my imagination and sharing our progress here.

Rich, Bruce, Clive and I stayed at Clive’s mother’s house in Exeter on the Friday evening and then drove down to Wembury, near Plymouth, to start our walk early on the Saturday morning. We walked down the beach and immersed our toes in the water before we set out: if you’re going to do this coast-to-coast thing, do it properly!

The route to our first overnight stop, at Ivybridge, passed through rolling green Devon countryside and along lanes sweetly fragrant with wildflowers. We walked through villages still deep in weekend slumber and caught occasional glimpses of the dark smudge of Dartmoor along the skyline to the north.

We crossed Cofflette Creek and then approached Ivybridge along the Erme Valley. In the evening we met Clive’s sister and her family for a pub meal. Although he left Devon more than thirty years ago, Clive still has family all over the county.

This first section of the walk is designated as the Erme-Plym Trail; the Two Moors Way proper starts at Ivybridge. We set off early on the Sunday morning heading north out of town. It’s an unrelenting climb out of the valley and up onto the moor, but very soon we picked up the Two Moors Way waymarkers and moved on to a recognisably moorland landscape. Although it is now deserted, with not even a hamlet or isolated farmhouse, this section of the moor is dotted with former china clay workings and at Redlake the route of a former tramway, used to transport the clay, is still discernible.

There is lots of evidence of earlier inhabitants of Dartmoor too, with Bronze Age cairns, enclosures and and the remains of burial kists dotted about the landscape.

Just beyond Scorriton we cross the still youthful River Dart and near here our resting place for the night. Alice Oswald’s 2002 poem Dart captures perfectly the otherwordly nature of this landscape:

What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out

listen

a

lark

spinning

around

one

note

splitting

and

mending

it

and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bark, a foal of a river

Alice Oswald – Dart

Map of Two Moors Way courtesy of Cicerone Press
All other pictures ©Bobby Seal