Today we headed off to the place I've been most looking forward to see: Dartmoor. It's a national park in England filled with moors, mires, bogs, streams, ancient stone circles, iron age village ruins, stunning views, sheep, wild ponies, charming pubs, and many legends of ghosts, beasts... and the devil himself.
On the way here, we got to enjoy the adventure of driving in Great Britain. We managed to get an automatic and Jeri volunteered to drive. She did an admirable job getting us to the East Dart Hotel in Postbridge while I navigated. No sheep were harmed on the way, despite their irreverent attitudes about road rules.
Dartmoor is more than I could have hoped. It's so lovely. Our inn is really awesome. I've had some good chats with the proprietors and learned a lot about the area already. We had a delicious late lunch after we arrived in the hotel's pub. We finished up with another wonderful sticky toffee pudding and had no need to eat dinner at all.
After lunch, we headed out to the clapper bridge over the stream nearby. "Clapper" is a construction style with slabs of local stone. This bridge is from the 1300s, over 700 years old. The newer bridge nearby is a pretty old one too, and lovely as well.
That's pretty much as far as we got since we decided today was going to be a chance to really catch our breath and recoup from lots of tours.
I'm writing this in the pub now at about 10PM having just returned from an evening stroll. One of the reasons I wanted to come here, aside from an amazing landscape populated with legends everywhere, is the dark.
Dartmoor is one of the darkest places of the planet. There's a scientific darkness scale from 1-9 called the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale. There are no places left on earth, aside from the south pole in deepest winter, that can still rate a #1 for darkness. There are only a handful of places that have a #2 for the Bortle scale - Dartmoor is one of those places. The bowl-shaped geography here makes the light pollution from cities outside the park almost absent.
So yes, my walk. I started off down the road from the East Dart Hotel. The darkness was truly impressive. I grew up in the midwest on a farm where it would get dark enough for the milky way to show up well. But this is a dark that falls across the land like a blanket.
Walking in this sea of pitch night, chill seeping into my bones, I started remembering all those legends. The devil on the moors, the ghost of some dead girl, the dartmoor beast... Then about four different types of owls started hooting and screeching out in the distance and I started getting the willies. I turned around pretty quick and made my way back to the hotel!
But it's lovely here, and I can't wait for more of this very quiet, very relaxed place tomorrow!!!
Sounds wonderful.
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