Low life
Nature ramble
Jeremy Clarke
The fracture in my pelvis is almost knitted and last week I started going for walks to rebuild my strength. On Wednesday, walking along the top of a cliff in a gale, a speck of grit blew into my eye and lodged itself under the contact lens, scratching the eyeball. On Thursday, leaving my contact lenses at home to allow the eye to heal, I drove up on to Dartmoor to join a four-hour guided walk called in the brochure ‘Tinners and Warreners’.
As I drove across the high moor to the meeting point, I could see the shadows of clouds racing across the distant brown hillsides. It was a glorious day and I was concerned that the walk would be oversubscribed and I’d be turned away. The meeting point (a lay-by) was deserted, however, except for a man leaning against a van. He had a knitted bobble hat on his head and green proficiency-type badges up one arm of his anorak. I drew up and wound down the car window. ‘Tinners and Warreners?’ I said. His face lit up. ‘Tinners and Warreners,’ he affirmed. I was the first and only walker to turn up.
Normally guided walks on Dartmoor attract up to 30 people. There’s always someone slower than you are, and you don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. You can just march along looking affable. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on a guided walk and be the only person being guided, however. I tried to talk him out of it. But it was his first walk of the season, he explained, and he’d been looking forward to it. So I paid my fiver and we shouldered our packs and struck off down the nearest ravine.
It was like going for a walk with God. Roger knew absolutely everything about everything. With larger walking groups, the normal practice is for the guide to stop once in a while to let the laggards catch up, and then everyone gathers round for the history or nature lesson. With just the two of us marching side by side, Roger gave a running commentary, naming, for starters, every fern, grass, lichen, sedge, flower, bush, tree, butterfly and bird that we saw, passed, or trod on. I can remember, for example, a maidenhair fern, some pink sphagnum moss, a peacock butterfly and a bird with a white bum called a wheatear. If he was as comprehensive as this on nature, I wondered, what was he going to be like on tinners and warreners? I hadn’t the heart to tell him I couldn’t see anything that was more than a mile away.
Every leat and pond merited an investigation, too. ‘Look! What’s that?’ he said, waving the tip of his trekking pole at some stagnant water. ‘A pond?’ I ventured. He was being more specific. He was pointing at a clump of frogspawn. I got down on all fours to study it. The frogspawn had died, killed by the recent cold snap, and turned an uncanny fluorescent blue. Nearby was an ant hill. We delved into it with cold fingers to see if any ants were at home — in the hope, I supposed, of recognising and perhaps even greeting certain noted individuals — but unfortunately none were.
And once we made a detour across a bog to identify an isolated, stunted tree. ‘What sort of tree is that?’ he said excitedly, when we were still some way off. ‘Can you see?’ I could hardly make out a tree, let alone identify it. As we came near he said, ‘Ah! It’s a holly tree.’ And when we’d got right up to it, he said, ‘Is it a male or female?’ It was a revelation to me, I panted, that holly trees — indeed trees in general — were either one thing or the other. If he was going to try to sex it, I said, he was on his own.
But just as I was on the point of thinking him the wisest man in England, Roger pointed to a distant hillside on which were four vast, irregular-shaped stone walled enclosures. They looked very ancient. ‘See those?’ he said. ‘Those are the Devil’s playing cards.’ He invited me to identify each irregular shape with a playing-card suit — one did look a bit like a heart, I conceded — then related the following tale. The Devil had been playing cards with a Widecombe man, apparently, and had won his soul. The Widecombe man had fled the scene, closely pursued by the Devil, who dropped his cards on the hillside. ‘And did he catch him?’ I said. Roger looked solemnly at the hillside and said, ‘I hope not.’ I looked at my guide as a child might on seeing his father incapably drunk for the first time with wonder and disillusionment. Admittedly, it was the only foolish thing he said in four hours, which by any standard is good going. But it goes to show how life really is just one disappointment after another.
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