Foggintor, Dartmoor

September 26th 2014

To call this place Foggintor is a misnomer.

For there is no longer a tor here, just an empty excavated hollow. A husk of a hill.

On the western slopes of Dartmoor, where the horizon expands to embrace sea, rolling pastures and the distant hills of Cornwall lies a quarry. A silent place now. Where the only sound is the soft, rhythmic grazing of sheep, or the occasional wistful moan of the breeze through long-derelict cottages.

 

Cottages built from the granite that was quarried here in the days when this lonely place was a bustling business, a thriving and self-sufficient community where men worked and lived, loved and left.

Cottages that lined up in a row against the casual whim of the elements. Where productive gardens and the family pig sheltered in the lee of dry-stone walls.

 

In its heyday, in the middle of the 19th Century, hundreds of men worked the quarry and from its grey faces were hewn Nelson’s column, Dartmoor Prison and the Plymouth Breakwater.

But that all changed in 1906 when the quarry fell silent and the bleak beauty of the moorland crept back.

 

And gradually the quarry filled with water; the crisp clear water that abounds around here from overloaded clouds and a myriad hurrying springs.

 

 

I had heard that this was a good place to swim; not deep nor wide nor long, but private and peaceful, protected on all sides from sight and season.

 

So on a languid, lazy and overcast September evening I stood on one of the few patches of coarse grass that abut the lake and escaped the hot grip of my clothes. Sliding into the shallows, I took care to avoid the razor sharpness of the discarded blocks strewn around the quarry bottom – a barely submerged obstacle course through which I twisted and wove.

 

The water was quite warm (14 degrees) as I swam into the deeper section, towards a brace of tiny islands, improbably adorned with an exuberance of leaves, like the head-dress of some Polynesian princess.

 

Taking a deep breath, I dived down through roots to where sunken grasses grew on the silty bed, amidst shards of granite and sunlight.

 

Surfacing to float on my back, my gaze drifted up past the yellow brightness of gorse flowers, their heavy coconut scent suffusing the evening air.  Ferns clung to sheer sides of rock, using an occasional crevice to claw and claim a foothold and up beyond these opened a clearing sky, alive with the swooping dance of swallows.

A burst of saffron heralded the slow steady decline of the sun, sinking deep beyond the silhouettes of Caradon and Bodmin moor to the west.

 

Jail Ale and the best steak and stilton pie that money can buy were calling from the ‘Plume of Feathers’ at nearby Princetown.

I stood for a while to dry in the warm breeze, as the last bees of the evening bumbled past and away and were gone, leaving only that wonderful, almost oppressive, silence of absolute solitude…

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February 4th 2015

 

It is only four months since I swam with the setting sun at Foggintor, but a few days ago I returned – slipping and sliding along the old horse drawn tramway by which the granite blocks were hauled to the sea for shipping.

Feeling the crisp crunch of freshly fallen snow underfoot, I gazed in awe at the wholly frozen expanse of ice that was so recently the quarry pool.

 

With wind chill, the temperature was minus five and, as echoes bounced and called between the rock faces, I imagined I could hear the shuffle of iced feet.

The clatter of a cough.

The cry of a chisel.