Dartmr. Sherlock Holmes
 Abbeys |
In 1901, the wilder aspects of Dartmoor were introduced to a wide literary audience when the most famous of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's ‘Sherlock Holmes' adventures was set in Devon, with the forbidding moor its backdrop. This was the dark thriller called ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles', originally serialised in The Strand Magazine, in nine monthly instalments. Generally regarded as one of the finest of all mystery novels, Doyle freely acknowledged that he owed the idea for the story to Fletcher Robinson, who regaled him with the legend of a spectral dog near his home on Dartmoor. However, as Doyle says "That remark was the inception of the book, but I should add that the plot and every word of the actual narrative was my own".
Various authentic sites are referred to in the novel although some like Grimpen Mire, despite having a fictitious name, are accurately descriptive of factual places. In the company of Robinson, Conan Doyle took himself to Dartmoor to research for material and soak-up the atmosphere of the moor - the game was afoot! He employed a young coachman, Harry Baskerville, to take him around the locale of the moor, detailing various oddities as they travelled; eventually also, Doyle used the young man's name for that of the main protagonist of his story. Conan Doyle also drew on many of the folk tales told to him during his reconnoitre of the region, most especially the oft told tales of spectral hounds (compare Okehampton and the ghost of Lady Howard), of wild black dogs and of people turned to stone. In an area, overlaid with centuries of history, that remained quite insular from much of the rest of England, it is not surprising that a wealth of rich folklore should be commonplace, drawing on material from an earlier more superstitious, less worldly age than our own.
Buckfastleigh churchyard has a curious mausoleum-like structure erected over the tomb of one Richard Cabell, a local tyrant, following his death in 1677; this was to ensure that his unquiet spirit could not escape to haunt the neighbourhood as he was considered to be in league with the devil. Tales of fire-breathing black dogs howling round his tomb are typical of material drawn on by Doyle for ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles', embroidering it with his own imaginative fancies.
Grimspound is the factual site of a well-preserved Bronze Age village, huddled in a fold of the central moor; a ruined stone wall encloses an area of nearly 4 acres in which the remains of 24 huts have been excavated. Grimspound acquired literary acknowledgement when it afforded Holmes a primitive shelter at one point in the story. Such usages authenticated Doyle's Dartmoor. Again, Doyle's dreadful Grimpen Mire, although not existing in name, was most probably based on such as Fox Tor Mire, one of the few valley bogs, the unpleasantness of which, matches its reputation.
When Dartmoor is described at its bleakest and wildest by Doyle he was conjuring up those cheerless wastes to the south of Princetown around Whiteworks, where the blistering wind can tear the breath from your lungs and the unutterable drabness break the strongest spirit. Deeper still into the moor, and further south, the ancient Abbots' Way, an antique route linking Buckfast and Buckland Abbeys, is marked by a seven-foot-high medieval cross, the Nun's Cross. Here it was, in this most desolate of spots that Doyle killed-off his imagined hell-hound, thus lifting the curse of the Baskervilles. By having his fictional characters enact their drama within a recognisable setting, however topographically inexact at times, Conan Doyle successfully imprinted the brooding ethos of Dartmoor upon the collective imagination of his reading public.