Lady from London

London + Dartmoor are not what I would call the most suitable combination and as you can see from the 1872 travel diary they certainly did not fit well on this occasion. As always when I post the descripts from the path I write them as they were written in order to maintain an authors authentic account in their own words. Having read this account maybe you will agree with me that this was not the most successful visit to Dartmoor and for one member of the party it was the most unforgettable. Having published several such accounts their seems to be a common thread running through them, the “hamper.” It seems during the late 1800s many visitors to Dartmoor had to be accompanied by the “hamper” and not to do so usually resulted in dire consequences. It seems that folk back then were incapable of putting a foot on the moor without the knowledge that a veritable feast was within the “hamper.”

“Three of us found ourselves benighted on the moors a few evenings ago, five miles from our destination, which was Dartmeet with weak notions of the road we ought to take, and still weaker hopes of finding house-room, even if we succeeded in gaining our goal.
We were in a small dogcart, drawn by an excellent and trustworthy cob, who has a deep-rooted detestation of every road that is not a short cut to her own stable. We had omitted to take “the hamper” which, like somebody’s smile in the old song, “can make a summer where darkness else would be.” We had forgotten our umbrellas, and there was a rich and abundant promise of rain, such as only falls upon the moors, falling immediately.
Two of us were experienced moorland travellers; but the third, knowing the moor by heart in song and painting, was an absolute stranger to it in fact a London lady, with a theoretical love of “roughing it” and a practical hatred of the same – a person afflicted with nerves, and a nose, and keenly sensitive and easily agonising ear.
We were hungry; we were cold; we were too cross to care a bit for the exquisite effects of rolling shadow and occasionally flashing light of the everlasting hills, which made a ring of jagged splendour between ourselves and the rest of the world. We believed in little else on earth in that hour but simple savoury food and peaceful slumber. So we called a council of three and endeavoured to determine which would be the best means to pursue in order most speedily to obtain those necessaries.
Dartmeet might be at the end of either one of the three roads that kindly offered themselves to our observation. It might be, but we doubted it. Accordingly we gave ourselves another obscure hamlet the benefit of the doubt, and slunk down a hill, and found ourselves in a wildly picturesque hole, where accommodation was offered in prominent capitals to “man and beast.”
How we hailed that haven! How we fell into it and found that it resembled nothing so much as a deal box on a large scale full of little partitions! How we were awed by a landlady who has worn herself to a thread-paper in her efforts to preserve a certain amount of acid gentility in this rugged district!
In our embarrassment (the offspring of our awe of her, and our grateful surprise at her efforts of anything we liked to order, which magnificent resulted presently in bacon and eggs), we backed into one of the partitions of this Arcadian deal box.
In the first place, the inn could not accommodate us all, so two of us were told off to a cottage that belongs to the landlord. Here we slept calmly enough, to the lullaby of the howling moorland wind and the rippling of the river. But our luckless friend – the highly organised being who had a “nose” and “nerves” and an agonisingly “sensitive ear” – was put to what was facetiously called “rest” in one of the partitions of the deal box.
I will try to call her own language to my aid in describing what she went through that gruesome night. But before I do this I will mention that in our journey across this land we had heard mention made of a big fair, and in our ignorance we had turned a careless ear to the mention.
“Well,” she told me the following morning, “I had settled myself down in what smelt and looked like a carpenter’s box full of shavings, when an irresistible longing to have some fine bracing air playing around me seized me, and I got up and found the window securely fastened down. This was depressing, but worse things followed. Presently I heard a manly form stumble up the fragile stairs, and instantly a manly nose poured forth such snores as would make the success of a new edition of Dante’s Inferno. A creeping horror came over me – the appalling sound seemed to be in the same room; but all dread on that point was dispelled by a door that I had not even seen before suddenly gaping open, and giving free entrance to one child’s whooping cough, another child’s shrill demand for a ‘penny whistle with a drum at the end that came from the fair,’ and the lamentations of a very tired mother, in addition to the aforesaid mentioned snores.
The ugly truth dawned upon me at once. There was only a shaving of deal and an open door between me and this family party. It was for this that I had come to health-giving, slumber-provoking, nobility-of-thought-inspiring Dartmoor. For this! – that a man who had spent a beery day at a fair might snore me out of the largest portion of my mind, and his child’s penny-whistle out of the remainder of it.

The pillow-case functioned as a counter-irritant certainly, for it was simply a canvas bag, and I spent a sizeable portion of the night in looking for pins in order to pin some cambric handkerchiefs ( which I had brought with me luckily) over it. But noise gained the victory over texture, and I hailed the beauteous morn more rapturously than I ever did before, after my first renovating night on the wild quite moor.”
After breakfast we followed a long, lovely road across the moor, between acres of golden gorse and purple heather, and found ourselves at Dartmeet about two o’clock. The West and East Darts unite together here, and in the triangle formed by their junction one small cottage for the accommodation of visitors stands.
Our worn and weary friend, who had been utterly unable to eat rancid bacon and stale eggs for breakfast, suffered fierce pangs of hunger directly she cam in sight of a human habitation which suggested the possibility of food. The solitary mistress told us that “A nice home-baked loaf and some fresh butter was all she had; parties generally brought their own hampers.”
How we groaned with hunger and disappointment, and with saddened hearts and lowered voices besought her at least to give us some beer. She had no licence, of course, but she had one bottle of her own which we were welcome to. So she brought forth a bottle, which she uncorked with her fingers with unpromising ease, and poured forth a distressing mixture, from which we recoiled as children do from rhubarb and magnesia.
Beautiful , boulder, bubbling Darts! How much more highly we should have appreciated our union if we had not been quite so hungry and thirsty and dyspeptic from want of rest! How much less weak our comments on the scenery would have been, and how genuinely grateful we should have been for that bright, hunger-provoking breeze, which only bothered and bewildered us as things were.
It was a pitiful sight to see the one who was having her first taste of the moor air, standing on the hedge trying to assuage the pangs of hunger with blackberries that were either fly-blown or unripe.” I have camped out in America and Connemara, and I thought that I could define the phrase ‘roughing it’ pretty well. But never, never, did I realise before what it was until I travelled to an empty land with people who were so unpractical as not to take a hamper.
I can confidently recommend anyone who wants magnificent scenery, absolute solitude, and glorious air to go and lodge in the little cottage at Dartmeet. It appears to be in the very heart of the moor, and the views in the vicinity would make the fortune of any painter, in either words or watercolour, who could reproduce them correctly and feelingly. It is a place to which I would never go to be idle in; but I would go there to work if I could for the next two months, with the sure conviction that the approach of winter in that spot would give me some new sensations that would not ingloriously make me deserve a martyr’s crown. Of our thirty-mile drive back I can say nothing, for I was stultified by hunger. The only objects of interest to any of us on our homeward journey were the milestones.” – The Queen, October 19th, 1872.