DARTMOOR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 913, 8 February 1957, Page 8

DARTMOOR

MENTION Dartmoor to a New Zealandér and ‘he'll think first of the prison, but there is, of course, much more to Dartmoor than that. Twenty-two miles long, twelve miles wide, rising up to 2090 feet out of the middle of Devon, the moor is the last great wilderness left in England. In spite of buses and bulldozers, motors and machines, it still holds out against man: purple with heather in late summer, golden with furze or green with young bracken, but for most of the year brown and shaggy and rough as the coats of the moorland ponies which you will see, if you look closely, in the picture of Cherry Brook ‘on the right. In The Last Wilderness, a dramatised tour of Dartmoor to be heard from YA stations and 4YZ at 9.30 a.m. on Sunday, February 17, listeners will follow the experiences of a varied collection of people and see it through their eyes-a hiker and his girl friend lost in the swirling mists, a chatty motor-coach conductor acting as guide to a collection of holiday-makers, an escaped convict glad ‘of the mist, with prison warders hunting him down; as well as other characters who provide local colour on this journey across the moor. John Moore, who wrote The tase Wilderness, stayed on the moor for a fortnight while collecting material for the programme, and set out to investi-

gate it first by car, then by pony and finally on foot, which he discovered was the only practical way of getting about, at any rate in winter, when even the cleverest pony cannot cross the boggy places. "The November mists persisted and in fact I lost myself almost, every day, sometimes by accident, and sometimes on purpose to see what it felt like," he wrote in the Radio Times. "Once or twice I was even a little frightened and perhaps I experienced something of what

a convict feels when he escapes in the moorland mist, even though I was not being hunted .. ." The things that struck John Moore about Dartmoor were its immense loneliness and the slight impact man has made upon it. On *several occasions ‘ne walked all day-alone with the Galloway cattle, the ponies, the horned Scotch sheep, the buzzards mewing like cats high above the tors-without seeing another human being.