Instead I decided to do my research on Dartmoor, the army’s
presence there, and how long I could survive on Boost Bars and 3 litre bags of
water. I asked my friends who had done the challenge in previous years,
consulted Wikipedia and even bent so low as to look in guide books for
Dartmoor. Every corner I turned, under every stone I peered and over every
metaphorical hill I searched, I found more and more lurid tales of teams
leaving checkpoint 8 with plenty of time to spare and never being seen again,
of teams braving the bogs to catch up on a little bit of time and finding
themselves neck deep in quicksand. There were innumerable stories of teams
losing an individual in the fog and finding him three years later still trying
to find his way to Kitty Tor.
I had
never heard of anywhere the army dispensed as much explosion with as much
reckless abandon as Dartmoor, and the possibilities of fatality were endless.
There were unexploded mines, animal remains obliterated into the hillside,
shells still packed with gunpowder littering the landscape. There was always
the possibility of accidentally taking a wrong turning into a firing range and
suddenly finding your arm scattered over the past mile of hillside. If you
think Arnie loves his guns, the British Army is much worse- they shoot anything
that may have or ever will move. They will shoot something if it’s alive, if
it’s dead, if it’s a rock, it may just be the side of a hill because there
isn’t a crater there yet.
The
army wasn’t the only thing that could kill you in a million different ways. A
story that especially haunted me, particularly because it was true, was the
tale of a large cat which was spotted in 1988 killing sheep. I’m not talking
about Garfield; I’m talking about a wild cat, probably a puma, which was never
killed. Furthermore that was 23 years ago, this puma could have had kittens and
grandkittens in that time- which it has done, judging by the amount of
unexplained skulls found every year. Even the army can’t keep up with that
quota. Another worry of mine was HM Prison of Dartmoor, on the moor. In 2001
this prison was deemed unsuitable to hold prisoners as it was in desperate need
of repair- it was falling apart. So what did the prison board do? Nothing.
Still it stands, holding prisoners as securely as last time everyone broke out.
Nights on the moor are rife with stories about the paedophiles that escape and
are lurking in that push ‘yonder, close to Jonny’s tent. Any twig snapping in
the night was due to a psychopathic murderer on the loose, locked up for mass
murder of hikers yet recently escaped from the prison and on the rampage once
again.
Nature
was just as deadly. The fog on Dartmoor was the fog of legends, swarming down
in minutes to disrupt an otherwise surviving team. The hills themselves were
killer, they were the kind of hill that you walked up for twelve hours, and upon
reaching the top revealing to you that you were in fact only a twenty-sixth of
the way up. The bogs on Dartmoor were also tricksy little pools of mud. You
could take a three day detour to avoid a huge patch of reeds, the tell-tale
sign of a bog, and it could turn out that the bog was as high as the soles of
your shoe. On the other hand, you could find the motivation to ‘tank’ it
through a tiny island of wet, until discovering that the whole team could fit
under the mud with ease. Another false friend, the rivers are rare on Dartmoor,
yet a third of the health and safety talk for the moor was dedicated to the
routine you had to complete if you found one- take off your bag, slowly form a
chain in your team, pass the bags over slowly, remember little Dunstan because
he could never jump the stream, and then do a rain-dance for good measure. The
Army seemed way too cautious over these measures, however the year I was
training a girl died from drowning in a small stream because her bag dragged
her under. The moors were deadly.
The
creator of Dartmoor had evidently been stealing inspiration from Ricky Gervais,
going by the names of some of the creatures on the moor. The Ring Ouzel, the
Dunlin, the Goosander, the Meadow Pipit, the Siskin, the Yellowhammer, the Red-Eyed
Mucus-Swallowing Childsnatcher. Well the last one was made up, but the idea
remains the same.
Tom Bedford 25/09/2013 20:22 (yeah I just put them all on the blog at the same time, and will publish a part a day)
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