In fair weather you may see the heights of Dartmoor from the first slopes of Exmoor, 30 miles away, beyond the Somerset boundary, and when its battlements are seen thus from the far distance, or when its towers stand black and weird against the sunset,there rises a mysterious country, beckoning and compelling.

A closer view of its outer ramparts is less impressive, because the whole encircling country crowds upwards to the margin of the moor. But the first impression is the true one. Within lies a country more spectacular, and more aggressively beautiful than anything in the West.

Pale grassy pastures start up bare to the sky. The hills are crowned with dark masses of granite, and covered with the ruins of primeval mountains. Among the rocks the ling and the heath lie deep. The hollows are thick with bracken and brilliant gorse. High among the hills lie the great peat bogs, the source of many rivers. These streams have cut their way tumbling through a hundred rocky valleys. About their banks coloured mosses cling, and rowan-trees dangle bunches of scarlet berries.

Except around the few moorland settlements, there are no trees. There never were any. The Princes of Wales have owned the Forest rights of Dartmoor since the days of the Black Prince, and the term “Forest” only signifies here a royal hunting-ground. Not all of Dartmoor is within the boundaries of the Forest. The outskirts of the moor are common lands belonging to the surrounding parishes. The whole moorland covers 225 square miles, and reaches more than 2,500 feet above the sea - in summer a maze of gold and green and purple; in winter a mist of browns and yellows, illumined by the colour caught in the clear cold air.

Every year thousands of visitors crowd to the villages on the edge of the moor, and cover the high roads in motor traffic, but in truth, there are few who trouble to stray far from the paths into the wild heart of the moor, where the old forest lies still unconquered, it’s silences only accentuated by a rare human voice and the sound of sheep and cattle and wild Dartmoor ponies.

Thomas Hood’s famous sonnet on Silence expounds a great truth about Dartmoor:

There is a silence where hath been no sound
There is a silence where no sound may be
In the cold grave, under the deep, deep sea,
Or in wide desert, where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound.
No voice is hushed, no life treads silently;
But cloud, and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground.
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,
And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,
There the true Silence is, self conscious and alone.

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