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coin from an ancient trove, but flakes? Surely there isn t gold on Dartmoor?
Not that I have ever heard. Perhaps I shall send this in for analysis, to see
if chemical tests give us any indication of its provenance.
But gold is an element. There won t be any distinguishing features, will
there?
It depends on how pure it is, if this soil is a recent addition or the ore in
which the gold came to life. Impurities differ, if this is in its raw state.
There was nothing else in the cache?
A few knobs of tin and some tools. I left them there.
So, I said with an air of moving on, where next?
Northwest is where the farmhand saw Lady Howard s coach; southeast is the
place it was seen by Gould s courting couple. We ll start at the top and work
down.
Packing to leave our night s lodging was a matter of getting to our feet and
buttoning on our waterproofs. We did so, and clambered up the slippery side of
the ravine to the floor of the moor itself. There Holmes paused.
One thing, Russell. Where we re going is a rather nasty piece of terrain. You
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must watch where you put your feet.
The Great Grimpen Mire, Holmes? I asked lightly, a reference to the
sucking depths that had apparently taken the life of the villain Stapleton,
after he failed to murder his cousin and legitimate heir to the Baskerville
estate, Holmes client Sir Henry.
That s a bit farther south, but similar, yes. There are mires, bogs, and
featherbeds or quaking bogs. With the first two, look for the tussocks of
heavy grass or rushes around the edges, which offer a relatively firm footing,
but if you see a stretch of bright green sphagnum moss, for God s sake stay
away from it. The moss is a mat covering a pit of wet ooze; if one slips in
under the mat, it would be a bit like laying a sodden featherbed on top of a
swimmer. Not a pleasant death.
It was, I agreed, a gruesome picture. What does one do then?
Not much, except spread your arms to give the greatest possible surface to
the ooze, and wait for help. Struggling is invariably fatal, as any number of
Dartmoor ponies have found. With their typical dark humour, the natives call
the mires Dartmoor Stables.
Other than the quaking bogs, the chief danger is from the elements. At night
or when the mist comes down, depend on the compass or, lacking that, find a
stream and follow it down. All water comes off the moor eventually, and
reaches people.
Thank you, Holmes. And if I find myself going in circles, I m to turn my coat
inside out to keep the pixies from leading me astray.
He bared his teeth at me in a grin. It couldn t hurt.
Baring-Gould had marked with great precision the place on the map where the
ghostly carriage had appeared, and an hour or so later Holmes and I stood more
or less on the spot. It was difficult to be certain because the rain (to
Holmes great irritation) had immediately washed the ink from the surface of
the map, leaving us with a small dark cloud instead of an X. Holmes began to
walk slowly along the path, studying the spongy, short-cropped turf for the
months-old marks of carriage wheels.
Quite hopeless, really, and after a couple of painstaking hours he finally
admitted that there was little to distinguish the hoof and wheel of a carriage
(both, presumably, iron-shod) from the naked hoof of any of a myriad of
wandering Dartmoor ponies or the drag of a sledge or farm cart, at any rate
not after a two-month interval.
Holmes straightened his spine slowly and stood for a while gazing up at the
surrounding hills, several of which were crowned with the fantastical shapes
of tors. The track we were on, unpaved and without gravel or metalling, was
nonetheless flat and wide enough for a cart, and largely free of stones which
was enough to make it noteworthy and of bracken, which made it visible against
the brown hillside. It emerged from the side of one tor-capped hillock,
wrapped around its side for a gently curving half mile or so, and then rose
slightly to disappear at the foot of another tor, vaguely in the direction of
Okehampton to the northwest.
It does look like a road, Holmes. Or as if it had once been a road.
There are a surprising number of tracks across the moor, dating to the period
when goods were moved by packhorse and the lanes of the countryside below were
a morass of mud between the hedgerows all winter. Sailors used them, too, as a
shortcut between putting in at a port on one coast and searching for the next
job on the other.
Those lanes must have been truly horrendous if travel on the moor was seen as
the easier alternative.
Indeed. I believe that this particular remnant is the continuation of Cut
Lane, which intersects Drift Lane near Postbridge and joins with the ancient
main track from the central portion of the moor to Lydford, Lych Way.
Cheerful name, I commented. Lych was the Old English word for corpse hence
the roofed-over lych gate outside most churches, for the temporary resting of
the bier (and its bearers) on the way into the graveyard. I trusted that
Holmes, a longtime student of linguistic oddities, would know this.
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Not by coincidence, Holmes replied. The Lych Way was the traditional track
by which corpses were carried to Lydford for burial.
Good heavens. Do you mean to say there are no churchyards on the entire
moor?
Not until the year 1260, I believe it was, when the bishop granted the moor
dwellers the option of taking their dead to Widdecombe instead.
Generous of him.
Interestingly enough, archaeologists find few burial remains other than burnt
scraps of bone. I suppose that either the peat soil is so acidic that it
dissolves even the heavy bones with time, or else when the turf alternately
dries in the summers and becomes saturated in winter its contraction and
expansion eventually pushes the bones up to the surface, where the wildlife
finds them and hastens their dissolution. The two hypotheses would make for
some interesting experiments, he mused.
Wouldn t they just? I tremble to think what the cut in Cut Lane refers to.
A passage dug into the hillside to make the transport of peat easier; nothing
more sinister than that. This particular track wends its way along several
peat diggings, although it is now in disuse because what peat is still taken
off the moor goes by way of the train line just west of here. The track as it
is would be quite sufficient to take a well-balanced carriage pulled by one or
two horses though not, perhaps, at any great speed.
The thought of that ride made my teeth ache or perhaps it was only that they
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