Paintings

Wistman’s Wood – with its twisted, stunted, lichen-clad oaks and moss-strewn boulders – is supposedly one of the most haunted places on Dartmoor, where the Wild Hunt is said to emerge at midnight, led by ‘Old Dewer’, the local name for the Devil, and accompanied by the Wisht Hounds, a ferocious pack of phantom black dogs with fiery red eyes. Whoabetide anyone who crosses their path.

The legend of the Wisht Hounds of Wistman’s Wood was actually conjured up by a bunch of 19th century middle-class antiquarians but I’m not going to let that get in the way of a good story.

The Wisht Hounds of Wistman’s Wood

Oil on Canvas, 2010

The Ghost of Lady Howard

Oil on Canvas, 2012

According to legend, Lady Howard, a seventeenth century dignitary, was sentenced to spend eternity doing penance for murdering her four husbands.

As punishment, she must journey across Dartmoor from Fitzford House,Tavistock (her ancestral family home) to Okehampton Castle in a coach made from her husbands’ bones. The carriage is driven by a headless coachman (in some versions the horses are also headless). Lady Howard’s phantom is either seated in the coach or seen running beside it, in the form of a huge black dog with blood red eyes and savage fangs.

On reaching the castle, she plucks a blade of grass and carries it back to Fitzford House, where it is laid upon a granite slab. Only once the grass has been completely removed from the castle grounds will Lady Howard be released from her penance and allowed to rest in peace.

Old Crockern is the guardian spirit of Dartmoor. You may have heard about him in relation to the recent mass protest against the wild camping ban on Dartmoor. On Saturday 28th January 2023, over 3,000 people came together on the moor to help raise the Spirit of Old Crockern and fight the ruling that favours wealthy landowner, Alexander Darwall.

This particular entity was first mentioned by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould in A Book of the West, published in 1899. Old Crockern’s origins, however, are unclear. Was he an ancient Land Spirit whose story had been passed down from one generation of moor folk to another? If so, there is no trace of him in any of the written texts I have come across. It seems more likely that Old Crockern was invented, like a number of other Dartmoor folk tales, such as the Wisht Hounds of Wistman’s Wood, by the Victorian intelligentsia as part of a push towards encouraging more tourism to the area. Whatever the case, he has become a symbol of the Land Spirits’ fight back and that should not be lost.

In A Book of the West, Baring-Gould tells of a rich Lancashire man who had purchased thousands of acres of Dartmoor land and begun reclaiming it using the latest technology. One day he met an old moorman with a message for him.

“[Last night] I falled asleep, and then I saw the gurt sperit of the moors, old Crockern himself, grey as granite, and his eyebrows hanging down over his glimmering eyes like sedge, and his eyes deep as peat-water pools. Sez he to me, […] ‘Bear Muster Vowler a message from me. Tell Muster Vowler, if he scratches my back, I’ll tear out his pocket.’ ”

The warning was justified, the foolhardy businessman going bankrupt soon after. As for Old Crockern, on dark, stormy nights he emerges from Crockern Tor, riding a skeletal horse and wielding a mighty sword, ready to smote anyone or anything that stands in his way.That’s how the story goes.

Taking a cue from the eco-feminist author Sophie Strand, I’d like to retell it by replacing the sword with a flowering wand, a more appropriate symbol for these ecocidal times. Strand writes ‘the sword slices, divides and subdues. Its tip drags imaginary borders across ecosystems. The sword does not embrace, it does not connect. It does not ask questions’.On the contrary, the flowering wand creates connections, enchants and heals.

References:

Baring-Gould, Sabine. A Book of the West: Being an Introduction to Devon and Cornwall. London: Methuen & Co, 1899: 182-183.

Strand, Sophie. The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. Rochester (USA): Inner Traditions, 2022: 1.

Old Crockern

Oil, pen & ink on Canvas, 2024

The Lych Way

Oil on Canvas, 2012

The Lych Way was painted on an old cloth map of Dartmoor. It refers to an ancient corpse road, along which the dead were once carried for many a gruelling mile to be buried in Lydford, on the western edge of the moor, a practice that lasted up until 1260. In more recent times there have been numerous reports of phantom funeral processions and monks dressed in white on this track, threading their way through the mist.

When I exhibited this painting at an exhibition in 2012, a woman told me she saw the ghostly cortege winding its way along the Lych Way. She was completely unaware of these spectral sightings at the time.