The first cross is stout, roughly-hewn and slightly tilting, a lonely-looking sentinel beside the road out of town. A dry stone wall isolates it from the nearby bungalows, and the grass and herbaceous plants around it have been mown short, as if the ragged-looking way marker is standing in a municipal park.
There is more semi-suburbia for the second cross, which is kept company by early morning golfers. Half-hidden by flowering gorse bushes growing beside the fairways, the cross is taller than the first, and lumpy, like a boxer’s nose, with graffiti-like patches of yellow and brown lichens clinging to the tough, abrasive stone it has been carved from.
These first two crosses are only a few hundred yards apart, on Whitchurch Down, the third, at a road junction on Huckworthy Common, is a mile or so further on. Another tall, column-like post of weathered granite, this one with the horizontal parts of the cross almost gone.
The artist Ithell Colquhoun once wrote: ‘Unless you like granite, you will not find happiness there’. She was writing about the far west of Cornwall, but the sentiment could easily apply to any of the volcanic intrusions that pepper the south-west; if this stone has captured your imagination early a happiness in granite landscapes stays with you.
The fourth cross, beside a track, marked on the map as a footpath, and opposite an isolated church, the village of Walkhampton it was built to serve now a half-mile away, has been dressed, the natural roughness of the first three tempered by the mason’s chisel.
I am on my way now, on what may or may not be the Abbot’s Way, a medieval route across Dartmoor that linked the monasteries on its western and eastern fringes. The Ordnance Survey records a different line, largely to the south of the one I am travelling. Richard Hansford Worth (1868-1950) in his book Worth’s Dartmoor speculated that the actual route was to the north, marked by the line of crosses between Tavistock and Buckfast I am following.
Many of Worth’s observations do not seem to have stood the test of time. His name now rarely appears in the bibliographies of academic books, unlike his near contemporary William Crossing. Crossing disagrees with Worth, suggesting the southern route the most likely, at least until it reaches Erme Head, which linked a different monastery, at Buckland, with Buckfast, and with a separate branch taking monks to Tavistock.
I am stuck with Worth’s hypothesis. Commandoes are training in the vicinity of Lowery Cross. There is a bouquet of flowers at the base of the broken cross at Cross Gate, in memory of a loved one’s favourite view you imagine, looking across Burrator reservoir and the surrounding conifers, and onwards towards Plymouth. There are two crosses near Crazy Well Pool, both marked as restored on the map; many of these crosses show clear signs of having been repaired during their long lifetimes.
Nun’s Cross has been broken in half, the result of nineteenth century vandalism. The fracture line is easily visible, with iron straps holding the monolith-like granite structure together, standing today much as it always has done.
This, the largest of Dartmoor’s crosses, can serve as a half-way point, and a reminder of the pitfalls of these speculations. The Ordnance Survey has it as part of its Abbots Way, an assertion Crossing disagrees with. Worth notes that the earliest record of Nun’s Cross dates from 1240, before Buckland Abbey was founded; Tavistock Abbey had its beginnings more than two centuries before that date.
To confuse matters further, a monk’s way often gets mentioned these days, with the hint of tourist board nomenclature. Neither Worth nor Crossing have a monk’s way in capital letters, although Crossing mentions a monk’s path, which seems to correspond to my route. Worth makes the astute observation that these tracks were probably in existence long before the monks started adding crosses to mark them.
From Nun’s Cross the open moor beckons, seemingly immutable, occasionally deadly. There is another once broken cross on the southern edge of Foxtor Mire, the vast bog supposedly the inspiration for Conan Doyle’s Grimpen Mire in Hound of the Baskervilles.
A little further on is Childe’s Tomb, a short, lopsided cross on top of a mound of dressed granite slabs, and below Fox Tor itself. This is said to be the resting place of a medieval hunter, caught by a blizzard whilst hunting on the moor. The tale recounts how Childe killed his horse and climbed inside its gutted stomach for warmth, but to no avail. The monks of Tavistock, being good Benedictine capitalists, are supposed to have recovered his body and buried him at their monastery in order to inherit his lands, in accordance with a note he wrote before dying.
Did Childe’s mortal remains travel the route to Tavistock I have been following? I head in the other direction, picking my way through long abandoned tin workings and up the steep slope to the trio of the familiar granite crosses on Ter Hill, one of which is a modern replica (westernmost cross pictured, looking across Foxtor Mire towards Nun’s Cross). This is the route’s highest point, with big views west and north. From here you begin dropping down to the east, past two more crosses on Down Ridge, and on to the oddly shaped Horn’s Cross. This cross was badly damaged in Crossing’s time but has since been restored as best as possible.
The lowlands stretching towards the south Devon coast and its seaside resorts open out before me as I head downhill, through a Bronze Age landscape of stone rows and field systems. The map shows one more cross on the direct line to Buckfast, but not mentioned by Worth, at a farmland crossroads near Scoriton. But a combination of tired legs and pub told me to stop short of that one, at the moorland-edge village of Holne, which marked the end of my short journey.
Was this the real Abbot’s Way? Whose guess is closest to the route the monks actually walked, Worth, Crossing or the Ordnance Survey? We shall probably never know for sure, and there is joy to be had from all three, but the experience of walking Worth’s Way had been a good one.
Author’s Note: I did this walk on a spring day several years ago, and was inspired to write about it, with the help of saved photographs and notebooks, after recently attending a story-telling evening devoted to Dartmoor folklore, in which the Childe tale got a mention. The route I followed is described in Worth R H, 1967, Worth’s Dartmoor, David & Charles, Newton Abbot; pp395.