Secret Places 1 - Central Exmoor

One catchphrase for the modern world we live in could be: everything everywhere. Armed with our smartphones we can look up and learn about almost anything, no matter where we happen to be. We can see pictures or videos of the most obscure places and entities, regardless of how distant they are. Which, for the romantics among us, means there’s a lot less magic and mystery waiting to be discovered by real, non-automated, non-internet-linked humans who like exploring the world for themselves.

On our way to this most secret of places

For centuries, all we had were paper maps (with varying degrees of accuracy) to tell us where we were in the world and show us what might lie around the corner. Before maps were invented, every journey away from a person’s home-patch would have been an adventure into the unknown. 

The empty zone of central Exmoor

Now, thanks to Google Maps and the like, the concept of that “adventure into the unknown” is just about impossible. Which, of course, can be a very good and useful thing indeed, but it doesn’t exactly add to the mystical allure of distant horizons or that wonderful sense of discovery you get by seeking to find what’s just around the next corner.  

A ring of trees in the middle of nowhere

People like me have been partly to blame. For nearly 25 years I have been writing walks articles which explain exactly how to find a place and which route to follow. Indeed, I have done it to the extent where some people have complained that I’ve been giving away wonderful secrets - exposing fabulous places to a wider public which hitherto have only been known by a few. 

My response has always been: don’t be selfish! Why shouldn’t we share a bit of countryside joy in this increasingly urbanised world? The more people get out into nature and enjoy it, the more they’ll care for it. 

For the entire latter half of the last century my journalist father, Peter Hesp, was having the same kind of argument. He loved unearthing and writing about strange and out-of-the-way places - and he was so good at it, eventually the local National Park Authority put together a book of his articles, called Secret Exmoor, which today has become a collector’s piece.  

Peter Hesp’s Secret Exmoor

As a boy, I would regularly join Dad as he explored some of the locations mentioned in the book - and over the recent Christmas lull I enjoyed re-reading the various articles which were collected in Secret Exmoor. It was only when I put the book down that I began to recall some of the adventures which didn’t make it into the book, or into any article he wrote. 

Author’s preface to Secret Exmoor

Why didn’t they make it into print? The answer can be found in the very first article in Secret Exmoor. It focusses on the long lost village of Clicket, which my father discovered and wrote about having met a very old man who actually used to live in what had been the West Country’s answer to a ghost-town.

This is what my Dad wrote about this particular journey of discovery: “In places the path petered out altogether and there was nothing for it but to follow the stream as best one could through marshy meadows or moss-grown woods. It was difficult to believe that this must once have been a well-trodden way - a score or more children travelled it to school each day towards of the last century…”

And so he went on, describing his adventure in an article which originally appeared in the newspaper he worked for, the Somerset County Gazette, just a week after he’d visited the out-of-the-way valley high in the Brendon Hills.   

Peter Hesp’s article about Clicket

Of course, he told his young sons all about the place and I can still remember the wonder in his eyes. He had, after all, discovered an entire overgrown, forgotten, village in which no one but ghosts had lived for donkey’s years. 

In his lengthy article, originally written in 1965, he eventually describes the last residents of Clicket… “One can still find the foundations of a little cottage where lived the miller and his family. In the first half of this century, when the village had become forsaken, an old homeless couple found their way here and set up house in the ruined mill rather than allow themselves to be taken to the workhouse and be separated.

“There they stayed together, finding what poor comfort they could, without doors or windows, and with the roof leaky and ready to collapse. Their suffering - and their fellowship - lasted one year, perhaps two, and then the old man died. His wife was taken away, presumably to that dreaded refuge for the destitute, the parish workhouse. 

“Some say the little village community vanished away because of plague or pestilence,” Peter concluded. “But the evidence seems to show that it survived quite happily from before the 16th century almost through to modern times. Then, when there was more freedom of movement and youngsters grew up hearing of a wider world, people just drifted away and never went back.”  

Of course, we boys were desperately keen to see this ghost village for ourselves and we pestered Dad to take us there the very next weekend, which he did. I can still see the look of bewilderment and sadness on his face when we discovered that more than 100 other people had been inspired to make the same difficult journey having read his article which had been published on the Friday.

Peter Hesp was very careful when writing about his Secret Exmoor from that moment on. Which is why there were adventures of discovery out in the moors which never made it onto any page. 

And recently, leafing through the book, one of them came back to me… A long boggy walk to a very, very, lonely place indeed - a place which we boys absolutely adored and found so magical that we returned several times to have picnics there over the years.  

On my way to one of Exmoor’s secret corners

A smallish handful of Exmoor-lovers will know it well - a great many will not - but this time I’m keeping schtum about the geography of the location (pictured in the photographs). The little circle of trees in the moors deserves to be visited, but not shouted about. 

Exmoor’s most sepulchral ring of trees

Perhaps it’s the fact that the trees appear to have sunk down into the moorlands which helps to promote this air of hiddenness. It’s as if the place doesn’t want to be known to the world - as though it is in hiding, more than happy to be far from the eyes of humankind. To catch a glimpse of this junction of moorland streams from afar, you would need to be in some kind of aircraft. And who can blame this clandestine corner for wishing to retain its privacy in this day and age when we’ve done so much to wreck the planet that we now call this era the Anthropocene?

To some slight degree, I felt like an interloper when I walked there a week ago in bright winter sunlight. Certainly we did not tarry for long. The January sun was sinking fast - and this is no place to be caught out in the dark. 

Finn the lurcher sniffing out a secret corner

However, I do intend returning every now and again - and to carry on doing so for as long as my limbs will take me across those sodden moors. Next time, I’ll go earlier and maybe take a flask of soup - or maybe we’ll have a summer’s picnic there later in the year. But we will always, always, ensure that we leave nothing save for the odd boot-mark here or there.

This place, above all others I know here in crowded Southern England, deserves its sanctity and its unbelievably refreshing sense of peace and quietude. 

And now, having visited the ring of trees in the middle of Exmoor’s great nowhere-in-particular-zone, and having written this little piece, I plan to create a short series of articles with illustrations focussing on a few of the West Country’s hidden places. All of them will be accessible to the public - each can be visited if you’re willing to put in a good walk - but I will not be naming any of them or giving their exact locations. 

Regard it as one man’s bid to add a little magic and mystery back into the landscape.