In a Dark Moor with the Beast of Bodmin

In a Dark Moor with the Beast of Bodmin

I am in the midst of a misty moor. It is the kind of place that fills my mind with scary images, of Dartmoor, with huge ghostly dogs like the Hound of the Baskervilles and of escaped prisoners hiding, ready to pounce on unsuspecting travellers. And this is Bodmin Moor, where, in a Daphne Du Maurier classic, Jamaica Inn, a fanatical fictional gang-leader named Joss Merlyn led a mad, drunken band of wreckers. In the book and in my mind they lured ship’s captains to founder their vessels on the rocks, and be looted, their crew killed as they swam to shore. I can almost see the dogs, the prisoners and old Joss and the boys, cutlasses, and pistols in killing-ready hands.

After some time hard climbing I arrived, breathless, at the top of a tor facing others of its kind over valleys beneath me. What is a tor? Imagine a hill whose slopes are booby-trapped with deceptively safe-looking, thickly tufted bunches of grass surrounded by nasty bits of bog that can sink your boots to the top if you don’t watch out. Catch the old, worn trails where you can. They may be rocky, with tripping possibilities, but at least they are safe from boots being sucked into the bog, taking your feet in there with them. At the top of this particular tor are flat, squared off, three foot high gray stones left over from simple structures used to honour the dead and maybe long lost gods hundreds of years ago. They are positioned in a rough circle. I am sitting on one of those stones at this moment, looking at the others like we are in some kind of discussion group. “Rock to my right, you have been here a long time. Do you think that this place is scary? I certainly do.”

I somehow sense movement in the valley. I stand up and look down the slope to the flat lands below. The locals told me that there were wild horses here. I didn’t quite believe them. But they were right. This is a sight I never thought that I would see. Not that I ever really sought them out at any point in my life before. They are magnificent.

As I watched them, I realized that the sound I had heard was of a few of them running. The ones that were still grazing when I first looked down were now starting to move too. Something was spooking them, something I could not see. There was a dense forest of evenly-planted evergreens near where the horses had been standing, the forest being probably an attempt to ‘humanize’ or ‘regularize’ the moor. But nothing emerged from its rows of darkness. I almost wish something had. Concrete fears are easier for me to deal with than are fiends of the imagination.

I looked again at the rock to the right. Is it time to leave this place and go back to the Jamaica Inn, where I am staying, and fictional 18^th century Joss terrorized his wife and niece in Daphne du Maurier’s novel? That’s a long question to ask a rock. 

As I stood I saw the rock to the right from a different angle, a more illuminating light. There was writing carved into it, something that I had not seen before. From what little I know of the language, it looked to be a form of Cornish. There were two sentences etched on the rock.

Wanting to know what it said, I took my sketching pad out of my knapsack. My intent had been to draw a few moor landscapes. But I had been so engaged in my emotional reaction to the moor, I had neglected my artistic plans so far. I had heard of people doing gravestone rubbings, so I took out a dark pencil (my medium) and rubbed it against the paper over the writings, copying out the text on the rock.

After I had completed that task to my artistic satisfaction, I stood up straight, and began to walk down the tuft and bog slope, paying very close attention to where I was placing my once-clean and previously-polished boots. I began my walk carefully, taking steps from tuft to tuft, trying to avoid the boggy bits.

Then I heard a sound not very far behind me. I turned around, and saw what had been its origin. All British moors I have ever heard of have their rumoured beasts. In several, it is a large cat, like a dark cougar. I used to think that strange, as I don’t believe that there were any large wild cats in Britain when there were humans there to scare. But there it was – the Beast of Bodmin Moor. It was a black panther-like creature. It walked low to the ground, like it was trying to creep under my bed to be the monster I feared at night when I was a kid. If stealth were a verb, I could say that it had stealthed up the hill behind me just after it had scared the wild horses away. 

           Even though I was pretty sure that the beast could move much faster than I could in its natural habitat, I had to make myself move as quickly as I could no matter how low my chances were of outrunning the black beast.

           I couldn’t hear it growl or snarl, and its paws didn’t seem to make any sucking-out-of-the bog sounds, but I still knew, somehow, that it was closing in on me as I stumbled down the slope. I felt its presence nearing me without seeing or hearing it.

           Then my right foot crashed through something light, papery and crunchy—a wasp’s nest. Soon the stinging began. Up my loose pant legs they came, sharp hot needles bringing intense pain. I jumped around like a madman, dancing about like some ecstasy-crazed dancer at a rave. Then I fell – splat-, roll-to-stand - splat. As I lay there, my mind left the wasps and their stings, as much as they hurt, as I remembered the Beast. It should have caught up with me by now. Where was it? Was it toying with me like I was some kind of mouse of the moors?

           Slowly, awkwardly I picked myself up, and looked all around me, 360 degrees, as I did. No beast was in sight. Then I proceeded down the hill- still in pain, but happy that I appeared not to be imminent beast fodder. Finally, breathlessly, I made my way back to Jamaica Inn, where I was staying for the week. I told the people there about the wasp’s nest and the stings, and about the wild horses. I kept my Beast story to myself. They might believe me. They might not. I didn’t want to take that chance and become the source of dumb tourist jokes. At this point I wasn’t sure whether I believed that I had seen and heard the dark presence. I had drunk a few Beast of Bodmin ales before I set out into the moor.

           But I did want to find out about what the meaning was of the writing on the rock. As luck would have it, there was a waiter in the restaurant at the Jamaica Inn who was a university student taking a program in Cornish Studies. He had taken two courses in the Cornish language, and was fascinated by the possibility of translating the text on the paper that I handed him. He lived a short distance away from the Jamaica Inn, so, after his shift was over, he went to fetch his Cornish dictionary, and his class notes.

           When he came back, his face was filled with determination. He sat down at a restaurant table, and puzzled out the message, word by word, triumph by triumph. And this is what his translation said, cleverly rhyming now in English (the translator something of a poet), as it had in the original Cornish:

“If you meet the Beast of Bodmin do not fear.

Do the dance of the demons, and it will disappear.”