Kirsteen McNish speaks to writer Sophie Pierce and artist Alex Murdin about their connection to the landscape of Dartmoor.
Dartmoor, like many moorland spaces, holds a special place in so many people’s psyches. Whilst it is a vast, breathtaking landscape — vibrant with wildlife above and below its surface — it is also a working and peopled place. One doesn’t have to journey across the moor for long to encounter farmers, peat workers, nature preservationists, walkers, cyclists, archaeologists, and artists, all deeply entangled with the land.
The moor is a complex place full of politics, care, mystery and hard graft, as well as the remnants of ancient communities that worshipped, worked, grew and dissipated, leaving their traces in stone rows, settlements, farms and quarries. Over the past 18 years I became increasingly connected as a visitor, feeling a strong a magnetic pull to Dartmoor’s moonscape-like boglands and beguiling stone circles, and eventually settled at its foot, from where I can look up at the rich moorland colours in the shifting light.
The landscape has taken a similar hold of writer Sophie Pierce and artist Alex Murdin, resulting in the forthcoming book Rock Idols Dartmoor: A guide to Dartmoor in 28 Tors, and in turn the germination of Dartmoor Tors Festival. In Rock Idols, Pierce and Murdin cast a wide lens over the tors that draw people in their thousands every year, considering how these places have brought forth worship, divination and captured the imagination of artists and writers, walkers and folklorists over the millennia. Alex’s drawings capture the tors’ multitudes of layers, and make us look and look again for the things we see in the half-light — that which haunts the periphery of our imagination.
Bringing together the likes of photographer Garry Fabian Miller, musician Martha Tilston, archaeoastronomer Carolyn Kennett, and the bewitching Beltane Morris Border Dancers, Dartmoor Tors Festival will lace together illuminating perspectives and practices threaded between venues in Ashburton and up to the stones rows of Merrivale. It feels significant too that both book and festival will be brought to life by the Beltane fires that warm the earth between spring and summer.
Many people are drawn to open spaces for a variety of reasons: to explore, to find solace, and discover more about themselves in relationship to the natural world. I know you have lived cheek-by-jowl with Dartmoor for over a quarter of a century. I also know you both have a deep emotional connection with the moor. What can you tell me about this relationship with the moor that imbues your creative practices?
Alex Murdin: As a visual artist I think I have always craved the uplands like Dartmoor because of the expansive ocular space they provide. To see from hill to hill, mountain to mountain, shades of ozone blue darkening outwards and upwards into the infinite black of space, seeing into the deep golden river valleys below, looking out above the birds, gives the illusion at least of a wider comprehension of the world. Along with this, it is a space away from norms, an interstitial space between architecture and sublime nature, which makes it a suitable place to dream. I’ve always made artwork about myself, my environment and my ecology, trying to understand better our complex relationship with/as part of the natural world but I often found myself in a comfortable world, focussing on charismatic megafauna, or familiar plant life. So I wondered about what it would be like to work with an integral part of life that is so much harder to empathise with, stone, and that also turned me back to the granite of Dartmoor.
Sophie Pierce: Since I was a child, I have always felt ‘in my skin’ in wild places, whether swimming in a river or wandering over the moors. As an adult I have constantly sought these places out, not really bothering to think about why. But when our son Felix died suddenly in 2017, my relationship with the landscape around me fundamentally changed. Dartmoor became a place not just of solace and diversion, but somewhere that opened up my heart and soul. Being outside, in the presence of rocks, rivers, forests and heaths, enabled me to wrestle with the trauma that had engulfed my life, and helped unleash my thoughts and my writing. Dartmoor’s non-human beauty, and also neutrality in a sense, liberated me to touch a delicate, profound reality about life and death that I find hard to name, but which I explore in my writing.
Being a long-time visitor of the stones of Dartmoor, their folklore and emerging new traditions, I know much less about the history of the tors, other than perhaps Hound Tor. I am interested to learn more about your book and its incredible artwork. Tell me about which Tors have the most compulsive draw for you both.
SP: Our book is a meditation on Dartmoor through stone, and in particular the tors. These are extraordinary natural monoliths, which come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Millennia old, they were probably worshipped by our prehistoric ancestors, hence the book’s title, Rock Idols. Each one has a different character. A particular favourite is Luckey Tor, which stands by the River Dart, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, shrouded in the summer by green vegetation. Sequestered in ancient woodland, it is a great contrast to most of the other tors which tend to be on top of summits. Another favourite is Fox Tor for its sheer remoteness and proximity to the rather scary bogs and mires.
AM: White Tor was special to visit again for the book as it always feels to me like the tor where the stones have ingested the most human culture for the longest period. People gathered there amongst its lightning-shattered greenstones in the Mesolithic, 10,000 years ago, gazing out across the game grazing in the Tamar Valley below, knapping flint weapons. Bronze age peoples succeeded them, building a separated, henge-like space and tor cairns to encircle the living rocks.
Another favourite is a place that many people would just walk past. Calveslake Tor is small and quiet, but it holds a strong attraction for me as a place that inspires awe and wonder for its alienness. Its plump fat-bellied rocks nestle in a remote rain-soaked valley near the head of the Plym. The rocks have cultivated a fantastical collection of some of the most amazing lichens on Dartmoor, volcanic, leprous, demonic — fairy worlds within worlds.
In the drawings I am trying to capture something of these uncanny worlds of stone, familiar but alien, the flickering shapes we see in them, the stories they have told us over the millennia.
You have drawn a unique constellation of writers, artists, musicians and venues for Dartmoor Tors Festival — what connective thread did you want to make with the curation of the festival?
SP: The idea for the festival has grown out of our love for Dartmoor and its role in both our creative lives; the thing which connects our work, and all the events at the festival, is the emotional relationship with places like Dartmoor. Why do they mean so much to us, and why do we care? We hope the festival will explore the nature of this relationship, through conversations with artists, writers, campaigners, musicians and historians, and through immersive walks exploring different aspects of Dartmoor including its mythology and folklore, its artistic inspiration, and its prehistoric archaeology.
AM: I think it’s been about finding people related to this landscape that can show us different perspectives on our lives through the lens of place, who understand the value of particularity, the characteristics that make spaces into places. We decided early on that this would be enhanced if it was a cross-cultural festival. So in a very modest way we are trying to get a bit of a mix going — history, politics, art, ecology and so on — a coming-together to look at where we live and swap ideas about Dartmoor past, present and future.
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Top photo: Emma Stoner.
Alex Murdin illustrations, top to bottom: Crockern Tor; Luckey Tor; Fur Tor; Kes Tor.
‘Rock Idols Dartmoor: A guide to Dartmoor in 28 Tors’ is published on 1st April by Wild Things Publishing, with an accompanying exhibition at the Princetown Visitor Centre, Dartmoor, from 1st April – 15th June.
Dartmoor Tors Festival will take place from Ashburton to the moors on the weekend of 23-25th May 2025. Book here.