Dartmoor Belongs to its Stories: Old Crockern and Protest

I have grown up in Devon and on Dartmoor. I live less than a mile away from a neolithic stone row, which my mother affectionately refers to as the ‘giant’s grave’. I live five miles away from a ‘healing stone’, a rock with a perfect person-sized hole in the middle that to slide through is to relieve any ailment. Slightly further is Wistman’s Wood, where, if you are lucky, you may witness the Wild Hunt and the hounds of the moor. Beyond that, at Postbridge, the Hairy Hands have driven people to their deaths. In these ways, Dartmoor is unknowable. Its history is vast and woven with folklore and traces of those who came before; its stories situate the collective and overlapping identities of the people who have related to the land for thousands of years. 

Old Crockern is one such example of the richly-threaded cultural tapestry of Dartmoor. For centuries, Old Crockern, the spirit and guardian of the moor, has ridden out from Crocken Tor at night. He is a ghoulish figure of varying gaunt descriptions who rides a skeletal horse. In the years of enclosure, locals called upon the spirit to resist the impeding of their common land. Old Crockern’s curse is powerful: there are stories of landowners attempting to farm and fence off the moor only to be forced out by waning financial circumstances or personal failings. 

It is apt, then, that Old Crockern has become the figurehead of a movement against a new kind of enclosure. On January 13th, Alexander Darwall, a wealthy hedge fund manager, won a landmark legal case which effectively overturned the right to wild camp on Dartmoor. Among his other estates across the country, Darwall sought to prohibit wild camping on his 4000-acre holdings on the moor for pheasant shooting. For years, Dartmoor has been the only place left in England where you can legally wild camp: a final bastion of legal protections for those seeking to exercise their freedoms on common land. Since, there has been significant public outcry. On January 21st, hundreds attended a peaceful march across the moor spearheaded by The Right to Roam UK and The Stars Are Ours.  Crucially, the objective of the march was to awaken Old Crockern. 

Here, I would argue, is a stroke of protest genius. To say that Dartmoor belongs to anybody, even ‘the people’ is to subtly disavow the contingency of the relationship between humans and the moor when they enter it. Of course, it is crucial to embolden the collective against their rights and access to nature being stripped. The revoking of the bylaw undermines one of the last few legal protections in England for access to nature. The case creates a legal precedent that the general population is not entitled to their green surroundings and helps further demarcate the land along contours of class and race. It takes away an opportunity to experience untouched landscapes in a time when they are increasingly few and need protection. But the moor belongs to itself. To claim ownership of the moor for anybody is to trace the same anthropocentric binarisms between human and nature that lead to it being exploited and cut up in the first place;  it ignores what people collectively owe to the moor. Using Old Crockern, however, problematizes claiming the moor at all. Old Crockern represents how the moor is its own, self-empowered site of human history and storytelling. He represents how human are inspired by and built from the land, rather than vice versa. 

Yet, there are issues with the use of Old Crockern worth attending to. ‘Tradition’ is often a precusor for regression, for staking a claim to a land and barring it off to others. In the case of Old Crockern, this pitfall is avoided purely because the spirit relates to the land first. Equally, going out and attempting to awaken a spirit is perhaps a particularly gentrified form of protest, removed from the very tangible, material circumstances that other protest movements grapple with. Again, though, focalising the movement through other means would probably be self-defeating because the protest’s desire is to attend to the land. And using Old Crockern isn’t unsuccessful. Ongoing talks between the protest movement, Dartmoor National Park and now the government are hopefully signalling progress. Just last week, the Labour cabinet pledged to revoke the wild camping ban if they came to power. 

The use of Old Crockern in protest, then, bolsters the land itself. Crockern helps us appreciate the histories of Dartmoor as a site of knowledge and creative inspiration. As a being of inbetweenness that is not wholly ‘human’ or ‘natural’, Old Crockern merges and balances the two spheres. The guardian symbolises a stewardship for the environment and emboldens the body of tradition and land that has made him. 

Dartmoor is saturated with storytelling, with rich geographies of folklore that situate the unknowability of the land. The way in which the moor ongoingly influences imaginations attests that the land will always predate human manifestations of it: that it belongs to itself. In protest, then, who are people like Darwall to try and undermine the relationship to the land that Old Crockern embodies? Who is Darwall to overlook such a testament to Dartmoor’s power? 

By Mia Fulford

Featured image credit: Author’s own iIllustration.