draped over two crossed sticks. Hooded and faceless, he holds a lantern in one unseen hand and a scythe in the other. I step gingerly over to photograph him, and a man of baby boomer age wearing a fisherman’s jumper emerges from the front door of the cottage. ‘Ooh, he loikes the reaper,’ he says to me in a strong West Country accent that leaves me unsure if it is genuine or being put on for hillbilly Straw Dogs effect. Something ominous hangs in the air for twenty seconds until a younger man – possibly his son – emerges from the house, chuckling. I ask the younger man if he made the reaper himself and he confirms that he did, with the help of friends, and that it was the centrepiece of a recent New Year’s Eve party. There is no such levity to explain away another haunting site I see six and a half miles upriver, near Staverton: a fence post, recently denuded of nettles and bracken and draped with a blue shawl, matching floppy felt hat and off-beige scarf to form what looks chillingly like a small, stooped woman, turned away from the footpath, crying over some crippling recent tragedy. Of these two ominous home-made figures this is undoubtedly the greater piece of art, constructed using nothing but a banal pre-existing boundary marker and three dirty pieces of clothing, yet conveying absolutely no sense that, were you to touch her and ask her if she was OK, she would not turn round with glowing crimson eyes and gnashing teeth, crunch your skull into fragments and suck fresh blood from your neck hole.
I hike these paths more often in winter, when daylight is scarce and I am reluctant to waste what there is of it on car journeys to further-flung walking destinations. South Devon is by far the most touristy place I’ve ever lived, but in January, February and March you can take a route across the hidden places and get a genuine sense that no other human feet have preceded yours for weeks. One of my favourite walks is a thirteen-mile loop to the village of Tuckenhay. I love the way the village looks from the top of the valley in winter, with smoke billowing from the chimneys beside the creek and the jumbled houses climbing into the narrow opposing valley as if forming an unruly queue for a magic tunnel. This most recent winter I walked down the steepest of the hills leading to the village and was reminded of the time my dad drove down the same lane in icy conditions in an old, untrustworthy car during a family holiday in 1987. With unintentional perfect timing Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’ had been playing on the car’s cassette player as he drove, and the combination of the perilous road and the hysteria of the music sent my mum, me and my auntie Mal into fits of laughter. Now, on the same hollowed-out road, I spotted a hubcap eight feet above me, lodged in the mossy, ivy-strangled bank; above it, brassy robins flitted about. How had it got all the way up there? Maybe the driver of the car it had been attached to had been listening to Vivaldi too, and got carried away. That is, if the hubcap was a hubcap and not a tiny flying saucer that had veered off course and crashed, which was what it more realistically resembled.
My preferred route back from Tuckenhay is the most arduous and impractical one, along the creek bed, where hopefully the tide will be low. The first time I was about to take this route I encountered two dishevelled, wheezing walkers coming from the opposite direction, who told me that I shouldn’t try to get down there, since they’d only just made it through, and they, unlike me, had walking poles and proper anoraks with labels on them. Had they known me, they would have realised that ‘I wouldn’t try to go that way if I were you – it’s difficult’ is one of the three main motivational hiking phrases a person can say in my vicinity, along with ‘There’s a great pub at the apex of this route’ and ‘This hill is well known due to the coven which is said to have practised in the copse at its plateau during the middle of the seventeenth century.’ I thanked them and pressed on in exactly the direction I’d intended, negotiating slimy pebbles and fallen trees with relatively little trouble. But this latest time along the creek was tough going. Rain had wrecked the valley for the previous five days. Vast mounds of slippy alien bubble seaweed sat on top of even slippier wet rocks, like the soggy crust of a treacherous pie. I took an hour to walk a broken studded necklace of land that I’d taken just fifteen minutes to make my way over last May. I only narrowly avoided tripping over, although in some ways it wouldn’t have mattered if I had, since I was already a six-foot strip of pure mud-spatter masquerading as a human male. I had some shopping to do on the route home and thanked my lucky stars that I lived in the kind of place where the sight of a man who looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon buying biological washing liquid and bananas would raise few eyebrows. The seaweed smelled less pleasant than usual: it gave off a salty pungent rot threat. Some of it, blasted there by the storms of recent days during high tide, had caught in the branches of the gnarly oaks which stuck out on precarious crooked noses of granite above the creek. Above it was another lonely haunted-looking barn I’d not previously spotted. A few strands of black binliner were caught in the barbed wire of the adjoining field. I’d not all that long ago learned the excellent Irish term for such a phenomenon – witches’ knickers. The creek formed a thin channel through the mud, then rounded the corner to merge with the river, which, like all other rivers in Devon at this time of year, had acquired that black look it does not possess even on the coldest and most unforgiving day of autumn, summer or spring. It whispered in my ear about the bad stuff it wanted to do to me, and I climbed away, back to higher, more solid earth, relieved. Further on, in a hedge on the hill above Sharpham, near the natural burial ground, I saw another example of witches’ knickers, far more elaborately and eerily crafted by nature: a curved strip of former black bag, complete with hood and slanted eyehole, which only someone in the most fierce denial about the dark side of existence would fail to admit looked like a demon – if not the Devil himself – reclining among the thin twigs, watching weary travellers struggle up the hill and idly planning their fate. If I looked closer, which I did not quite want to, I half-expected him to be casually examining his fingernails. A few weeks earlier similar nearby hedgerows had been strewn with redoubtable, undying wild clematis. Forgetting what the folklore name for it was, I asked a man emerging from a nearby garden if he knew. ‘Those? They’s dead men’s whiskers,’ he said. He was incorrect; the name I was looking for was in fact old man’s beard, but I preferred his term and resolved to use it on all tenable future occasions. Now, though, the wild clematis seemed to have vanished. We had entered January, winter’s peak. Time of tax return terror, bare trees, delusional gym resolutions and scheming hedge demons. Too bleak even for the strong and wiry whiskers of the deceased.
If you spend enough time out walking and witnessing this stuff you realise that there was always a predestiny to the ghosts and monsters that have, for centuries, spilled from the imagination of rurally situated British writers: if the people who invented them hadn’t made them up, someone else would have, or at least ones not unlike them. The countryside – particularly the gnarly, craggy, knobbly countryside of the Deep South West – and the creaking, weather-blasted architecture of that countryside, especially when stripped back by seasonal change, is too rich with spooky imagery for it never to have happened. I am hugely inspired by this on my walks, to the point that it can send me into a minor state of witchy rapture, and I welcome its onset, but, even so, winter is not my season. It claws at me with its mucky nails and strips me back until I’m in the proper fallow state to best receive and fully appreciate my true season, which is spring.
I love spring. I feel it in every fibre of my being. This is not an unusual feeling of course for a human who wants to feel warm and sensually switched on, but there might be an extra, biological factor to it for me. I was born in May, the middle part of the month, when everything has usually fully kicked into gear, and May is when I feel most alive, most me, and never more so than here in Devon – because it’s more fertile and wild than anywhere I’ve lived before and because that makes you feel more entrenched in May’s essence.
I love May so much, I attended three Devonshire May Day festivals last year. At the most memorable of these I walked down Lustleigh Cleave – a dramatic cheese-wire slice in the wooded land on Dartmoor’s softer south-eastern edge – on the first roasting hot day of the year to watch the crowning of the Lustleigh village May Queen, a tradition revived in the early 1900s but stretching back unknown centuries prior to that, and a perfect day out for anyone who tends to see the original 1970s version of The Wicker Man less as a horror film and more as a sweet, well-meaning documentary about agroforestry. After
