How to lose a Tor

No, look, I'm going to change that immediately. Lose just isn't the right word. It invokes some degree of ineptitude, some sense of deficiency; it has no context, no connection, you just can't get close to how misty it was. And yes, that is an excuse. It's a good one. It doesn't matter that Haytor is a huge, huge, lump of granite that sticks out of the ground by perhaps eighty or a hundred foot.

We went here. And that huge, huge lump of granite sticking out in the middle of the screen is Haytor.

Starting off in the Visitors' Centre car park, designated by the capital P in the Streetmap view, we tramped off in the direction of the disused quarry, before briefly stopping to take the following image.

As you can see, this was a black and white world with vague, extremely vague, patches of colour peeking out from beneath the cloud layer. And for anyone in doubt, that fluffly grey layer at the top of the image is the cloud layer. It was resting, quite handily, maybe deliberately, below the height of every major outcrop in the immediate vicinity. For anyone not comprehending that last sentence, every major outcrop was lost to sight.

This makes navigation ... interesting.

But we got to the quarry easily enough.

Like many disused quarries on Dartmoor, this one has long since filled with water and like most on Dartmoor this last week, it had susbsequently frozen. Here then, in a pretty standard reflective construct, is a frozen quarry lake. You'll have to trust me when I assert that this is the same quarry lake you can see on the map.

What you can't discern from the image is the resonating sound, most likely induced by both ice and quarry, when you pitch a stone into the middle of it all. You can, of course, get an idea that many people before us had experienced said sound even if, like us, the intention had been to break the ice. Not many had succeeded.

From the quarry we maintained our general direction, crossed the tramway and made Smallacombe Rocks. A few delinquent minutes of hanging around coincided with me vetoing the idea of continuing down into the valley - we wouldn't want to get lost would we - was most likely my general comment.

In an effort not to get lost, we moved back towards where I thought Haytor should be, but keeping to a level gradient. Soon enough, we made out what we now know was the quarry beneath Holwell Tor, the tramway bisecting the view. When the time seemed right, we took off up the slope, crossed the tramway again, and went up a steep incline, again towards where I thought Haytor should be.

Unfortunately it wasn't there and soon enough, walking inside the cloud layer, we found ourselves in a place that we weren't sure of. There, that's a distinct enough phrase - a place we weren't sure of. Eventually, we made the rocky height north of Saddle Tor. A quick check of the map led to an eastward adjustment in our direction and soon enough, we struck the road, kept to the left of it, and were able to climb the eastern shoulder of Haytor and thence back to the car.

Easy enough really, but there was a time, adrift in the mist, when I was quietly pleased that I'd packed a flask of tea and my new, and still unopened, survival blanket. Ros meanwhile, was rehearsing the phone number to the Dartmoor Rescue Group.

And Clover? You know I'm not entirely sure she realised there was a problem. Not with our route finding anyway. It was the gorse she was worried about.