The Most Unsettling Walk I've Ever Taken

This is a piece I wrote when I was very first using Substack. Most of you won’t have seen it so I wanted to make it free to read, once again.

What is more remarkable: our capacity to forget suffering and darkness, or our capacity to remember it? I’m frequently equally struck by both. But I do know that my memory has a special knack of editing out troubling experiences: a process it does all by itself, without me really noticing. “That was ACTUALLY the worst house move,” I think directly after a house move, probably because I’ve somehow managed to blank out three others that were just as, if not more, traumatic. “This is ACTUALLY the worst physical pain I have ever been in,” I think when I get ill, feeling utterly adamant about it, even though a full and thorough analysis of my medical history would almost certainly prove otherwise. So when I say that the walk I did yesterday, around the upper reaches of the Tamar, on the Devon-Cornwall border, was the most unsettling I’d ever been on, perhaps take that statement with a pinch of salt. And it should perhaps also be kept in mind that I am a person who - as anyone who regularly reads my writing will know - goes quite far out his way to seek out eerie and disturbing places to walk in. But it felt very much like the most unsettling walk I’d ever been on as it was happening and perhaps that’s the important thing.

The West Devonshire countryside between Holsworthy and Launceston is extraordinarily quiet and forsaken terrain: a rare place in the south-west that still feels unchanged by second home culture and the attendant snazz of the down-from-London pandemic goldrush. It’s often idyllic but you wouldn’t quite ever call its landscape “friendly”. If it is pretty, it is pretty in a very raw way that feels much further than the 90 minutes it is from the south of the county, but also feels secret and forgotten in a way that none of the relatively nearby north coast does. It’s wild but not classic moorland wild, like the areas half an hour south west and south east. I imagine a lot of it looks like it probably did long before I was born. Before I’d even begun the walk, close to its starting point, I found, in the village of Chapmans Well, what might be Britain’s oldest abandoned garage, with a Triumph TR3 and a Jaguar XJS rotting on its forecourt. How long had they been there? Twenty years? Thirty? Forty?

My walk - as so many mid Cornwall and mid Devon ones tend to - soon become one of many rotting vehicles: dozens of them, left in fields to battle it out with eternity, their bonnets turned green with moss, trees beginning to grow out of some of them. As I inspected one, two collies launched from a farmyard to bark their disapproval at me. One followed me down the lane for over a hundred yards, checking I had no intention of coming back.

When he had finally gone, I turned to my left and saw another dog, opening its mouth in a preview of violence, then realised it was just a terrifying statue of a wolf - or maybe just a very wolflike dog - howling in pain, next to a large nondescript industrial unit.

The skies remained remorselessly grey. I had walked over two miles now and had not seen one other walker and something told me the remaining four or five miles would be no more sociable. It was that kind of place, that kind of walk. Underfoot, the ground was exceedingly gloopy, making my progress slow, and at one point, sucked down into the mud between two gateposts, I wondered if I would have to leave my boots behind and negotiate the remainder of the walk in a threadbare pair of socks I had been intended to retire since mid-2021. Why had I come to this place? Why was I not at home? Home was gentle and warm. Home contained my girlfriend and chocolate and books and hot water and a bath.

I walked on, in the direction of the lonely St James’s church in Luffincott, part of the Tetcott Estate, and redundant since the year of my birth, 1975. I remembered at this point that Tetcott once belonged to the Arscott family, who rose to the ranks of the squirearchy owing to a gradual accumulation of property and wealth, beginning in the Middle Ages. The last of the Arscotts was well-known for having a pet toad and employing one of the final English jesters, a hunchback called Black John, less than four feet tall, who bit the feathers off live sparrows and swallowed live mice before retrieving them from the lower reaches of his gullet using invisible string. It is said Black John’s ghost still haunts the nearby Tetcott Manor, searching for rodents.

Just as I was thinking about this, and James Northcote’s haunting oil painting of Black John from the late 1700s, I heard the buzzing of flies to my right, and glanced through a gap in the hedge to see the bloody carcass of a recently decapitated heron in the field next to me.

This was an even lonelier part of the walk and now, as I pressed on towards the church, I realised it was not just that I had not seen another walker; I had not even seen another human, not even in a house or a car nearby. To my right, I saw what looked like a hunched, crawling witch’s familiar slink across the lane.

The woods leading up to Tetcott Manor which run parallel to the Tamar have a very heavy atmosphere and when you are in them you feel like you might have found the last place untouched by anything that the world is currently about. In the thickest part of them are several derelict buildings and, as I admired these, two deer burst out from the undergrowth above and prompted me to do a vertical take-off, in the way my nan used to when her phone rang. Not far from here I found a collection of abandoned jars near a stream: they still had the remains of a brown viscous liquid in them and looked like they had been there for a long time - at least as long as the cars I’d seen earlier at the garage.

Years ago, when I walked in the lonely winter landscapes of deepest Suffolk and Norfolk, I would look over my shoulder a lot, with the feeling that some unseen presence was behind me. This doesn’t happen so much now, perhaps because I am more immune to spookiness on walks. But as I climbed the hill from the lonely woods to Tetcott Manor, where Black John’s ghost still wanders, I looked over my shoulder several times, and once even spun around, feeling that if I was quick I might be able to catch someone or something out during their dark business. At the top of the hill near the manor I admired a stilted 18th Century grain store which, while it might have seemed eerie to some, in this context provided the kind of light relief that a pun or a disco hit by Donna Summer might in many situations.

I followed the path past the manor, with its dark windows, each of which seemed to have a thick fog behind it, and another church. Here I finally saw my first two humans of the walk: two very young men in a car with L plates. Did they live here? What would living here be like? How would you go about and still find methods with which to make yourself part of the everyday human race?

I was almost back at the car and, with more rain threatening, I let my body relax, only realising how tense it had been as I did. The relaxation was deferred by the sight of a tree, overlooking a small fishing lake, which at first resembled a tall monster and subsequently a carved supercilious totem that might oversee a Pagan sacrifice. But it was just a tree. I was safe and only an hour’s drive from home. I felt unusually dehydrated, and glugged down at least a pint of water. I began to drive, but as I did I felt a face watching me from the side of the road. I turned to examine it full on, then pressed on, back to all the soft and comforting and familiar things I keenly required.