Writing a Dartmoor Novel

This first appeared in the brilliant Dartmoor News magazine – https://www.dartmoornews.co.uk/

Writing a Dartmoor Novel

By John Bainbridge, whose book Gibbet Hill has just been published.

Sixty years ago, when I first started to discover Dartmoor, I read very widely about the Moor. William Crossing was my inspiration – I did every single walk and route in his Guide to Dartmoor while I was still a teenager. All the other Dartmoor writers too: Worth, Malim, Pilkington-Rodgers, Baring-Gould etc. But I also enjoyed reading the novelists of Dartmoor – Eden Phillpotts, John Trevena, L.A.G. Strong, Jan Stewer, Beatrice Chase etc., particularly Phillpotts, who wrote some very good literary Dartmoor novels, as well as lighter fictions.

Easdon, a hill that features in the book

    Even then I wanted to write a Dartmoor novel. I started several and ditched them. When I came to write and publish novels, I tended to set them away from the Moor. A few years ago, I wrote a thriller set on Dartmoor called Dangerous Game; but it was not the novel I had in mind, one that dealt with real historical events on the Moor. Which is why I’ve spent the past two years writing a book called Gibbet Hill.

    I’ve set the book in 1817, one of the most lawless times in British history, when walls were being erected on Dartmoor as landowners sought to restrict the freedom of the peasants. (If that sounds very topical, I would stress that my book was finished before a certain, recent and notorious court case!) 

    I’ve brought in some old moorland tales, setting them at that date. For a long time, I’ve wanted to do my own telling of the story of Kitty Jay, so I made her a character in my tale. I wanted to relate how Irishman’s Wall might have been built and demolished, how houses were built in a day by squatters, how the moorland folk resisted the landowners who were trying to wipe out a traditional way of life on the Moor for their own selfish interests. Kitty Jay has, of course, been the subject of Dartmoor fiction before – in John Galsworthy’s short story The Apple Tree, and in Lois Deacon’s excellent An Angel From Your Door, but I wanted to do a different take on the old tale.

    It’s been a interesting expedition into Dartmoor’s past, though I would stress it’s a work of fiction and not a history book. This has allowed me dramatise events beyond what they actually were in reality. I’ve enjoyed writing an author’s note in the book, which looks at the reality as well as the fiction and hopefully, will enthuse readers to seek out the actual history of the place. Crossing’s books are a good starting point.

    Apart from Gibbet Hill itself, most of the book is set around Manaton, Moretonhampstead, Belstone and Princetown. I’ve invented very little where the landscape is concerned – just one farmhouse and a manor house. I did set some scenes at the rocks known as Figgy (Figgie) Daniel, on the slopes of Easdon. Figgy Daniel almost certainly didn’t have that name in 1817, but it was easier for me to backdate the name for my purposes. I’ve also set some major scenes in the old War Prison at Princetown, which was standing empty and redundant two hundred years ago.

    Then there is Gibbet Hill itself, which gives the novel its title. There were several gibbets on Dartmoor in 1817, for example one at Beetor Cross, just outside Moretonhampstead. But Gibbet Hill was the most notorious. Not just a place where executed men, woman and children, were tarred and left to swing in the breeze, but probably an actual place of execution as well. Dartmoor folk who infringed the law could well be executed or transported for offences that, these days, would just get them a police caution. In the lawless days of 1817 – as with today – the law was harsh where the poor and desperate were concerned.

    The other problem for the Dartmoor novelist is what to do about the way people spoke at the time. When I first knew Dartmoor, the local dialect was very dense, but not so much today, as the older generation have left us. In 1817, it might well have been incomprehensible to the outsider. Eden Phillpotts and the other novelists, writing a century or more ago, deal with it very accurately in a way that readers might not tolerate so much these days. I’ve tried to give a flavour of it without losing the readers along the way.

    I’ve known and walked Dartmoor for over sixty years and Gibbet Hill, is my tribute to the place. A glance at the lawless Dartmoor of those times.