Lost in moorland fog

Text 1: The Track to Withypool, by George Treloar

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I set out from the inn at Hollow Cross at nine in the morning with a map, a stick, a pocket of bread and cheese, and the landlord’s solemn assurance that the track to Withypool was as plain as the nose on my face. For two hours it was. The moor rolled away on every side in long brown waves of heather, larks went up singing from under my feet, and the sky was so wide and so blue that I sang too, very badly, there being nobody to hear.

The fog came in at noon. I saw it first as a white line along the western ridge, like the edge of a tablecloth, and thought nothing of it. Ten minutes later it was upon me. It did not roll or drift, as fogs do in books; it simply arrived, swallowing first the far hills, then the near ones, then the track ahead, until I stood in a small grey room whose walls moved with me as I walked.

I kept on, for there was nothing else to do. The heather dripped. My boots filled with water. Every rock that loomed up out of the murk looked like a man, or a sheep, or a cottage, and was none of these. Twice I came upon my own footprints in the mud and understood, with a cold drop in the stomach, that I had walked in a circle. Somewhere a curlew called, a long, thin, bubbling cry, like a question that nobody would answer.

It was near four o’clock, and I was beginning to think seriously about the bread and cheese and what I should do when it was gone, when I heard a bell. A sheep bell, dull and tinny, and then a dog barking, and then a man’s voice, cursing the dog with great fluency. I have never heard sweeter music.

The shepherd brought me down to his farm and his wife gave me tea, and I learned that I had been wandering all afternoon within half a mile of their door.

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