a wisht place

(spinning in the wind)

By the time we reached the peak of the tor, the rain was horizontal, lashing our faces. My smallest son, who had clambered up, goat-like, shouted directions down to me from the top. ‘Take the right-hand path, Mum—this one is too hard for you to climb!’ I lowered my head and focused on my feet through bog and boulder. Up on the summit, the wind was wild. My eldest teen appeared from behind a rock face: ‘I’ve been spinning!’ he said, gleeful. The younger teen, who had scaled the rock, was silhouetted above us against swirling grey sky. He extended his arms, allowed the wind to fill his coat, and whooped at the top of his lungs. Laughing, I joined him and let out a yell. All the anxious tension I had been carrying was released into the air. It felt like freedom. I shrieked again and again, twisting in the wind as the rain soaked through to my skin.

‘It’s beautiful here’ said my eldest later, as we sheltered behind a wall of granite, eating Mars Bars. It was their first time on Dartmoor, but not my own. I spent my early years in a town on the edge of the moor—this is the landscape of my blood and bones. Dartmoor is somewhere that becomes part of you—a wisht place (a Devon word meaning haunted, eerie or uncanny)—it catches hold and never lets go. After I moved away, to the neat, flat East Anglian fields, returning here always felt like coming home. Once, (when I was around the age my youngest son is now) visiting friends of my early childhood, we all stripped naked and threw ourselves into the River Dart. The moor calls you to offer up every inch of yourself, to allow it to consume you.

With just a few years left now before my eldest son leaves home, I find myself thinking more and more about what he will take with him when he goes. Not the bag of possessions he will shoulder as he walks out the door, but memories, meaning, a way of moving though the world. I worry that we have not given him enough, that it is too late to do more. But then, seeing him spin in the wind on top of the tor, breathing in beauty, I saw the sky embrace him and I knew that he has what he needs.

Laura x