This
is the main square. The photogenic building in the middle is the market
house. It houses a few small businesses and restrooms. The foggy-looking
patch on the steeple is a patch of fog, it was raining and foggy that day.
Although it is small, Chagford has 30-odd businesses, giving one of everything
you need, with three exceptions. There are two huge hardware stores, charmingly
referred to as ironmongers. These are located on the square, off the right-hand
side of this picture.
The other exceptions are lodging -- there are numerous
places to stay in and around the town -- and, more to the point, four fine
pubs. For all of my trips, I have stayed at the Globe
Inn, which is a pub and a bed-and-breakfast. Two of the other pubs
-- Bullers Arms and the Ring of Bells -- offer B&B accommodations,
and the third is the Three Crowns,
a hotel. On the latest trip, I did something I had long wanted to do: the
Chagford pub crawl. (I had a pint of bitter in each of the pubs after dinner
one night, and I am told that I was amusingly inebriated by the end.) The
Globe costs about £45 a night for a couple, and the breakfast would
hold you for most of the day if you didn't get any serious exercise.
But you do get serious exercise. Other than eating and
sleeping, both of which you can do well in this quiet, well-provisioned
place, the reason to come here is to walk on Dartmoor. The moor sits atop
a granite upthrust, with many topographies: heath, pasture, marsh, woods
and rolling hills. Chagford is surrounded by the last, and this photo is
taken from one of them. The bush with the yellow flowers is gorse. The
"chag" in Chagford is a Saxon word for gorse, so Chagford is literally
the gorse-y place where you cross the river (Teign). Lots of English place
names are similarly constructed. Dartmoor, for example, is the moor crossed
by the river Dart. Where the river's mouth meets the English Channel is
Dartmouth,
which is different from the Dartmouth in Kent, birthplace of Keith Richards.
The college in New Hamshire is named after the second earl of the one in
Devon, but I digress.
The previous photo was taken looking down one of the hills. This one
is from roughly the same spot, looking up.
This is the beginning of a small stretch of open moor, which in the summer
can look like the moon. It was awfully red in January, though.
Most of the people who live in this neck of the woods
think it is amusing that tourists trek around the moor for hours on end,
risking life and limb to experience mud. The not-so-complimentary term
they use is grockle. Sometimes, when you are soaking wet inside your heavy-duty
rain gear, you can see their point. So you excuse yourself by taking an
artsy photo, something you might call "Barren Tree in Fog Storm":