Rain (5 page)

Despite Dartmoor’s many blanket bogs and mires, it is considered a ‘flashy’ catchment area due in part to its impermeable bedrock, which means that when it rains
the effects are seen almost immediately in its waterways. When the drizzle falling today on the high ground reaches the sea at Dartmouth it will find a wide, deep-water harbour, very different from the gin-clear, rocky rivers of the high moor with their fast, white eddies and tin-coloured depths. There, at last, it will become part of the sea, only to evaporate, condense, and fall again – perhaps on Devon’s uplands – as rain.

The track joins a narrow road between drystone walls and we put the dog on the lead in case of cars. The grazed, improved pasture on each side of the road is so green compared to the upland landscape we’ve just left. Spiky rushes may be making inroads here and there into damp corners and along the field drains, but these are the green postage stamps of the English imagination, here made from ‘newtakes’ – no longer newly taken at all – and walled off cleanly from the dull pewter and bronze of the moor above. But cultivation often comes at a cost: not only is unimproved land usually more biodiverse, but it also tends to hold on to water better. A recent study by the Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, showed that one square metre of intensively improved grassland held just forty-seven litres of water compared to the 269 litres per square metre held by unimproved ‘rhôs’ pasture with its naturally occurring purple moor grass and sharp-flowered rush.

The old drystone walls bounding the road where we
walk are shaggy with moss and dog lichen and pinned with medals of pennywort and the delicate buttonholes of maidenhair spleenwort, all beaded silver with rain. A few paces ahead of us a stonechat perches on the top of the wall and flicks his wings insouciantly. The call he makes echoes almost exactly the clash of wet pebbles loosed from the disintegrating road surface under our boots.

We pass through a hamlet where water drips from the eaves of a lovely old thatched longhouse, now with two expensive cars parked outside. A little burn gurgles in a stone-lined channel thick with yellow and brown ash leaves, and a dozen or so fieldfares startle from a garden and cluster into a hedge, a foretaste of the big flocks the coming winter will bring. Then we leave the road and take a semi-sunken path overhung with dripping trees that leads back up onto the moor. It’s boulder-strewn, almost like a dried-up river bed, but at one time would have been kept clear for carts and packhorses. The very last of the yarrow and red campion bloom amid the sodden autumn grass and fallen leaves at the edges, and the gate that takes us onto the moor has another lovely, rust-red latch.

I unclip the lead from the dog. She shakes herself, her body turning faster than her waterproof coat can keep up with, and trots on ahead, following narrow, weaving sheep paths that lead up and away from us through the heather.

Here and there are fungi: exploded earthstars filled with damp grey spores, and the fairytale parasols of fly agaric hiding underneath the sodden bracken. Agaric contains both hallucinogens and neurotoxins, helpfully flagged up – unlike some of its duller and more poisonous cousins – by the bright red danger signal of its cap. A wet summer usually means a good autumn for fungi, helping their mycelia to spread and penetrate the ground – although it’s thought that several of our native species are now fruiting in spring as well, due to the warmer temperatures brought about by climate change. Some, like the earthstars and puffballs, use rain to trigger the dispersal of their spores, but in common with most fungi that have open, downward-facing gills the fly agaric will wait for a dry day before releasing them to drift where they will on the wind.

At last, there ahead of us is the familiar shape of the final tor on the walk, a place I’ve felt hefted to all my life, and still am. Easily reached from the road on its other side, it seems recently to have become a favourite with families; when I was growing up, though, there were far fewer tourists on the moor, and when we came here, as we did on every visit, we’d usually have the tor to ourselves.

Its granite bulk is dark with rainwater, but nevertheless we sit for a few moments in the lee of the topmost mass looking out through the smudged, wet air to the
valley of the Dart below and the hills beyond. The drizzle patters only very lightly on the hood of my coat, though the bits of my fringe that have escaped it drip in tails. The dog shakes the rain from her ears and waits.

My mother loved this place, and I think about the day when we brought her up here one last time, right at the very end of her life. It was a strange afternoon; it felt to me as though it should have had more shape, more meaning, but none of us quite knew how to give it the significance we needed. Like so many things in life, you just do your best; but for a long time after we all straggled back to our waiting cars, leaving the gritty ash to blow from the tor’s top, I thought, every time it rained, of her body passing slowly into the moor around the tor, and becoming part of it, drawn down by the life-giving water and returned slowly to the earth.

It was a mild winter, not nearly so wet as the one before. Some snow fell in the north of the country, but there wasn’t a great deal anywhere else. Spring arrived unheralded by gales or storms, our landlady got our gutters fixed, and slowly, as the months passed, I stopped worrying each time it rained.

My year of getting wet – and thinking about, and reading about, rain – has broadened and deepened my feeling for the outside world. I’m no longer just a fair-weather walker; I can choose now to overcome the impulse for comfort and convenience that insulates us not only from the bad in life but from much of the good.

I think we need the weather, in all its forms, to feel fully human – which is to say, an animal. It’s under our skin: not just psychologically, but physiologically too. New research has revealed that despite our double-glazed homes and brightly lit offices, a tiny but vital part of our brain knows what season it is outside and alters the behaviour of our immune systems accordingly: proof that millennia of evolution in nature – not apart from it – have left their mark.

In any case, to experience the countryside on fair
days and never foul is to understand only half its story. To watch rain pock the surface of a chalk stream, feel mizzle on the chill skin of your face or smell petrichor rising from summer-dry soil is to be baptised into a fuller, older, and more deeply felt relationship with the natural world.

We commonly describe rain as
chucking it down, bucketing, pelting, tipping
and
pouring
, but here in the UK we have a long, rich lexicon of words for wet weather: