Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Moors, mystery, and murder

by Carola

Moorland has provided a setting for a great deal of fictional (and some real) mystery and mayhem, at least since Wuthering Heights and probably before. The example everyone knows is, of course, The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is set on Dartmoor.

Someone recently told me the stories she had read planted an image of moors in her mind that she found to be very inaccurate when she went to England and saw the Yorkshire Moors for herself. When I was in Cornwall last month, I hiked a corner of Bodmin Moor that I plan to use in my next Cornish mystery, so I'll share some pics of the hazards to be met there:

Animals, domestic and wild, and what they leave behind them





   Vicious plants

Rough country







Unexpected sink holes

 and mine shafts not guarded by restored pit-head buildings

















Plenty of room for mayhem, methinks!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The moors look like a wonderful place to explore or just to take a walk, taking care of course to avoid the hazards. Thank you for a great blog. Visiting Cornwall is something I really want to do one day.

Carola Dunn said...

That was a beautiful day. When the mists come down, the moors can get pretty scary. Really easy to lose your sense of direction.