busyLast Friday morning, on my well-earned day off, I decided to head off to Dartmoor to try and catch the sunrise. The weather wasn't promising, in fact it was raining when I left home and I wondered whether I was wasting my time. I got to Hound Tor, one of my favourite places on Dartmoor at around eight o'clock, after a drive of about an hour and a quarter. The rain had cleared off but I could still see storms and showers massing on the skyline to the west. I walked up the hill towards the tor itself. Hound Tor, like all the other tors on Dartmoor, is an outcrop of granite poking up through the soil on a point of high ground. The rocks have eroded over millions of years and have been turned into magical and intriguing shapes.
Near Hound Tor, in the valley to the south, is an abandoned medieval village. There isn't much to see, just a few walls and trackways, but I had never been down to it before and I felt I ought to take a look. It had an eerie feeling at that time of the morning and it was very easy to imagine myself trying to eek out a living in this desolate and forbidding place.
From Hound Tor I drove round and took various photos of sheep on the hills and crags, dodging showers as I went.
I hope you like the photos I took. I'm sorry there are quite a lot of them but I think they illustrate my morning well.
 |
| Cloudy sunrise over Hound Tor |
 |
 |
| Silhouette of Hound Tor rocks |
 |
| I thought this looked like the face of an old man blowing out a stream of orange light |
 |
| Haytor in the distance |
 |
| More Hound Tor rocks |
 |
| Looking down at the abandoned medieval village in the valley below |
 |
| This gives a little of the scale of Dartmoor |
 |
| A storm brewing |
 |
| Haytor in the distance |
 |
| The medieval village |
 |
 |
 |
| Mist rising in a distant valley |
 |
 |
| The shapes of the rocks fascinate me |
 |
| Across the valleys |
 |
| A Dartmoor pony |
 |
| Lone sheep |
 |
| Trees on the skyline |
 |
 |
| Haytor from the other side |
 |
| Sheep amongst the rocks |
 |
 |
