Cranmere Pool: on the mother of rivers, and the nature of desolation

It’s unusual for me to spend a whole day on the moor at the moment, with the new show and other projects bubbling away in the pot. But on a rare sunny day this week, Emma Cunis (Dartmoor’s Daughter) and I determined to visit Cranmere Pool, and that demands commitment.

It is not an easy place.

Walking in from Okehampton direction, for the first hour it’s military roads; for the second hour, degraded moor grass and peat cuttings; and for the third hour, the most Molinia-infested, tussock-barren wasteland I have ever experienced on the moor.

We persevered, icy wind whipping across the tops, past the eroded peat hags and along the dent in the land that indicated the top of the West Okement river, where the tussocks were more spaced and the land within them treacherous.

Then, up to Cranmere Pool itself.

Well, it used to be a pool, but of course, like all the rest, it was drained long ago. There’s a cute little concrete cupboard adorned with a Dartmoor National Park logo, containing the visitor book and stamp and pad beloved to letterboxers. It’s a tiny bastion of artificial cheer in the middle of a place that is no use at all for either people or nature.

This place is isolated, but also desolate through mistreatment. It should be a mixture of heather, bilberry, moss, dragonfly, frog, sundew and sedge. The ground should still be treacherous and quake as you walk (what the old moormen deliciously called the ‘featherbed’). But decades of drainage, overgrazing and burning of this place have caused purple moor-grass (Molinia caerulea) to invade and create its own kind of bleak, tussocky wasteland.

Believe it or not, folks, this is SSSI – one of the best sites for nature in the country. Unfavourable, declining, and if farmers are being paid for better site management -it’s clearly not working. Those landowners & commoners who wail that this land is ‘undergrazed’ just don’t get it. It’s hugely damaged. But it’s not beyond repair.

Nearby were the diggers and kit of the South West Peatland Partnership, the workers cheerful and chatty. They are using local timber and stone to block up drains, create bunds, hold back the water and get the peat bogs working again. Once the water table is raised and sphagnum moss returns, the slow natural process of peat formation begins again, locking in carbon and creating homes for all the creatures and plants of the bog.

With the help of cattle in summer to break up the Molinia, and the removal of sheep, this place really could slowly be healed – to all of our benefits. And, let’s not forget, to restore this SSSI so it meets the requirements of the law.

It will still be pretty bleak, though. Poor old Cranmere Benji. The folktale says he was banished here by a magician to complete endless, impossible tasks. Could we persuade him to plait sphagnum moss with his ghostly hands, creating a mossy carpet and making the moor anew?