Category: Blog

A journey to White Moor stone circle, Dartmoor. 

‘The sublime is in turn of different sorts. The feeling of it is sometimes accompanied with some dread or even melancholy, in some cases merely with quiet admiration and in yet others with a beauty spread over a sublime prospect. ‘ (1764, 2:209 Kant)

Yesterday I walked across the moor to Little Hound Tor and White Moor stone circle. Along the way I met a group of people while we navigated our way in opposite directions over two streams . ‘Are you alone? ‘ one of the group asked. I thought it was pretty obvious I was, there’s no where to hide out there, and no one else here, then I wondered if she could see the moorland spirits furtively following me, but disappearing whenever I looked behind.

If it wasn’t for the wind I would think I was on the moon or some other distant planet. The landscape is vast, barren and lonely at this time of year. The peak of every hill appears to be closer than it is. The land seems to expand when you are about to reach the next slope. 

I’ve been exploring the Romantic sublime in the landscape, and according to 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke the sublime can be not only awesome but also terrifying. He writes:

‘The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment ; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. ‘  (1757 , p.53)

Of terror he writes:

 ‘For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror, be endured with greatness of dimensions or not; for it is impossible to look on any thing as trifling, or contemptible, that may be dangerous’ (p. 53) 

 Sublime landscapes include vast wild landscapes, oceans, starry skies and high mountains. 

I can imagine you could feel terrified if you lost your way here or stumbled and fell, (especially when your phone just ran out of charge like mine did) , who would ever find you? I didn’t see anyone else for the rest of the walk and I could see a long way in every direction. 

It definitely felt spooky with the wind whistling in the molinia grass, and I had to break up the gnawing loneliness , which seemed to come on after only an hour of walking, by chatting to myself (or the Dartmoor spirits) about sheep, stones and circles. 

Immanuel Kant (another 18th century philosopher ) describes 3 states of the sublime:

‘I will call the first the terrifying sublime, the second the noble, and the third the magnificent.’ 

Of the first he says:

‘Deep solitude is sublime, but in a terrifying way. For this reason great and extensive wastes, such as the immense deserts of Schamo in Tartary, have always given us occasion to people them with fearsome shades, goblins, and ghosts.” (2:209, 2:210)

The Dartmoor spirits followed me on my journey through the pale wind dried grass and scrub. Sometimes  I could hear them whispering, but if I stopped to listen they would cease while the wind continued to shush  and weave through the grasses like an ocean in the distance. Yet it wasn’t just this sound that made me feel that the sea really was just over the distant hills, it was the molinia grass, (which is more or less the same as marram grass found on the coast ) , the sandy colour of the grass grazed short by sheep, and the general shape of the terrain . It was easy to imagine what it was like when Dartmoor was a sea 400 million years ago.

I was looking for two stone circles , neither of which seemed to be showing themselves to me. I had visited the Scorhill stone circle the week before and knew how it had been quite hard to find until I was nearly upon it. As the land is so expansive, I had expected to see it from a distance, but it was hidden by a fold and lay on a gentle slope. Armed with this knowledge I hoped to unexpectedly come across the other two circles. 

When I met the group of people at the stream crossing, I grappled with whether to ask them if they had seen either of the two circles. Part of me didn’t want to ask where it was (not that any directions would make much difference here, as the weren’t many way markers here) What would they say, ‘find the sheep with the sprayed red bottoms and bear left up the hill’ ?  I felt I wanted to challenge myself to find it and it would show itself when I was ready to see it. However I gave in to my pride and asked. One of the woman said they had only seen one and it was on the right under ‘Little Hound Tor’, just up there, and she pointed vaguely in the direction I was walking.

‘Just up there ‘ became another hour of walking or stumbling I should say. The track was worn and stony. In places, farmers or perhaps the Dartmoor National Trust had added gravel and sand to make the tracks accessible and/or to retain the peat/water below the ground. 

Despite being able to see for miles I couldn’t see the tor. The group said they had walked 15 miles from Scorhill. I could see this could be a long walk.

Kant says:

‘A long duration is sublime. If it is of time past, it is noble; if it is projected forth into an unforeseeable future, then there is something terrifying in it. ‘ (2.211)

I climbed for sometime before I saw a blackness. A stretch of the blackest of black. Hard to tell what it was I walked towards it. The trees in the far distance by the North Teign river were very black so I thought it could be trees but as I got closer I could see that the blackness hugged the ground. Bushes perhaps . Then the smell hit me. It was a patch of burnt scrub, mostly heather,  about the size of two tennis courts. Presumably from a wild fire, luckily put out or burnt out before it caused even more damage. Amongst the charred heather were some large stones that looked as if they formed a loose circle but they were spaced too far apart to make me think they were one of the circles I was looking for. 

 Then I saw two tors in the nearest distance side by side so I headed for the closest one, constantly scanning the land on both sides for a circle (or two) . As I got closer to the tor the wind picked up a notch or two and things began to feel extraordinarily other worldish.   I felt as if I’d slipped through a portal and was viewing the landscape beyond the misty veil, everything was soft focus, the contour of the mountainous hills on the horizon perfectly curved as if in tune with a beautiful harmony, so I could listen with my eyes.  

I climbed to the top of the tor. It was the smallest tor I’d seen on Dartmoor so wasn’t difficult to climb and I stood at the top while the wind buffeted and whistled around carrying the moorland tunes that caressed my skin. I could taste peat and burnt heather on my lips. My shifting senses merged and I felt a sense of freedom, exhilarated, melancholic and engulfed by something I can only describe as the sublime, at least my interpretation of it. 

As I looked back to the path I had just walked I saw the stone circle in the near distance. Now I knew where it was I could relax a bit and I sat behind a rock to get out of the wind, eat my peanut butter sandwiches and do a sketch of the mountainous landscape that opened before me. 

Forty minutes later I had reached the circle.  It felt bigger than the one at Scorhill although both had 19 stones (I wondered if there was any significance in this number , perhaps there had been more originally , would there be any significance in 20 or 21? ) Each stone was beautiful in shape and size and when I entered the circle, despite the wind maintaining its force, I felt an unexpected sense of calm. The windswept, wild and lonely euphoria of the sublime on the tor was replaced with an inner calm, as if the stones were offering supernatural protection. 

I wondered if this was an encounter with another kind of sublime.  

18th century philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn described the beautiful as having boundaries whereas the sublime was boundless:

‘what is genuinely beautiful has definite boundaries which it may not overstep. If the full dimensions of the sublime cannot be taken in by the senses all at once, then it ceases to be sensuously beautiful and becomes gigantic or enormous in extension’ (‘Sublime and Naive’, 192 – 193, in Brady p.48)  

In her book, ‘The Sublime in Modern Philosophy’, Emily Brady sums up neatly:

‘the beautiful involves calm contemplation, while the sublime is marked by a ‘movement’ of the mind.’ (2013, p.57)

In light of this and as the stone circle formed a ‘boundary’ it would seem to fit into the aesthetics described as ‘beautiful’ however despite having different feelings to the wild ones of freedom I felt on the tor, I think the circle experience is something more than beautiful. Burke discusses an ‘artificial infinite’ a sublime experience found through religious (man made) architecture such as cathedrals and temples, which highlight a relationship with sacred geometry. As long as the uniform space has no angles to break up the line of sight:

‘It is in this kind of artificial infinity, I believe, we ought to look for the cause why a rotund has such a noble effect. For in a rotund, whether it be a building or a plantation, you can no where fix a boundary; turn which way you will, the same object still seems to continue, and the imagination has no rest. But the parts must be uniform as well as circularly disposed, to give this figure its full force; because any difference, whether it be in the disposition, or in the figure, or even in the colour of the parts, is highly prejudicial to the idea of infinity, which every change must check and interrupt, at every alteration commencing a new series.’ (P.68) 

With these rules the stone circle would not be sublime as it isn’t uniform enough to substantiate it. 

I see the stone circle as an open and closed space, it isn’t set within a tight boundary like a round temple or cathedral, there are gaps between the stones and there is no roof so the boundless sublime moorland is within sight. It’s an ‘in between’ sacred space, it’s both and neither artificial sublime and/nor sublime, it’s a liminal and subliminal otherworldly space, a place for calm contemplation and wild passions,  a place where Dartmoor spirits continue to dance*

With the wind still whistling through the grasses, I didn’t try to sketch the stones, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold the paper still from flapping around in my sketchbook, so I walked around the interior noticing the blood stains and bird shit that had run down the stones. Signs of life and death. The never ending cycle of the cosmos, the stone circle telling the story.

I thanked the stones for their hospitality and headed back leaving the Dartmoor spirits behind in the circle. Except for one who followed me to the gate …

Quotes from:

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke (1757), Oxford World Classics, 2008

Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime By M. Immanuel Kant ((1764) Konigsberg, by Johann Jakob Kanter, 1st edition 

The Sublime in Modern Philosophy by Emily Brady (2013) 

*The Nine Maidens at Belstone Stone Circle.

This circle is a few miles away from the White Moor Circle. There is an arc of circles on the Dartmoor high moor. I didn’t find the other circle near White Moor and I think I still have to others to discover.

Find out more about this Lino print and why the maidens are dancing here