'It is an ‘enormous wilderness of peat and granite’, where squalls drift across the russet face of ‘the melancholy downs’ and ‘heavy, slate-coloured clouds’ trail ‘in grey wreaths down the sides of the fantastic hills’.Ībove stand ‘gnarled and craggy cairns and tors’, below lies the Grimpen Mire, a maze-like morass that swallows all but the most careful, be they people or ponies. In the landscape and its lore, he found material so sensational that he felt justified in reviving a character he’d killed off eight years earlier.įor all that the dog is demonic and the detective dazzling, the genius of The Hound of the Baskervilles lies in its main location.Ĭonan Doyle, in the person of Dr Watson, describes the moor as ‘gloomy’, ‘sinister’, ‘so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious’, and ‘like some fantastic landscape in a dream’. Having stirred Conan Doyle’s curiosity with tales of spectral hounds, Robinson agreed to show him Dartmoor and to help him with the plot and details of a novel to be set there. In those old days, there was evidently a population of very many thousands here & now you may walk all day and never see one human being.’īy ‘we’, he meant himself and his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson, Daily Express journalist and devoted Devon man. It is a great place, very sad & wild, dotted with the dwellings of prehistoric man, strange monoliths and huts and graves. ‘We did 14 miles over the Moor today and we are now pleasantly weary. 'In June 1901, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to his mother from the Duchy Hotel at Princetown in deepest Dartmoor:

We enjoyed Mark Griffiths' Country Life article - ‘Unleashed, mad and dangerous’: How Britain’s wild, romantic moorland is our ‘signature habitat’, inspiring everything from Beowulf to The Hound of the Baskervilles.Īt this time when travel and holidays are pointing towards the exploration of our Great British landscapes - we would urge you to get caught up in the mystery and wild beauty of Dartmoor just as Arthur did - perhaps you'll be inspired! Country Life Magazine

The hound of the sherlock holmes