It was on a similar Dartmoor excursion when another memorably strange occurrence took place. We had clambered to the top of a tor and the night’s camping spot wasn’t far off. The day was closing in at the edges; it was a grey day, threatening – and at times delivering – bouts of misty rain. When we reached the top, we found ourselves enveloped in a fog that turned the world to white: no horizon, no landmarks. For some moments we stood, damp and disorientated, our waterproof maps rendered useless, our trust in the compass at a wary ebb in this landscape so swallowed up by cloud that we only knew which way was up and which down.

Soon, other walkers entered the cloud and the momentary panic subsided; then we saw the other group of students, clad in bright plasticky colours, standing not far off. The spell was broken; the strange sensation never quite shaken.

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Dartmoor holds myth and folklore within its granite bedrock, peat bogs and moss-covered woodlands. Dotted across the moors are prehistoric menhirs – standing stones – and huts circles, as well as remnants of Bronze Age boundary walls, known as reaves. Passing a churchyard or gatepost, a walker might also come across a stone cross, one of a series of granite boundary markers or navigational aids that dot the moorland. Some are thought to date from the Middle Ages, while more recent counterparts to these ancient wayside monuments can be found marking the moor’s military zones.

Today we can navigate using GPS on hand-held devices, and track precise distance and pace without the need for granite milestones. But what if we were to start to read the landscape not as wholly fixed, mappable, and trackable; not so cleanly divided and enclosed?

Totum terrarium orbem — “The whole earthly globe”

In the Middle Ages, particularly from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the rise in Christian pilgrimage – to the Holy Land of Jerusalem, to Rome, and other smaller and local shrines – played an important role in European Christian belief. Partly as a result of pilgrimage, the “allure of the distant swelled”, as the art historian Naomi Reed Kline suggests in Maps of Medieval Thought (2001). This curiosity can be seen in world maps that were created in the medieval period, over a thousand of which have survived today. Kline notes that the Hereford Mappa Mundi (c.1300), an encyclopaedic wall-scale world map that includes more than a thousand images and texts, is full of depictions or references to biblical wanderings, from Adam and Eve expelled from earthly paradise to the ‘wandering of the Jews’, as well as several centres of religious pilgrimage (Santiago, Mont-St-Michel, Canterbury, Rome).

Known as mappae mundi, from Medieval Latin mappa (cloth or chart) and mundus (world), these maps are not meant to be read as literal, navigational depictions of the world, organised by geographic information. The simplest versions – called ‘T- O’ maps – show the world divided into three: Asia at the top, Europe and Africa in the two lower portions. The ‘T’ represents the ‘Great Sea’ dividing the continents; the ‘O’ is the ‘Great Ocean’, encircling the earth.

Even in a highly detailed example like the Hereford Mappa Mundi, the spaces between countries or cities do not represent actual distances, and the multiple mythological creatures should be indication enough that we are looking not at a realistic, cartographic entity but instead an amalgamation of information. It reveals a complex enmeshing of oral and visual traditions spanning cartography, cosmology and natural history, woven through with fable and allegory often indistinguishable from historical accounts, all of these falling under the arc of medieval Christian belief. Kline describes mappae mundi as “pictorial atlases”, or a “conceptual enclosure” of information both visual and textual. While the maps were not intended as navigational tools, they were, and still are, a way to navigate through ideas and beliefs of the medieval Christian world.

Linked to mappae mundi, Kline investigates medieval rotae, circular images depicting the four elements, the wind and the stars, and concentric rings depicting the strata of the earth and the heavens. These cosmological diagrams represent the world in macro – the earthly realm as a great container, encircled by the heavens and resided over by God. They show a world vast and complex but made comprehensible to the medieval viewer through their multiple allusions and references, albeit often needing some level of ‘translation’ for lay people by the learned, literate men of the church. But if we zoom into the micro, what else can we learn?

“My eyes were in my feet”
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, 1977

In the Palaeolithic cave of Pech Merle in the South of France, there are traces of human passage through the cave complex. Alongside walls adorned with spotted horses, woolly mammoth, a bear, and a red ochre handprint, there lies a series of fossilised footprints, covered with calcite and dust; a petrified moment of prehistoric time. Christian pilgrimage carries echoes of this ancient footprint. Several medieval pilgrimage sites are said to bear the mark of Christ’s footprints in stone – Jerusalem’s Chapel of the Ascension is constructed around a stone believed to bear the incarnate Christ’s last earthly impression before ascending to heaven; two copies of footprints in marble are housed in Rome’s Chiesa del Domine Quo Vadis, built on the site where, according to the apocryphal Acts of Peter, Saint Peter met the risen Christ.

As well as seeking out physical places made sacred by the long- gone presence of a holy figure, pilgrims might gather earth or stone from a holy site, or purchase ampullae, flasks that could be filled with holy oil or water, to return to daily life with a tangible souvenir.

While these material connections to sites played an important role in medieval pilgrimage, there are also records of ‘virtual’ pilgrimages. These were often made by women, particularly nuns or anchorites who, bound by vows to remain in their convent or cell, or otherwise limited in the funds or freedom to travel, were compelled to ‘walk in Christ’s footsteps’ through the mind alone. Kathryn M. Rudy’s 2011 study of these virtual spiritual journeys examines how, by drawing upon pilgrims’ accounts or contemporary guidebooks, and often aided by other images or objects, Rome or Jerusalem could be imaginatively evoked. Unusual as it might seem, if pilgrims were encouraged to put the ‘real world’ aside as a mere “shadow of the invisible spiritual world” as Naomi Reed Kline suggests, then these virtual pilgrimages might even be preferable – no distractions from society, and no interruptions by inclement weather, severe illness or theft, all significant risks for the medieval pilgrim.

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Our relationship with the land has altered immeasurably since the Middle Ages, but perhaps it isn’t all irrevocable. Walking through the British landscape, neatly compartmentalised as it is, doesn’t hold as much potential for drama to play out, either in reality or in the mind, as it would have for a medieval pilgrim. But it still holds mystery, and can always set the imagination whirling. What can we learn from the systems of thought that we have partial, tantalising access to in the form of these maps and diagrams?

In part, it encourages an imaginative leap, to hold multiple histories at once. Crossing Dartmoor’s varied terrain, keeping one eye out for the unexploded shells occasionally flagged by red-and-white military training signs, history tangles with the present: traces of tin-mining, medieval waymarkers, stone circles, and the tips of granite tors, formed from magma cooling beneath the earth’s surface hundreds of millions of years ago, revealing the deep-time past.

Earlier this year, access to the magic and mystery of Dartmoor sank a little further from reach with a High Court ruling that made wild camping on Dartmoor without permission an illegal act, at the urging of Alexander Darwall, owner of the 4,000-acre Blachford estate on southern Dartmoor. The case, ironically, put huge focus on the growing Right to Roam movement which calls for greater access to the 92% of English countryside, and less than 4% of rivers, that are currently off limits to the public. The case incited widespread protest but also something more – a slight shift in some people’s thinking, imagining what a ‘right to roam’ bill could give us: fear and restriction giving way to freedom, belonging, care, and an opening up of the wild imaginary. ⯀

Grace Crabtree is an artist, writer and filmmaker. She is a recent recipient of an Arts Council England DYCP grant for 'The Art of Fresco', a studio and research project. This essay forms part of an ongoing series of writing exploring medieval wall paintings, maps, and manuscripts.

gracecrabtree.co.uk