The story of the church of St Michael de Rupe begins – as all the best Dartmoor stories do – on a dark and stormy night. A sailor, stricken in a wild and furious sea, fell to the deck of his ship to pray for salvation. The almighty unveiled a mountain in the midst of the tempest where the ship duly made landfall: in gratitude the sailor built a church on its summit. The devil – who had unleashed that evil storm – did his best to prise the church from its foundations, but Archangel Michael sprung to its defence and became the patron of this Devon parish. The tale has many versions, but this is the general gist.
Today, St Michael de Rupe counts as the highest working church in southern England – poised dramatically on top of a western outlier of Dartmoor’s tors. This medieval building casts a striking silhouette over the west Devon landscape, but it also marks the start of the Archangel’s Way: a pilgrimage route created in 2021 by the diocese of Exeter that travels 38 miles eastward from here across Dartmoor to a second St Michael’s church in Chagford. I chose to walk the route in February when the moor was at its quietest and most mysterious – and though the seas of the famous folk tale had receded, on my visit the storm had not.
Storm Herminia was thrashing through the West Country as I climbed the muddy path to the porch of St Michael de Rupe. Inside, the church had the mood of a ship in a storm. There was the whistle of the wind in the roof: gusts pressing lead-lined glass into ancient panes. The winged figure of Archangel Michael adorned the stained glass behind the altar. In folklore he is the guardian of high places, and the vanquisher of heathen forces that once held dominion over the peaks.
Sitting in the porch, I unfolded a map and considered the path ahead of me. The Archangel’s Way passes villages with parish churches, pubs with warm hearths, places where you can find succour and society. However, it also skirts the North Moor – the more desolate and remote half of Dartmoor, where signs of Christendom are still outnumbered by prehistoric pagan edifices, such as stone circles and cryptic megaliths.
In Dartmoor folklore there is barely a crossroads the devil does not frequent to barter for a soul, nor a hill nor stone at which some evil entity claims authority – phantom, beast, horned figure. To walk this route was, in a sense, to walk a line between dark and light. To be a wanderer of the English wilderness for, if not exactly 40 days, then at least about 40 miles.
The path led to Lydford and then climbed the western flank of Dartmoor proper. Green fields turned to bracken the colour of a well-thumbed two pence piece. A final stone cross guarded the approach on Brat Tor: to the south red flags fluttered on poles, a warning sign that the army were conducting live firing exercises nearby.
The storm blew on. The overflow waterfall of the Meldon reservoir flew upwards into massing clouds. I was walking with my friend, Justin Foulkes, a Devonian who has been exploring the moor since he was 15. He pointed out the lonely ruin named Bleak House, and Amicombe Hill, the scene of fires attributed to the devil by residents of the farmland below. Justin was clear that, for him, Dartmoor was never a sinister place. As a teenager he had found himself too anxious to revise for exams at home and so brought piles of textbooks out on to the moor to find focus. “When you’re sitting on top of a bronze age burial chamber it puts everything in perspective,” he said.
After a night on the moor at a friend’s near Belstone, further prehistoric remains followed on the second day of walking. First came the Nine Maidens stone circle – the stones said to come alive with the ringing of the church bells (out of earshot in the wind). There followed the stone rows on Cosdon Hill, arriving through a thick Hammer Horror mist. There followed the stone rows on Cosdon Hill, arriving through a thick Hammer Horror mist. Lastly came the spectacular Scorhill stone circle – supposedly protected by a magic forcefield which prevents livestock from entering.
Folklore is an errant guide to these relics of an unfathomable past – whose meaning and function are lost to an age before recorded history – indeed an age before climate change helped lead to a large-scale human exodus from Dartmoor’s high country.
However, where certainties are absent the imagination steps in to complete the picture. It was perhaps natural for God-fearing folk to populate the moorland with supernatural entities that could thrive in the wild weather and hostile terrain where humans could no longer live.
“Dartmoor is like the sea,” Chloe Axford of the diocese of Exeter later told me. “It’s a rugged, wild and unpredictable place. We wanted to harness the spirituality of the moor in the creation of the Archangel’s Way. And also encourage people to visit its churches and chapels, and give them a warm welcome there.”
Eventually, there were signs I was returning to society: a cattle grid, a row of conifers. A country lane winding down to St Michael, Chagford, where snowdrops were sprouting among the graves. Inside the beautiful little church was a rough-hewn sculpture of St Michael – a demon vanquished beneath his foot. Yet, you could still hear the wind pressing upon the rafters, as if Herminia herself was trying to get inside.
On This Holy Island: A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain by Oliver Smith is published by Bloomsbury (£10.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
